The Poverty Within Ourselves
By Nathan Forsthoefel
I stepped off the train in northern Virginia after traveling back north from Focus missionary training in Ave Maria Florida. Having not participated in a mission trip since the early 2000’s, I did not know what to expect. In the early 2000’s, my father and I traveled with our parish, St. Maximilian Kolbe, to West Liberty, Kentucky to lend a hand replacing a family’s deck and accessibility ramp that had been destroyed during a storm the previous year.
Washington D.C. is drastically different than Ohio. The city is a patchwork of government buildings, affluent neighborhoods, and underserved communities – a blending and meeting place of many cultures, backgrounds, and experiences. On this trip, we were tasked with ministering to the citizens without homes, on the streets of D.C. We based our ministry out of Holy Name parish, near Gallaudet University on the eastern side of the city. The pastor, Father Bill, helped familiarize us with the area and introduced us to the people on the street. It was remarkable how many names he knew.
As we traveled through the city, I was taken aback that, in perhaps the most powerful city in the world, there was so much need and poverty. Throughout the week, we distributed food, toiletries, resource cards with the addresses of soup kitchens and shelters, and spoke at length with the people on the street about their lives and their situations. When we were set to leave, many of the people asked when we would return to that area of D.C. I found that many of them were just as starved for conversation and human connection as they were for food.
Father Bill emphasized meeting both the spiritual and immediate, temporal needs of those around us. Although we came with food, socks, and toiletries, we often left with prayers, intentions, and the stories of their lives. Every encounter always came with an invitation to Christ – an offer to know the person of Jesus, accept His abundant mercy, and encounter Him by attending the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It was incredible to see how many people that we invited actually attended Mass later that week. Several of the individuals that we met stated that they came to Mass just because we took the time to listen and be with them.
It is easy to dehumanize the destitute, to categorize them as an “other” that is an inconvenience to society. It is easy not to give much thought to the materially poor and even easier to ignore them completely due to their circumstances or appearance. However, the Lord does not seek to wash us before he encounters us. The very crowd of people that we often turn our nose up at, are where the Lord desires to go. How could I say that I was Christ’s hands and feet if I did not follow the way He did ministry, going to the outcast, hopeless, and poor? We often fail to recognize the deep spiritual and material poverty that is around us. Those in poverty are worthy of our time. They need to hear the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ. Through this trip, the Lord invited me to recognize the poverty that is present within myself and in my own community. I would like to invite you to do the same. Praise be to Jesus Christ, now and forever.