KEEPING
FAITH
Serving in Guatemala for a week over
spring break was a totally humbling experience for Shenika Tanner,
21, a junior at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Mo.
In a trip organized by the Jesuit university, Tanner joined about
a dozen students who stayed in the village of El Carrizal and helped with
renovation of a church and a school. We helped them out building
things, Tanner said, but she said that what the students learned from the
Guatemalans was a greater gift. The people were so open, nonmaterialistic
and nonjudgmental, said Tanner, a member of Our Lady of Guadalupe-Sacred
Heart Parish.
When Sally Mews returned to the
Catholic church in 1980 after a long estrangement, she felt nobody knew I
was gone and nobody knew I was back -- and I realized that a lot of others were
in the same situation.
So she developed a program called Catholics Returning
Home. Whether someone has left because of divorce and remarriage, anger
at God or the church or never connecting in the first place, her outreach
offers nonjudgmental invitation, compassion and acceptance to
inactive Catholics, said Mews, who is a member of St. Patrick Parish in
Wadsworth, Ill.
The six-week series offers both support group discussion and
educational updates on the Catholic faith. Mews, 52, who runs the
program as a volunteer, has brought it to dioceses all over the Midwest, as
well as to Los Angeles and New Zealand.
Three days a week, Margaret Collins,
78, seeks out the homeless of the Palm Beach, Fla., area to offer them
soap, soup and soul.
Through the program Love Works, which she founded in
1988, she and other volunteers go to the streets and to the parks to bring
meals, clothing, toiletries and prayers to over a thousand people a week. The
food is prepared at Collins house. She turned her two-car garage into a
storage facility.
Most of the programs dozens of volunteers are retired as
well. I dont do all the giving, said Collins, a parishioner
at St. Paul of the Cross Church. Many people are just as generous as God
has blessed me to be.
Send suggestions for Keeping Faith to Teresa Malcolm at
NCR. Her e-mail address is tmalcolm@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, June 2,
2000
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