Head north and you’ll bring honey to your head. Go east and you’ll carry milk on your hands. Head south and you’ll be filled with sugar. Walk west and you will walk on sugar cane.
This is a traditional saying of the people of the land we serve. Very typical of this beautiful land of Madagascar. I had heard it in an address to our Metropolitan and it made such an impression on me that I asked the speaker to say it accurately after the graceful greeting he gave to the Pastor and the clergy and people who were gathered that day as part of a festive event. These are the people we are called to serve. A poor but so very rich people.
We are in the poorest areas of Touliard, in the region of Abani. You look around and see endless stretches of desert land. Outside the church of St. John the Russian, now in the quiet night, I can hear the muffled sound of the angry waves coming from neighboring Mozambique. Our fatigue is endless. My good friend, a monk and doctor, exhausted, rests in the mud hut prepared by the village parishioners for the hospitality of this man who helps them so much. All day long he does not stop examining people. What is there to remember? The nursing mothers with infants roasting in fever from malaria? The guy with the abscess from the advanced strep? The dying little boy we baptized on an emergency and necessary basis hoping for a miracle? And you know well that the miracle here is a fact, as you see before you the people you had yesterday written off, now once again, alive as the risen dead by the grace and mercy of God. Remember the little children in the Church who praise the Lord, even though hunger literally reaps their whole being. The young man who today with great joy and satisfaction told me in confession that he was freed from the sin that had dominated him for so many years. The pain of my brothers, when they confide that the food supply has long since been exhausted for the family, since the crops have all dried up due to the prolonged drought. The people who beg for catechism from remote villages. But yes, our forces are so small! Unable indeed without the Divine Hand to serve on this supernatural horizon, which every morning rises the hot sun of poverty for the inhabitants of this desolate land and the boundless and uncompromising struggle for the humble workers of this truly multi-dimensional but multi-faceted ministry called Mission.
Night has fallen and you are now sitting under the darkened sky. You admire its exquisite starry clarity, but at the same time you feel the sandy dust brought by the sea air, penetrating your clothes and soaking your lungs. As if this nature also wants to remind you at all times of the irrefutable link between giving and suffering and the value of joy when it comes from sorrow and deprivation. I cannot describe the emotions and the emotional swings one undergoes in this place. In a place in which we know well that we are not found “for my righteousnesses – for we have done nothing good on earth”, but for the mercy and love of Christ. Here you know well that when a little child embraces you in gratitude, your whole being is changed within you. Here you know well that even the slightest effort pays off. Your small monetary donation can literally save souls. Your small word can change an entire community. And of course you don’t expect any more miracles from what you see and experience. That early Christian simplicity and conversion of people who are like infants nursing the heavenly “milk” offered to them by the Father in inconsolable experience, received as a lottery and a gift at the same time.
For the last time I look with awe at our sunburnt and dust-choked church and I ask its Holy Patron, St. John the Russian, whom I especially venerate, never to forcefully claim me to be separated from his flock which I love so much as a member and deacon. Look, I monologue, look once more and direct your gaze to the North. And thou shalt nip the scant honey of the Divine Word which thou hast fed to the hungry beehives – these simple poor. Thou shalt nibble it a hundredfold in thy poor heart. Now head east and you will drink of the milk you offered yesterday to the thirsty children. Milk not thine; yet thou didst drink thy thirst and thy poor and aching existence.
Now I feel a little friend of mine, soiled and ragged, shaking my hand with his own soiled black hand and directing it towards the South, my coveted poor South, and whispering in my ear: “From there you will be satiated with the sweetness of ‘sugar’. From us poor and impoverished people you will get your fill of ‘sugar’ and sweetness of heart and conscience. And abruptly he turns it to the west. There where the red sun is letting its fiery rays color our great red island for the last time today. He changes color in his voice and like a grown man warns me: “I do not promise you bars of gold and relief. I have nothing like that to give you. I will give you a rod in your hands to carry and support you on your long marches through the dust and mud. Like the simple reed the Lord bore before that supreme sacrifice on the cross. For our life here is an endless march through pain and death. But beware, this reed is pure sugar cane. So at the end of your course, in the west of this life, tear it up and eat the sweet “succulent shoot” that lies within. “Sprout” that will sweeten for eternity your bitter heart. This is the people you serve, my good father and friend. Is not this sacrifice truly worthy of you?”
Monk Polycarp Agiannitis
