For our doctors, and nurses, and for ALL of our brave frontline workers

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Easter Sunday

For our doctors, and nurses, and for ALL of our brave frontline workers, this is for you especially

Dear brothers and sisters:

One of the most difficult things in life is to encourage and to inspire when we ourselves are on the outside of the suffering we wish to share our hearts with. It is like embracing a sick child with her parents on the other side and hoping to offer them some little succor when your own children are robust and healthy. What right could you have except for the greatest regard together with the prayer that all will be well? But we are still desperate to offer something of the excess of our love to a fellow human being. When a good act or a show of heroic endurance genuinely touches us it compels our spirit to share our compassion. To say as poorly as we might, ‘I am, the best I can during this moment, co-suffering with you’. We are all part of that “great church of humanity”, as a discerning writer once said. So, please, accept our deepest thanks however far removed from your daily realities and sacrifices, I and most others might be, during these testing hours of your souls and courage. In the Gospel of John we find these awesome words spoken by the Nazarene: “[t]here is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn. 15:13). Many in the world reflect nightly on these words when together you are all brought to prayer. So often our media has highlighted the darker side of our humanity, but the nobler more heroic side of people which is far the greater, has been sadly passed over. Remove love and charity, if even for one solitary minute from this world of ours, and everything will stop. The angelic side of human nature is always there waiting for the call. Your everyday testimony confirms this disclosure in your godly definition of what it means to be truly human. You could never do what you are doing unless this spirit of service was already pulsating through your souls. It is something which is either in your blood or it is not. You are bright lights to remind the world what this actually means: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk. 12:31). Simone Weil one of the most compassionate of people to have lived on this earth of ours, said it rightly: “To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.”

Thank you is all we can say,

Keep well and strong, for this ordeal, too, by the grace of God, will surely soon pass.