In recent months, I’ve found that one word continues to be on my mind, in my prayer, in my discussions with others, and at times in my preaching.
The word? Compassion.
I wonder sometimes if our sense of compassion for those less fortunate has lessened or even been lost. We as believers in Jesus should know better than anyone the importance of taking care of those who are in need.
In the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25), Jesus himself tells us that those who will enter heaven – “Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” – will have fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, welcomed strangers, clothed the naked, visited the sick, and cared for those in prison.
Earlier this month, we celebrated the first feast of Saint Teresa of Calcutta. She died on Sept. 5, 1997, and Pope Francis declared last Christmas Eve that date would now be a liturgical feast for our world. Every year, we will celebrate Mother Teresa, whose only agenda was to help those who needed it.
You may know her story. She was a sister for 20 years teaching at schools in India when, on a train ride to the Himalayas, she heard Jesus calling her to leave teaching and spend the rest of her life taking care of the poor. She called it “a vocation within a vocation.”
Her obedience, compassion, and love for the poor took her to the slums of Calcutta, where she served the neediest. She ran a children’s home for abandoned infants, and she picked up the seriously ill off the streets and took them to a home for the dying called Kalighat, a former Muslim mosque that became her sanctuary for those in need.
Mother Teresa had saintly compassion. Her whole life became one of service. She said her vocation was to take care of the “poorest of the poor,” and her example still speaks to me today.
Twenty-five years ago, a few years after Mother Teresa had died, I went to Calcutta for a month and spent that time working with her sisters. I helped at Kalighat, a leper colony, and other places. I had never experienced anything like this in our country, and everything I saw and did influenced me in my own personal journey.
I saw incredible compassion from both volunteers and the sisters of the Missionaries of Charity. It’s truly amazing to see these sisters who give up everything to compassionately serve the poor and the needy.
I developed a deeper appreciation of their compassion in one experience that is still fresh in my mind. It was at the end of my month in Calcutta, and I was asked on a feast day to go up where the sisters lived while they prayed in the chapel to bless the entire residence with holy water and invoke God’s blessing.
I walked into a room that had probably 50 beds. There were about 150 sisters in the convent, so there were three of these rooms. Above each bed was a wire that went the length of the room, and on that wire hung the sisters’ saris – the ones they would wear the next day. All their possessions were in shoeboxes under their beds.
Can you imagine any of us having all our possessions in a shoebox? Two saris and a shoebox was all they had. I can’t imagine any greater example of compassion that giving up everything to serve the poor and minister to those in need.
A quarter of a century later, I worry about our own compassion. As the former head of Catholic Charities, I realize there are more struggles now to feed people and to make sure they are comfortable coming to our food programs amid increased worries about immigration issues and their safety.
I hear more about those staying inside as much as possible because they are worried about possible repercussions if they are found on the wrong side of decisions that could get them deported. We also now have troops on our streets in Washington. I know some are in favor of it and others are not. Either way, it changes the atmosphere for those who want to enjoy our great city.
I was talking recently to a woman who told me that she and her husband have been here for years but are technically illegal. They have worked in various capacities through the years. She said their children are safe, were born here, and are currently in Catholic schools. She and her husband are happy their kids have a home here, but they worry about being forced to leave.
We all have opinions on border policies, including me, and I pray for a good solution. But that’s not my lane. When someone is standing in front of me and needs help, I can’t turn my back on them. I don’t think Jesus would want me to.
We hear at least six times in the Gospels that Jesus’s heart was “moved with compassion,” which is the meaning of the Greek word splanchnizomai. It is a powerful term for compassion so deep it is felt in our very core – in the “guts,” as the Greek term suggests.
Are our hearts still moved with pity? I hope so.
We all desire justice in our world, and I pray we move toward that. I also pray that we never lose sight of compassion and mercy. We will rely on God’s compassion and mercy when we face our final judgment, and we do well to show our own compassion it to our brothers and sisters made in God’s image.
(Msgr. John Enzler serves as the mission advocate of Catholic Charities of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington and is a chaplain at his alma mater, St. John’s College High School in Washington. He writes the Faith in Action column for the archdiocese’s Catholic Standard and Spanish-language El Pregonero newspapers and websites.)
