Blog – Page 171 – Comboni Lay Missionaries

Way of the Cross

17 March, 201527 February, 2015 by Maggie and Mark Banga

A couple years back, we joined Fr. Sixtus Agostini, Comboni Missionary, to journey through the Good Friday “Way of the Cross” liturgy in the small rural mission parish of ‘Kege’ about an hour south drive of Awasa city. Good Friday is the commemoration of the death of Jesus Christ and the Way of the Cross is a retracing of Jesus’ Passion, the final events leading up to his crucifixion. What a precious blessing it was to “walk” this Way of the Cross as guests with our brothers and sisters of Kege.

The Kege area has a soupy, clay valley floor that delivers beautifully fertile soil to the farming community, and is flanked by rocky hills. We turned off the main asphalt highway and as we drove through the final 20 km to our destination we began passing more and more people walking with large crosses they had made of wood. We wondered if they would be joining in for the Way of the Cross procession and also wondered how far they had come from and whether they were going to make it?! We packed as many people as we could into the truck but we looked with astonishment out the window at small groups every few hundred meters diligently walking, crosses in hand.

We arrived around 9:00 am at the local chapel. To our surprise there were about 200 people already gathered praying in silence in the simple chapel. No one peeped a word when we entered. The chapel was constructed using the local method of mud (chika) and chopped straw (chid) packed and smoothed onto a wooden skeleton. Your nostrils filled with an intense earthy aroma upon entering. Maggie and I took a seat on a plank of wood at the back.

Soon we were leaving the chapel on procession. Realizing that we were the only ones without a cross, Maggie picked two small branches from the ground and a piece of grass which she tried to use to fasten the two pieces together. The children understood what was happening. Instantly, numerous teenagers came to the rescue with dried palm leaves and they tied Maggie’s cross tightly together. She shook the mud off the sticks and raised it into the ready position. This spontaneous fabrication triggered giggles and huge smiles around us.

Teenage boys carried a massive cross at the front, along with backpacks carrying a megaphone, receiver, and batteries. The megaphone crackled and Fr. Sixtus began the Way of the Cross procession with the first ‘station’ or moment of the Passion. The Gospel passage was read, followed by a reflection and prayers. The tone was solemn and penitential with the people singing responses to the prayers. As Fr. Sixtus began to read the blessing to conclude the first station, to my surprise, everyone knelt down right where they were standing – be it, the mud (it had rained hard the night before), cow dung or onto rocks, depending on one’s chance. People had dressed up to attend the service, but without hesitation plunged their knees into the mud in humbleness of heart to the whole purpose and penitential spirit of the day, Good Friday.

Everyone stood up and we began walking. The congregation scattered loosely behind the central wooden cross continued in procession with somber song. We repeated the above prayer service 13 more times through all the stations of the Way of the Cross. The procession journeyed maybe 5 km weaving through the town of Kege and surrounding farms. Along the way, Maggie and I were quite a novelty and many young children scrunched in close to walk with us. As we walked and prayed, all the people that we had seen on our drive joined group by group. By the end the congregation grew from 200 to 750. Maggie and I could only feel very touched at how passionate people were about being present on this holiest of days. People had walked hours in order to walk some more. They desired to be present to Jesus and walk with Him.

During the final stations, the procession turned up the valley wall, symbolically mirroring the ascent of Calvary. The pitch was astoundingly steep, demanding your hands to push up on rocks and pull on small trees. This was the way to celebrate the Way of the cross! It was quite the sight to see this large group slowly scurry up the rocky slope, suddenly stopping along the way to pray a station. Maggie and I climbed too. Everyone around seemed very concerned that we were not going to make it. Tiny children and old women would extend their hands at tricky boulder locations to us! At one moment, I made the tinniest of slips on some loose gravel and 100 people all gasped in unison.

We arrived all together at the top of the slope and everyone sat down amongst the brush and rocks. The procession now flowed into the celebration of the Good Friday service which Fr. Sixtus started over the megaphone. A few minutes later, the sky flipped from sunny to stormy and it poured. It poured hard. Everyone huddled under the few umbrellas that people had brought. Maggie and I soon had 7 children piled in tightly under our umbrella. The liturgy continued and everyone did their best to listen to the megaphone above the sound of the rain.

After communion had been distributed under umbrellas, the rain and the liturgy both ended together. There were smiles all around – both from the happiness of having completed the 3 hour procession and from a humorous knowledge of having endured together the sun, mud, steep pitch and thunderstorm. Roasted dry peas were passed around in celebration.

This story is not original or unique. It is the recounting of a scene which is played out in countless unknown places in the developing world – a scene where people who live in extreme material poverty gather together and turn their hearts to God. The people did not come to hear a theological lecture on Jesus’ Passion or to participate in the Easter journey out of obligation. They came simply to walk because they love Jesus and want to express their gratitude for the love He has shown them.

In front of this kind of faith, I could only but feel humbled.

– Mark & Maggie Banga

Comboni Lay Missionaries serving in Awassa, Ethiopia

Dear St. Daniel

13 May, 201527 February, 2015 by Maggie and Mark Banga

Dear St. Daniel,

In the last couple years as I have serving here in Ethiopia, I’ve been diving into some of the thousands of letters which you wrote. In your words, it is clear that you loved the African people so much. Being here in Africa myself, the place where you gave your whole life, you are a great faith model for me because it was your big love that fueled your tenacity to persevere amidst every kind of hardship. Where did such a love come from? At a time when most everyone else in the western world disregarded Africa and saw only insurmountable destitution, you saw a sister and a brother and potential. When others saw selfish opportunity, profit and a source of slaves, you saw Jesus in their faces and the dignity of a fellow child of the Father in heaven. As boats left the harbour packed with slaves destined for the ‘civilized’ world, you sent African men and women to Europe to study at university with the firm confidence that they would return to their homelands being the best architects of their own people’s liberation and development. How much opposition you must have faced? I guess you wanted for all Africans to savour the freedom you found in God’s love, a love which you obviously felt so strongly yourself.

– Mark & Maggie Banga

Comboni Lay Missionaries serving in Awassa, Ethiopia

Easter in Ethiopia

30 March, 201526 February, 2015 by Maggie and Mark Banga

Walking through Holy Week here in Ethiopia requires you to take off your shoes and feel the rocky soil between your toes. Ethiopians don’t celebrate Easter in a mere cerebral way; instead they need to feel it more physically. They manifest their spiritual journey of the week with tangible expressions which are at the same time profound yet plain: joyous palm waving as the King enters on a real donkey, 10km long stations of the cross processions in the blazing sun which literally scale up the hill of Calvary, vivid dramatic reenactments to supplement the liturgies, four straight hours of prostrations and prayers on Good Friday to enter into the Passion with one’s body. Yet the faith expression is marked with a humble simplicity – processing through the mud alongside herds of cattle, unadorned crosses made with two pieces of wood joined by a nail, Easter Sunday baptisms from a plastic bowl in a mud-walled chapel. All is beautiful and meaningful, in the same way for Jesus’ Passion to be fully redemptive, it also needed to be physical.

Palm Sunday Processions:

Good Friday Way of the Cross:

Easter Vigil and Sunday:

Mark & Maggie Banga

Comboni Lay Missionaries serving in Awassa, Ethiopia

Aspirants CLM meeting in Ghana

25 February, 2015 by Alberto de la Portilla

We held our meeting this 14th Feb. We first have a talk on Comboni Spirituality which was presented by our Spiritual Director Fr Godwin Kornu. First of all, he showed us the books that can help us in our journey: The Writings of Comboni, The passion of a life of Don Lozano, We the Heirs of Francesco Pierli. He then explained the word Spirituality by the way a person experiences God, him or herself and the world he/she is part of. The spirituality must be shaped by Christ but it is influenced by the time and our environment. And talking about the spirituality of a person demands to pass through the life, the history of the person, the way he experiences God. And this experience of an individual is unique. Father led us to discover that the “loving heart is a suffering heart” and “what is good is not relative” which means what is good cannot be determined by a tradition or a culture. What is good is good by itself. The relativism is one of the points that the Pope Emeritus Benedict condemned lots. (The theme is very broad so for now it is just an introduction).

After the presentation, we moved on for some discussions. The minutes of the last meeting was read and few corrections made. From the matters arisen, we agreed to levy ourselves with an amount which can be paid from now up to the next second meeting. At last, we decided to have a recollection on the 14^th March to redo ourselves in the Lenten Season. The meeting was then moved to closure with prayer and benediction. After this, we had an agape.

Justin Nougnui, coordinator.

“I was in prison and you came to visit me”

23 February, 2015 by Alberto de la Portilla

Among the various pastoral activities of the parish of Santo Domingo, led by the Comboni Missionaries in Nova Contagem, it is also the prison ministry, in charge of 15 volunteers, including the Comboni Lay Missionaries, which are part of the parish.

Every Tuesday and Wednesday morning, the group meets to visit the pavilions of the maximum-security prison of Nelson Hungria, located in Nova Contagem, with about 2,000 inmates. The meeting is at 08:00 in the square next to the prison.

The prison situation in Brazil, as in other parts of the world, suffers from high overcrowding due to prison system with little attention to the recovery of prisoners.

Prisons in Minas Gerais, for example, can receive 32,000 prisoners, divided into 144 prisons; actually, there are 54,000 inmates in the different units. This situation only gets worse the living conditions of prisoners, with a further object of punishing instead of re-educate and re-socialize, with serious violations of human rights.

The action and commitment of the group of Prison Ministry, composed mainly of women, is to believe in a work of promoting human dignity, respect for human rights, and the overcoming of the limits of the current prison system in favor of a model that allows effective recovery and reintegration of the individual.

The most important of our pastoral activity is the testimony of a God who does not discriminate anyone, in a place marked by contempt, prejudice and violence, making ours the words of the Gospel: “I was in prison, and you came to visit me “. It is the pedagogy of Jesus, method, model, who heads the way of this pastoral, recognizing the face of God in every person, including the prisoners.

There are many challenges and difficulties in our pastoral activities, such as excessive bureaucracy that often delays and complicates our work, controls, restrictions on visits, limited permissions; but with courage, this small group of volunteers are facing difficulties. This has allowed in 2014, to create two groups of catechesis in prison. And it was possible that some inmates, who had requested, receive the sacraments.

For this are fundamental the moments of ongoing formation that we make at the end of the month, to have a dedicated space of programming and training, allowing prison pastoral agents learn the actions that will help to improve prison visits and the relationship with the inmates. In this also helps the training conducted by the diocese.

In short, this would be the work of the prison ministry. A simple action, giving hand, encountering real faces, listening to the life stories of those who are on the other side of the bars, to bear witness to the dignity of every human being, because as the Gospel says “by this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (Jn 13, 35.).

Emma Chiolini, Comboni Lay Missionary