Dear Friends,
On Wednesday, March 4, just over a year since my arrival to STM, our campus ministry drastically changed, due to COVID-19. We canceled our Alternative Spring Break trips. We began implementing the evolving precautionary measures taken by Yale and the city of New Haven in an effort to flatten the curve. We canceled all public liturgies, switching instead to livestreamed Masses.
We celebrated our first livestream Mass on Sunday, March 15, the morning after President Salovey announced that Yale’s Spring semester would move online. All students should stay at home, and those still on campus should depart for home. We were just beginning Lent, and our students were about to experience the Cross and plunge into the passion, death and resurrection of Christ in a way that no one could ever have imagined or planned for. Experiencing Lent and Easter amidst a shared global pandemic has given us a whole new understanding of what it means to be the Body of Christ, spread throughout the world— who cannot be constrained by physical barriers of time and space, nor held back by social distancing. We clung to a “hope that does not disappoint,” knowing that love and light rise from the darkness of the tomb at the Easter dawn.
As the world now begins to emerge from the tombs of fear, disappointment and sorrow, we are awakening to the reality that the deeper wounds and illnesses of humanity have been exposed. We need our Easter faith now more than ever, as Christ has commissioned us to be his healing, reconciliation and love in the world. At Pentecost, God’s Holy Spirit shook us out of our protective upper rooms—to come out of ourselves at were—in order to listen, advocate for and stand in solidarity with our sisters and brothers who suffer from the evils of injustice, inequality and hatred. I have been deeply humbled and totally inspired by the way in which our STM community, and particularly our students, have moved through this unforgettable first half of 2020 while bearing witness to the fact that Christ’s love triumphs over hate and is stronger than death itself. May their faith and perseverance reflected in the following section reignite within you the fire of that love.
Yours in Christ,
Fr. Ryan
Rocio Trujillo '20 J.D. prays in the Chapel after receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday—just two weeks before STM closed due to COVID-19.
