Colloquy, Volume 14 #1

A Ministry of Everyday Human Struggle

To write about God in my life these days is to write about God in the grind, and that definitely poses a challenge. Working with the poor and marginalized in Halifax produced an inevitable clash between my ideal and the reality of this work. The challenge was to make the reality my own.

My desire to work among the poor was genuine, but the ideal I shone with, along with the other volunteers, was one of vague naïve heroism. However, this is a ministry not of heroism but of humility, not of grandeur but of everyday human struggle.

My ideal crashed when, suddenly fearful, I first felt the urge to turn my back on the people. Then the deception began to crumble. But when I accepted that fear as part of myself, I began to grow in my own reality. Every day that I set out to work I bring with me the struggle to accept myself and to accept others as true brothers and sisters.

Some of the men at the sleeping shelter aren't easy to call brothers. When my fellow volunteer Anders and I first walked into that shelter, it wasn't compassion I felt. The way some men looked at us and carried themselves filled me with apprehension and fear. I wanted to get away from their scruffiness, their dirt, their stares. Yet at the same time, the desire to be with them, to talk with them and help the slow hours of their days go by, was strong in me. I realized that I bring all aspects of myself to the work, not just the "heroic" ones.

Oscar Romero once said that we are not the master builders in our ministries but the servants. I am just beginning to see that I cannot build alone. Laying the trust foundation is quiet and slow and often consists of mundane routine, but it must be lived and accepted if one is to be part of the lives of the poor, lives that can be so full of waiting and drudgery. If I am to be at peace, I have to accept the waiting and drudgery in my own life, and if I am to accept their poverty, I must ultimately love myself with my own poverty.

In the evenings at the same shelter, it wasn't the questioning, sometimes suspicious glances of the youth that were hardest to take but my own wariness. In the beginning all of us would simply sit there and watch TV, neither the volunteers nor the youth saying much. Sometimes Anders and I left wondering exactly what we had done. In our initial frustration, it was easy to forget that we were going there simply to be with the youth, to be present to them in whatever they might be doing or feeling.

Now going to "hang with the guys" in the evenings has become one of the more rewarding parts of my ministry. When I first met "Mike" at the men's sleeping shelter, he was a quiet youth who had a gentle way about him. My conversation consisted of asking questions and listening to his often barely uttered answers. After several months of meeting me, he now begins the talking, rather shyly relating the events of his days. And when I meet him and other youth from the shelter on the streets, they ask when Anders and I will be coming by. Something in me gently warms to that, as I begin to feel the first frail tendrils of trust beginning to grow between us.

Whatever these people are, they are not victims. They are survivors, feeling acutely the deaths and rebirths within their lives. Every day they are nailed to their crosses and every day they shove the stone away from their tombs. Death can come in many ways, from rejection by peers to "falling off the wagon" and getting kicked out of a shelter. For them, resurrection may not be about a shining new life but about deciding not to end the life they have.

In our own community, we ourselves are experiencing the ancient cycle. When one of our community members abruptly and painfully left the Jesuit volunteer program, we died. He left a hole in us, strange and hurting. But the four of us who remain are being reborn. Instead of stagnating in our hurt and fear, we are investing more of our hearts and souls in our community.

My ministry is not about carrying the poor on my back but about walking with them through their days. I cannot fix their brokenness, only be with them in it. With the youth at the shelter I have learned to be patient, to smile more, to laugh with them a bit and, most precious of all, to simply listen to them. I am seeing I have come not to save but to be saved myself. God's dream for the world is to be found in the grime and pain of the lives of these people, and I am beginning to hear the whisper of it through our daily struggles.

After graduating from high school in Waterloo, Ontario, Shanti Zachariah joined the Jesuit Volunteer program in July 1994. She spent a year in Yellowknife and now lives and works with her colleagues in the north end of Halifax.