Category: Behold Vancouver

Maura’s Story

Around a dozen girls, sporting the reliable Catholic school plaid, sat in a classroom tucked away in a side hallway on the third floor of an all-girls high school. During the fall of 2006 and into 2007, the room was filled with raucous, back-and-forth conversations every time the class met. We talked about the genocide in Darfur, homelessness in our city of Boston, and the death penalty. Tough topics, but this was senior year theology at my high school: a yearlong class in social justice.

We read the work of Catholics who dedicate their lives to social justice work, watched Frontline documentaries, and studied the seven themes of Catholic Social Teaching until they were basically second nature. When we weren’t in our classroom chairs, there was a community service requirement to fulfill, because the mission of the sisters who founded our school, the Sisters of St. Joseph, is to “love the dear neighbor without distinction.”

We didn’t always have the same ideas about how to help or even who to help. One classmate sold T-shirts and donated the proceeds to a nonprofit. Another volunteered at a local food pantry. I helped out at a theatre camp focused on building self-esteem in preteen girls. But whatever we did, it all came back to the idea that every life has inherent value and potential.

I’ve been Catholic since my baptism in November 1988, but attempting to live out what I learned during senior year high school theology is why I’m Catholic today.

For me, the heart of the Catholic Church and Jesus’ message, is reaching out and helping others. Different messages and priorities might seem louder or more prominent, depending on who is talking, but my lived experience of being Catholic is one that aligns with the image of a welcoming Jesus — a man who sought out people who were different from him, who helped people who were otherwise overlooked.

There have been times when I’ve been embarrassed to be Catholic, especially with all that continues to come to light with the clergy abuse crisis. Sometimes, it feels like my experience of Catholicism might not exist anymore, and it definitely isn’t the one that gets attention. I’ve worried that people might assume the worst of me when they hear the worst of my Church. But then I remember those conversations in that third-floor classroom, and the group of women who went out into the world to bring justice to others, each in their own way. So I resolve to be that vision of Catholicism, to be representative of the Church at its best, not its worst.

One of my favorite church songs is called “The Servant Song,” and it includes these lyrics: “We are pilgrims on the journey, we are travellers on the road.

Research suggests that, on average, we make well more than 200 decisions every day about what we eat and drink. And yet, most people are aware of making only 15 to 20 daily nutrition-related decisions. These findings could easily be extrapolated to other areas of decision-making throughout a typical day. Not only do many of our choices lack intentionality, but often we aren’t even aware we’re making decisions at all.

We humans are an adaptive bunch. Arguably, there are thousands of micro-decisions to be made each day, and it would be overwhelming to deliberate over each one. (Chidi from The Good Place, anyone?) Part of the problem is that our commercialized culture presents us with a dizzying array of choices about things that don’t really matter, as author Thomas Merton famously diagnosed one day while shopping for toothpaste after spending the previous months “off the grid.”

The trick is to identify which decisions are worth weighing carefully and which aren’t. It might help to relearn the art of asking what might be termed “foundational questions.” Foundational questions come packaged in the rawest, most basic language and demand an answer not just from the information in our heads but from the very fabric of how we understand the mysteries of life.

Asking foundational questions is built into the very DNA of toddlers and college students, but somewhere along the way we mistakenly “outgrow” the habit. During our young professional years, many of us are busy developing the expertise and specialization necessary to analyze profit margins, decipher CT scans, or diffuse temper tantrums. Incidentally, the young professional years — when there is the least amount of mental and emotional space for asking foundational questions — are when many of us begin making for ourselves what might equally be called foundational decisions that shape the course of our lives and the type of people we’re becoming: deciding what neighborhood we live in, what kind of work we will do, and what and how much we consume.

For more than two millennia, folks in the Church have been asking foundational questions about life in this beautiful, broken, and messy world in light of three beliefs central to the Catholic Christian faith: 1) God lovingly created a good world; 2) the goodness of creation has been damaged by sin; and 3) God became human and invites us to participate in His saving work here and now toward our final good in the life to come.

Guided by these three tenets, people of faith and goodwill throughout the Church’s history have accumulated questions, time-tested good ideas, and real-life examples in building up what is known as the Catholic social tradition, or CST.

“Pass those plates down to the food disposal,” Grandpa would inevitably boom at the end of each meal, scraping sandwich crusts and half-eaten bowls of applesauce into a pile on his plate. Through the doorway of the adjacent dining room, our parents winced as Grandpa smilingly gobbled down his 18 grandchildren’s scraps. They knew that their admonitions to “Eat your dinner or no dessert” had been empty threats, for Grandpa’s presence at the kids’ table and his commitment to letting no food remnant go to waste were as ritual as the Sunday Mass we had just attended.

Grandpa hated wasting food. As he enthusiastically drank the briny juice from a pickle jar once the last spear had been consumed, he passed the value of being conscientious down to his children and grandchildren. Our attitude toward food waste is more than a family tradition, though; it is a value intimately tied with our faith. And it’s particularly linked to one of the greatest treasures of our tradition: Catholic Social Teaching.

Informed by Scripture, the Catechism, Vatican documents, bishops’ letters and more, Catholic Social Teaching offers an abundance of wisdom and guidance on living justly in our current world. The U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops has identified seven key themes that run throughout the tradition, and some of them are especially helpful when considering how we treat the food that passes through our lives.

Option for the poor and vulnerable

Keeping a preferential option for the poor means considering first how the choices we make will impact the most vulnerable members of our world. This includes the small, everyday decisions of our lives. When the burger we ordered is overcooked, do we send it back and ask for a new one? What do we do when we’d prefer a fresh meal to finishing yesterday’s leftovers? When we’re in a hurry, do we take the time to wash and prepare the soon-to-spoil vegetables in the refrigerator? In each of these choices, we are called to keep the poor and vulnerable in mind and to remember that our decisions have repercussions. Refusing to waste may not solve the problems of world hunger, but it can reduce our grocery budgets so that we are able to share more with the poor, and it can act as an antidote to entitlement, reminding us that our priority should be considering the vulnerable, not minding our own preferences.

Rights and responsibilities

Human dignity can only be honored if basic human rights are met, including the rights to food, housing, medical care, education, equality, and freedom of religion. Those of us with full pantries have the responsibility to not only make thoughtful individual choices but also to consider how our food system can better protect the rights of the most vulnerable.