For most of the year, my Wednesdays have seemed to last forever.
Not because it’s the middle of the week, with last weekend a distant memory and the coming weekend a hopeful light at the end of the tunnel. Not even because of Community Nights, which are a 4 hour Amate House requirement after a full workday where we join with our community for dinner and some form of personal development.
Wednesdays seemed to last forever because they are filled with that tasks that challenge me the most–challenges that seemed insurmountable until I stopped and opened my eyes.
Let me give you a run down of the tasks I’m referring to…
THE CLOTHING ROOM
My Wednesdays operate on a rotating schedule. Each week I alternate between the clothing room and the food pantry. The Clothing Room, properly titled the Emergency Assistance Clothing Room, is essentially a large empty room in the basement of Catholic Charities where our amazing volunteers unpack boatloads of clothing donations and organize them to look like a little thrift store. People can come in once a month and, for 15 minutes, dig around for whatever items they may need for themselves and their families. I serve as the intake specialist when I am there, checking people in and finding their file to verify addresses and mark down the date of their visit.
I’m know that I sometimes have a “rose-colored glasses” view of the world, but no dose of realism could have prepared me for my encounters in the clothing room. People of all races and backgrounds come through our doors, and it’s always a mixed bag of attitudes. The scents and sounds of the clothing room are often overwhelming as I find myself face to face with the nitty-gritty of poverty. Screaming babies, unwashed hair, jaded eyes. Children with no shoes and mothers with no patience. The clothing room pushes me further each week as angry clients took their daily frustrations out on me, the first face to greet them when they enter our little shop.
Entrance to The Clothing Room
THE FOOD PANTRY
On the weeks where I am not at the clothing room, I travel to Back of the Yards neighborhood (the yards as in stockyards as in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle) to the Casa Catalina food pantry. On Wednesdays, the pantry receives a truck full of food donations from the Greater Chicago Food Depository. We spend our mornings unloading cases of green beans and peanut butter and organizing them around the pantry. Then we spend a few hours dividing up the food into bags based on family sizes. Often two or three of us pack over 300 bags! Loading each can in, one by one, over and over becomes monotonous. After lunch we package the produce and meat. On some days, I get to do intake at the front, greeting the faces of the people who came in through the doors. On other days I remain in the back, sorting frozen chickens and deciding which bananas were too overripe to distribute to clients. The combination of large amounts of physical labor mixed with the familiar sights and sounds of impoverished neighborhoods began to wear on me and I came to have a sense of dread about Wednesdays.
The entrance to the “Back of the Yards” Neighborhood
Then one day, the gospel at Mass stopped me in my tracks.
“…for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me”
How had I been so blind? Here I was face to face with Christ each Wednesday and I was so caught up in the smell or the negative attitude that I couldn’t even see Him. WAKE UP! I felt so selfish and small. I can hardly call it a year of “service” if I spend the whole time counting down the hours until my escape. It was time for a little reevaluation.
A lesson that I’ve learned throughout the year is that you never know where someone is coming from, so you have to meet them graciously where they are. The woman who is yelling at me to find her card faster is actually a mother who needs clothes for her son’s funeral after he was killed in gang violence. The man who is angry that we don’t have enough clothes in his size needs a new suit jacket because his had been stolen after a job interview the week before. The teen averting eye contact and quietly asking if we have any Pampers to give out is an expecting mother who had to drop out of high school and work to support herself and her unborn child. When I stopped to look at things through the lens of the works of mercy, I gained a whole new perspective on the clothing room and the food pantry. Direct service isn’t just charity, it is a responsibility. Christ doesn’t have to smell good, look clean, and have a smile on his face and a thank you on his lips. He might just as well have dirty hair and a screaming baby on his hip. I look forward to meeting Him graciously each Wednesday no matter what.
Love in Action 