The Quest to be an Ignatian Family & the Call to Serve

My first real experiences of service were in college on service trips to Denver, Colorado and later to Mexico, and they expanded quickly into weekly volunteering at St. Matthew the Apostle parish in North St. Louis during my senior year of college. Through service, I felt my world grow immensely bigger. I became less judgmental. I felt called to fight injustice. I left every time feeling like I was given more than I gave. My worldview was challenged and changed with each experience.

When I became a high school campus minister, service became a significant piece of my programming. I was teaching in a small, rural town in Missouri, where it seemed most people were distant relatives of each other. I offered a service trip to Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation each summer, and I offered two Urban Plunge retreats a year. I knew that in order to change the way these students (and their families) thought about the world, I had to get my students out of their small town and simply let them serve. (At just 21 years old, I was so lucky to have the principal’s blessing in doing both of these endeavors.) These experiences were life-changing for so many of my students, and I’m proud to see them now on social media having grown into compassionate, open-minded individuals who care about the dignity of all humans; it’s an immense honor to know I may have planted seeds to help with that.

Service became a part of my identity in my twenties. After teaching, I spent two years living in an intentional faith community in North St. Louis and volunteering weekly in the neighborhood. Once I became a military spouse and moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, service was a part of my everyday job as the assistant director for the local GEAR-UP grant. I worked daily with students who qualified for free and reduced lunch and their families. My job was to create high school programming from scratch to help these high school students succeed in college.

I also dabbled in service in my first teaching job in Washington, DC, starting Urban Plunge retreats there, but in my thirties, as my life turned to fertility treatments, my husband’s deployments, and eventually having three kids, time was precious and volunteering ceased to happen. 

Once my own kids started fourth grade, though, they were expected to do service hours for school. Finding service opportunities for kids as young as nine has been challenging, and even more so post the Covid-19 pandemic, so we’ve turned to our parish for a lot of their service needs: we’ve done walks for the poor and helped with parish activities like taking down and putting up Christmas decor. My daughter started reading at Mass as a fourth grader. My son has started baking for bake sales. These were all good, but they weren’t service as I wanted them to experience it.  I wanted them to encounter human beings and be humbled by what we have, and what others don’t. I wanted them to see Jesus in those who are having a hard time in life. I wanted them to be Jesus by helping out, by serving them.

Last year was the first time that my family participated in serving dinner for individuals in the local Safe Nights program. Select homeless in our county spend the coldest of the winter months bouncing from church to church for a week at a time, and the parishioners of each congregation help house them and serve them their basic needs. I realize that we’re only doing the lowest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in providing basic shelter and sustenance, and we’re hot helping end whatever is causing their homelessness. But hopefully, having those lower levels of basic needs and security covered allows them to have the stability needed during the day time to do whatever they need to keep moving up the pyramid.

For my kids, last year was the first time they had ever experienced service like this. I was in the middle of completing the spiritual exercises myself, and I was feeling a constant call to serve with my kids. I even researched family service trips, trying to find something that would allow them to be involved in direct service. My research left me unsatisfied and believing I would have to wait a few years to give them the service experiences I created for my high school students, but our parish helped me fulfill a tiny bit of that need I was feeling, allowing us to serve dinner together as a family. 

Last year was rough; the people we were serving were late to arrive for dinner, my children’s ADHD meds were wearing off, and my kids were taken aback by the mere look of people who have little clothing and little possessions. They were quiet, and they asked a lot of questions after about what they saw and experienced.

This year, was different; my son, having just won 1st place for his cookies at the parish picnic in the kids’ contest, was excited to bake cookies, and even though he is my quiet introvert, he even went around to tables asking those we served to try one of his cookies on the dessert table. All of my kids, even my third grader, were more comfortable with serving the food, asking if the portions were enough, making eye contact as they offered options of rolls or corn bread and butter. They were at ease, and I was so proud of them. I made sure they were medicated better, and the dinner and serving times were accurate, not keeping us as late on a school night. I left feeling proud of them for engaging, for seeing that those who were served are human beings who had bad luck or maybe made a bad choice. Our job was to help them get back on their feet, and hopefully, we won’t see any of the same people at Safe Nights next year. My third grader even asked if we could go back and do it more often! Mom win!

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and around the country, some people will spend the day volunteering and honoring Dr. King’s legacy through service. He had wise words to say about serving: 

“Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”
“Life’s persistent and most urgent question is ‘What are you doing for others?'”
“Seek to serve and your life will be filled with more joy than you can imagine.”
“You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve”.

What powerful words to remember today.

Traveling abroad and service experiences are the two gifts I want to give my kids as they get into their middle school and high school years. Both experiences widen a person’s understanding of the world. I know from my previous experiences in traveling and serving that I have come to realize how big and how beautiful the world is. I have also broadened my understanding of God, seeing how beautiful the world is and by seeing the faith of those who have little else.

In the Ignatian exercises, the prayer that a person experiences in week three is supposed to lead them outward by week four– to show their faith in an outward way, often bettering their community.  Mother Teresa understood this, saying that “service to mankind is service to God.”

Food for Thought: As you enjoy your day off, potentially watching the inauguration, what is your call to serve? Who are you called to help in your community? How are you called to make your community a better place? Covid-19 really damaged our community’s pushing us inside, making us afraid to go out. Let 2025 be the year you decide to serve a community you don’t know well, to get to know them and their story, and to find connection and see humanity in them and their stories.