Catholic Reading Wednesday

With many thanks to our awesome curator, Karen Celano, you can delve into a faith-related news article each Wednesday! Karen writes:

In June, a Methodist pastor in Tennessee named Willie Lyle spent four days "undercover" as a homeless person, begging for food and shelter.  During his experiment, he experienced disdain and rejection, and learned how the material discomfort of homelessness is augmented by spiritual and emotional poverty and alienation.  He speaks about the need to learn from the homeless and hungry, which I take to mean that we should approach them with spiritual and intellectual humility.  He also speaks about the need to reach out beyond our "comfort zones" and our comfortable communities - and he reminds us that Christ's cross is not a comfortable place to be.

Pope Francis has also been gently but poignantly reminding his Church to reach beyond their comfort zones, most recently by his embrace and kiss of a man suffering from neurofibromatosis.  Reporting on this event, Mathew Schmalz writes that Pope Francis' embrace reminded him of Mother Teresa's confession that working with the poor and sick can be, quite frankly, physically revolting - and of how it takes persevering prayer to develop the sacramental worldview that helps us overcome that revulsion and see Christ in those who are diseased or disfigured.  He writes of the need to go beyond mere compassion and to show through our deeds our wholehearted embrace of the "ugliness" of suffering and disease - not by whitewashing it, but by entering into it and allowing ourselves to experience and overcome the mental and physical distress we sometimes feel towards those who look or act differently from ourselves.

We are approaching the season of Advent, which, though we often forget it, is one of the two penitential seasons of the Church year.  Although Catholics are always called to live out the three spiritual pillars of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, the season of Advent is a particularly good time to emphasize these practices as we begin to prepare for Christ's birth.  As I read these articles this week, I was struck by the ways in which prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are intimately interrelated.  Normally we see "fasting" as simply abstaining from food, but I think the examples of Pastor Lyle and Pope Francis show that fasting, in the broader sense of asceticism, is about breaking out of our physical, emotional, and spiritual "comfort zones" - to allow ourselves to experience discomfort in a way that contributes to our ability to practice charity (or almsgiving) by fully embracing those who suffer.  And it is prayer that gives us the spiritual strength to overcome our repulsion towards discomfort and helps unite our struggles to the Paschal Mystery.

There are people who are sick, hungry or homeless in our own community and parish.  These maladies strike people in material, spiritual, emotional, and mental ways - and I believe they are used by Satan to drive wedges into the Body of Christ.  Our natural tendency to avoid those who are different or strange is corrupted into a force that causes alienation and disunity.  We who wish to strengthen Christ's body must overcome these forces.  We may not need to drink pus or suck on a leper's sores the way Catherine of Sienna or Catherine of Genoa did, but there are other things we can do: Spend time talking to a mentally ill person.  Reach out to someone who dislikes or even hates the Church.  Sit beside a homeless person on the bus and ask him about his day.  Reach out beyond our "comfort zone" and do something that downright repels us.  In doing so, we will emulate Willie Lyle, Pope Francis, Mother Teresa, Catherine of Siena - and Christ Himself.