This path of mission must be walked on the basis of two fundamental laws – that of love for God and one’s fellow man and that of love for suffering. The second flows from the first, which in turn is the first precept of the spiritual law of the Gospel.
During one of the services we held in a suburb of the capital, I was invited to see a young man who was sick. When I went into his mud hut, which is usually an almost open space – a room of 15 square meters – in which up to 10 family members can live on average, I was repulsed by a lingering stench of advanced putrefaction of indeterminate origin. But I went on because I was obliged to see the sick man. On the bed I found a literally melted young man of 28 years, and when asked what his illness was, his mother revealed to me his leg wrapped in a dirty cloth; a swollen grey leg with multiple holes through which moisture was seeping out and finding plenty of food for all kinds of microbes and insects. The stench came from this leg. The reason for not taking him to a hospital: lack of money. Something very common by Madagascar’s social standards.
The next day we sent the boy to the hospital. In a few days the affected limb was removed after an expensive and admittedly lengthy medical procedure, which at best cost at least 5 months’ pay for a worker in this country.
The young man is still hospitalized today without having escaped the danger, but with a clear improvement in his health and above all with a new name, a Christian name, since he wanted to receive Holy Baptism there in the chamber of pain and agony.
Seraphim has (now) been resurrected mentally and almost physically. Our agony continues, of course. But in the joy of his personal resurrection.
This was one small incident of the countless that you encounter here… in this “prison of pain”. Here you learn to tune your heart out of necessity to the pain of these people’s hearts. Here you learn that there is nothing more precious than Christ. The one you see in the eyes and the agony of the suffering children, the inconsolable mother, the unemployed father with 7-10 children, the old scavenger, the people of hunger and thirst – spiritual and material.
This is where you learn to build not fairy tale best-sellers but real temples. This is the great comfort and relief in this “prison” of our self-exile. This little “cold glass” to the tragic “thirst” that is heard from the holy cross of Golgotha to these forgotten mud huts of the Third World.
Christ is risen from Madagascar. Christ is risen from yet another “prison of pain”.
Monk Polycarp
