The Convery Press

Fast Tube by Casper

I recently spent another mid-summer week on a mission trip to Appalachia, Pennsylvania with high school and college students from St. William Parish in Walled Lake.  Even after 7 previous trips, I can only describe the experience as “overwhelming”.

My first trip was in 2002.  Living in one of the wealthiest counties in the United States and travelling to Clearfield county (then the poorest county in Pennsylvania), I found myself completely overcome with distress at the abject poverty of most of those we served.  Beyond the physical poverty, I encountered a great deal of  emotional poverty especially among the elderly, many of whom have stayed in Appalachia while children and family and friends have moved away to find employment as the mining and logging industry of the region contracts.  In the midst of that overwhelming temporal poverty, I often find overwhelming spiritual wealth.  The love of life, sense of gratitude, and deep relationship with God that many of these people possess stands in stark relief to the nearly dead economy, the dearth of material goods, and the want of relatives, friends, and close neighbors to visit with.

All of this experience and observation leaves me with a good deal to ponder and pray about at the end of the day.  Returning to the mission in its rather isolated and picturesque setting and having time for quiet reflection and recreation time in addition to a simple meal helps me ‘decompress’.  Night prayer with the rest of our small mission community is really the key to the whole day.  It seems that my personal reflection and private prayer always fall a little short.  By the time our evening prayer is complete, however, I am no longer ‘completely covered over’ by the experiences and observations of the day.

This year’s mission trip, while no less ‘overwhelming’ in this earlier understanding was ‘overwhelming’ in a completely different sense.  Each year, my experience becomes deeper, richer, and more insightful than the previous one.  Now I find myself increasingly overwhelmed by the love and joy which I encounter among the sisters of the Anawim Community, the people whom they (and we) serve, and among the young men and women who devote a week of their summer vacation to the call to mission.  In a place and among conditions which ought to foster only sadness and despair there is joy and hope.  The young women and men in our group can’t contain their joy and seem to value it so little that they take no inventory of it but are constantly taking it out and showing it around to everyone they see and invariably leave it behind with no thought of collecting it and packing it away to keep it handy for some future need.  And Hope?  It is so abundant among this group, that if it could be distilled and packaged, there would certainly be little commerce left to support the vast majority of counselors and psychologists now gainfully employed.

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn 4:16).   Of these words, Pope Benedict writes,

“We have come to believe in God’s love:  in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. To be in the midst of the joy of the gospel lived out in this way is truly overwhelming.”

And so I find myself blissfully overwhelmed and mightily encouraged by spending a week working with and for so many people who have had such a meaningful encounter with Jesus Christ that it has decisively directed their lives.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 9th, 2010 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Tom & Peg Convery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.