Service to the Poor

A Reflection January, 2002 Ray Towey, Tanzania

Service to the poor at a personal cost is a purifying process because the spiritual journey needs a painful removal of illusions previously held. There is no gracefilled experience without an emptying and there is no emptying without resistance. The poor are the gift for clarity of vision. When love of the poor replaces fear of the poor the kingdom of God is at hand, the poison of racist words has no power over you, the stranger is welcomed, our gifts are shared, nonviolence reigns as the greater power.
When you give from your excess you still remain secure, when you give from your core you change, and when you change, at the core, for the sake of the poor the Kingdom of God is at hand. VMM offers service to the poor at a personal cost; the location is Africa, an opportunity for personal transformation, an experiment with the Gospel demands where all outcomes are in doubt and all outcomes possible.
VMM offers no easy solution, no easy answers, just a few questions among friends. VMM offers nothing but a channel for a personal journey. We lack the security of an endowed institution. We proclaim a fractured Church and embrace it as our own. We are prudent for those in the field but you return to no private health plan, no cloisters of comfort, no team of counsellors, even no bed or home to lay your head unless you work once again for it as anyone, poor or rich in our own culture. The poverty of our institution means its smallness cannot obscure the journey. That is a blessing!

Service to the poor at a personal cost is not extraordinary. It is the ordinary chance meeting when time is spent and money not made, when money is given away and time is made, for the poor, for the community, at a personal cost. Until the personal cost is spent is it seen that the joy of the personal cost is the greater. There is no special debtor in the Kingdom of God because we are all debtors to the God who chooses life, who chooses us.

And so we come home and exchange our stories, the good and the bad, and continue to explore the journey and test out the Gospel to see if it is still good, to see if it is still news,
to the poor.