by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
What is the story in which we live? What motivates the characters and moves the plot—greed, lust, power? Do the perils for Earth from climate change testify to human self-absorption? Is profit our only moral compass? Is the human story ultimately tragic?
Anyone who answers yes hasn’t read the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights or the Earth Charter. Both articulate human dignity and unalienable rights for all. Both call for economies that include people who live in poverty.
Pope Francis insists that we Christians are resurrection people. In our faith new actions and attitudes can arise.
What is the story we personally live? How are we giving and receiving kindness, generosity, and respect? To what values do we give witness day in and day out? How do we pour our love into one another’s lives?
Here is a testimony that some people still live Jesus’ story. A woman I know recently arrived at our airport and took light rail home. She sat, observing familiar sights, but tired after her flight. A homeless man came walking slowly down the aisle. She remembers smelling him before she saw him.
Homeless people are familiar to her. She heads development for a nonprofit that provides affordable housing for some 9,000 residents in our area. This day she stays a bystander as the man moves past her and sits down. He is missing a shoe.
While she looks away, another woman sits down beside him. She is wearing scrubs. “I think my shoes will fit you,” she says and puts the shoes on his feet.
The man thanks her, but she is in a hurry.
“This is my stop,” she says and steps off the train in her stocking feet to her job at the Veterans Administration hospital, a stunning witness.
- Who have you witnessed living Jesus’ story?