Christ in the city

JVC
I was blessed today to attend a day of reflection for young adults living in the Philadelphia area. We gathered in the Temple University Newman Center for prayer, Eucharistic adoration, group reflection, and Mass. The focus of the retreat was living a Christian witness in the midst of the city - an especially pertinent topic for me at this point in my JVC experience. My colleagues in the shelter keep asking me why in the world I'm staying on for another year - and secretly, I've been asking myself the same thing. Why I am staying in a place where there is so much pain and suffering, violence and poverty? Why I am working in a job where I net $85 a month, and where my best efforts often yield no results? Why am I living in a city of abandoned lots and run-down tenements, of gunshots and sirens, of drugs and human trafficking?

These were the unspoken questions that I brought before the Lord today, on my knees in adoration. And the Lord answered me in equally unspoken terms. I felt Him draw my eyes to the crucifix mounted behind the altar, and for one fraction of a second, I understood what Christ had done for us. He, the only-begotten Son of God the Father, who had lived for all eternity in the peace and joy and love of the Trinity, had seen our suffering and had not left us alone in it. He had taken on all that bound us - our pain, our sorrow, our infirmity, our wounds, our frailty, our fear, our loneliness, our mortality - so that we might know true freedom.

And in that fraction of a second, I also understood why I still live and work amidst poverty and violence - because Christ had stood beside us in all of the ugliness of human existence, so that we might stand with Him in the beauty of His eternal existence in the Father.

That is why I struggle against a broken housing system, why I welcome a tearful young woman into my office at the end of a long day, why I help a young mother pack up her children's clothing when we cannot keep her family any longer in the shelter. That is why I cradle a wailing infant to my chest and chase hyperactive children through the hallways, why I call ambulances and make visits to psychiatric wards where I will be asked if I am the Cambodian translator. That is why I rent storage units and save dinner plates and hand out SEPTA tokens, why I talk women through panic attacks and work on behalf of clients who may one day tell me that I have done nothing at all to help them.

I am not here for results. I am not here to save people or to solve anyone's problems. I am not here to end domestic violence. I am here because Christ is here. I am here because Christ lived among the poor and the broken-hearted, the marginalized and the dispossessed; because Christ was beaten and humiliated, abandoned by His friends, told that He was a liar and a failure. I am here because His Body is still broken in all of my clients' wounds, because His Blood is still poured out in all of their tears. I am here to be a living Eucharist, to say: this is my body, here for you in this moment. These are my ears to listen to you, my eyes to acknowledge you, my voice to affirm you. These are my hands to support you. These are my feet to go where you cannot. This is my body given for you, because He has given His Body for me.

Be still and know

JVC
My community just came back from a four-day Silent Retreat at a Jesuit retreat center in Morristown, NJ. We spent 40 hours of that time in silence, following guidelines laid out by St. Ignatious in his Spiritual Exercises.

Although I had been looking forward to this retreat for months (nothing is so precious to an introvert as some silent time!), when we arrived, I was not in the greatest of moods. Work at the shelter had seemed unusually stressful for the previous few weeks, and the last thing I wanted to do was get trapped inside my head with my thoughts.

Looking back, however, I'm pretty sure that this mood was all part of God's providential plan for me during this retreat. On the advice of the awesome spiritual director I was paired with, I tried to put down my expectations for the weekend and just relax and let God come to me. Which, of course, He did. I spent hours in the retreat center's tiny chapel, just sitting with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and being reminded yet again of how deeply and intimately God loves us.

Coming into the retreat as I did forced me to confront the darkness that is so often part of the spiritual life, those times when God seems far away from our struggles on earth. It forced me to lay down all of the pain and brokenness I had been carrying around with me from the shelter, to come before God and say, Lord, this is where I am, and I can't find You here.

And the miracle is, God found me. I struggle so often to see God amidst the chaos of the shelter, where change is slow and hope often seems far away. Yet what this experience taught me is that if I simply ask God to reveal Himself, He will. Jesus reminds us that whatever we ask of God in prayer, He will give us - even if it is simply the gift of His Presence, which is sometimes what we need most.

The Long View

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

~Archbishop Oscar Romero

The Credo Project

Prayer for Generosity

Lord, teach me to be generous
Teach me to serve you as you deserve
To give and not to count the cost
To fight and not to heed the wounds
To toil and not to seek for rest
To labor and not to ask for reward
Save that of knowing that I am doing your will

~St. Igantius of Loyola