At a school assembly recently, after the student council presented Catholic Relief Services’ annual Operation Rice Bowl as an opportunity for Lenten giving, our principal took the microphone and shared a moving story:
A few years ago, he was given the opportunity to visit Burkina Faso for two weeks and observe first-hand the work of Catholic Relief Services: the schools, homes and shelters. He toured one facility that stores the food purchased and shipped thanks to donations from around the world. As he walked slowly among the crates and cans, he spotted the large rice bags after which the Rice Bowl initiative is named. Printed on the bags was a label: “United States.”
America is known internationally for many things, some more laudable than others. Those rice bags represent some of the best of America: persons who “have” saving and sacrificing for those who “have not.”
Barriers of distance, language, and culture melt before the indomitable beauty of charity. Is that not the whole message of Christianity? God Himself, who has everything, freely and lovingly chooses to come to earth, emptying Himself utterly to save us. The infinite distance between God and man is bridged in the self-gift of Him who calls Himself both Son of God and Son of Man and whose supreme act of love portrayed on every crucifix speaks wordlessly to lands and generations far removed from His own.
In meditating on the parable of the Good Samaritan, we tend to see ourselves as the Samaritan and those we help as the wayfarer lying by the roadside, robbed, beaten and left for dead. And these identifications express truths. But they presuppose the parable’s primary meaning, the one so touchingly expounded by the Church Fathers: the Samaritan is Christ, and we are the man lying by the roadside. Christ comes down the road of our life; He sees us, beaten and bleeding from the wounds of our sins and insecurities; and He bathes and anoints our gashes, finally entrusting us to the Church, the “inn” — or Pope Francis’ “field hospital” — where, through the coins He leaves behind, the coins of the sacraments and Church teaching, we receive continued healing.
Lent is a time of turning back to God, reorienting ourselves toward Him so that we can become more and more like Him. The primary actor in this reorientation, however, is Christ, not ourselves. It is He who takes our prayer, our fasting and our almsgiving and, ever the Carpenter, goes to work interiorly in our souls, forming us into His image. It will then truly be He who slips those coins and bills into the cardboard Rice Bowls, and the bags of rice will then bear an invisible label: “Heaven.”
Sr. Maria Veritas Marks is a member of the Ann Arbor-based Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.
