First appearing in The Tecumseh Herald, Nov. 2016, 2023
Writing a regular column is both a joy and a challenge, and right now, in this space and time, I am finding it a challenge to find joy.
We are right at the start of our holiday season, with Thanksgiving just days away, and I think I’ve gotten at least 30 appeal letters since the start of the month. That’s not even counting what showed up in October.
I remember visiting my grandma as a youngster and she had a lot of those same appeal letters, as well as copies of Catholic magazines The Ligourian and Maryknoll. I remember my grandma poring over each and every missive she received, her glasses perched on her nose and her large, old-school magnifying glass gripped in her left hand. She’d have the magazines opened to a particular page and fanned face down on the table, saving her place as she made her way through the letters.
She responded to each and every appeal with a little something. It made her happy.
I remember sitting at her round kitchen table in her rundown old house with its sagging ceiling and peeling paint and listening to her talking about the important work of these missionaries.
The ones I remember most clearly involved starving children in Africa. Missionaries representing Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans, Salesians, Vincentians, Carmelites, Benedictines, and many religious orders traveled to Africa and India, South and Central America, parts of Europe and the U.S. to build schools and orphanages, dig wells, provide food and clothing, and spread the Good News. Their appeal materials included scores of photographs of black children eating from wooden bowls and smiling or listening attentively in makeshift classrooms with thatched roofs and no walls. I was glad my grandma was so generous and cared so much. She set a good example.
Fast-forward 60 years and now I’m receiving similar appeals. Some have a selection of greeting cards or address labels. Other popular tokens are guardian angel coins, rosaries, saint medals, and offers to pray for my special intentions. Most recently, I received a tiny relic of St. Anthony of Padua on a key chain. All of these pleas represent people in great need in a world that should be doing a better job taking care of its citizens. Yet, they are also letters filled with gratitude and joy because they are written by people who are devoted to their work, who are determined to take care of each and every person in need, no matter their circumstances. People who continue to ask, no matter how many times they are rejected or rebuffed.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, canonized as St. Teresa of Calcutta, comes to my mind when I think about all of the mission appeals I receive and the hard work and sacrifice they all represent. Mother Teresa, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work among the poorest of the poor in India, founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1946 to serve “the poorest of the poor” and continued this work almost to the day she died, Sept. 5, 1997. Like so many others before her and since, a deep love for every living person on the planet guided her way.
She surrounded herself with the poorest of the poor, she challenged others to see those who are suffering as humans deserving of their love, their compassion, their help. In a world filled with so much sadness and sickness and neglect and cruelty, Mother Teresa found joy.
“Love begins at home,” she told the Nobel audience in 1979. “It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the action that we do.”
SQUIBS 