CIVIL REVOLUTION: SERVE WITH LOVE PART 5

It’s important to realize that loving your neighbor can take far more forms than marching with the masses. Some people may need to do that in order to bring about systemic change. But how many people can also bring much-needed hope and healing on a personal level through opening up their homes and practicing the ancient art of hospitality – love demonstrated around a table? “Meals slow things down. Some of us don’t like that. We like to get things done. But meals force us to be people oriented instead of task oriented.”* Meals offer unique opportunities for communication, a time to hit the brakes on our frenzied pace of life. “In the Near East, to share a meal with someone is a guarantee of peace, trust, fraternity, and forgiveness: the shared table symbolizes a shared life… ‘I would like to enter into a friendship with you.’”**

Our common human hospitality longs to find room for those who are left out. It’s just who we are if allowed to foster something different, something more greatly resembling what God had in mind… [At our] Comunidades Eclesiales de Base (CEB’s)…Small faith-sharing and service groups in the parish. They would have carne asadas and other gatherings to communicate clearly that the gang members were not our enemies. One CEB even had a Thanksgiving dinner for homies who had no place to go. They wanted to signal to the gang members, “You are our sons/daughters—whether we brought you into this world or not.”***

Alan Graham, founder of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, in Austin, Texas, has taken this same concept of family and applied it to the homeless population – a group historically known as an “enemy” of most cities. People don’t typically put out welcome mats for the homeless. Most seem to consider them lazy and a complete burden on society, just trying to leech off the system – definitely worth less than other people. Alan listens with humility, speaks to them in love, and continues to demonstrate a servant mentality as his mission to them expands.

Video: Finding Home

 Music: Man in Black 

 

“Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world, but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it’s almost a miracle… The love of neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’”* This love entails giving our time, talents, and treasures to those in need. The only vaccine that may cure the civil unrest present around the world is love – the kind of love that seeks to demonstrate the value of every person through the rectification of the racial inequality, wealth disparity, and economic injustice that has long plagued our country. May we be willing to heed the foundational hallmark of Jesus’ life in order to shower that type of love on others in order to balance the equation: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.”**

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life. (Francis of Assisi, 1182-1226)

Video: Prison Culinary Program 

Music: Hold My Hand

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*Tim Chester, A Meal with Jesus, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011, Kindle – location 678

**Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel, New York, NY: Multnomah Publishing, 2005

***Father Greg Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart, Detroit, MI: Free Press, 2011, Kindle – location 135, 107

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*Simon Weil in Paying Attention, Gary Peluso-Verdand, Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 2005, 25

**Matthew 20:28