St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, SoHo, Good Friday. Warm, sunny day in New York City, a glorious and fitting end to our 15th Holy Week Mission on the streets of SoHo. It was truly a “Good” Friday, a feast celebrating Jesus’ unfathomable love for us. And that love just poured out of everywhere and everyone. It was a love fest.
Beyond this, it is difficult to describe in words what happened. For both I and the dozen or so other street missionaries, all of us by night’s end were overwhelmed by the flood of souls we spent time with in rich discussions about God, art, Good Friday, the coming Easter holiday, and the power of preparing for it with a solid reconciliation with God.
So many joyful, loving conversations, often back to back as lines formed around us on the streets and the flood of passers-bys just kept coming; as on Monday at the Cathedral, note-taking was out of the question. Due to the lines of people around us, there was often no time even for the more normal “confession escort service” (walking a nervous soul into the church), and we had to rely instead on the “visual hand off method”, sending folks from our corners to the visible team we had in the front of the church, who would then turn them the rest of the way in. Inevitably, individual stories melded, names faded and morphed, hugs from one joyful encounter blended into hugs from the next, and old friends from previous missions re-appeared, older, wiser, and yes, closer now in their relationship with God.
In the back of the church, the action was thick, as our two missionaries there “worked” the crowd quietly. Many had come in for a “quick prayer” at the urging of one of the missionaries outside, and then, moved by the Holy Spirit and the gentle prodding of the back of the church crew, came to the sacrament of confession. There, in the words of another mission veteran, Fr. Shawn Aaron, who had flown up from Atlanta to hear confessions for us, “many big fish were landed.”
As the long day and night wore on, there were also plenty of tears, of sorrow for mistakes made, and of joy for mercy and forgiveness received. Father experienced this himself a few times in the confessional, and so did several of the missionaries. Every one of them, at one point or another through the day, “found their soul”, as a missionary ambiguously charged them to do as we set out from Mission HQ in the early afternoon. Their soul was often a person who they somehow uniquely touched, convinced to visit the church, and ended up with a conversion experience in the confessional. As Fr. Shawn told more than one penitent that night, “You can’t explain this. You just can’t explain the series of ‘coincidences’ that somehow, unexpectedly and without planning, landed you here at this moment, to have this experience of the Lord’s mercy, to have this change in your course. There is no adequate human explanation. Only the hand of God could have done this.”
I’ve often talked about how the mission is not just for the “missioned-to.” It is also for “the missioned-from”, the missionaries themselves, who find their own soul in the process of working so intimately with the Holy Spirit in His plan of salvation. For it was we who experienced and witnessed, again and again, the miraculous impact of the “hand of God” on the souls brought to us through the day within and amidst the river teeming with souls flowing through SoHo on that bright sunny afternoon. And when that happens, our own faith in God transforms from theory to reality, from something in our mind to something in our hearts and souls. And so, yes, the missionaries too cried last night. We cried tears of joy amidst all the hugs and kisses out on that busy street corner in SoHo. And not just the newcomers among us. The veterans too. All of us needed this.
We cried, we hugged, we loved.
We were out in the Love Fest.
