Up to your knees in the mud on the way to Him …

I visited the last of my flocks, the most distant, only nascent community of the Church. Thirty kilometers away and a little more on foot. The period was not the best, a lot of mud and water. The Crooked Man, called a cockroach here, is stuck in the mud… What to do? I take off my pants and look for stones, helpers to somehow get out … I manage, although there is mud everywhere. I will not say that I was particularly pleased and thanked God for a sister or a mud brother – rather the other way around. I reach the village, wash my shoes and walk barefoot through the village to invite people to a meeting, the first meeting of the Church that is being born in the mud. I manage to gather maybe fifteen people, two children are prepared for baptism … I smile and greet everyone warmly … and barefoot, with my feet in the mud, I begin to include the children in the community of believers in Christ. I prepare adults, I devote much more time to them, it even takes two years…

It may be outrageous that I am administering God’s sacraments with muddy pants and dirty feet. For a moment I thought this myself, after all, in Poland, Europe, always shiny shoes, a white shirt and everything so beautiful … And to cheer myself up and whiten a little bit of this mud, I start to think: Isn’t the priest’s job to mess in the mud? Don’t you have to get your knees dirty to find this precious pearl in all that dung and bring it to Jesus?

Or maybe more than gold-plated cufflinks we need dirty arms and legs to accompany people wherever they are? Eat together with pigs to show a saved man: you are everything to me! How important and special is a man that Jesus got so dirty, soiled, decayed …

And I looked at my feet, saying the words: “I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit …” A little blessed water fell on my muddy toe and it became cleaner. In this clean drop the light reflected on the dirty toe … Finally, of course, I solemnly showed the toe to the faithful, explaining that Jesus washes us, cleanses us, makes us new …

I can’t dig myself out of the mud that I got into myself. I need not only him, but also another human being.

Confession … The second person makes sense, because I also made the other muddy, my mud splashes on others, stains the wandering people … not another, it is a man in himself … The other is a mirror, without a mirror I will not remove all the mud … I see from my own experience of confessing and confessing that more than sin, man carries hidden pain and suffering … also caused by sin … There is more poverty in man than evil or sin…

Immerse yourself in the mud, go to the pigs, sit on a bench with a drunk offering rum … Too earthy, too non-church?

I would like to be treated like this by the Good Father, when I get to the end. Maybe muddy with sin, maybe imperfections in torn pants …, maybe sweaty with everyday struggle … and burned with the mediocrity of my faith … but with this drop of water sparkling in the sun on a thick toe … And I believe that God will not have white cuffs and gold cufflinks, which I could stain with mud … And he will embrace me kindly, and will embrace me with tenderness, and everything will be so different and ordinary at the same time. The God of my everyday life, who got dirty with mud that day with me …

Number of views:
37