Yesterday, the government announced guidelines for hairdressers and barbers just as our bishops met with the Minister of Health to discuss gradually reopening churches.
A client-hairdresser relationship is not unlike that with a dentist, or with our family doctors. We don’t seek their “services”—with almost sacrosanct regularity!—just because of their “professionalism” or “role.” We go to them—to the particular hairdresser, dentist or physician—because we trust them; because we entrust our very selves to them; because—quite frankly—they know us in ways that we could never know ourselves.
Some might dismiss it as vanity or as merely taking care of one’s health—but we all know it is much more profound than that. It is not easy to “commit,” to find “the best fit,” to be “comfortable” enough with a person whose very role in your life is to touch you and take care of you. The experience of going for “your regular appointment” is also one that, bit by bit, becomes a true meeting of souls, and not just a “service rendered.” My hairdresser, my dentist or my physician might never become my most intimate friend. But they certainly know me as a person in ways that many others do not, and never will.
Which of course, begs the question: to what extent do we as Church, as fellow travellers on this journey of faith, accompany one another intimately, personally, and not just through our “office” or “role”?
The ancient Church tradition recognised the ministry of deacon because they were entrusted with tending to bodily and material needs and not just “spiritual” ones. It is also why the ministry of deaconness was (likely?) recognised by the Church because, as any woman would tell you, certain physical and spiritual needs only women can offer to one another. But, closer to home, Pope Francis constantly reminds us that the very point of being “missionary disciples” is to minister to a world that is like a “field hospital after battlefield.” Tending in a personal and intimate manner is the Christian way.
But, lest we forget what we celebrate on Holy Thursday, when the Church turns her attention to the sacraments of Holy Orders and the Eucharist—that dual remembrance prefiguring the most holy season of Easter leading to Pentecost—tending on its own is hardly sufficient. No true ministry of healing leaves the healer personally unmarked. Christ himself rose from the dead with a glorified body marked by the wounds of the world.
The point of Christian ministry is not just to touch, but to be touched; not just to serve, but ultimately to accept that Christ himself washes our feet—in a mutual service that binds in friendship.
As we wait for Pentecost, the desire is not merely for “churches reopening,” but for a community of those who have tended to one another in moments of darkness to come together and rejoice!
Echoing the first Sunday of our lockdown, when the gospel of the Third Sunday of Lent was proclaimed, Pentecost is a true rebirth “in spirit and truth” … A communal rebirth that will move all others, since the mystery of the “tongues of fire” is not so much that the first ecclesia “gathered” or “spoke”, but that they moved others and were understood… That they broke through the barriers of Babel that separated man from man, woman from woman, when through our human hubris we could no longer communicate and commune with one another.
Pentecost promises communicating as communing… a divine comforting and accompaniment that allows for a true “coming together” as that one Body, one People, who remembers its struggles, who retells its story of salvation, and thus rejoices in Thanksgiving, in one banquet binding heaven with all the earth.
That is the only return to “Christian worship” that we long for and aspire to.
