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Maryhouse Yukon
This is a story about how God writes straight with crooked lines even during a pandemic. It all began a few years ago when Maryhouse hosted a weekly scripture gathering, a shared reflection on the readings for the coming Sunday.
A friend came weekly, listening, sharing and feeding on the riches of Scripture, Church tradition and our own Madonna House spirituality. She expressed a certain sadness that her only child, an adult daughter living away from Whitehorse, no longer practised the faith.
Fast forward a couple years. Our friend had moved to central British Columbia, and her daughter had moved back to Whitehorse.
Somewhere along the line, the daughter returned to the Church and Mass became important to her, so much so that she now serves as lector.
Living in our neighbourhood, she often asked to accompany me home from Mass, asking faith questions all the while.
This year, at the beginning of Lent, she was eager to learn all she could about the significance of Lenten practices and how this connected with the celebration of Easter.
When I mentioned the richness of the liturgies of the Triduum and encouraged her to attend as many of these as she could, she lamented that she was committed that weekend to coordinating a ski race in Old Crow, an isolated village several hundred miles north of Whitehorse. It was an annual, standing commitment, and one she loved to fulfill.
So, when this ski loppet, (a long distance cross-country ski event) was suddenly cancelled due to the corona virus, she quickly consoled herself that this year she would attend the Triduum. Imagine her dismay when she found out that the churches were closed and that possibility was taken away.
But God had something even better in mind. Her current employer is a member of the Yukon’s Legislative Assembly, and live-streaming meetings is a regular component of her work.
When she approached Bishop Hector Vila, the bishop of our diocese, with the possibility that she could live-stream the Triduum liturgies, he quickly accepted. So, not only did she film these liturgies, she was one of only two lay people present at them, and served as lector.
It seems God wanted to give this young woman a lasting impression of these sacred days. And her mother must have been grinning from ear to ear down in British Columbia as she “attended” these solemn liturgies with her daughter via modern technology.
