I don’t want to believe in a God who makes the rain stop for my convenience. But the torrential downpour that accompanied the Festival Mass to celebrate the Feast of Christ the King did come to a dramatic halt just moments before we left the church for a procession around the City of God.
It’s late spring in Rio de Janeiro, temperatures should have been soaring and skies should have been blue for the Patronal Festival but from daybreak, as London-like grey clouds hid the sun from view, we were in for a deluge. My heart sank as it started to spit whilst I queued for flowers at the stall in the town square. The only thing that lifted my spirits was the florist penning a greetings card for the elderly woman in front of me who had never learnt to read and write.
In church, with raindrops turning to drizzle, I blew up the yellow balloons that were to be carried in the procession, a symbol of the universe of which Christ is Lord and King but whose weather systems he apparently has little influence over. By the time the service began the rain was lashing down. Then, as I was going to call the whole thing off, it just stopped.
Not every priest gets to lead his people down the Street of the Gospels but take two right turns out of church and you enter a narrow road whose uneven surface makes it hard to walk bearing just that name. We looked a rather bedraggled bunch marching behind the cross through the puddles in ‘Rua dos Evangelhos’. A robust drainage system couldn’t have been high up the agenda of the planners who built Cidade de Deus in 1960. It soon seemed that the ability to walk on water was going to be an essential aspect of life here. We sang ‘Tell me the old, old story’ in the hope that it would be a new song for some. The owners of the Boca de Fumo – or crack den – we passed on the way looked as if they’d heard it all before.
It had been Pope Pius IX who established the Feast of Christ the King in 1925 at a time when secularism was on the rise and Communism and Fascism held sway. The creation of the new festival was an attempt to assert that in the end Love would have the last word. In 1991, a partnership between the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil and congregations in the USA, Canada and Holland built the Church and dedicated it to Christ the King. I haven’t yet discovered why. Perhaps the forces at work in Cidade de Deus seemed to them as insurmountable as the ideologies of the 20th century and they too wanted to send a signal of hope. I trust it’s what we did today.
Fr Nicholas
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