CHALLENGES

After four months the challenges are becoming clearer.

Though there is a commitment to campus ministry at the Catholic University at the institutional level and from the director of the local campus, there are great challenges to ministry on campus. A few years ago there was, I have been told, a flourishing campus ministry, but in the last year it has weakened almost to the point of dying out.

The causes are many – the challenges of a campus that is much like a commuter school, the intense schedule of classes in a trimester system – four or five classes for each subject a week, the attraction of a consumer culture, the upwardly mobile student body, and the weak support that campus ministry has received and the lack of careful accompaniment of the process in the past year or two. It pains me to write this – partly because this means a long hard process of trying to resurrect the ministry.

Yet in the midst of this I am trying to plug along. Each week I am spending part of Tuesday and almost all of Thursday on campus, sitting around and talking with students and faculty. I am getting to know a lot of them – and, of course, forgetting their names. I have had any number of very interesting conversations. Many of them, especially the guys, are quite surprised to find that I am single and have no children! Machismo runs deep.

I am trying to do a few activities on my own as well as work with the two folks involved in campus ministry. This week I started a bible study on Tuesdays at 4 pm; one person showed up but she promised to try to get more folks for next week.

Friday, October 18, I went back to the kindergarten in Colonia Divina Providencia. Some students will be volunteering there as part of a class which includes 25 hours of volunteer service in the community.

Saturday, I’ll be going out to nearby town of Dulce Nombre de Copán for the parish meeting. If all goes well, I may very well be helping out in this rural parish not far from here for several days each month.

The project of the comedor infantil, the lunch program for children, is on hold for a bit. The bishop is out of the country until the end of October, visiting the US and Europe, mostly in pursuit of support for his opposition to open pit mining and the current mining law. We have to speak with him about where we will house the program, since the first site has not proved feasible.

I continue to go to the kindergarten in Colonia Divina Providencia. I have also been going a few more times to the local jail with the Spanish Franciscan sisters who live on my street. Last Wednesday I was helping one student with writing Spanish sentences I dictated and with simple multiplication as well as helping another young prisoner who wants to learn English.

Speaking of English I have run across Catholic University students who know English – some of whom lived and worked in the US for a number of years. I also keep encountering people who have relatives in the US.

But the real challenges here are more often the challenges of the spirit – how to be patient when things don’t go as planned or when people don’t follow up, how to just try to be present when I’d really like to be doing a lot of projects, how to trust in God’s ways when things seem so complicated and difficult.

Today I ran across this prayer in an e-mail from the National Catholic Rural Life Conference:

We adore you, Jesus our Shepherd and Savior.
And we praise and thank you for your living among us.
We ask you to walk beside your missionaries as they seek to proclaim your Gospel. Cherish, guide, and strengthen them; help them to be patient when they meet frustrations, and encourage them when they are disappointed.
Lead them, we beseech you, along the path you desire for them.
For you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit for ever.
AMEN