My former students at Red Cloud Indian School would cut off the second half of certain duo-syllabic words. Money was pronounced “mun,” nothing was “nuth,” and emotional was “emoshe.” It was almost as if they were guarding themselves from the full existential implications of talking about money or nothingness or emotions. To distance themselves from being vulnerable before such fraught concepts.
In that spirit, I will just say that attending the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis this week, I keep surprising myself by getting emoshe.
When I got off the plane at the Indianapolis airport yesterday and went down the escalator to ground transportation, there was a huge pink and red sign pasted to the floor below: “Heaven on Earth. No boarding pass needed. National Eucharistic Congress.”
Two women coming down the escalator next to mine said, quite earnestly, almost as if they weren’t sure they had landed in the correct city, something like, “Oh, we’re in the right place!”
There was just something so simple and nonaffected and happy and guileless and endearing about them saying that—“Oh, we’re in the right place!”—that I got a bit emoshe. I cannot tell you exactly why, except to say that maybe I am sorely in the mood for something simple and nonaffected and happy and endearing and guileless. (Maybe everyone is?)
Last night at Lucas Oil Stadium—a massive indoor and very cool-looking stadium of exposed girders and pipes and catwalks, a brilliant theater set of a stadium—thousands of people knelt in the half dark in adoration of the Eucharist as a simple song played quietly in the background (“Set a fire down in my soul, I want more of you God. No place I’d rather be than here in your love…”).
The next morning a woman in the buffet line at the hotel restaurant said to my colleague Ricardo DaSilva, S.J.: “Wasn’t it beautiful, all those people at adoration kneeling? It’s just what we need, what the world needs.” Something about her saying that, her quiet joy, someone who is simply pleased with what is happening here, got me a touch emoshe.
At the press conference today, Bishop Andrew Cozzens reported that during the third “missioning” year of the Eucharistic Revival, “We are inviting every person to walk with one person who is away from the faith or not of the faith and help them to take one step back to the church.” It is a smart way forward, this manner of evangelization: simple, manageable, right-sized, humble. Just hearing it made me (O.K., I’ll say it) emotional.
In some ways, this Eucharistic Congress is not really an earth-shattering event. News is not breaking, candidates are not stumping, teams are not battling, records are not being shattered. It is people walking around wearing orange Congress swag bags happy to be here with other Catholics and to pray together. And it is moving.
