Loving Without Limits: A Journey of Prayer and Service

I can often remember as a child growing up and hearing the ever-familiar words of Jesus time and time again, Love thy neighbor!  Although these words did not often have greater meaning for me outside of how I treated my immediate family, or maybe my neighborhood friends, I did most often try to be a kind child to others, whether with or without much success on any given day.

Even while living and working many years later as an adult for three years as a full-time volunteer in the region of the Appalachian Mountains in Eastern Kentucky, still considered to be one of the poorest areas within the United States today, I was not completely able to appreciate the deepest demands of ‘charity’ that compels one to serve others regardless of their race, creed or nationality with great love.

It was quite honestly many years later when I had eventually entered the seminary to prepare for the priesthood that on a one-week mission trip to the poorest regions of Peru, that I began to experience – by God’s grace – the truth that every person is truly a ‘brother or sister’ in Christ. I can still remember all of these years later, some thirty years ago, thinking in prayer one day in a small Catholic chapel in a missionary house where a group of seminarians were living with The Missionary Society of Saint James the Apostle, a mission begun by the late Cardinal Richard Cushing here in the Archdiocese of Boston, that even strangers, people who I didn’t even know and would never see again, must be seen and treated as ‘sisters or brothers’ in Christ. This changed my life!

Certainly, I didn’t speak the native language of Spanish, nor did I even meet the tens of thousands of people who were cared for at that time under the many priests serving the Society of St. James, but I knew I was ‘forever’ changed for this gift of a brief visit to those most in need, those most filled with faith in Jesus Christ.

 I quickly learned and witnessed myself, that poverty is not the deterrent to believing in a loving GOD that I imagined it would be, but in fact it almost seemed that those who had the least had the most joy, the most peace, the most faith. Yes, my experience was that Jesus was loved even ‘more’ by those who had the least.

In fact, it was overwhelming to observe the faith practices of these very people who had so little: vibrant, joyful, committed, generous and certainly ‘loud’ to the tune of singing ever so much about how Jesus was their Savior. Yet, the ‘volume‘ of their faith and trust in Jesus only became more ‘incarnate’ for me when I met a different ‘side’ of poverty even many more years later as a priest: the deep, abiding ‘poverty of spirit’ that offers eternal joy in the LORD.

This deeper abiding faith was what I came to experience in little Christina Dangond, whose ‘poverty’ of a severe and fatal cancer only seemed to brighten her ever-lasting ‘proclamation’ of true faith: “Jesus, I trust in you!”  Yes, it was now in this little child, impoverished only in ‘physical’ health, that I began to see what it really meant to ‘believe’ in the saving power of Jesus!

Yes, little Christina, over a period of five years, lived joyfully through the ups and downs of cancer treatments within the context of a loving, devout family and a close circle of friends.  The daily ‘life’ of every little girl who still wants to go to school, play with friends, sing and dance, taught me how to truly ‘love,’ not only our ‘neighbors,’ but to truly love our GOD when seemingly the things of this world could no longer ‘contain’ her love of Jesus.

And now, the ‘irony’ of it all is that this little child began a foundation that builds Catholic churches in the poorest areas of the world so that the ‘poor’ can have Jesus close to them in the presence of the Eucharist, which allows them to ‘praise’ this loving GOD. How great is that!

Thank you, little Christina, for ‘teaching’ all of us – tens of thousands of us – how to truly build the faith for every ‘sister and brother’ in Christ!