First Friday reflection, ‘Reparation’ seen as ‘repairing the damaged, the mutilated, the de-reverenced’.  Gerardine Doherty OLSH.

We used the word ‘reparation’ in a sense of penance and mortification. How can it be understood more challengingly now?

Jules Chevalier was intensely aware of the “evils of his time” and he urgently desired to restore to those wounded by such “evils” their rightful dignity, the truth of their personal value and worth.  He longed to “repair” the “image of God” where he saw it had been damaged, mutilated, de-reverenced. 

To live reparation today, I believe, is an invitation to imagine the world and one’s place in it as quite different from the existing order.  To live reparation has something to do with grieving over what has already been lost and the possibilities that have never actually been realized.   To live reparation is to feel in one’s own heart the enormous tension contained in the paradoxical truth, “Redemption is complete but not yet finished.”

I believe that the quality of our reparation would be considerably enriched if we constantly made the effort to examine, not only from the economical, ecological, and political viewpoints but also from the

theological stance, the grassroots of the evils of our day.  This I think would empower us to act with greater creativity, effectiveness, and awareness of the real anxieties and urgent needs in today’s world.