In each visit, find the presence.

A major part of my job here is Philly is to act as a Visitor for the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Philadelphia. This entails receiving referrals from local social service and mental health agencies of clients who are in need of food, clothing, and furniture assistance and then going out into the community, into the homes of those in need to access their needs and ultimately, to provide individuals and families with vouchers so that they can attain these goods free of charge.

As Sr. Linda, my supervisor at Visitation Parish, told me early on- "We're the only game in town!" No, we're not the only social service agency in the Kensington, not by a long shot, but in terms of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, we are the only society in the city and our sister societies are at parishes in Greater Philadelphia (i.e. the suburbs). So in terms of serving the need for accessible and free assistance, Visitation Parish is it. The parishes we partner with give us financial assistance, but if you are looking for a Vincent de Paul Visitor to come to your doorstep, talk with you, and give you a voucher be prepared to see my smiling face!

It was a late afternoon during the second week of September that I showed up on the doorstep of a home in Northern Philadelphia. What had been a heat wave a week before had cooled with the earliest chill of fall in the air. After a few wrong turns and then redirection, I found myself pulling up before a nondescript row house, typical of any neighborhood in Northern Philly- storm door, wooden steps, and bare porch- a slight variation of the row house that I currently live in, which trades the porch and the wood steps for a concrete stoop but otherwise is just another row house in the landscape of row homes that dot the landscape. I was outside of my normal jurisdiction as a Vincent de Paul Visitor but had made the appointment to visit anyway thinking it would be nice to explore the area around LaSalle University.

Since I was fifteen minutes late, the woman I was visiting was at the door waiting for me. We exchanged pleasantries as I entered her home. What do you say to someone who has come to assess your house and the life you've built? Somehow "Hi, how are you doing? Beautiful day isn't it?" doesn't quite fit the bill.

I explained who I was and the process that we would be going through, a simple tour of the house so I could see what furniture was needed and could fill out a voucher for the necessary furniture and clothes so she could pick it up at the Vincent de Paul warehouse. As we began our tour, I noticed a little girl making her way through the house with us. I asked her her name and age and bashfully she responded that she was Kaio (pronounced Kay-O) and that she was 5. "Oh so you must be starting kindergarten this week then!" I chirped back. She shook her head, a bit taken aback that this strange visitor was paying her any attention.

"No, she's starting pre-K", her mother stated, smiling kindly on her daughter.

"Oh! Well you must be excited and I bet your mom is too!" I said to both of them. Kaio avoided eye contact smiling at her shoes while her mother grinned, assuring me that it would be a welcome break.

Raising five children by yourself is no easy task, no matter where you live. But in a community where support is scarce and in a four-room home that is furnished by only two mattresses on the floor of one bed room, the task is even harder. As we talked, I learned about their life, a life strikingly similar to many of the homes I've visited over the last few weeks. A single mom, making ends meet and trying to survive not only for herself but for her children.

I try to ask a lot of questions of the people I visit, judging by their answers and general demeanor I determine how deep I can go/ how much they want to or are willing to share. My hosts are my neighbors and I must always remember that I am their guest. I have been invited into their home and it is in their hospitality that they share with me.

It is easy in my position to presume that I am giving to people who need so much and it is easy to assume the posture of a savior, to give myself a position of power/superiority through my ability to meet the needs of those I am serving. The threat of this presumption, this entitlement is present in each home I enter. I could be a savior to that little girl. I could rescue her mother. I could give them a couch and a dinette set. I could make this broken house a home. With disparate pride, I think I could, but really I can't nor should I think I can.

My job is to be a guest. To be welcomed into the home of another, to visit with them, to be gracious for what they share and to leave having taken something for the journey. What I take from each of these hosts is different. I hope that by being the attentive visitor I take something that will lighten their load, that by truly hearing their needs, needs far beyond a few pieces of furniture, I might be able to bring to them hope and gentleness in a world greatly deprived of both.

As guest, I find hosts willing to be vulnerable and in turn, I must be vulnerable too. While I strive to be Christ-like in my visitations, a savior I am not. I am not saving anyone. I may bring good news but ultimately it is those I encounter who are the one's in whom I encounter Christ.

The suffering Christ.

The simple Christ.

The very human Christ.

The sacred Christ.

The Christ who greets me, no matter how late or lost I am, at the door of an unassuming house. With a smile that shines through layers of filth and from behind faded eyes, he says, "Hi, how are you doing? Beautiful day isn't it?" and somehow in all its pleasantry and reality, humanity and divinity, that fits the bill.

Bounded: Visions of Orientation

The following are images I captured during my week of Orientation for the Mission Corps. All are from Chestnut Hill College and I hope they give you a sense of the sights I took in & meditated upon while I was there. At the end of orientation, the word that my heart settled on for the experience of the week was bounded. May these photos bind you to my experience, encapsulate the space I was in, and give you a glimpse of whatever you are meant to be bound to in them.

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Weeks that seem like months

Here I am at the end of week number two of my Mission Corps experience; there is much to reflect upon and many thoughts to be developed here on this blog soon, but for now let me give you the basic rundown of what's been going on in my life the last two weeks.

Week 1:

I moved into our house on Allegheny Ave. on the 22nd of August and was greeted by the leadership team of sisters who run the program. I had met many of them over my last year of hanging out with the sisters but among that crowd was my new community mate Barbara, our very own California girl, fresh off a red eye flight. We made small talk and got settled into the house before our third community member, Gabi arrived from Puerto Rico. The rest of the night is a blur, lots of getting to know you, lots of introductory conversation, and lots of just wanting to get this whole thing going.

The next morning, I was awoken by our neighbor's roosters at 5:30 AM (I live in Kensington, not the country & there are no hens around, so you draw your own conclusions about what they're doing with them). I have now become accustomed to the early morning crowing but for the first day it was a rude awakening. After getting up and getting ready we all packed our bags for orientation- a week at Chestnut Hill College for reflection and foundation in the program. So after less than 24 hours in our new home we were off to a home away from home, which barely had time to be acknowledged, let alone supplanted, as home. The week that followed was full and fruitful (a phrase I've been using a lot lately). Monday we toured each other's worksites; Tuesday we delved into the spirituality of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, learning about the history of the order, the prayer style of the sisters, taking part in a 'sharing of the heart', and getting a taste for the spirituality that will enrich the year ahead and on which this program is built; Wednesday was a glimpse into the tenet of community, what our individual experiences of community have been, how we operate in community, and our own expectations for life in community with one another; Thursday justice was our focus, including a trip on the 23 us line from the northern reaches of Philadelphia in Chestnut Hill all the way down to Citizens' Bank Ballpark at the river's edge, seeing the mass of humanity in between and traveling through the MANY neighborhoods that compile Philly; On Friday, we explored simple living first hand, sustaining ourselves on a total of $8.50 for three meal for three women throughout the day, finding new places to be filled, spaces that needed emptying, and bearing the triumphs and burdens of living a life of simplicity; finally, Saturday we were commissioned into the SSJ Mission Corps with a Mass at St. Joesph Villa, the community's retirement community in Chestnut Hill. The Mass was wonderful and a good cap to the week, which was full of blessings and challenges (often one in the same), the sisters at the Villa were ecstatic to see & meet us and being with them was a joy, if not a tad bit overwhelming, but who could resist a thousand hugs from old nuns?

Week 2:

By the end of Saturday, the three of us were exhausted. Full and fruitful for sure, but nonetheless tiring. One can only reflect and share with relative strangers for so long before there is a need to simply be in your own space. For that, Saturday night was much welcome. Although we had had a good first week, we all went our separate ways Saturday night, if only to regain the sanity that comes with decompression. Sunday we were met with the task of a house meeting, establishing our calendar for the coming month, setting some order to our community (I get to be the treasurer of the good ship Mission Corps), and laying ground rules for our time (Sundays= spirituality night & Wednesdays= community night). After completing our first grocery shopping trip well under budget, we toured center city (i.e. Independence Hall, Christ Church, Redding Terminal Market, City Hall) by ourselves & got the woman at the visitor center to recommend lots of fun (and cheap) things to do during our time in Philly.

When Monday finally rolled around, I felt like I had been here for two weeks at least. Yet with the sound of my alarm (or the crowing of the roosters, if you're so inclined), I soon realized our orientation was over and our long awaited and anticipated job placements were upon us. For those of you who don't know, I will be working at Visitation Parish and the Cardinal Bevilacqua Community Center (CBCC) during the coming year, splitting my time between the two and serving as an outreach coordinator in the parish for the food pantry and St Vincent de Paul Society and as a volunteer coordinator at the CBCC. Believe me, many of the details of my job had been ambiguous leading up to Monday morning, so if it seems to make no sense to you, just imagine how I felt facing this unknown as I rode my bike the mile down Kensington Avenue to the "Viz" that morning.

My first week on the job dispelled some of the anxieties I had that morning and helped to reassure me that this place was in some way the place I was meant to be at this moment. The first half of my week was spent conducting home visits with those requesting assistance from the parish's St. Vincent de Paul Society, seeing the need in person and accessing what material assistance I might be able to give them. This led me into the homes of my neighbors. It allowed me to meet those in need in their own space, to hear their stories, and to, in some small way, offer help and hope. From being asked out of respect to move down the street by a woman selling drugs to support her family to visiting a home infested with rats and with holes in the plaster walls to seeing a five-year old girl feed what little food she had to two cats as her mother explained that they must sleep in the same bed at night, a full mattress on the floor of an apartment empty of furniture, but cluttered with the lives of four adults and five-year old girl.

As the week wore on, I learned my way around the neighborhood, picking up what streets go where and beginning to acquire a little Spanish which will no doubt be an integral part of my ministry. After moving a woman and her two children into a new home in a different neighborhood Wednesday afternoon, I checked in with my supervisor at the CBCC. A new venture for the parish, the CBCC was just taken over from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia by Visitation Parish and is still getting its programming set for the fall as the school year fast approaches. Working at the center is certainly exciting. Being present to its beginnings means lots of tasks need to be accomplished and I am playing a part in orchestrating its vast mission. For me, the center is a prospect full of promise and potential that I will have a part in forming, supporting, and bringing into reality. That prospect is invigorating, but identifying and accomplishing the work needed to realize this mission is daunting and is reinvented/ newly imagined each day that I come to work. For now, my focus is to get volunteers into the center and program up of the ground, to foster community and invest in the future of the wonderful, even if troubled, neighborhood that the CBCC is a part of and seeks to serve.

That leaves me at the end of week two. We spent Labor Day weekend down the shore at Cape May with the sisters. Expect pictures to follow as I find beauty in Kensington and entries that will hopeful unpack some of what I've laid out here. I know, I know- lots of exposition and not a lot of analysis- in time, just you wait. For now, what more can I say? It has been full and fruitful.

It is, well I am, here.

Hey everyone- Just a quick update...

I'm all moved into the house in Philly. My community mates are moved in & as of 10 AM this morning we begin orientation (think 2 truths & a lie....joy). With that said, it may not be until Saturday that you hear from me again, but rest assured that I am safe & sound, getting settled in, and taking every moment for all it's worth.

love.

Corpus Visum

I move into community on Sunday and begin this next adventure with the Mission Corps. Yet, all this week I have found myself immersed in the life of community, connected with the corpus that I am readying myself for. In a way, I have already become a part of this body.

As I've moved through this week, I have moved with each one of my community mates. Watching the towns and country of New Jersey blur past my window on one of my last commutes, I pictured what it might be that my community was looking out upon at that moment. Visions of landscapes near and far, distant homes, and spaces familiar but far from my own landscape. Moments in my mind have drawn us together and many more will draw us together over the coming months.

(Believe me, I am fully aware that we know nearly nothing about each other and that whatever our community is like, it will be different, if not far different, from anything thoughts I could conjure up before Sunday- but forget all that & just go with me, won't you?)

Together we look forward with eyes united in mission. No doubt each set of eyes will see our experiences differently, but as a body we will see as one, adjusting our eyes to another's perspective, sharing our own vision, and discovering the landscape we wander together. It is something about the mission of this body, this Mission Corps, that caught our eyes; something that is different for each, but must, I believe, bear some resemblance to what each of us originally saw and will, in the end, prove to have some semblance to what drew us forth.

For now, I can sit and imagine what it is that each body of this community is seeing. I imagine their thoughts are similar to mine, if only in the excitement and anxiety that come with taking a new step. In these moments of connection, prayer fills my heart and I pray that it might fill their's too. Fleeting thoughts and moments, a blurred landscape, and eyes ready to be opened- to see what lies ahead, to uncover what is already here, and to discover it all through the lens of a community, a body, united in vision, in mission, no matter how near or far we find our selves from it all.

Expect Nothing. Experience Everything.

One of the greatest pieces of advice I received from an RA during my undergraduate career was: don't have any expectations.

Well that's kind of morbid and depressing don't you think? Well, yes and no.

Expectations allow us to dream about what is to come. If you never expect anything then you really don't have anything to hope for or strive for- do you? It is in our expectations that we envision what lies ahead, both for good and for bad. So if you never expect anything, can you ever achieve anything? Or does living without expectations simply make what you achieve/ what happens to you more serendipitous or does living without expectations require more or less work to reach your goals?

After all, goals are expectations- aren't they? If you didn't expect to reach your goals, there would be no point to making them in the first place. To expect something is to set a standard for which to strive. So if the fateful advice my friend gave to me was to not have any expectations, he must have been one un-motivational RA (he wasn't the best, but I digress).

Yet, I remember that advice from my freshman year and even more, I followed it. (and I didn't turn out that much worse for the wear, right?... right?!?!!?) It's not that you shouldn't have expectations, it's that you have to be realistic and, sometimes, you just need to realize that no matter what you expect, you can't (nor should you try) to predict what exactly lies ahead.

I'll never be able to have no expectations and to try to eliminate them from my consciousness would be unhealthy. What I can do is keep my expectations from inhibiting my actions. Expect the best but don't push it; be honest enough to experience everything that comes your way; and allow the experience dictate your expectations, not vice versa.

So I bring that piece of advice, which came to me before my first spring break service trip, with me as I get closer to Philly. I'm trying not to have too many expectations and not having a ton of information about my job, our orientation, or my community mates is making that a lot easier. In a way, it is forcing me to detach from any presumptions I could I have and, in so doing, I'm realizing that those expectations and assumptions I do have about the program, where it will lead me, and what the year may hold are ungrounded and unjustified. (I still have them but now they come with a grain of salt.) For good or for bad, expectations won't get me anywhere- being true to this experience, the emotions it raises in me, and the new thoughts, prayers, and, ultimately, expectations it plants in me will take me to places I never could have imagined.

The beginning of an end ends up at the beginning

"My deepest vocation is to be a witness to the glimpses of God I have been allowed to catch"

- Henri Nouwen

In less than a month I leave for the SSJ Mission Corps in Philadelphia. I'll be living and working in the Kensington neighborhood of the city. My days will be spent in service at Visitation Parish and the Cardinal Bevilacqua Community Center as the Coordinator of Outreach Services. That position entails everything from managing the St. Vincent de Paul Society for the parish, running the food pantry, and overseeing and assisting with any assortment of programs at the CBCC.

The process that has gotten me to this point has been long, arduous, and full of discernment, not to mention twists and turns that landed me in a place I never thought I would be at 6 months ago.

Since graduation from college, service had called out to me, so I wasn't surprised when that call arose again in the Fall of last year. When I began looking for service programs in mid-October I ran across a program run by the Sisters of St. Joseph based out of the Twin Cities in Minnesota. For the last year I've been spending time with the Sisters of St. Joseph and looking at the description of this program I fell in love with it pretty hard and fast.

Wait a second, you might be saying to yourself, she said she's moving to Philadelphia... last time I checked Philly was in Pennsylvania not Minnesota! Correct you are.

I fell in love, and at the time I didn't know exactly what with. My gut reaction told me that it was this program in MN and for a long time that's what I believed. Based on that, I visited Minneapolis, went through the entire application process, interviewed via skype, was accepted, interviewed with a placement site and then decided MN wasn't where I was meant to be. Of course the story wasn't/isn't that simple, but to recount all the emotions and situational changes involved would be a roller coaster ride that I would have trouble putting into words and even if I tried, I'm pretty sure you would have just as much trouble trying to deceipher it.

Leave it to say that some time after visiting the program in MN, I was hanging out with the Sisters of St. Joseph in Philly for a justice event and each time I would tell a sister that I was looking at this program in Minnesota, they would mention to me that they had their own, albeit new, program. Each time this happened I would brush it off- I was going to MN afterall- but after much talk (see: persistant talk bordering on nagging), I was convinced to talk to a current SSJ Mission Corp volunteer, if only to tell the sisters "I told you so".

Well what I expected to be a 15 minute phone conversation turned out to be an hour and 15 minute phone conversation. I heard a lot of things I liked and having filled out enough applications to choke a horse, I threw an application together for the SSJ Mission Corps that very night. Soon enough I was invited to Philadelhia for an interview with the program. What followed was an interview with MN, finding that I was in love with service and my desire to serve blinded me to some pretty aggregious faults between myself and MN, and some heart-to-heart talks with some close friends and the big G-O-D.

All of these realizations allowed me to decicively say "I'm not meant to go to MN... I may not know where I'm meant to go, but Minnesota, I'm pretty sure, is not where I'm being called." And so I declined my spot in MN... without having been accepted to Philly yet.

While my interview with Minnesota threw up some major red flags, my interview in Philadelphia was challenging and life giving. The challenge was in questions that dug deep and really made reference to who I am and how I had shared myself in my application (not to mention that because I threw my application together last minute from a variety of sources, I wasn't exactly sure what stories I had and hadn't included). The vitality of the interview came in interviewers who genuinely and respectfully handled my application, who cared to ask deep questions, and who, in return, allowed me to ask deep questions of them.

As I waited in discernment limbo to hear from Philly, I knew that these women and this program despite its faults in some area was ultimately the place for me. When Julie called to invite me to join and gave me 3 weeks to make my decision I told her I'd get back to her by the end of the week- at the latest. At this point, I was at the end of a year long discernment (well not really, but for this entry's purpose I guess I could say a resting point after a year of discernment) and could say yes despite all the unknowns before me.

I still am filled with questions and the unknown hasn't gotten any more known, but I'm ok with that. Lots of people think I'm crazy. Crazy to pick up and move; Crazy to pursue such an unknown; and crazy for leaving a full time job to do so. Sometimes when I sit down and think about it, I honestly think I might be a little crazy. But then my heart beats a little faster, I think of everything that has led me to this point, and I figure if it's for love, what's wrong with a little crazy.