Having a faith conversation with old and new friends is as easy as setting the table.
FAITH FEEDS GUIDE UNITY & PEACE
CONTENTS
• Introduction to FAITH FEEDS 3
• FAQ 4
• Ready to Get Started 5
• Conversation Starters 6
• “Working Toward Peace” by Sister Helen Prejean 7 Conversation Starters 9
• “Miracle” by Cullen Murphy 10 Conversation Starters 11
• Gathering Prayer 12
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 the Spring 2016 issue of C21 Resources. The cover of today’s Faith Feeds is a photo by Paul Hanaoka at Unsplash. The photo directly left is by Jomarc Cala.
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 two articles to guide your FAITH FEEDS conversation. 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 wherever the Holy Ghost leads. Conversations should respect and ensure confidentiality between participants.
This guide’s theme is: Unity and Peace
Working Toward Peace
by Sister Helen Prejean
The most direct road that I have found to God is in the faces of poor and struggling people. For me, it was the connection with people in the St. Thomas housing projects, then with people on death row and in prison, and then with the murder victims’ families. I was forty years old before I realized the connection between the Jesus who had said, “I was in prison and you came to me, I was hungry and you gave me to eat” and real-life experience where I was actually with people who were hungry and people who were in prison and people who were struggling with the racism that permeates this society. And it was like the feeling of coming home. Finding God in the poor was like coming home, because you just say, “Where have I been all my life?”
I remember being in a soup kitchen. My job was to serve the red Kool-Aid at the beginning of the line when people came for a meal. It was the first conscious act I did where I needed to be in touch with poor and struggling people. This young man came up, a beautiful kid, he looked like Mr. Joe College. He was handsome, with blond hair and blue eyes, and his hand was shaking as he handed me the cup. And he whispered, “You have to help me, it’s my first time here.” The tears welled up in my eyes. I was thinking, “My God, what is this young guy doing here?” It draws out of you this tremendous energy and gifts that you don’t even know you have. My image of finding God is that our little boats are always on the river. We often are in a stall, and we
Photo courtesy of Emiliano Bar on Unsplash
wait and nothing moves, and everything seems the same in life. But when we get involved in a situation like this-for me it was getting involved with poor people-it’s like our boat begins to move on this current. The wind starts whistling through our hair and the energy and life is there. And that brought me straight into the execution chamber. You see, it was very quick from getting involved with poor people in the St. Thomas housing projects to writing to a man on death row, to visiting a man on death row, and then being there for him at the end, because he had no one to be there with him. And that experience of being there with him, it’s really life up against it: It’s life or death. It’s compassion or vengeance. All life is just distilled to its essence.
In that situation, I experienced a tremendous strength and presence of God, that God was in this man that society wanted to throw away and kill. And the words of Jesus-”the last will be first”-came home to me. That is what those words meant: that God dwells in the people in the community that we most want to throw away. It’s what builds the human family and human community. Because what makes things like the death penalty possible, what makes things like the racism that continues in our society, the oppression of the poor, is that there’s this disconnection with people.
To me, to find God is to find the whole human family. No one can be disconnected from us. Which is another way of talking about the Body of Christ, that we are all part of this together.
I feel that everybody needs to be in contact with poor people-that in fact, as Jim Wallis of the Sojourners community has said, we need to accept that one of the spiritual disciplines-just like reading the Scriptures and praying and liturgy-is physical contact with the poor. It’s an essential ingredient. If we are never in their presence, if we never eat with them, if we never hear their stories, if we are always separated from them, then I think something really vital is missing.
The other thing I would want to add to the whole question of finding God is that the journey, wherever it takes us-to me it has been to the poor and the struggling-must be coupled with a reflection and a centeredness that comes from prayer and meditation. It’s very important to assimilate what’s happening in our lives. I find that I can’t function if I don’t have that sense of being at the center of myself and in the soul of my soul, so that I am truly operating from the inside out. And it’s important to be very self-directed, because it is so possible to be caught on other people’s eddies in the river and to get into a stimulus/ response situation. It’s so possible not even to realize that we are really moved by other people’s vision of life, other people’s insights, other people’s agen-
das, and just to be caught on one current to another, that we have no rudder on our own boat. When you hit something big like this, and you know that it’s bigger than you-like working for justice in the world, or trying to connect faith with going against powerful and entrenched systems-you have this sense of “Yes, I am doing my part.” But then you also need to be able to put it down and let God run the universe, so you can play a clarinet or be with your friends or work in a garden. To be whole is very important. Wholeness, I think, is part of godliness. I don’t think it’s cleanliness anymore that’s next to godliness-I think it’s wholeness! To have a well-rounded life. To have a good intellectual life, where you’re reading and thinking and discussing. To have a strong emotional life where you can give and receive intimacy with people. To develop friendships like a garden. Because there’s just no room for these Lone Rangers who go and try to save the world by themselves.
SISTER HELEN PREJEAN, C.S.J.,
is a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph based in New Orleans, and a leading American advocate for the abolition of the death penalty. Prejean founded the groups SURVIVE to help families of victims of murder and related crimes.
Healing at the Pool of Bethesda – Carl Heinrich Bloch (1883)
WORKING TOWARD PEACE
“I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
— Ephesians 4:1-3
Summary
Sister Prejean reflects on her epiphany that she can encounter Christ by loving the poor and the imprisoned. She recommends that we recollect our experiences of charity through prayer and meditation. Prejean concludes by commending wholeness over cleanliness. We do not need to avoid people whom we perceive to be dirty. Rather, we become whole by stimulating our minds, enjoying fellowship with our friends, and, yes, serving the poor.
Questions for Conversation
• How does our reverence at Mass relate to the way we serve the poor? Remember Matthew 25:35-40.
• When and where can you feed, clothe, and give drink to the poor?
• As Christians, we believe that our salvation is a gift of sheer grace — we could not earn it. How does this belief affect the manner in which we love others?
MIRACLE
by Cullen Murphy
It’s a question I’ve heard all my life – one that I can recall asking others at a very young age, and one that I’ve been asked in turn at a considerably older age. The question is complicated, as even youngsters understand. What, first of all, do you mean by the term itself – “miracle”? And then, what do you mean by “believe in”? And so the question “Do you believe in miracles?” tags along like a shadow, impossible to grasp and impossible to escape. But every so often something happens that affords a glimpse of an answer – a glimpse also into the very idea of hope as an escarpment beyond the realm of mere coincidence, where willful actions by flesh-and-blood people lead to something that looks to me like grace.
I’ll tell the story as I remember it being told to me. A young woman friend of mind some years ago was suffering from a serious neurological disorder of unknown nature. She has since recovered. But one day during the period of her illness, while riding on the subway in New York City, she suddenly experienced the loss of her eyesight. She waiting a few moments , thinking her vision might return, but it did not. And so she did what anyone might do, though it required a certain amount of trust in humankind. She turned to the person next to her, explained what happened, and asked if this person, who turned out to be a woman, could serve as a guide up to the street level. The woman heard out my friends, took her by the arm, and said “Of course.”
The train came to a stop. The doors slid open. My friend held tight to the woman as she left the subway car and threaded her way along the crowded platform. They negotiated the turnstile, and once beyond the two of them flowed with the traffic toward the steps leading up to the outer world. As they began to climb the steps, my friend’s sight slowly began to return – the light at the top coming into view, the jostling people all around turning slowly into visible shapes. My friend turned to the woman at her elbow, who had led her from the subway car, and saw that the woman’s other hand held a thin white can, and that she was blind.
I’m not sure I’ll ever know the right name for this event. But I think of it always when I try to locate hope. Because so often it turns out to be at the miraculous intersection of one person’s faith and another’s charity.
JOHN CULLEN MURPHY, Jr. is an American writer, journalist and editor who was managing editor of The Atlantic magazine from 1985–2006. He was born in New Rochelle, New York, in 1952, a son of illustrator and cartoonist John Cullen Murphy. He grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Photo courtesy of Juan Ordonez on Unsplash
MIRACLE
“Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose.”
— 1 Corinthians 1:10
Summary
Cullen Murphy meditates on the remarkable story of a woman who temporarily loses her vision and must be assisted by a stranger. What this woman learns upon recovering her vision is that the good samaritan was herself blind! Murphy concludes with a profound thought: “I’m not sure I’ll ever know the right name for this event. But I think of it always when I try to locate hope. Because so often it turns out to be at the miraculous intersection of one person’s faith and another’s charity.”
Questions for Conversation
• What is the meaning of Murphy’s final sentence?
• Sister Prejean’s article emphasizes charity in the Christian life. How would these articles be different apart from hope and faith?
• Have you ever had an experience at the intersection of faith, hope, and love?
GATHERING PRAYER
John 17: Jesus Prays for Unity
As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
