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was still plastered into the bulletin boards, there, as in all places, God broke my heart. New Orleans broke my heart. *** At the parish back in Jersey it would be a busy year. Although it was only my second as youth minister, I knew that along with the Pastor (Father Leonard Gilman, O.Carm.) and the staff, I wanted to return here and bring our parishioners, particularly our youth, back to New Orleans. At Our Lady of Mount Carmel (OLMC) in Tenafly, New Jersey, we’ve structured our youth ministry program around event-based service events. Rather than a more traditional program based around fellowship and weekly meetings, we have bi-weekly commitments to local soup kitchens, food banks and other volunteer opportunities. Around those service events we bring the varied groups of young people together at retreats and youth meetings for formation. “Paint the wall,” I tell a newly-arrived youth, knowing that through her service she would soon find why and to whom she was serving, trying to follow in her that ever continuing process of conversion: moral, spiritual, intellectual. ‘Out Of The Mouths Of Babes’ Most of us stayed just outside of the city—south over the Mississippi at Madonna Manor, a former Boys’ Asylum built in the mid-nineteenth century (yes, the spooky stories were prevalent.) Present-day New Orleans rattles in a tectonic shift between decay and beauty, and Madonna Manor was no different, its gorgeous Spanish styled balconies illuminated in the cold light similar to that of any public bathroom fixture. We would wake around 5:30AM, eat breakfast and say Morning Prayer. We dedicated our trip to Saint Joseph, the patron of workers, who dedicated his life in both spiritual labor to God and the practical demands of life’s labor. Taking his example, we reserved a special time in prayer to personally dedicate our day’s work to a person in our own lives. Every day we would travel to our ‘home base,’ the seventh ward’s Saint Raymond’s Church, an African-American Catholic Parish and School that did not survive the collapse of the levees and was turned into part offices, part Home Depot, part mess hall for the continued rebuilding operations. From Saint Raymond’s we would load into the vans, supplies gathered, and head off to our worksites through out the city of New Orleans. Because we were a group of twenty-four, we would break-up and head to sites in both the seventh and ninth wards. *** The passing scenes outside of the window took on the notion of pages turning in an all too familiar and troubled family history—our history—uniquely American, yet universally human. The markings on the buildings indicating how many dead were found. On a spray painted abandoned building: “Can these bones live? Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and ye shall live.” *** My friend, a filmmaker in her own right, brought along a film camera, a practical move for several reasons, though mainly because I have always felt that as artists (writers, filmmakers, poets, etc.), we are called to “bear witness” individually to our collective experience. While filming, we continually interviewed the teens and what developed was a type of cinematic journal, their free-thought observations on what they were doing while the actual service was taking place. What they shared was immensely real. Before our eyes (and the camera’s lens), they were emotionally moved, righteously angered, and outright scandalized by the unique violence such poverty brings to people. Out of the mouths of babes. Indeed. *** It would be remiss of me to suggest that our work was easy, that we were forever bonded to the Christ-like ideal. No life is perfect, save One, no journey perfect— which is precisely why they are journeys and not destinations. We experienced hardship (certainly the point of a service trip) but not only the hardship experienced with hard work over long days, but those incurred when people work differently with different experiences, worksites and paces. All the same, we managed to push through the repetition, the hunger, the chill or heat. Elliot Guerra is an English and Catholic Studies graduate of Seton Hall University where he is the founding editor of Arcadia: A Student Journal for Faith and Culture published by The Center for Catholic Studies at Seton Hall. He is currently the Coordinator of Youth Ministry at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Tenafly, New Jersey, where parishioners serve well over 1,000 hours of community service each year. He is a member of the Tenafly Interfaith Association and the founder of Crossroads, a service day for youth from Christian, Jewish and Muslim backgrounds. He is currently working on his first novel.
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