Here we are at the beginning of a new year, moving from the Christmas season to Ordinary Time. I admit that I love the Christmas season, perhaps because it seems so overlooked in our culture in which the “Christmas season” begins on Thanksgiving and ends on Christmas night. So I’m a little sad as we approach the culminating feast of the season, the Baptism of the Lord, this weekend.
Today’s gospel reading (Luke 5:12-16) picks up Jesus and his disciples on a seemingly “ordinary” day near the beginning of their public ministry. Jesus has just called the disciples from their ordinary work as fishermen to become “fishers of men.” But Luke doesn’t narrate any kind of apostolic master plan. If anything, the agency in this narrative belongs to the man “full of leprosy.” He is the one that demands Jesus’s attention by falling prostrate and pleading for deliverance from his malady and its accompanying social ostracism. Whatever the weakness of his flesh, his faith is strong, perhaps even desperate. Jesus touches him and heals him, ordering him to fulfill the Mosaic Law but not to spread the word about how he was healed.
And yet the word does spread. The sick crowds seek out Jesus. They are desperate. They are hungry. And they have few options. They remind us that “the victor over the world who believes that Jesus is the Son of God” often comes in the form of the mourning widow, the desperate leper, or the paralytic and his friends.
This narrative reminds me of a remarkable Catholic leader in Burundi. In 1993 Maggy Barankitse had an ordinary life working at a diocesan center in Burundi. Then her life experienced a terrible interruption. In the midst of Burundi’s brutal civil war, a government militia entered the diocesan center where Maggy worked and slaughtered 72 people. Maggy was left to mourn among the dead. Seeing the tremendous need around her, she began taking in dozens of war orphans, then hundreds, then thousands. She started a community called “Maison Shalom” (literally “House of Peace”), providing safe places where students could go to school, learn a trade, and form a new community that transcended the poisonous ethnic labels of the past. Maggy described Maison Shalom as a sign of a “revolution of love” in the midst of social hatred, embodying a Eucharistic spirituality that “includes everything.” It is important to note that she also had a Eucharistic Adoration chapel where she spent an hour a day in contemplative prayer. Like Jesus, she too had to “withdraw to pray” in order to have the spiritual sustenance needed to feed the desperate crowds around her.
Maggy was exiled from Burundi in 2015 for opposing the third term for President Pierre Nkurunziza and now works in Rwanda. Maggy is a remarkable woman with a remarkable story. What stays with me, though, is her sense that she is an ordinary Christian who sees the world through the lens of God’s extraordinary grace. In her words, “don’t go out and imitate me. Rather, listen to where God is calling you in your own context.” As we move into Ordinary Time, let us pray this week to allow God’s extraordinary grace to interrupt our ordinary lives and transform our ordinary vision, enabling us to see the world anew.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!