“Be Positive But Test Negative”

Ready to have your heart broken?  Then be inspired again? And proud to be Catholic?

Read the narratives of some Catholic nuns on the ground in India during this horrific time of pandemic, suffering, and deprivation. We all see the clips on the news. We watch as cameras skim over jammed hospitals, overwrought caregivers, funeral pyres, people bent over in grief, wide-eyed with fear, or deadened with despair. Reporters give us bleak statistics and brief analysis, and then they and we move on.

But the nuns who serve in India do not. They stay and face the day to day misery and tell us what it is like, right there, right now, to try to bring hope and faith and love as well as supplies and salve and solace to a country and people so blighted. These are the kind of Catholic women who keep us in the Church because they show us what the Church, in so many ways, can be. 

Some are already leaders, organizers and advocates, taking the male- dominated government and Church to task. Others are already communion celebrants, consecrating the earth’s gifts by giving them as medicine and comfort and nurture and presence (and, I believe, Presence) for those who need them most, including us in the privileged West who hear their stories. We raise them up as women – perhaps also other-gendered – already filling proper roles in leadership and ministry. 

I include here a very brief overview of some of their profiles and firsthand accounts as published in the May 13, 2021 Global Sisters Report. 

Lalita Roshni Lakra’s story affected me the most. A Daughter of St. Anne from North India, she studied social work and science but ultimately earned a law degree. She now serves in the Office for Tribal Affairs of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India and practices law in the district and supreme courts for the Alliance Defending Freedom in New Delhi. 

She begins her narrative with the sentence: Choking India screams, “More oxygen, please.” Imagine hearing those words coming from all around you, and there is nothing you can do to relieve the agony. She tells us: 

Almost all calls and messages shock us with news of death, calls of requests and help, with crying and sobbing. We are tired of responding, “Rest in peace,” and exhorting friends to stay home, stay safe, take care, prayers assured! Everywhere, there is breathlessness, helplessness, mourning, sinking hopes and prevailing despair.

And imagine living with this scenario: 

People are being treated by the roadsides, in parks and makeshift hospitals with saline bottles hanging on the trunks and branches of trees. The scarcity of medical facilities is scandalous to us; in this tug of war between life and death, death seems to be stronger, swallowing lives. I was stunned to see on the TV news a woman giving oxygen to her infected husband, mouth to mouth. (Ultimately, he died in a car outside the hospital from lack of a ventilator and hospital bed.)

She begins to agonize about her own vocation: 

It is in this context that I, as a Catholic and religious, am pondering how to revive hope in people who trust in the divine power and existence of God and how to help people to deepen their faith in the Lord. How and where to get courage and strength? Sometimes, like Jesus’ apostles, I ask: “Where are you, Lord? Why have you forsaken the world and me?”

And then she gives herself, her people, and us, renewed hope:

But maybe those are the wrong questions. Now, I am asking, “Lord, how are you present to us amid this pandemic reality?” 

And then she concludes with an injection of the spiritual merged with the scientific: 

“Let us ‘be positive but test negative.’”

Monica D’silva is a Sister of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd from Southwest India. She is a nurse who also has a diploma in theology. She works in the COVID 19 ward at St. Martha’s Hospital in Bangalore, and as she calls out to the afflicted; she calls out to us: 

Can you hear our cry?

My brothers and sisters, let us be united in one spirit, supporting each other as we go through these difficult moments. Even now, as broken as you may feel, you are still so strong. You hold yourself together and keep moving, even though you feel shattered. Don’t stop. This is your healing. 

Margaret Gonsalves, who belongs to the Sisters for Christian Community, is the founder of ANNNI Charitable Trust, and works to empower Indigenous girls and women in India. As an empowered woman herself, she speaks out for all women and other-gendered oppressed by Church and/or State:

India has been exporting vaccines to the world, and we have to be satisfied with the crumbs! Men are busy fighting elections, erecting statues and temples, and traveling at great cost. Too long, the male voice has dominated both church and civil society. We in India are in dire need of caring mothers who would think of their children first and then politics.

And she ends with what we all need to hear: 

Kindness brings oxygen to the air. The rise of prophetic female political leaders will provide oxygen and plant seeds of health for all.

I love the thought of all of us, included, raised up, fully empowered – and ordained by Church and community- as a renewed source of oxygen for the Church and the world.