The economic crisis is going to be long and hard. We shouldn’t be fooled. We can’t let our gaze wander. Right where we are, right in our neighborhood we’re going to run into families forced to live on charity, people threatened with eviction, neighbors hit by the strike, patients who don’t know how to solve their health problems or get medicine.
No one knows very well how society will react. Without a doubt, the sense of powerlessness will continue to grow, along with rage and discouragement. It’s foreseeable that fights and delinquency will increase. It’s easy to imagine that selfishness and obsession with personal security will grow.
But it’s also possible that solidarity will grow. The crisis can make us more humane. It can teach us to share more of what we have and don’t need. Family bonds can strengthen, with more people helping each other. Our sensitivity toward the most needy can grow. We will be poorer, but we may be more human.
In the midst of the crisis, our Christian communities also can grow in fraternal love. It’s the time to discover that in order to follow Jesus and collaborate in the Father’s humanizing project, we need to work for a society that’s more just and less corrupt, one that’s more in solidarity and less selfish, one that’s more responsible and less frivolous or materialistic.
It’s also a moment to recover the humanizing power that is contained in the Eucharist, especially when it is lived as an experience of love that is confessed and shared. The meeting of Christians, gathered every Sunday around Jesus, must become the place to move toward greater consciousness and toward a practical solidarity.
The crisis can intrude into our routine and mediocrity. We can’t celebrate communion with Christ in the intimacy of our heart without celebrating communion with our brothers and sisters who are suffering. We can’t share the Eucharistic bread and at the same time ignore the hunger of millions of human beings who are deprived of bread and justice. It’s a farce to share the sign of peace with one another while forgetting those who are socially excluded.
The celebration of the Eucharist must help us to open our eyes to discover the ones we have to defend, to support, to help in this time. We need to be awakened from the ‘illusion of innocence’ that lets us live peacefully, that allows us to be moved and to fight only when we see our own interests in danger. What we live each Sunday with faith can make us more humane and better followers of Jesus. It can help us to live this crisis with Christian clarity, without losing dignity or hope.