On February 11th, 2020, the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, I renewed my consecration to Jesus through Mary for the fourth time. Essentially, it gives Mary permission to lead you closer to her Son in a very intimate way. It involves 33 days of preparation before dedicating yourself to Jesus through His Mother, on a Marian feast of your choice.  
 
   The feast itself celebrates the Blessed Mother’s appearances to a French, peasant girl named Bernadette. A spring of water miraculously welled up at the grotto where she appeared, which has been the site of many miraculous healings ever since. To this day, Our Lady of Lourdes is associated with healing.  
 
   And little did I know when I began preparing for my re-consecration, that it would truly set the course of the entire year.   
 
    In the later weeks that led up to, and followed after that day, I came face to face with my woundedness like never before. I became very angry with God, had very little hope for the future, and was paralyzed by lies and insecurities. On the outside, it seemed like everything was fine. Interiorly, however, I felt dead and empty. I wondered if God was just going to let me live like a shell of a person for the rest of my life. I prayed for healing, but the results were not obvious to me.   

     In retrospect, part of the healing came through an unexpected experience: ministering to the homeless on the streets. During the school year, I lead students from my university on “street walks” to befriend the homeless in downtown Minneapolis (see Christ in the City, our inspiration).  For three consecutive Saturdays after my re-consecration, I met individuals who, in our conversations, practically held a mirror to my face. Although their sufferings of violence, addiction, and severe financial instability were nothing like mine, we all had several other things in common.   

 Hopelessness. Self-loathing. Distrusting God.   

   In those moments, I was snapped back into reality as I tried my best to convey their worth and God’s mercy to them. It pained me to see how entrenched they were in the lies they believed about themselves. How could they not see the truth? Despite their circumstances, I could see it plain as day for them!  
 
  But then I had to wonder, why don’t I see and believe it for myself? 

   We are blessed, here at Lourdes, to belong to a parish that not only upholds Justice and Charity, but healing as well. At first glance, it seems as though the two spheres are unrelated, but they indeed intertwine with each other.   
 
   Jesus—and His Mother—draw close to the poor. In Matthew 25, He identifies Himself with the naked, the prisoner, the hungry, the homeless to the souls standing before Him for judgment. Mary herself was a peasant girl from small town Nazareth, and over the centuries appeared to many in the lower class—St. Bernadette being one of them. It is clear that God is drawn to the least of this world, and that it is imperative to serve them.  

   What about the rest of us who don’t suffer from material poverty? We may believe we have everything we need: friends, family, a nice job, a home...or so we think. 

    The truth is, we all suffer from a form of poverty, be it emotional, relational, and especially spiritual. Poverty is simply that which we lack. All of us, because of sin, have areas in our hearts where we have chosen to shut God out. Usually it is because we attach ourselves to certain mindsets, material possessions, people, and leave no room for His grace to redeem these wounded places.  

    That has certainly been true for me, and the reality of my own interior poverty has only been magnified as I draw near to the homeless. I recognize myself in their hurting, but also see the beauty of having nothing but God when I see their joy in bleak circumstances. If I, having all the comforts I could imagine, still feel dead inside, and they are praising God in their situation, who is really poor among all of us? 
 
   Fr. Greg Boyle, the speaker at my college graduation, said something that resonates with me to this day:

    “You don’t go to the margins to make a difference.
     You go to the margins to be different.” 

    None of us are qualified to be saviors, only Jesus is. We are called to be His hands and feet, but we should never assume that we have the power to make it all better. Yet it is in sitting down to encounter the ones with whom He identified, that we meet Him. When we do this without a savior complex, knowing that our hands are empty before the King, our hearts become more receptive and open to His healing grace. 

   For He brings down the mighty and lifts up the lowly.  

  I could go on and on about this...and I hope to! For future posts, I plan on sharing my reflections and lessons learned from befriending the homeless through Street Ministry. What a gift it is to share these graces with you, and I do hope you'll stick around and see. In the meantime...Our Lady of Lourdes, pray for us. 

   

Hazel Jordan is an Office & Communications Assistant at Our Lady of Lourdes. She is currently pursuing a Master's in Theology at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. A recent graduate of the University of St. Thomas, she continues to be active in the faith community there, leading and developing a street ministry program that forms students to encounter the homeless in the Twin Cities. Among other things, she is a self-taught artist and musician, proudly acquiring graphic design and guitar/songwriting skills!