The Trough Periods

About a month ago, I called my church and asked if they needed help with anything, whether it’s driving food or groceries to the infirmed, or helping finish their web site. The web site work will resume in a couple months, when the church organizer is caught up with his other non-church duties. The other thing they asked me to help them is with the Eucharist.

Without celebration or ceremony, I became a Eucharistic Minister, also called an Extraordinary Minister of the Eucharist. “Extraordinary” being the opposite of what one would think, since I am not ordained nor have any authority to perform a mass. I am “outside” the ordinary. “Ordinary” Ministers are priests and bishops who have paid their dues, done their time, and have a really good idea of what they’re doing. I am simply a Fedex guy that brings holy bread to those who can’t make it to church because of illness, injury, or old age.

And so my church gave me a pyx (a small container that holds about 25 Hosts, or holy bread), a burse (a leather pouch to keep the pyx inside), a name tag, a small stack of books and pamphlets about what it means to be a Eucharistic Minister, and an address and a phone number regarding my first gig. Last week, I went to a senior retirement home and rehab center, and gave Communion to around 20 people, some in groups, some in their own rooms. I prayed with those who had the strength to pray out loud, and for the others who barely had the strength to open their mouths, I did the praying.

Things are tough right now. Some of my friends are losing their jobs, getting their hours cut, or having trouble paying their mortgage. It is now the reverse of the dot-com era, when people had more money than time. This also applies to me, with my clients suffering from this recession. I now have at least three new hours a week to use as I wish, to either panic about the world’s financial situation, or to spend that time doing something constructive that has absolutely nothing to do with anything that I’ve ever done before. I chose the latter, and now spend one afternoon a week bringing Communion to others.

Last Sunday’s homily by Father John was about two books by C.S. Lewis, the same author of the Narnia stories. The first book, which I have yet to read, is The Great Divorce, about people who are stuck in Hell that are about to take a bus ride to spend an afternoon in Heaven. One by one, they complain about trivial things, whether it’s the person sitting next to them, or the way the bus driver drove, to the point where complaining about the road to Heaven was more important than getting there.

The other book is The Screwtape Letters, a series of letters that a high-ranking demon, Screwtape, writes to his nephew, Wormwood. Wormwood is a fledgling demon who has been assigned to “guide” a human to do everything possible so that he ultimately winds up in Hell.

There is a reason that I didn’t, but I wish that I had known about this book a long time ago. It uses irony and reverse perspective, where God is the “Enemy”, and every advice is the opposite of what it should be—although I’ve caught myself rereading some passages because some of Screwtape’s advice is the same exact advice I had read in very popular financial and self-help books.

I had underlined some passages:

If he is of the more hopeful type your job is to make him acquiesce in the present low temperature of his spirit and gradually become content with it, persuading himself that it is not so low after all.

In 1994, I worked four days at a job that was a very good paycheck but made me feel soulless. My friend back then had told me to stick it out for six months, and I’ll probably wind up not minding it so much after that. I was desperate to have a job back then. I quit after four days.

It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be…He cannot ‘tempt’ to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.

Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.