Charity Begins At Home and Is Felt Worldwide

St. Victor

As is no doubt true with everyone, I get busy. And the busy-ness, while perhaps understandable, even required at times, distracts me from the Christian mission, Supernatural mandate, to help others. Fortunately, in that I do participate in a Catholic faith community, at least on Sundays, and Holy Days of Obligation, and have been with that community for many years, I am rescued from my distraction by caring individuals for whom charity is far more reflexive than it is for me.
  Twice, a priest has focused me in the last ten years. One was by the current pastor of the church pictured above, in being a small part of what is now (I am no longer involved) a transitional residence for homeless men, who are helped until they are mainstreamed into our midst. The other, by the former pastor, and that most recently.
After a natural disaster, he became aware of the drilling efforts being made by various organizations to bring clean water to drought prone and drought stricken areas, in particular, in East Africa, places like Kenya and the Sudan.  He contacted me, a long time parishioner and friend, to help him do some internet research on whether Catholic Relief Services was one of those entitites which was involved in any of these projects. I found that it was. I gave him the information. I forgot about the whole thing.
But the Monsignor, a most persuasive man, contacted me again. He wanted to engender parish and outside of parish interest in these water projects, literally a matter of life and death. And he wanted me to help him. I had and I have no expertise in this area of charity, but I knew to just follow his lead. He had a contact at CRS (see that logo above, that's them), a lovely man who had spent much of his life overseas in many different projects, in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Africa, and he put me in touch with him. Out of this has been borne the germ of a group, a little rag tag right now, but with hearts in the right place, beginning at my Church but not intended to be confined to it, which Monsignor put under the aegis of what he called "Our Lady of the Well of Nazareth".  I have since seen that there is a well, purportedly near where Mary, Joseph and Jesus lived in Nazareth. So apt then this connection to her.  After some initial contributions by several at the parish, today, our most earnest and sincere spokesperson from CRS came and spoke at all the Masses. The image of women, freed from walking miles to get water, often not clean enough to drink or wash in, breaking the earthen jars in celebration and thanksgiving when a well of safe water is dug, was, of itself, an enormous motivation to keep myself involved, however slowly we develop as a group, however many or few of us there are. The parishioners were touched, and energized, and there is a flowing of hope from us to people we have never seen and will never meet. As our speaker said, we in Hollywood were walking with people in the Sudan, all as Harry Stack Sullivan said, "more human than otherwise" and in fact, all created in His image for His love and protection.
A really good day!