She wrote that she had not been able to reach a church in four years. Her knees had gone, the nearest parish was eleven kilometres, and her son worked in the Gulf.
What four years means
It is worth sitting with the arithmetic. Four years is something like two hundred Sundays.
She was not lapsed and she had not chosen any of it. She was simply a woman whose body had stopped cooperating with the distance between her house and the building where her life had been held, and there was no one left in the house to drive her.
Two of those years with us
She said she had prayed with us every evening for two of the four. She knew our voices. She knew which of us would lead which mystery.
She had assumed, for a long time, that we were a radio station. It had not occurred to her that the people she prayed with each evening were two individuals at a table who might conceivably be written to.
Why we make it in Malayalam first
People sometimes ask why the mission did not begin in English, which would have reached further faster.
This letter is the answer. Prayer in a second language is comprehension. Prayer in your mother’s language is something else, and for a woman who has not heard a Mass in four years, the difference between those two things is not academic.
The letter itself
We have had a great deal of correspondence since the mission began, and we cannot keep all of it.
I have kept that one. On the days when the work feels like production scheduling and licensing arrangements and the management of three channels, it is useful to have a physical reminder that the entire apparatus exists so that one woman with bad knees can pray at seven in the evening.