I am getting progressively worse, I know.

Just wanted to throw out a couple tidbits (not all, there is too much to say). My second retreat group comes in tonight, and I am really excited to see what they are like and how this week will be. It is a group of high school boys, which will surely bring back flooding memories of Esperanza with O'Dea, and I really just can't wait to talk to my mom about it when it is done.

The only downer about having the group this coming week is that I feel like I only just finished with a group, having been with the medical group last week, and I feel like I haven't been in the neighborhood for a very long time. The Medical Group was absolutely incredible. This one was the group that comes down specifically to work with the patients at Padre Damien and do nerve decompression surguries, and a team doing full knee replacements for the hospital patients also. Getting to work with the patients at the foundation really made it what it was for me. I would have loved it simply for the medical perspective and the excitement of scrubbing in on a knee surgury and talking to doctors and nurses all week, but to have gotten to expand my relationships with the patients from Damien was just a blessing I was not expecting. I know the inpatients there really well, the 50 or so men and women that live there and I interact with daily. Of the hundreds of outpatients though, there are maybe two I would have considered even acquantances before. Now, they are dear friends. Getting to share in the entire process with them - testing at the foundation for weeks before the group even got here, taking them into the rooms to be seen by the doctors for the first time, checking them into the hospital for the surguries and talking with them before they go in the following day, watching part of the surgury itself in most cases, checking in on them in post-op, going around with the physical therapist and teaching them their exercises and encouraging them to keep them up, and then most notably just spending this week with them at the foundation, checking in, changing bandages, laughing, sharing stories, and just accompanying these friends I've grown to love and will miss greatly when they go home in a week - has been truly humbling. It has made my fall in love with Damien all over again, and really begin to understand the extent of the amazing work that Sr. Annie and the entire foundation does there.

The foundation is in trouble though. They are in a huge financial crisis, and the threats that the foundation may not be around when we leave in August is becoming more and more plausible. I cannot express the sadness I feel at even writing that here. And that is coming from a volunteer who has only been here for 8 months and only gets to spend half days there 4 days a week. When I think of all of the staff, inpatients living there, and even outpatients that rely on our clinic exclusively, I shut down. They've been in crisis before, and part of me wonders if we just won't get through it as we have in the past, but as Annie tells me yesterday that they are depositing their last check for 15,000 in the bank, the equavalent of keeping the foundation running for less than a month (a foundation that runs on 300,000 a year, incredibly low for all the services it provides and people that it serves), I can't help but admit that they truly are desperate. I admire Sr. Annie so much, as her faith continues to move her in face of the panic she must be feeling. "If it is God's will, we will find a way to keep our doors open." That woman spends half the year in the states fundraising as it is spending every waking moment battling to keep the foundation going, she doesm't even have the time to spend with the patients that she loves so much. So us crazy volunteers do our best to light up the faces of aging friends, hoping to God we may be able to transmit even just an ounce of the love Sr. Annie has for each of them.

Outside of the foundation I have found comfort in reading lately, a luxury I rarely am able to make time for, but fully enjoy whenever I do. I am currently in the middle of Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne, and am thoroughly enjoying it. If anyone needs a book to pick up, I definitely recommend this one, and it is a relatively quick read (assuming you have more than a half hour a day).

A few reflections it has brought me to recently:
one, as a church, all of us that claim to make up this romantic world of Christianity, as a whole suck at being Christians. And what a truly beautiful vocation it is! I won't waste either of our times trying to paraphrase or explain, but pick up the book. I promise you won't regret it.

and two, I've been thinking a lot this year about what it means to practice resurrection. It has come to mean different things at different times, and has never left me short of topics for meditation and challenges to intentionally. One new one that this book made me look at though was the creation component of practicing resurrection. The beauty of creating something new from something old, of taking a withering and rotten reality and finding the beauty in it, bringing it to the surface to be released onto this world with such force that it cannot be ignored. It is a beauty that was always intrinsic, but just lacked a visionary to show the rest of us where it was hiding. And it is up to each of us to be those visionaries - to acknowledge the beauty we find in things and not just be content with knowing they are there, but allowing them to boil over and flood our culture and our reality with this truth and simple profound expression of love and of God in this world.

three, organizations are made by and of people, not ideals. It is the people who give it the vision and bring life to their ideals, and without that backbone, they are nothing. I feel like I've have long had this naive admiration for ideals and organizations that I felt embodied them, but was never ever to realize that it was people like you and I behind them giving them that idealism and execution. Or at least I was never willing to acknowledge my own responsibility of making that happen. But with the examples of Sr. Annie, Pat and Sonya at Nuevo Mundo, and our very own Fr. Ronan, I realize that I KNOW these people. They are the ideals I aspire to live out, not the foundations they have built that I confuse them with. They ARE the foundations- what keep them going, what give them purpose and vision, and what they look like skin and bones. There is a beautiful simplicity in that, although the responsibility (and vulnerability that it entails) can be kind of scary.