Dark holes...

"Love of God and Love of neighbour have become one: in the least of the brethren we find Jesus himself, and in Jesus we find God."
- Benedict XVI (Deus Caritas Est)

"Bring me into the dark holes of the poor. Come, carry me, I cannot go alone."
Those were Jesus' words to Mother Teresa when she received her "call within a call". But as i meditated on these words i realized i had no idea what they really meant.
At first it seems obvious that the dark holes are the gutters and slums, jails and hospitals...but this invitation seems to have a much deeper reality which i wanted to see.

Which are the holes of the poor?
Thursday night...2 hours of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament...a little dosis of "God in the streets" and off we went to the emergency room of the public hospital of Comayagua- Santa Teresa. We arrived and stood there in the middle of a big waiting room filled with silent people, sitting, walking, laying down, coughing ...7 foreigners in the middle of the pain of so many different lives. We were clueless and almost disappointed at not knowing what to do, realizing our expectations were so different than what we found. We wanted to save lives and heal people like the apostles! The choice was clear, remain there useless and turn around our the door, or just do it!
I walked out spontaneously before i could think to much and found 2 men peacefully sitting. It began. Before i knew it, all 7 of us were spread all over the waiting area talking to the patients and relatives of the sick. It was amazing!

i spent most of the, almost, 2 hours listening and talking, praying and crying, smiling and sharing with Amilcar, an alcoholic, semi-drunk at the moment, who had travelled from far away to bring his son to the doctor. The boy's leg was broken and causing much pain. I am not sure what God did that night in Amilcar's life. i pray a lot was transformed in his heart, but i know He changed me forever. As i prayed over this man out in the parking lot, he knelt before God and as best as he could surrendered his life and begged for healing, for his son and for himself. He wanted freedom, he was thirsty for freedom! I saw right into his eyes, just as i had seen into Doña Nicha's 90 year old, cloudy, blind eyes earlier that day in a home visit. And they stared right back, but from a place of true suffering...they were on the cross, and with that love and thirst they were able to see into my soul.

Alyson's (a sister volunteer) scapular said: "Behold the sign of Salvation, put on the Lord Jesus Christ"...but i began to realize He who loved us first also vested in us first; Jesus had put on our humanity and our weakness, only through love! and here He was, vested in Amilcar and Doña Nicha piercing my pride and sin, with love!

"Bring your finger here and look at my hands; bring your hand and thrust it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believing!" (John 20,27)This was Jesus' invitation to his disciple Thomas after he had resurrected. How many people would you invite to thrust their hand into your inside, your heart, your womb...the holy temple of the Spirit, the sanctuary of life? none perhaps...what kind of invitation is that?
Christ invites us and moves us, calling us to believe and not doubt, to enter His Sacred wounds...his dark wounds...his dark...holes!
If the wounds of Jesus in His passion became, through and by Love, the gateways to eternity and to the unveiled, glorious face of God, then the Body of Christ, the Church, must also contain these wounds of salvation. Yes! And these wounds, the weak, the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the little ones, the hungry, the thirsty are us! at many points in our lives, in times of weakness, we will be the wounds, but how important it is that we attend to those other wounds when we can. That we love and choose freely to bear the wounds of Jesus...this is the essential meaning of the stigmata. The call of every follower of Christ, is to accept the radical invitation to enter the mysterious intimacy of the eternal portal, the mystical passage way and the dolorous sacrifice that constitute the wounds of the Christ -the Word made flesh, God made man!
This is the Lord vested in us, and it is why He called Thomas and Mother Teresa to enter His dark holes. To take Jesus into the dark holes, it is to be Jesus to the wounded and to enter their frailty for the sake of love. To bring Him into the dark holes, it is to be fully human and vested in His Spirit, and ultimately to see the Holy Image of God in the "least of my brethren" (Mat. 25, 40).
From this perspective, the dark holes are merely the places of the wold where the poor live...in the light of Love, the dark holes have become the Heart of Jesus Himself. He is calling us to have faith and enter Him fully, intimately and without reserve.
Let us then believe although we may not see, so that we may say like Thomas: "My Lord and my God!" (John 20, 28) and enter, like Mother Teresa, the eternal presence of God through the painful, but beautiful windows of Love, the stigmata of redemption! AMEN

"Love grows through love"
-Benedict XVI