Well, I’ve officially been part of the IWM family for just over a year now. Marcelle, one of my community mates, finished her two years of service and is now back in the states. Katie and Kyle, our two new community mates, have arrived and are starting to gain their footing here in Chimbote. Our community is slowly developing into what we hope will be a solid, supportive household. The four of us are beginning our journey to imitate Christ’s first disciples, who “bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus” through the love made manifest in their community (Acts, 5:33). We are willing recipients of your prayers during this important time of transition!
It’s hard to believe that it’s been so long since I left the U.S., but looking back on the past year I know that I have experienced and grown a lot. I have formed lots of life-giving relationships that I already know will be very painful to say goodbye to, and in that process have found little niches in my service sites that help me feel like an active, contributing member, and not just a visitor. All taken into account, I am very happy with my life here in Chimbote.
Amidst the many joys that occur daily in my life, I have lately been struggling with and reflecting a lot upon my own incapacities – incapacity to be everything a friend should be, to be everything a community mate should be, to be everything a missionary should be. I grew up thinking, and rightfully so, that I can do anything I set my heart on. But what is too easy to forget is that it’s not going to go perfectly, and it’s not going to be easy. Likewise, I developed many ideas in college about what it means to be a Catholic missionary, what it means to be a development practitioner and what it means to be a United States native in a foreign country. These ideas are well-ingrained in my thoughts and beliefs, but what is again too easy to forget is that I’m not going to fulfill those roles perfectly, and that it’s not going to be easy. And it hasn’t been.
I will not claim to have made any significant difference in the lives of people here in Chimbote during the past year, but I know that I have discovered much about myself, my capabilities and my limitations, some of which is very exciting and some of which is difficult to swallow. Just this morning I happened to turn to a passage in a collection of writings by Dorothy Day that illuminated my feelings of self-doubt. Her reflection spurs from the words of William Blake: “We are put on earth for a little space that we may learn to bear the beams of love.” She writes:
“Suddenly I remembered coming home from a meeting in Brooklyn many years ago, sitting in an uncomfortable bus seat facing a few poor people. One of them, a downcast, ragged man, suddenly epitomized for me the desolation, the hopelessness of the destitute, and I began to weep. I had been struck by one of those ‘beams of love,’ wounded by it in a most particular way. It was my own condition that I was weeping about—my own hardness of heart, my own sinfulness. I recognized this as a moment of truth, an experience of what the New Catechism calls our ‘tremendous, universal, inevitable, and yet inexcusable incapacity to love’ … Because I felt so strongly my nothingness, my powerlessness to do anything about this horrifying recognition of my own hardness of heart, it drove me to the recognition that in God alone was my strength.”
People sometimes ask, if it is so difficult to choose to live closer to the poor, closer to the world’s most ghastly injustices, and jump into a position of uncertainty where I may or may not have any idea what I’m doing, why do it? I do it, as I think many people do, because by putting myself in a position of completely vulnerability, by losing the ability to depend on family, intelligence, material comforts, language, talents, privacy, and the limitless list of dependencies that we humans foster, all I am left with to depend on is the love of God, made manifest both in the people around me and in myself. And then I begin to realize that only by accepting that love am I capable of sharing it.
So that’s what I’m working on right now… an on-going process that is in every moment more difficult and easier at the same time. But I am thankful for the life I am living, and that it allows me to pursue a spirituality that is fueled by the raw authenticity of the world.
Thank you for letting me share some of my reflections with you! My prayer for you, as much as for myself, is that we can know and accept our limitedness and incapacity in order to fill it with the unlimitedness and infinite capacity of God’s love!
