Helping God: The Paulist Center’s Young Adult Social Justice Education Series

This week, Jessica Coblentz, the Pastoral Minister for Young Adult Ministry at the Paulist Catholic Center, reflects on a recent gathering of young adults to discuss Catholic social teaching and homelessness in Boston.

“Jesus said when you help the poor, you help God. It’s cool to know that you’re helping God.”

Last week at the Paulist Catholic Center in downtown Boston, one young adult referred to her work with those experiencing homelessness in this way. Most Christians are quite familiar with the biblical reference underlying her statement—Jesus’s famous line, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:40). Yet, spoken with ease from the mouth of my sincere peer, Catie, this common line was startling: She truly believed that her work at the shelter each day was helping God.

I can’t imagine having a job description like that. I can’t imagine waking up each day, setting out for the office, and thinking: “Alright, time to help God.” I can’t imagine it—and I work at a church.

It’s not that I don’t have some sense that I’m helping God through my work at the Paulist Center, where I have served as the pastoral minister for young adult ministry for the past two and a half years. Still, after Catie said this during a monthly installment of our year-long Social Justice Education Series, I found myself thinking that maybe she and other young adults at the Paulist Center who spend their careers and free-time accompanying the poor are, in fact, helping God in a profoundly special way—a way that I simply do not in my day-to-day work as a minister. Based on everything I’ve read about helping the poor in the Gospels, Catie really is helping God in the most important way possible.

Our Social Justice Education Series initially started as a forum where people like Catie can share with the church community about their social justice related work in the Boston area. Each month, we gather to engage a new social justice theme with the help of a different young adult presenter who starts the evening with a fifteen-minute reflection on five questions:

1) Why are you committed to this social justice issue?

2) How is this social justice issue relevant to the Boston area?

3) What organizations are doing this type of work in Boston?

4) What types of social and ethical controversy surround this issue?

5) How does this work relate to your Catholic faith?

We spend the next hour in small and large group conversation about the presentation and the social justice issue at hand. In October we treated economic injustice and the Occupy Movement, and in December we considered global health and the work of Boston-based Partners in Health. Like this past month’s gathering about homelessness in the Boston area, every event in the series has left me more educated about my faith and local social justice issues, accompanied by a deep sense of gratitude for the work of my peers who help God each and every day.

Please join us throughout the year as our series turns to topics ranging from immigration and education. Our next gathering will be Sunday, February 19 at the Paulist Center (5 Park Street, Boston) beginning at 7pm. The evening will focus on mental illness.

For more information about the Social Justice Education Series, contact Jessica Coblentz at jessica.coblentz@gmail.com.

Jessica Coblentz is the Pastoral Minister for Young Adult Ministry at the Paulist Catholic Center in downtown Boston. She is also a doctoral student in theology at Boston College.

Ending Homelessness with Homes

In the reflection below, Caitlin Kelley of Father Bill’s & MainSpring reflects on the importance of advocating not only for housing, but also for homes.

I am a Housing Specialist with a confession to make: I don’t believe housing is what people experiencing homelessness really need.

It has taken me a long time to come to terms with that confession, and in all truth, I don’t even fully know what it means yet. I strongly believe that we can end homelessness in our society by creating more affordable housing, yet over the past few years I have started to wonder if there is more to the story.

In 2007 I packed my bags and flew across the country to spend 2 years volunteering as a Jesuit Volunteer in Portland, OR. I worked for a non-profit cafe that sought to create a place for building community; it was a place that practiced hospitality, non-violence, and gentle-personalism (a term coined by the Catholic Worker Movement that is profoundly about love and is about honoring the dignity that exists in each one of us). There was one day in particular that I remember vividly. I had started to close up the cafe for the day and walked over to one of the barter workers and said,

“You’re free to go home John. Cafe is closed.”

John smiled, handed me the bathroom key, and said:

“But I am home.”

As he walked past me I smiled to myself because I knew he was telling the truth. His apartment was where he slept. The cafe was where he was known and embraced, loved and respected, and in Boston terms, was a place where everybody knows your name.

Danny was another regular customer who had brown straggly hair, a permanent grin plastered on his face, and a tendency to speak like Wayne and Garth from the movie Wayne’s World. A heavy metal musician, Danny always told wild stories about smashing his guitar on stage and crowd surfing. One day at the cafe register Danny forgot to sign his receipt, so I called him back over. He jokingly smacked himself on the forehead and shaking his head said, “It’s a good thing you reminded me, otherwise no one might have known I existed today. Now there’s proof!” Danny smiled and walked away so nonchalantly you might have thought we just had a conversation about the weather. I, on the other hand, stood stunned that someone could feel completely invisible if not for tangible proof of their existence.

Stories like these touched the deepest part of me, and I was resolved to continue to work for a more just society as I made my move to Boston. I began working as the Housing Specialist at Father Bill’s & MainSpring and couldn’t have been more excited to be part of an organization that wasn’t interested in managing homelessness, but was taking a housing based approach towards ending it. Each and every person I worked with who moved into housing was cause for celebration; that is one less person sleeping in a shelter or on the streets tonight.

As I worked to connect people to housing, I could not help but notice the similarities among the stories I heard in Portland with those I was hearing in Boston. I heard people speak about their poverty of loneliness and isolation just as much, if not more, than their physical poverty. It made me wonder, can we address one type of poverty without addressing the other?

As I thought about this question, I thought about people like Grace who still sleeps out with her street family four times a week because she isn’t use to sleeping alone. And Jerry who abandoned his housing because his loneliness was consuming him. It’s difficult to understand why someone would choose to be homeless or sleep outside. Yet I think this choice becomes closer to us than we might think when it is re-framed as a choice between loneliness and community, and I don’t know many people who would choose the former over the latter. Dorothy Day, a leader of the Catholic Worker Movement, articulated this idea in her autobiography: “We have all known the long loneliness, and we have discovered that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community.”

A person’s outer poverty is easy to see if one is willing to look. What is much harder to see is a person’s inner poverty because that requires getting to know someone, but I think that is exactly where we need to start. We must continue listening closely to those who are living on the streets and in the shelters. It is in listening to the experts themselves, the people experiencing homelessness, that I’ve heard them talk about their need for more than just housing. What they are in need of, what we are all in need of, is a place to call home.

As I said in the beginning, I don’t fully know what it means to take a home approach, rather than a housing approach, to ending homelessness. I would imagine advocating for homes looks quite different than advocating for affordable housing. After all, creating affordable housing is a matter of policy, creating homes is a matter of the heart. And perhaps this is where we all come into play – no matter our belief system or color, our age or gender, our class or ethnicity, it will take all of us, uniting as human beings, to create a sense of belonging and homecoming to those who have lived on the margins of our society for far too long.

How can you and your community of religious or ethical commitment take action to end homelessness by advocating both for housing and for homes? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Caitlin Kelley has worked at Father Bill’s & MainSpring for just over 2 years and has recently transitioned from her position as the Housing Specialist to the Triage Coordinator. Caitlin is an active member in her Catholic faith community as well as the MHSA Young Professionals Group. Caitlin hopes to eventually return to school to study Non-Profit Management and Social Policy, but in the meantime enjoys living in Jamaica Plain and is frequently spotted running around the Arboretum.

Tomorrow: Flip the Switch to End Homelessness!

Come join the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance (MHSA) tomorrow, December 28, for a free reception, with hors d’oeuvres provided by Pine Street Inn’s iCater, as a “thank you” for your support in our efforts to end homelessness.

We will convene in Center Court of The Shops at Prudential Center at 4:30 p.m. sharp and “flip the switch” on the Prudential Tower lights at 5:00 p.m., with mingling and hors d’oeuvres to follow.

MHSA has been chosen by The Shops at Prudential Center as a Lighting Partner for this year’s “31 Nights of Light” program. 31 Nights of Light was created to help community organizations gain key visibility during the holiday season. On December 28, the Prudential Tower will be lit up in blue to raise awareness for MHSA’s mission to end homelessness.

For more information, contact Erin Donohue at edonohue@mhsa.net or (617)367-6447 ext. 25. We hope to see you there!

Click here to register!

Register Today: MHSA Annual Meeting on December 13!

MHSA cordially invites you to the 2011 MHSA Annual Meeting.

Register today, Wednesday, December 7, to reserve your spot!

MHSA Annual Meeting
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
8:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.
Nine Zero Hotel
90 Tremont Street
Boston, MA 02108

Honoring

Representative Ronald Mariano, House Majority Leader
For his career-long commitment to supporting innovative solutions to homelessness.

Sheila Dillon, Housing Advisor to Mayor Menino at the City of Boston
For her work in preserving vital resources for homeless individuals in Boston.

Click here to register now!
The above link will take you to our secure online registration system. Should you wish to register over the phone or by mail, contact Caitlin Golden at cgolden@mhsa.net or (617) 367 – 6447 x 28.

The Gospel of This World

As part of our dialogue on the SAM blog, we invite people from diverse faith-based or ethical communities to share how their religious or philosophical beliefs connect to their commitment to social action. This week, Chelsea Link, Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council, reflects on the connection between atheism and social justice.

This summer, a Christian student at my school told me that if he found out God didn’t exist, he would kill himself.

I was horrified, of course, but also simply confused. If this student stopped believing in God, would his world really look that bad? Would it suddenly look that different? Would it cease to be worth living in?

That world is my world. I live every day of my life assuming that God doesn’t exist, and I’m having a grand old time.

But I was even more confused when the same student went on to say that, if he didn’t kill himself, he would at the very least become a heartless monster; he would stop doing community service, stop caring about the wellbeing of others, and devote the rest of his life to selfish and radical hedonism.

As somebody who has lived through exactly the process he is hypothesizing about – the transition from a theistic worldview to an atheistic one – I can testify that my commitment to serving others only became stronger when I stopped believing in God.

I’ve always believed in the importance of community service. But, for most of my life, it didn’t seem particularly urgent. It will all be evened out eventually, I figured. It’s nice to do what you can, but no matter what we do in this life, God will sort it out in the next. Justice will be served regardless of my participation in it.

When I became an atheist, I suddenly lost recourse to this comforting thought. I became painfully aware of the very real possibility that justice might never be served. With that awareness came the unshakable conviction that I must do everything in my power to ensure that people do, as nearly as possible, get justice in this life. If I don’t do it, I can’t assume that it will get done.

Rabbi Hillel famously asked, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” I ask, if we are not for ourselves, who will be for us? And if I am not for my fellow humans, who will be for them?

Thus, the idea that atheism dissolves responsibility is baffling to me. On the contrary, the way I see it, responsibility is a constant; the question isn’t whether it exists, but who bears it. You can only abdicate responsibility if you have somebody to foist it off on – somebody like God. When God is removed from the picture, the weight of the world falls squarely and irrevocably on our own shoulders.

That’s why I, as an atheist, am committed to working as hard as I can for social justice.

I believe in the religion of reason – the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.

– Robert Ingersoll

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine. She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. She also writes for NonProphet Status and the Harvard Brain, and volunteers with the Be the Match bone marrow donor registry.