Faith Feeds Guide: Faith in Action - Works of Mercy

Having a faith conversation with old and new friends is as easy as setting the table.

FAITH FEEDS GUIDE FAITH IN ACTION: WORKS OF MERCY

Introduction to FAITH FEEDS 3

Conversation Starters 6

• With Love and Tears: My Memories of Dr. Paul Farmer by Dr. Sriram Shamasunder 7 Conversation Starters 9

• The Community of Sant’Egidio: For Prayer, the Poor, and Peace by Father Robert P. Imbelli 10 Conversation Starters 12

• Works of Mercy by Pope Francis 13 Conversation Starters 14

• Gathering Prayer 15

The FAITH FEEDS program is designed for individuals who are hungry for opportunities to talk about their faith with others who share it. Participants gather over coffee or a potluck lunch or dinner, and a host facilitates conversation using the C21 Center’s biannual magazine, C21 Resources.

The FAITH FEEDS GUIDE offers easy, step-by-step instructions for planning, as well as materials to guide the conversation. It’s as simple as deciding to host the gathering wherever your community is found and spreading the word.

All selected articles have been taken from material produced by the C21 Center.

The C21 Center Presents

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Who should host a FAITH FEEDS?

Anyone who has a heart for facilitating conversations about faith is perfect to host a FAITH FEEDS.

Where do I host a FAITH FEEDS?

You can host a FAITH FEEDS in-person or virtually through video conference software. FAITH FEEDS conversations are meant for small groups of 10-12 people.

What is the host’s commitment?

The host is responsible for coordinating meeting times, sending out materials and video conference links, and facilitating conversation during the FAITH FEEDS.

What is the guest’s commitment?

Guests are asked to read the articles that will be discussed and be open to faith-filled conversation.

Still have more questions?

No problem! Email karen.kiefer@bc.edu and we’ll help you get set up.

READY TO GET STARTED?

STEP ONE

Decide to host a FAITH FEEDS. Coordinate a date, time, location, and guest list. An hour is enough time to allocate for the virtual or in-person gathering.

STEP TWO

Interested participants are asked to RSVP directly to you, the host. Once you have your list of attendees, confirm with everyone via email. That would be the appropriate time to ask in-person guests to commit to bringing a potluck dish or drink to the gathering. For virtual FAITH FEEDS, send out your video conference link.

STEP THREE

Review the selected articles from your FAITH FEEDS Guide and the questions that will serve as a starter for your FAITH FEEDS discussion. Hosts should send their guests a link to the guide, which can be found on bc.edu/FAITHFEEDS.

STEP FOUR

Send out a confirmation email a week before the FAITH FEEDS gathering. Hosts should arrive early for in-person or virtual set up. Begin with the Gathering Prayer found on the last page of this guide. Hosts can open the discussion by using the suggested questions. The conversation should grow organically from there. Enjoy this gathering of new friends, knowing the Lord is with YOU!

STEP FIVE

Make plans for another FAITH FEEDS. We would love to hear about your FAITH FEEDS experience. You can find contact information on the last page of this guide.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

Here are three articles to guide your FAITH FEEDS conversation. We suggest that you select two that will work best for your group, and if time permits, add in a third. In addition to the original article, you will find a relevant quotation, summary, and suggested questions for discussion. We offer these as tools for your use, but feel free to go where the Holy Spirit leads. Conversations should respect and ensure confidentiality between participants.

This guide’s theme is: Faith in Action: Works of Mercy

WITH LOVE AND TEARS: MY MEMORIES OF DR. PAUL FARMER

By Dr. Sriram Shamasunder

The last time I saw Paul Farmer was less than a week ago. I had traveled to Rwanda to teach the inaugural medical school class at the University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, a rural village. It is a place Paul Farmer helped dream and blossom into reality, a gorgeous, pristine medical campus arising in a very rural area among the beautiful hills of Rwanda.

I did not expect to see Paul Farmer there. I had last seen him at his 60th birthday right before the pandemic. That was a star-studded affair in New Orleans. He seemed comfortable among the rich and famous. But there he was in rural Rwanda, teaching, seeing patients, and spending time with Rwandan colleagues. He seemed more at home. He knew each medical student and gleefully came to the daily morning report—the discussion of clinical cases— with a cup of tea and a bright grin. He said he delayed his travel to Sierra Leone, where his organization Partners in Health has worked for years, because of one patient.

The patient was a young man in his mid-30s who had AIDS, an infection that arises from end-stage AIDS, and a profoundly weakened immune system. The infection had ravaged his body and mind. In a span of two weeks with treatments, the patient had gone from minimally responsive to opening his eyes and nodding. Paul had canceled his

travel plans to try to see this patient through. He believed the patient would get better and wanted to be around to see it.

A FIRST (INSPIRING) ENCOUNTER

I first met Paul when I was 19, as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley over 20 years ago. This was before the monumental, deserved fame that came after Pulitzer Prize author Tracy Kidder profiled him in the book Mountains Beyond Mountains. He spoke in a church. The church wasn’t totally packed but as he spoke you could feel the room lean in. Not because of any scholarly analysis but because he had incredible moral clarity and purpose. He had made a promise to stand with the most destitute in a community in central Haiti, struggling to provide what the Jesuits have called a “preferential option for the poor.” For Paul that meant access to care we would want for our mother or our brothers. We could hear it in his voice and feel it in his presence.

When I finished my residency, like so many physicians in my generation, I attempted to follow his example. I wanted to work in Haiti, where he started his organization Partners in Health in 1987. On a brief phone call, he instead enrolled me to work over the next year in rural Burundi, a place with even fewer physicians. Like so many before me, so early in my career, he made me feel as if I were making the only career deci-

sion that made sense—choosing what he called “pragmatic solidarity” alongside the poor. He conveyed with his words the irresistibility of social medicine, where health workers aim to address the root causes of disease in its social and economic context. This work is where necessity, urgency, and joy become bound together.

From time to time during my work in rural Burundi, I would consult him informally on patients to ask his advice. He would reply with a couple lines at most. One time I asked him what to do with a “non-compliant” diabetic patient who was not taking her medicine. He wrote back with a three-paragraph retort. He said the onus remained with the physician to figure out what the barriers were that prevented a patient from receiving care. He wanted me to

deeply understand how the health system often conspired against our greatest hopes for the healthy lives our patients sought. He would not allow me to blame a patient, especially someone who lived in poverty. Over the years I have heard versions of this teaching philosophy from Paul over and over.

When student doctors spoke about the need for community education, implying the need to educate patients to come in earlier for care, he reminded us that patients usually try to seek treatment but are handcuffed by user fees they cannot afford and discouraged by facilities with unavailable, underpaid staff and little equipment. When healthcare economists or his students speak of cost-effectiveness, he asks “for whom?” Certainly not the patient whose life hangs in the balance because of an expensive treatment they cannot afford. He routinely distinguished between “price” and “cost.” The price often set by companies or hospitals focused on profit—while the actual production costs of making a pharmaceutical drug or performing a transplant were much lower, for example.

A HEARTBREAKING WEEK – FIRST FOR PAUL, THEN FOR US

During the week I spent in Rwanda, the patient that Paul was following had an unexpected complication and got sicker and sicker. On a WhatsApp thread with many of us taking care of the patient, Paul turned over and over therapies that might be given, interventions that should be done, possible transfers to other facilities that would give this patient a fighting chance of living.

The patient died. Paul was devastated. He was heartbroken. I remember thinking that this is why he

is Paul Farmer. After 40 years, losing one patient was like losing the whole world. Many of us felt the urge to console him. I told him I could feel his anguish because he loved the patient in a way that we doctors often don’t allow ourselves to. He replied that he had unabashedly loved that dying man and had told him so every day.

I sent him a Mary Oliver poem I read with my team when we lose a patient back in San Francisco, where I live and work. She wrote:

you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

Paul said he had read the poem but not for years. He said it was beautiful and just what he needed and thanked me. The next morning, he shared that he had been friends with Mary Oliver. Of course, he had. He was somehow similar to the poet. He brought deep sacredness to patient interactions, an awe of what might be possible if those who care about health equity work together, and a bold struggle for a more equitable world rooted in faith in others and in the universe. His life was a kind of embodied poetry of medicine.

I left Rwanda Saturday night. Paul died Monday morning. Even if we must learn to let go of his physical life, we, his students all over the world, will never let go of the example he set for us.

Dr. Sriram Shamasunder is an associate professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco and co-founder and faculty director of the HEAL Initiative.

WITH LOVE AND TEARS: MY MEMORIES OF DR. PAUL FARMER

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me... ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’”

- Matthew 25:35-36, 40

Summary

Dr. Paul Farmer, founder of the global nonprofit medical group, Partners in Health, died suddenly on February 21, 2022. Accolades quickly poured in for his prolific work. Farmer was inspired by his faith and committed to serving Christ through the poor. Throughout his career, he mentored many, including Dr. Sriram Shamasunder. In this article, Sriram offers his own recollections of and inspiration from this larger-than-life “man for others.”

Questions for Conversation

1. What experiences serving others do you have that you can share? Why were you drawn to serve?

2. What have these experiences meant to you? What have they taught you?

3. How was your faith enriched by helping others? How has it changed your spiritual life?

THE COMMUNITY OF SANT’EGIDIO: FOR PRAYER, THE POOR, AND PEACE

By Fr. Robert P. Imbelli

A spring evening in Rome. People, returning from work, pause in one of the city’s countless piazzas, chatting amiably. These public spaces seem expressly designed for such conviviality, luring individuals and families into the forum of the res publica. Then at seven, as the bell of the baroque church in this ancient Roman district of Trastevere tolls, they enter the church for vespers, not to leave the world, but to concentrate it at its still point. The Community of Sant’Egidio comes together in prayer. The community takes its name from the old Carmelite convent in that small piazza in Trastevere, where its members have gathered each evening since the early seventies and which still remains the heart of a community now numbering 15,000 members. Half the members live in Rome and come together for prayer, worship, and social service in local groups, large and small, in various zones of the sprawling metropolis. Another 5,000 live in other Italian cities, and the rest in various European countries as well as in Africa and Latin America.

The community’s origins recall the Gospel’s “mustard seed.” A group of Roman high school students, meeting together in the fateful year 1968, in the midst of ecclesial and social turmoil, pledged to live their lives in the light of the Gospel and the service of the poor. From such inconspicuous seeds has grown a spiritually vibrant community that is now recognized canonically by the Holy See. Impressions abounded during that first vesper service and in subsequent visits and exchanges with community members. I was struck most forcefully by the evangelical spirituality that directs the members’ vision and commitment.

One sensed the task of evangelization to be so urgent, the harvest so ripe, that little time could be spared for ecclesiastical polarization and contestation. The profound spiritual renewal, desired and charted by Vatican II, seems here to have brought forth mature fruit.

The community’s service to the poor, for example, takes multiple forms according to local needs. Members visit the elderly and shut-ins. They minister to the handicapped and to those afflicted with AIDS. They organize classes for children and staff soup kitchens, including the central one in Trastevere that serves 1,500 dinners a day. The community sponsors advocacy forums in Rome to support the new immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe. As Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini of Milan wrote: “What impresses about Sant’Egidio is its unique integration of a profound sense of prayer and Scripture with an intelligent commitment to the poor and to difficult issues of social justice.” This ongoing commitment of Sant’Egidio to the poor and to social justice works daily, barely perceptible miracles in the lives of countless people.

But without doubt, the most dramatic of these miracles occurred on October 4, 1992, when, through the patient mediation of members of Sant’Egidio, a historic peace accord was signed between representatives of the government and rebels of Mozambique. Several years of intense negotiations, shepherded by the community, overcame the suspicion and hostility that had wrought untold suffering and death (one million dead, over a million refugees) and opened the way of hope for a more just and peaceful future. Sant’Egidio’s long presence and service in Mozam-

bique and the relationships of trust it had cultivated with the contending parties lent it credibility to promote this dialogue of peace. During the protracted and often tense negotiations, the community’s representatives often repeated John XXIII’s dictum: “Let us commit ourselves to what unites rather than to what divides us.”

Sustained by what they call the “strength-in-weakness of faith and prayer,” the community’s participation also reflected a realistic (even hard-nosed) incarnational sense of the need for concrete institutional forms to guarantee the peace accord. This continuum of concern, from the regional to the international, from local parish to ecumenical dialogue among the world religions, from fervent liturgical celebration to responsibility in the world, marks the comprehensive vision of Sant’Egidio. Its realization is unimaginable without the inspiration and direction that Vatican II represents for the contemporary Church. But it is equally unimaginable without the community’s whole-hearted response to both the letter and the spirit of the council. The members of Sant’Egidio accept the council’s integral vision: the primacy of God’s Word, the centrality of liturgical prayer, the Church as sacrament of unity, the world as worthy of respect and theater of responsible action. By doing so, this association of the laity has thrown open the doors of the former Carmelite cloister of Sant’Egidio to embrace the world: it has wed contemplation to action; joined the mystical and the political.

The community’s life and mission rest upon the “four pillars” of the Second Vatican Council: the constitutions on divine revelation, the liturgy, the Church, and the Church in the modern world. The organic and compelling integration of these four dimensions of the Christian life, not some “new breakthrough” or “magic formula,” represents, to my mind, the distinctive grace of Sant’Egidio. Members of the commu-

nity are married and single, mothers and fathers of families, students, professionals, and workers. Further, the hundreds of small communities scattered through the world take on distinct configurations and respond to the specific needs of their local cultures and regions. Sant’Egidio is a community of communities. In the ecumenical sphere, Sant’Egidio has taken up and extended the initiative of Pope John Paul II in bringing together leaders of the world religions at Assisi in 1986 in a day of prayer for peace. With the pope’s encouragement, in each succeeding year the community has sponsored international ecumenical gatherings for prayer and reflection, with a particularly poignant gathering in Warsaw in 1989 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.

In the “mother church” of the community in Piazza Sant’Egidio, it comes as no surprise to find a chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in which the sacrament of Christ’s Real Presence is reserved for adoration and prayer. But directly across from it stands another chapel. It represents Christ’s Real Presence in the form of graphic icons of the poor, the homeless, the outcast of society. And it bears the stark scriptural reminder: “He had no place.” The spirituality of the community seeks to realize ever more fully the varied modes of [the Real] Presence. Thus, when members of the community speak of the “soup kitchen” in Trastevere that serves 1,500 hearty meals a day, they use the richly evocative word “mensa”: table. It is also a word used to refer to the altar upon which the Eucharist is celebrated. Perhaps nothing better testifies to the eucharistic spirituality of Sant’Egidio than this Catholic commitment to realize the body of Christ.

Fr. Robert P. Imbelli is a theologian and Roman Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of New York. He is an associate professor emeritus of theology at the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College.

THE COMMUNITY OF SANT’EGIDIO: FOR PRAYER, THE POOR, AND PEACE

“He said to them in reply, ‘Whoever has two tunics should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.’”

- Luke 3:11

Summary

Initially known for its work with the poor and elderly in Rome, the Community of Sant’Egidio is now recognized as an advocate and activist for refugees and migrants worldwide, a force for interreligious and ecumenical dialogue, and an effective peacebuilder in hot spots around the globe. Today, more than 50 years after its founding, the community boasts 50,000 members in 73 countries. In this reflection, Fr. Robert Imbelli discusses the mission of this “community of communities” that “has wed contemplation to action” and “joined the mythical and the political.”

1. Questions for Conversation

The Community of Sant’Egidio demonstrates the power of ordinary people making a difference in the world. What “mustard seed” ideas or experiences do you have that you can share?

2. Fr. Imbelli references the Communities “strength-in-weakness of faith and prayer”? What impact do you think the spiritual devotion of the Community has on its ability to accomplish its work?

3. What needs does your “community” have? For reflection: What passions and gifts could you offer to meet these needs?

WORKS OF MERCY

By Pope Francis

(…) “Be merciful, even as your father is merciful” (Lk 6:36). It is a responsibility that challenges the conscience and actions of every Christian. In fact, it is not enough to experience God’s mercy in one’s life; whoever receives it must also become a sign and instrument for others. Mercy, therefore, is not only reserved for particular moments, but it embraces our entire daily existence.

How can we, therefore, be witnesses of mercy? We do not think that it is done with great efforts or superhuman actions. No, it is not so. The Lord shows us a very simple path, made by small actions which, nonetheless, have great value in his eyes. Jesus says that every time we give food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked and welcome the foreigner, visit the sick or imprisoned, we do the same to him (cf. Mt 25:31-46). The Church calls these actions (as well as giving alms to the poor, burying the dead, and sheltering the homeless) “corporal works of mercy,” because they assist people with their material necessities. There are also, however, seven other works of mercy called “spiritual,” which pertain to other equally important needs, especially today, because they touch the person’s soul, and often create the greatest suffering. Bear wrongs patiently, counsel the doubtful, instruct the ignorant, admonish sinners, console the afflicted, pardon offenses, pray to God for the living and the dead.

… The Church, after all, faithful to her Lord, nourishes a preferential love for the weakest. Often it is the people closest to us who need our help. We should not go out in search of some un-

known business to accomplish. It is better to begin with the simplest, which the Lord tells us is the most urgent. In a world which, unfortunately, has been damaged by the virus of indifference, the works of mercy are the best antidote. In fact, they educate us to be attentive to the most basic needs of “the least of these my brethren” (Mt 25:40), in whom Jesus is present. Jesus is always present there. Where there is need, there is someone who has need, be it material or spiritual. Jesus is there … The works of mercy reawaken in us the need, and the ability, to make the faith alive and active with charity. I am convinced that, through these simple, daily actions, we can achieve a true cultural revolution. If every one of us, every day, does one of these, this will be a revolution in the world! … How many Saints are remembered even today, not for the great works which they accomplished, but for the charity which they knew how to impart! We think of Saint Mother Teresa: we do not remember her because of the many houses she opened in the world, but because she stooped down to every person she found in the middle of the street in order to restore their dignity. How many abandoned children did she embrace in her arms; how many dying people has she accompanied to eternity, holding their hands! … May the Holy Spirit help us; may the Holy Spirit kindle within us the desire to live this way of life: at least once a day! Let us again learn the corporal and spiritual works of mercy by heart, and ask the Lord to help us put them into practice every day, and in those moments where we see Jesus in a person who is in need.

WORKS OF MERCY

“Be merciful, even as your father is merciful.” - Luke 6:36

Summary

In his October 12, 2016 General Audience address, Pope Francis discusses the Works of Mercy and their profound impact on the lives of people served, as well as the faith of the individuals performing them. In this excerpt, he reminds us that the “small” and “simple” works are the most impactful and encourages us “to be attentive to the most basic needs of ‘the least of these my brethren’ (Mt 25:40), in whom Jesus is present.” (A link to the Pope’s full General Audience address can be found at: bc.edu/c21spring22.)

Questions for Conversation

1. Pope Francis is convinced that “simple, daily actions” performed by each of us “can achieve a true cultural revolution.” What are some examples that you have witnessed this week which give you hope?

2. Why do we need both Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy? Why wouldn’t one or the other be enough?

3. How can you apply the Works of Mercy in your everyday life? Which of the Works of Mercy resonates with you the most?