Poverty, Jesus, and God's Silent Night of Love

While in Haiti, we found the unsettling poverty of Our Lord Jesus everywhere, on every street, in every home, shop, school, chapel, church, clinic, hospital, cane field, and alleyway. In the eyes of nearly all Haitians--especially the children--Jesus starred at us and held out his hands to us to touch and hold. While at the Village of Hope, Pastor Bollinger took the three of us (Pastor Ron Luckey, Pat Mundt, and I) twice to visit "The Little Children of Jesus," an orphanage for 101 "throw-away"children who are, in one way or another, severaly disabled, either physcially or mentally, sometimes both. As sadly and commonly understood among the poor of the world, there are not enough resources to take care of the weakest and most desperate. Were it not for the Village of Hope, these children would not be living.

Children everywhere are in need to help, love, and assistance. In his arms Pastor Luckey holds a little girl whose parents died in the recent hurricane; in Ranquitte Pat Mundt is opening herself to a special relationship with 12-year-old Hippolyt; and I saw the face of my Lord Jesus in little Monuel, who just recently underwent a coronary transplant and now sees at least a bit more clearly her Haitai world and friends. Her photograph here is in my prayerbook.

Going to Haiti changes us. I expect my prayer life to change now so that it will include intercessions for this little Monuel, this Jesus. I will look at her, remember her before God, and then do what I can to give her some water, some clothes, a meal, and the touch of a nurse. And so Jesus will be in my prayers speaking to me through Monuel.

The world's poverty unsettles terribly. And one might well grow desperate were it not for God's abiding Presence in the midst of it all. While in Haiti I had little time to enter God's Silence, his Deepest Presence wherein all Haitians and their recents visitors-Ray and Bobby, Greg, Pam and Grover, Charlene and Amos, Pam, Shannon, Joe, Ron, the orphans, Pat, Hippolyt, Monuel, and all God's poor--are covered in the Night of Love and blanketed with compassion beyond words.

Recently a friend sent me the following from Thomas Merton's The Hidden Ground of Love; apparently it was part of a letter Merton sent to a Christian community. You may wish to enter its encouragement as I do today:

O my brothers and sisters, the contemplative is not the person who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, but simply those who have risked their mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust, that is to say, in the surrender of our poverty and incompleteness in order no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist. The message of hope the contemplative offers you, then, is not that you need to find your way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God: but that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, abides with you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing ever found in books or heard in sermons. The contemplative has nothing to tell you except to reassure you and say that, if you dare to penetrate your own silence and risk the sharing of that solitude with the lonely other who seeks God through you, then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond words and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained: it is the intimate union, in the depths of your own heart, of God's spirit and your own secret inmost self, so that you and God are in all truth One Spirit. I love you, in Christ. (157-158)