“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power, because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present.” - Thomas Merton

Pope Benedict XVI said,
“Hunger is the most cruel
and concrete sign of poverty.
Opulence and waste
are no longer acceptable
when the tragedy of hunger
is assuming greater proportions.”
Hunger and malnutrition
are on the rise
due the disastrous escalation
in basic commodity prices
during the global recession.
We urgently need to guarantee
regular access to sufficient
amounts of food and water
for those who face hunger
on a daily basis.
Today, more than
one billion people
are undernourished,
and one child dies
every six seconds
because of malnutrion.
In light of such an
overwhelming (and under-reported) disaster,
we are compelled
to put the common good
ahead of greed and profits.
Food production
can not be geared solely
towards consumption;
food is not just like
any other commodity.
Every human has a right
to enough food to
sustain life.
We must practice compassion
and insure that no child
will die due to
a lack of adequate food.

Extending compassion
to all people,
even our enemies,
is the very heart of
the Christian faith.
You can’t receive
what you don’t give.
Jesus said,
“Give and it will be given to you.
Good measure, pressed down,
shaken together, running over,
will be put in your lap.”
In other words,
in the jargon of today,
outflow determines inflow.
Jesus makes it abundantly clear
that compassion is to be
our central spiritual practice.

Through compassion
our moral blindness
will be healed
and a new world
will be possible.
We must control greed
and work together for
the equitable distribution
of the resources of God’s creation
through the fullest utilization
of humanity’s creative ingenuity
so that one day soon
there will be no hunger
on planet Earth.

The gospel reading for
the Third Sunday of Advent
contained a question and an answer:
“The crowds asked John the Baptist,
‘What should we do?’
He said to them in reply,
‘Whoever has two cloaks
should share with the person
who has none.
And whoever has food
should do likewise.’”
John spoke in spirit and power,
saying simply and clearly
what we must do.
What if you lived
in Cite Soleil?
How would you like
people to treat you?
This is how
we should treat
those who do live there.
Water for the thirsty,
bread for the hungry,
a strong hand for the uncertain:
these are what Jesus promises
and asks us to deliver.

Through the Prophet Isaiah,
God says:
“Turn to me and be safe,
all you ends of the earth,
for I am God; there is no other!”
Knowingly or unknowingly,
the world hungers for
the redeeming presence of Christ.
The poor and the powerless
who seek the Lord
in poverty of heart
shall be fed the food
that truly satisfies.

Cite Soleil is a great place
to prepare your heart
for the coming of Jesus,
in whose incarnation
humanity and divinity
are joined in communion.
God is coming,
of this there is no doubt;
the only question is,
will we be ready
to receive God?

God asks three things
of us:
To walk humbly with God,
to love kindness,
and to do justice.
To love kindness
is more than
just being nice.
It means to enter into
relationships of solidarity
with the entire human community
by being patient with and attentive to
all whom we encounter.
And to do justice
is more than being fair.
It means we cannot tolerate
injustice, and must intervene when
the powerful abuse the powerless,
and requires us to change
systems of institutionalized injustice
that imprisons people
in chains of poverty.
We need to be willing
to lay down our own lives
for the sake of those
whose lives have been stolen
from them.

Institutionalized injustice
can be found everywhere,
in every nation.
Cite Soleil in Port-au-Prince
is no different from
Skid Row in Los Angeles.
Both are disgraceful abominations
in the eyes of God,
and God demands
we dismantle those prisons.
Sadly, we avert our eyes
and pretend
Citi Soleil and Skid Row
are not there.
But they are there,
and people are suffering.
May God have mercy
on us…and on them.

Jeremy and I are back from our week in Haiti, Even after spending time in the war-torn north of Uganda, Haiti managed to shock and sadden us.

The name sounds almost enchanting…Cite Soleil.
The name means “City of the Sun.”
But even under the stunningly bright Caribbean sun,
Cite Soleil is a dark and dangerous place,
a slum so wretched few outsiders enter it.
More than a quarter million people
are crammed in the three square miles
that make up Cite Soleil.
They live in rusting peak-roofed tin shacks.
Open sewers and the stench of rotting garbage
intensifies the brutally ugly reality.
Kids run around naked or in tattered clothes
and many of them
have never been to school.
People are so hungry
they eat pies made of clay and dirt.
Pigs rummage through the rubbish
in search of food.
People are sometimes forced
to give up their kids to servitude
because they can’t afford to feed them.
When it rains at night,
the rain seeps into the shacks
and the poor sleep in the mud.
Woman and children
squat in the rancid, insect-infested rubbish
to defecate and urinate.

And if all of that is not bad enough,
Cite Soleil is riddled with
unbridled violence.
Guns and gangs rule the slum.
People are decapitated or burned alive
for opposing the neighborhood
gang leader.
Death is in the air.

The residents of Cite Soleil
live in the shadows.
The grinding poverty and
desperate daily search for food
have left them literally numb
to the normal aspects of life.

Nearly twenty years ago,
a man walked into this
nightmare under the sun,
a gentle, humble, funny man
from Philadelphia.
A former chaplain at Princeton University,
he seemed ill-suited
by temperament and training
to be a beacon of hope
in such a hopeless place.
His name is Fr. Tom Hagan.
He is a member of the
Oblates of St. Francis de Sales.
Fr. Tom is the embodiment
the luminous force of
intentional kindness and compassion.

Flip Sides of a Coin

Action is as important as prayer;
each of us must take responsibility
for meeting the world’s need,
for we are the accomplices of evil
if we do nothing to prevent it.

Contemplation and action
are flip sides of the same coin.

Contemplation means to witness and respond.

One

Christ loved every human being,
without exception,
without limits.
Can we do otherwise?

Love casts out the darkness
of hate and division.
From love
flows understanding, compassion,
mercy, forgiveness
and peace.
Love unites.
Love is One.

One Word

God is talking to us.
God has always been talking to us.
God will always be talking to us.
God has been, is and will be saying
one word: Love.

And in that love
rests a profound truth:
We are one.
We just imagine
(as Thomas Merton pointed out)
that we are not one,
that division exists within
the human family.

In God there is unity.
In the beginning,
we were one.
We are still one.
We just need to recover
our original unity.

The Beauty of All Life

We are slow to compassion
because we are quick to exploit
others for our own gain.

As we grow in compassion
we are able to see more clearly
the beauty of all life
and we also increase our desire
to transform everything ugly
into something beautiful.

A Broken World

Ours is a broken world in turmoil.
We need restoration and wholeness.
We need Christ.

God is in the midst of evil,
ever ready to redeem it.

God is constantly revealing his redemptive power.

If you are a disciple of Christ,
you should be doing the work of Christ.

Faith should not be locked up in the mind.
Faith needs to be lived out -
by service to the will of God.

The Cries of God

We pray for our daily bread.
Yet for millions of people around the world,
their daily bread consists of
violence, famine and destruction.
Did God hear our prayer and not theirs?
No.
God hears the cries of the poor.
We do not hear the cries of God
asking us to be divine hands
tending to the needs of the poor.

God took on human form
as a vulnerable baby,
the child of homeless refugees,
needing human help
in the ongoing work of creation.
We are God’s messengers
delivering food and hope
to those living with hunger and death.