Dear Parishioners,
“As much as you did it to the least of these little ones, you did it to me.”
At the end of time we will be judged. And we will not be judged on the basis of what we thought, or what religion we practiced or didn’t practice, or whether or not we read the Bible. We will be judged on what we did; in particular, how we acted towards the least of these little ones. So . . . who are they, “the least of these little ones”?
Jesus pointed to them in his own time. But who are they now in our time and in our community? Who are the most needy people that I know and meet or read about?
Each of us will have our own individual answers to that question. Each of us has a different calling. But, as I prayed over this passage and examined my own conscience on this question, there came to my mind the image of the most miserable place I have ever been in my entire life. It was a ward at a public hospital in the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya; a ward specially set aside for the care of people who were dying of AIDS.
When I visited there twenty years ago, the place was dreadful: it was filthy, infested with rats and dirty water running down the walls. There was an open sewer running along side the building. The smell was beyond dreadful. There were no medicines, no clean water, hardly any food, no trained nurses, and no doctors. I once heard one of the patients ask an aide for an antibiotic for his chest infection. He was told, “We’re not wasting that on someone like you. You’re going to die anyway.” That was, without doubt, the worst thing I ever heard anyone say to another human being.
Those patients were the most deprived people I have ever known. They lay two to a bed, without clothes, without sheets, without dignity, without self-respect, without hope. They were close to dying and in tremendous pain: the pain of ulcers where the skin had broken down over the skeleton. the pain of the dreadful hacking cough of tuberculosis eating out their lungs. But worst of all, the pain of dying alone, almost always abandoned by their family and friends. I learned from them, that when you have been deprived of everything, what you miss the most is human companionship.
If there was any joy at all in their lives, it came from a tiny old nun who used to visit with a little food, a little clothing; some soap and some towels. She herself admitted that, very often, she could do very little to help. But she said that at least she tried. She told me that she hoped that at the very least no one would die without feeling they had been touched, even if only once, and briefly, with the love of God. It was to that hope that she was devoting the last few declining years of her life.
Let us reflect for a moment on the many people we will meet in the course of the coming week, all the people whose lives we will touch. And let us pray that we may touch each and every one of them with the touch of God.
We live in a world that has some great evils, suffering, injustices, hatred, disease and despair. It is in that world, that God has placed in us, as we heard last week, all the talents that God has given us for service to God’s People. God does not expect us to do miracles, but he does expect us to do our best. So, when we come before him, as he separates the sheep from the goats, let us be able to say, that at least we tried.
Fr. Leonard