How easy it is not to see

Thursday, October 4, I went with 48 students and 4 faculty members of the Santa Rosa campus of the Catholic University to the Catholic University retreat center in Valle de Angeles, a seven to eight hour bus ride for a Professional Life retreat. It is a mandatory retreat for students who would soon be graduating. The faculty and I went so that we could eventually lead the retreat at a site closer to Santa Rosa.

We left in an air-conditioned bus, complete with comfortable reclining seats and a television to watch movies. I settled back, listening to music on my iPod and began reading my book. I didn’t watch most of the movies which were much too violent for me.

I was reading Mark and Louise Zwick’s The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins – which provides an insightful look at the roots of the Catholic Worker, giving a few insights into the saints and authors who inspired Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day. I heartily remember it.

At one point I put the book down and looked out the window and saw some shacks at the side of the road. All of a sudden I realized that I felt like I was not in Honduras but in the comfort of the first world, passing through. I realized that it is very easy to fail to see the reality of poverty and misery around me. If it can happen here, how easy it is when the suffering is distant.

The retreat is meant to prepare the graduating students to live their faith in their professions. It was mostly some basic insights into faith and life and I would have liked to see some more direct effort to encourage students to find ways to integrate their faith and their work. There was some reference to the need to care fro the poor and to justice at work, but I would have liked to see a stronger challenge to work for justice in a country rife with corruption and unjust structures in both the private and the public spheres. Maybe my role is to help this happen.

On Sunday. October 7, I went to the Colonia Divina Providencia here in Santa Rosa for what I thought would be a meeting with the community council, but it was with the entire community organization – about 65 people – meeting in a dirt floored, tin roofed structure. They had a report for me on the community – at least 400 people in the community, including 149 children and 111 young people! I have been pulled (not unwillingly) into helping them find finds for the materials for their community center.

Here I saw the reality of poverty – the hopeful and the discouraging. There is the effort to work together to get things done. But Manuela, the president of the community council, spoke about the need to work together; she was particularly strong in her critique of some members of the community who are not cooperating in the communal work.

And so? In the Zwicks’ book on the Catholic Worker they quote the pre-eminent twentieth century Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain who was supportive of the Catholic Worker:

The gospel text “The poor you will always have with you” … means on the contrary: Christ himself will not always be among you, but you will recognize Him in the poor, whom you must love and serve.

Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism