I have returned from my final visit to Nuestra Casa, the girls’ shelter. Do you know what it feels like to be unneeded and unwanted? Of course you do; that is the human condition. I am standing back now and regarding the last three months of visits to the girls as an unspectacular failure to communicate. This impression pressed itself as far as it needed to go this morning, as I read two more witches’ stories to a captive and totally uninterested audience. I do not know much Spanish, but I think I know body language. All the heads down or turned away, all the murmuring between this pair or that pair of girls, all the fidgeting with clothing, all the playing with other objects, said enough to me. The girls’ distraction was their way of giving me a one-way ticket back to Convento San Francisco.
It’s nobody’s fault; it’s everybody’s fault. The girls did not pay attention; maybe they just cannot pay attention. Maybe it is just not fitting for a middle-aged man to volunteer at a place where girls have found refuge from just that cohort of victimizers. Sometimes you just cannot connect with certain people; not the right people, not the right place, not the right time. I am remembering a cardinal rule of ministry, which is that your passion should meet the needs of others. Well, I understood the rightness of being with the youngest survivors of violence against females. But the good that I wanted to do for them did not come out right through the heart. So they were indifferent to my being there, and I could not change that reality. They neither wanted nor needed me to be one of their companions. Their happiness and their ability to overcome their traumas has been neither helped nor hindered by my being there.
Perhaps, at the present level of Spanish skill and with my particular set of social skills, I was not up for this challenge. So, what I wrote on the blog as a self-assessment a few weeks ago holds true today. I do not think I am capable of doing pastoral ministry with Spanish-speaking communities as of this moment. Furthermore, I know that I do not wish to work with children or adolescents. (Father Michael and brothers of the provincial council, please take note.)
So I tried do something more than I could do. It did not work. It is all right. I will simply refocus my attention on the final six weeks of classes to come and not try to do more than I can integrate into my world. It is a consolation that I will not be living in a 24-hour-a-day immersion when I return to New York City. I can step in the cultural space of my Spanish-speaking sisters and brothers, and perhaps I have enough energy to do that on a daily basis for an hour or three. More than that, I cannot do, but I will not have to do more than that. I hope that what God is endowing me with through my training here will be good enough for the ministerial encounters I will have going forward.
Still, questions remain. I know what I cannot do; I know what I do not want to do. So what can I do, what do I want to do for my Spanish-speaking sisters and brothers in Christ? It is not enough to state the aim negatively. How do we declare the aim positively? What have the girls at Nuestra Casa taught me about myself, about the human community, about the Holy Spirit and its activity?
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