Bro. Mark Bangura
This year I spent the Holy Week and Easter in Yiffin, a beautiful Kuranko village in the Northern part of Sierra Leone, 85 km of bad road from Kabala, deep in the bush where it takes a whole day to repair a flat tyre!
I am a xaverian seminarian and the experience was really fruitful for me. The celebrations were alternated with meetings and activities so that everybody could enjoy and participate fully. On Holy Thursday, for example, we were told that, as we eat rice and the rice becomes part of our body and gives us strength, in the same way, when we take communion, we are assimilated to the body of Christ. One prominent person in the church immediately drew the conclusion that with the Eucharist we become Jesus and all our actions become his. We remembered a prayer: ‘Jesus has no hand, only our hands, no feet, only our feet...’. Sometimes people can say that our Mass is short, but considering that when we leave the church we continue to act as Jesus, I think that our celebration lasts all the long!
Being in Yiffin, where the Fathers can be present only some Sundays in the year, and considering the centrality of the Eucharist, I also felt how important is the role of the Priest for the community.
Good Friday is the day when Jesus died for us. But this time I did understand better how it is all about God loving this world to the extent of giving his Son. It is a love born in the heart of the Trinity, with God going out of himself in the work of creation, and then with Jesus leaving his condition as God to become Human, a humble man, and then accepting to die on a cross, he went back to God renewing everything and giving us the opportunity of a new life. In this way the negative was transformed into a passage to life: the paschal mystery! We see Love not as a sentiment or just a good feeling, but action, going out of oneself to encounter the different, even the suffering, without fear because it is in losing that we find. A big provocation for my life, but also for the everyday small actions. This triumph of life over death is what we celebrated the Easter Vigil and on Easter Sunday mass.
We left Yiffin happy for these days spent with wonderful people and wonderful youth with whom we shared so many joyful moments, including a volleyball match and swimming in the river. The only thing that made us hold our breath was the bad road and the worry about flat tyres. But all went well, and we are grateful to God.
This year I spent the Holy Week and Easter in Yiffin, a beautiful Kuranko village in the Northern part of Sierra Leone, 85 km of bad road from Kabala, deep in the bush where it takes a whole day to repair a flat tyre!
I am a xaverian seminarian and the experience was really fruitful for me. The celebrations were alternated with meetings and activities so that everybody could enjoy and participate fully. On Holy Thursday, for example, we were told that, as we eat rice and the rice becomes part of our body and gives us strength, in the same way, when we take communion, we are assimilated to the body of Christ. One prominent person in the church immediately drew the conclusion that with the Eucharist we become Jesus and all our actions become his. We remembered a prayer: ‘Jesus has no hand, only our hands, no feet, only our feet...’. Sometimes people can say that our Mass is short, but considering that when we leave the church we continue to act as Jesus, I think that our celebration lasts all the long!
Being in Yiffin, where the Fathers can be present only some Sundays in the year, and considering the centrality of the Eucharist, I also felt how important is the role of the Priest for the community.
Good Friday is the day when Jesus died for us. But this time I did understand better how it is all about God loving this world to the extent of giving his Son. It is a love born in the heart of the Trinity, with God going out of himself in the work of creation, and then with Jesus leaving his condition as God to become Human, a humble man, and then accepting to die on a cross, he went back to God renewing everything and giving us the opportunity of a new life. In this way the negative was transformed into a passage to life: the paschal mystery! We see Love not as a sentiment or just a good feeling, but action, going out of oneself to encounter the different, even the suffering, without fear because it is in losing that we find. A big provocation for my life, but also for the everyday small actions. This triumph of life over death is what we celebrated the Easter Vigil and on Easter Sunday mass.
We left Yiffin happy for these days spent with wonderful people and wonderful youth with whom we shared so many joyful moments, including a volleyball match and swimming in the river. The only thing that made us hold our breath was the bad road and the worry about flat tyres. But all went well, and we are grateful to God.