Go and See #1

Essays from Missionaries of the Poor

In August 2023, I traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, and spent ten days with the Missionaries of the Poor (MOP), a Catholic order that runs apostolates in the slums of Kingston and elsewhere in the world. In the weeks to come, I’ll publish a collection of essays based on my experiences. I hope and pray that a few readers will find something worthwhile in them.

Thank you for reading.

Matthew

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Preface

We have a tendency, a friend of mine likes to say, to experience the profound and then try to share it with people by giving them a book. Or, perhaps, a link to a YouTube video. We tell others about the things that have changed us instead of inviting them to experience it for themselves.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of religion. Our idea of evangelism is often to give our unbelieving family members Mere Christianity or send our agnostic friends a clip of Richard Dawkins debating some renowned apologist. But salvation is not found in words on a page or images on a screen. It is those words, those images taking on flesh and blood that saves us.

The disciple Philip gives us a picture of how simple evangelism can be. After meeting Jesus and recognizing him as the Messiah, he invites his friend Nathanel to meet Jesus. “Come and see,” he says, knowing (consciously or not) that his friend must encounter this man for himself.

I hope this collection of essays presents a similar invitation to the reader: to go and see the brothers of Missionaries of the Poor for themselves. For my brief visit with them has changed me, and there is nothing better I can say than, “You ought to see for yourself.”

Like you and me, the brothers are all born with different talents. Some are intelligent and others simple-minded, some are eloquent evangelists and others evangelize with a bright smile, but they are called to the same physical love. Their faith is not an intellectual exercise. They bear their crosses with flesh and bone, serving the poor not just in thought but deed. They have given up everything—body and spirit—to serve the people most of us would rather not see. They embrace the outcasts who are easier to love with a donation. And yet whatever they sacrifice they gain far more in return. The joy I witnessed in them is not something that can be translated into words.

There is a definite irony in writing a book to exhort people to quit searching in a book for life’s answers, but perhaps this is the irony of our age—that self-help and self-love and self-, self-, self- dominates our search for meaning. Steinbeck lamented that his generation were all “wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain,” thwarted by the limits of rationalism, prisoners in their own minds. We are a different type of prisoner today—captives of our own hearts. Unlike our minds, which impose limits, our hearts are fickle, untrustworthy beasts, as Greene might say, which are not tethered to reason or confined by any walls, beasts which are liable to gallop off into the dark and stumble headlong into a bottomless pit. We have moved beyond the age of knowledge to self-knowledge. Where we once worshiped the mind we now bow down to the heart; where we once enshrined reason we now celebrate confusion. This, I believe, is a more profound darkness.

In part, I have written this collection for the person who is lost, who does not know what he or she is about, who is searching for a motive to live another day, because I have often been that person. I have my suspicions about why we are on this earth and I have certain ideas about where we are going, but these do not account for that word we often toss around with spurious confidence: faith.

I can say that I live by faith in Jesus, but that faith must be an expression of something deeper than mere words; I can say that I have surrendered all to God, but I must pick up the cross he has given me. And this is a daily call, a struggle, an experience that cannot be neatly summed up in a book.

I believe words do have meaning, otherwise I would not write them, and they often lead us to the precipice of something profound. But a word has never leapt into the great unknown. People, not words, must do the leaping.

I invite you to read this collection not in the hopes of you having some great epiphany, but so that you might be compelled to go visit Missionaries of the Poor for yourself, feel the malformed fingers of children in yours, hear the thump of bongos as the brothers sing hymns in the morning, and embrace residents with tumors hanging from their necks, and see the flesh of the world as you never have before.

Go and see, and if your experience is anything like mine, you might have an epiphany after all.

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