Learning to Stand in Awe

As an eternal English major at heart, my mental landscape and moral compass both tend to be pretty heavily shaped by words, whether that’s little phrases I happen upon in conversation or quotes from books that I copy into some notebook or another to make sure I don’t lose track of them. That may be why a whole year after I first stepped foot in Syracuse to see if I really wanted to commit to this whole FrancisCorps thing, I still return to my supervisor Kevin talking about the opportunity to “learn from the bottom up, not the top down” when I try to explain how I ended up here at Brady. And while there were many mornings over the last year where I woke up wondering how I found myself volunteering through a Franciscan program at a diocesan mission in central New York, I now find myself equally surprised by the prospect of leaving that all in a few short weeks. As I begin looking around to see what parts of this incredible experience I can take with me into the next chapter, I find myself returning, once again, to words.

Fr. Greg Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries (the largest gang rehabilitation program in the world), is an oft-quoted figure around Brady. One phrase of his that tends to pop up more than any other is the idea that we need to learn “to stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.” It turns out that a lot of what I had to learn from the bottom up on the Southside this year was how to begin standing in awe.

A moment that crystallized this for me happened early on in my time here, maybe a month or two into my service at Brady. I was in the car with Kevin going from a full morning of admin work to a pastoral visit in a different part of town. As we sat at a red light, we noticed a woman walking down the street who seemed like she was suffering and not in sound state of mind. I didn’t say anything after I saw her, half expecting this to be one of those moments when good people pretend not to see someone suffering from something that seems to be out of their control. But instead of looking away, Kevin let his eyes rest on her and simply said, “Poor thing.” It was a response unlike any I remembered hearing before in the face of similar circumstances. Rather than ignoring the woman’s predicament or making a derisive comment about it, Kevin was able to see beyond the situation to the person experiencing it with a humility that acknowledged he didn’t know what brought her to that point. That kind of compassion, the kind that understands what it means to love someone beyond and through what has happened to them and how they seem to be responding to that, is a path that has been shown to me by the people I serve and serve alongside at Brady. It is a path marked by humility and empathy and choosing to stay with people even when you don’t fully understand what they’re going through. It’s a path I hope to keep walking long after my time at Brady is complete so I’m in the right place the next time I’m called to stand in awe.

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