By Hunter Messner
Experience desired:
– Fluency in English, Spanish, French, and Haitian Creole with the ability to teach.
– Teaching experience with middle schoolers
– Experience with urban farming
– Skills with home improvement and repair
– Extensive experience in commercial and residential kitchens and food service.
– Familiarity with immigration law and legal proceedings.
– Experience with mental health counseling, management, and referral.
– Ecumenical spirit, with a focus on relating to all types of Christians
– Event planning experience
– Discipline in communal and personal prayer.
Responsibilities:
– Accompany Individuals on their way to heaven in the highly diverse neighborhood of Allison Hill in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
– Embrace voluntary poverty for your own sanctity and to better help those around you.
– Embrace dignified work in order to manifest your love to your neighbors, and set an example of a joyful life in Christ.
– Deepen your relationship with Christ by encountering him in the poor, mentally ill, the child, the migrant, the addict, the enslaved and the alone.
– Reflect on this each day by setting aside time for personal prayer.
– Praise God in community by attending Mass and praying the liturgy of the hours with your fellow workers daily.
– Connect parishioners, workers, and the “least of these” together with prayer, meals, and work.
– Keep your fellow Catholic workers sane. Enter into conflict when needed, ask for help when needed.
– Share the gospel and the wisdom of the church to all.
Title: Catholic Worker
Location: Harrisburg, PA
Pay: $0
Direct report: Jesus Christ
My Experience
I had the privilege of living at the Harrisburg Catholic Worker for just five weeks and felt like I was more than compensated for my labor.
Not long ago, I pursued money so that one day I might be able to retire and enjoy life. There seemed to be many joys to having lots of disposable income. I was so bought into the modern American vision of life that I was prepared to endure slavery (temporarily). I hoped that by squirreling away enough money, I might one day be free to enjoy life to the fullest. Clearly, this is a childish view of work and money, but nothing has made that more clear than my second stay with the Catholic Worker. There is no stagnation when one is working for Jesus. He brings constant growth intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.
If work bears no fruit, no amount of difficulty can be endured. Yet, in Allison Hill, though it took serious work to get what I wanted, I was able to jump out of bed each morning ready for the day because I knew I was making a difference and bearing good fruit.
The local parish is right next door. I started each morning with personal prayer followed by Mass. On the weekends, I got to join the bilingual choir and serve at Mass. During the day, I got to help out at Joshua Group, a neighborhood after-school program, as a summer camp “teacher.” I got to share my math knowledge, hang out with the kids, and hear about their lives.
In the afternoons, I would head over to the soup kitchen and help serve food or simply grab lunch and hang out with the patrons. There was a garden to work in and a house to improve, too. In the evenings, there was often a communal meal. I got to show off my cooking skills for anyone who was there to share a meal. We would always finish the day with night prayer and whoever was present would join in and chant with us.
Besides spending time in conversation and meals, I found that spending time in work and leisure with my neighbors also brought me close to them. Gardening and hiking with a man from the local tent encampment were some of my favorite moments of the summer.
As a Catholic Worker, I felt like I both planted the seed and got to watch it grow. The people I encountered daily became friends and neighbors whom I felt that I had a real impact on. One particular person was B. B largely ignored me for the first few times we met, but eventually warmed up and actually wanted to visit and have conversations. Even though the problems she was experiencing were way beyond my ability to solve, I didn’t feel like God was absent or out of reach in her life, but rather present in the suffering.
Not every person I met warmed up to me. There were a few other encounters where I felt my relationships with others were stuck in a transactional space. To be honest, I felt like I was being used as a vending machine sometimes. Yet, by experiencing the real hardship of my neighbors, this was easy to forgive. I felt God was present here too, ex my heart in a different way.
One of the best spiritual fruits came from the brokenness in my neighbors. I was always smaller and weaker than the problems they faced. Normally, it is all too tempting to solve my own problems, and leave it to state institutions to solve others’ problems – ultimately leaving God out of it. When my neighbor’s situation is beyond me, and no state institution can help, it becomes a chance to trust in God’s love. I found that by turning to God, I was able to become “little” (as St. Therese describes it) and be enlivened by my inability to fix stuff, rather than ashamed. There was always a soul who desperately needed prayer, and a broken society to ask God to heal.
I was unable to meet all the ways that Jesus was challenging me to grow. He showed me my own smallness of heart when my neighbor, asking for just a little, I turned away. I found that, when confronted with people who couldn’t think straight, I was reluctant to get involved in their life, fearing that they would ask something unreasonable from me. Did they? Yes. Was it a problem? No. Yet there was a constant fear that saying yes to a small thing would hurt me down the road. I can be sure of one thing: there is still so much growing to do as I continue to encounter Christ in the poor.
I look forward to continuing to serve Christ in the poor and being humbled each time. I have found spiritual growth rewarding, while financial growth, numbers increasing in a bank account, leaves me empty. Why endure wage slavery when I could have deep relationships, meaningful work, and make a difference in the world right now? I think the Harrisburg Catholic Worker is a great place to do this, and I would do it again if given the opportunity.
Hunter Messner is a seminarian at St. Paul Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.