Moments of Eternity

By Justine, recently returned from mission in Senegal

The last weeks were filled with dozens of visits to friends, some as close as the house next door and others as far away as Ephie’s village, to honor them and give thanks, knowing that when I was gone, others would be there to receive my friends as their own. Those visits were demanding and difficult as farewells always are, but I was determined to be present to the reality of the moment, not to get too lost in emotions. There too I received gifts: drinking a Coke with Mama while she told me the story of her childhood in Guinea, the loss of her father, and her mother’s famous rice fields; sitting perched on Marie Catherine’s sofa while she folded laundry late into the night on Sunday with only the light from her cell phone because the overhead lightbulb was burnt out; cooking enough Thieboudienne (rice with fish) to feed a few dozen people including Fatou-Ba’s two sons who are in jail; laughing at the spunky neighbor girl putting on a dance performance for Tata Louise and Pawel and I; opening the door to our house on my last afternoon in the midst of a packing frenzy to find that Badji, a gardener who lives alone an hour-and-a-half bus ride away, had come to visit me. 

Each moment has the “value of eternity,” to use a phrase of Pope John Paul II in his address to the young people of France in 1980. Being there, sometimes, by grace and no virtue of my own, I could see beyond myself and through the material reality, poor and broken as it sometimes was, to what was enduring. It took on so many different faces. Surprisingly, those moments of eternity are incredibly simple, just as our whole mission is incredibly simple: living alongside the poor, cooking, cleaning, playing with the kids, visiting those who are lonely or in need of a friend. A little participation in eternity.