WE HAVE BEEN LEFT WITHOUT CARNIVAL…
Two years ago I participated in the Carnival in the north of Argentina. It was a party atmosphere with typical dresses and an environment full of joy.
People painted each other’s faces with colors and gradually formed a mask so that it was difficult to recognize each other from so much paint or chalk. This year, due to the well-known pandemic, we have been left without carnival and in many places this absence was felt. We are left without the music and joy of “Rio,” without the glamour of “Venice,” or even without the dances and colors of our own places. But thinking a little further, the pandemic not only removed the masks of the carnival, but it also was able to remove so many other masks from our societies. It removed the masks from the health systems, where we have realized their precariousness in many of our countries, and that health was not for “all” but for a chosen few. It removed the masks from economic models that could not respond quickly to needs and understand that a simple virus can bring down the entire world economy.
The mask of “care of the planet” disappeared, as we could witness the true oxygenation of the world when human beings stopped invading all spaces. But, as usual, when the masks fall off, we can begin to see the faces, which showed us, perhaps, those who would have wanted to continue covering the faces of the poor, of those who were left with nothing, without even the possibility of feeding their children; the face of the sick, of those who were not “priority” left in the waiting with their pain; the face of the elderly in solitude, many of them spending years in this situation, bearing silence and depression; the face of those who have died in extreme solitude, without a hand to sustain their departure, like that of relatives who had to resign themselves with just a few ashes between their fingers without the possibility of saying goodbye. However, our gaze cannot remain only here.
The Church gives us a time to rediscover ourselves in truth before the Lord, without masks, without disguises, and perhaps with the only mark we need on our faces – that of the ashes of conversion.
This time invites us to rediscover our true face, the one that marks our identity as children of God, as followers of Jesus Christ, Evangelizer of the poor, as a missionary community. He invites us to take off our costumes and put on the Spirit of Jesus Christ. We have the challenge to look at the face of those at whom no one looks, the poor, those who have no face for society. The challenge is to remove the masks that cause so many social injustices, to bring God to those empty hearts. True, we are left without carnival, but not without joy. We are witnesses and bearers of the true Joy of the Gospel.
P. Hugo Marcelo Vera, CM
