The Absurd Logic of Love

“The less we have, the more we give. Seems absurd, but it’s the logic of love . . . True love causes pain. Jesus, in order to give us proof of his love, died on the cross. A mother, in order to give birth to her baby, has to suffer. If you really love one another, you will not be able to avoid making sacrifices. The poor do not need our condescending attitude or our pity. They only need our love and our tenderness. . .

“God has created us so we do small things with the greatest love. I believe in that great love, that comes or should come from our heart, should start at home: with m y family, my neighbors across the street, those right next door. And this love should then reach everyone.” Mother Teresa of Calcutta
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Give a Glass of Water

"When a poor person dies of hunger, it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed. You and I, we are the Church, no? We have to share with our people. Suffering today is because people are hoarding, not giving, not sharing. Jesus made it very clear. Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do it to me. Give a glass of water, you give it to me. Receive a little child, you receive me." Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Robert's Story: He chose a cold sidewalk over a warm bed . . .

By

Jake Folger

Robert is another of those never ending list of folks I have met while having coffee early in the morning in [Washington D.C.'s] Dupont Circle before my AA meeting. Only Robert is obviously different.

The first morning I saw him out on Starbuck's patio, he was sipping a cup of coffee and surfing the web on his lap top. A large, rolling suitcase sat beside him on the patio floor. Robert looked a lot more like a traveling businessman than a homeless person.

However, as days passed, I began to realize that Robert was always wearing the same set of clothes. Eventually I approached him saying, "Hi, I'm Jake. I'm an advocate for the homeless. Are you homeless?" He was indeed.

We began talking about his plight. He was receiving disability checks, which was not enough money to afford him a place to live.

Robert refused to live in a shelter. He, like so many homeless people didn't like shelters. The reasons are good ones. Shelters can be very dangerous places. There often are violent people, sick, angry and surly people all crowded into a small space. There is often a lot of thievery as well. And, the staff can be very surly too. Shelters often are just not a safe place for homeless people to be. Many will choose the streets to sleep on rather than a shelter. Such was the case with Robert.

He had applied for subsidized housing and was waiting for a slot to open up. Until that time, Robert, the other homeless folks and I met daily for coffee and conversation. I helped him mostly with friendship and some clothing. He eventually got his place and dropped out of the picture.

My meeting Robert reminded me of two things. One, that you don't have to look like your homeless to be homeless. And that sometimes it is preferred to stay "out there" to stay safe.

More on the Internet:
http://friendtothehomeless.org
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It's Not Unusual

Living homeless is not that unusual, in fact, it is the very price we pay to be an apostle of the Gospel of Christ. Tattered, hungry and thirsty we are to suffer and endure the slander of others with compassion, empathy and forgiveness. Rejected and despised for our beliefs because we hold to what is the opposite of the world, we are then dismissed as trash. In solidarity, let us sympathetically embrace the homeless on our city streets as signs, images and symbols of our own pathetic condition.

"For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like men condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men. We are fools for Christ, but you are so wise in Christ! We are weak, but you are strong! You are honored, we are dishonored! To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless. We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. Up to this moment we have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world. I am not writing this to shame you, but to warn you, as my dear children." 1 Corinthians 4:9-14
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The poor you will always have with you, but why?

Some people believe that Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you,” because he was encouraging us to realize this will always be an unmanageable plight and because it is so large, just learn to ignore the problem as you wish. No! Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you,” because without the poor, the middle-class and the wealthy do not have the ability to “lay up treasures in heaven.” We need the poor, they will always be with us because by seeing them, they help us “rich” people to go to heaven. They give us the chance to practice the virtues of charity that make heaven possible. If we did not have the poor, the wealthy would remain self-centered and thereby doomed to the fate of the rich man in Jesus’ story - "The Rich Man and Lazarus".

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Damien of Molokai

By Fr. Richard Veras

Saint Damien of Hawaii’s Molokai is a great witness for charity, for he laid down his life for his friends. Damien was the Belgian priest who volunteered to live and minister among lepers in the colony on the island of Molokai, and who did just that from 1873 until he himself contracted the disease and died from it in1889. He is perhaps an even greater witness to the continual incarnation of Christ through the Church . . .

Molokai was filled with sons, daughters, wives and husbands whose leprosy had separated them from their families. For many, love had become something distant, something only to dream about or lament. Damien knew these poor souls needed someone who was their priest, who lived life with them. He moved to the island and built a church and rebuilt the humanity of those whose suffering was much deeper than the flesh. He recognized the face of Christ in the deformed faces of his new friends . . .

Fr. Richard Veras is the pastor of the Church of Saint Rita in Staten Island, NY. He is the author of Jesus of Israel: Finding Christ in the Old Testament. He is a regular contributor to the Magnificat.

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Prayer to Saint Joseph, Our Patron Saint of the Homeless

Dear Saint Joseph, you took the Christ child into your home. For many years he could not do things for himself. As a carpenter and as a true laborer, you became the very hands of Christ. Help us to become the hands of Christ for those who are helpless, those who are homeless; for they can not do things for themselves as well. We build ourselves into a home to serve those who labor through your intercession and in your son’s Name, Jesus Christ the Lord. Saint Joseph, patron saint of the homeless, hear our prayer. Amen. (Servants of the Father of Mercy, Community Prayer)
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The Beggar of Perpetual Adoration

Saint Benedict Joseph Labre was the oldest of fifteen children in a prosperous middle class family. Educated by his uncle, a parish priest; following his uncle’s death, he tried to join the Trappists, Carthusians, and Cistercians, but was rejected by them all. He spent years wandering Europe, especially Rome, Italy, in complete poverty, spending his days in perpetual adoration in the cathedrals. Given to religious ecstasies when contemplating the crown of thorns; also known to float, soar, and bilocate when raptured in contemplation of the Lord. He begged in the streets, and if he was given more than he needed for the day, he would give the remainder to some one he considered more in need than he was. Benedict healed some of his fellow homeless, and was reported to have multiplied bread for them. Noted counselor to people of all walks in Rome; he died in a hospice, exhausted from his life of austerity. His biography, written by his confessor Marconi, describes 136 miraculous cures attributed to him within three months of his death.
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Recognizing the Obvious Requires Moral Responsibility and Accountability

We know that God exists in the poor because, despite all the evidence that they are with us, some people still ignore the poor and act as though they don’t exist – much in a similar way to how some deny the existence of God. Many wish to think that the poor are nowhere to be found since they can’t see them from their homes. In the same way, everything around us points us to God, yet many turn their faces from him and pretend he does not exist either. In both cases, recognizing the obvious requires moral responsibility and accountability, thus many remain in blindness because they do not want personal responsibility or accountability. Ignorance and indifference toward the poor is also indicative of ignorance and indifference toward God and therefore can be argued that it is one of the proofs that He exists in the poor.
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Father Michael may be the worst-dressed priest I’ve ever seen - but he would make a great Pope!

By Nicholas Kristof

. . . If the top of the church has strayed from its roots, much of its base is still deeply inspiring. I came here to impoverished southern Sudan to write about Sudanese problems, not the Catholic Church’s. Yet once again, I am awed that so many of the selfless people serving the world’s neediest are lowly nuns and priests — notable not for the grandeur of their vestments but for the grandness of their compassion.

As I’ve noted before, there seem to be two Catholic Churches, the old boys’ club of the Vatican and the grass-roots network of humble priests, nuns and laity in places like Sudan. The Vatican certainly supports many charitable efforts, and some bishops and cardinals are exemplary, but overwhelmingly it’s at the grass roots that I find the great soul of the Catholic Church.

The Vatican believes that this newspaper and other news organizations have been unfair and overzealous in excavating the church’s cover-ups of child rape. I see the opposite. No organization has done more to elevate the moral stature of the Catholic Church in the United States than The Boston Globe. Its groundbreaking 2002 coverage of abuse by priests led to reforms and by most accounts a significant reduction in abuse. Catholic kids are safer today not because of the cardinals’ leadership, but because of The Boston Globe’s [coverage].

Yet the church leaders are right about one thing: there is often a liberal and secular snobbishness toward the church as a whole — and that is unfair.

It may be easy at a New York cocktail party to sniff derisively at a church whose apex is male chauvinist, homophobic and so out of touch that it bars the use of condoms even to curb AIDS. But what about Father Michael Barton, a Catholic priest from Indianapolis? I met Father Michael in the remote village of Nyamlell, 150 miles from any paved road here in southern Sudan. He runs four schools for children who would otherwise go without an education, and his graduates score at the top of statewide examinations.

Father Michael came to southern Sudan in 1978 and chatters fluently in Dinka and other local languages. To keep his schools alive, he persevered through civil war, imprisonment and beatings, and a smorgasbord of disease. “It’s very normal to have malaria,” he said. “Intestinal parasites — that’s just normal.”

Father Michael may be the worst-dressed priest I’ve ever seen — and the noblest.

Anybody scorn him? Anybody think he’s a self-righteous hypocrite?

On the contrary, he would make a great pope.

In the city of Juba, I met Cathy Arata, a nun from New Jersey who spent years working with battered women in Appalachia. Then she moved to El Salvador during the brutal civil war there, putting her life on the line to protect peasants. Two years ago, she came here on behalf of a terrific Catholic project called Solidarity With Southern Sudan.

Sister Cathy and the others in the project have trained 600 schoolteachers. They are fighting hunger not with handouts but with help for villagers to improve agricultural techniques. They are also establishing a school for health workers, with a special focus on midwifery to reduce deaths in childbirth.

At the hospital attached to that school, the surgeon is a nun from Italy. The other doctor is a 72-year-old nun from Rhode Island. Nuns rock.

Sister Cathy would like to see more decentralization in the church, a greater role for women, and more emphasis on public service. She says she worries sometimes that if Jesus returned he would say, “Oh, they got it all wrong!”

She would make a great pope, too.

There are so many more like them. There’s Father Mario Falconi, an Italian priest who refused to leave Rwanda during the genocide and bravely saved 3,000 people from being massacred. There’s Father Mario Benedetti, a 72-year-old Italian priest based in Congo who fled with his congregation when their town was attacked by a brutal militia. Now Father Mario lives side by side with his Congolese congregants in the squalor of a refugee camp in southern Sudan, struggling to get schooling for their children.

It’s because of brave souls like these that I honor the Catholic Church. I understand why many Americans disdain a church whose leaders are linked to cover-ups and antediluvian stances on women, gays and condoms — but the Catholic Church is far larger than the Vatican.

And unless we’re willing to endure beatings alongside Father Michael, unless we’re willing to stand up to warlords with Sister Cathy, we have no right to disparage them or their true church.

More on the Internet: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/opinion/02kristof.html?hp
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His Poverty in the Bread is Our Model

By
Caryll Houselander

We know that in It [the Eucharist] Jesus is wholly present: body, blood, soul and divinity. But all this is hidden; even His human appearance is hidden. Because this is the way of absolute love, He insists on coming to us stripped of everything but Himself. For this self-giving Christ in the Host is poor, poorer than He was when, stripped of everything, He was naked on the Cross. He has given up even the appearance of His body, the sound of His voice, His power of mobility . . . He has made himself as close to nothing as He could be, while still being accessible to us . . . In the Host, He is our [model] of life on earth today.

Caryll Houselander (+1954) was a British mystic, poet and spiritual teacher.

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