Stories Behind the Advent Offering: Justice & Mercy
KATY ENDRESS
I first traveled to Honduras with Imago in 2015. That week, I met two sisters, Andrea and Fanny. They are sweet and sassy, respectively. These girls keep me coming back to Honduras year after year. Do I love digging trenches and mixing concrete too? Absolutely not. But I do it anyway. Because of these relationships. I quickly formed a bond with these girls in the span of just one week five years ago. The following year, I was unable to go on the trip due to a school commitment, but wanted these girls to know that I had not forgotten them. So, I sent a photo along with my husband, Kyle (or Carlos, as he’s known in Honduras), of us together taken the year prior, as well as a brief note to let them know that I think of them often and that they are loved. The delivery of this message, true as it is, can be challenging in Honduras given the daily lives of those living in poverty and their experience of exclusion, being forgotten, and having no social rights. So, how do we express this?
Father Gustavo Guiterrez, a Jesuit priest from Peru, believes the answer lies in the heart of the gospel where we see the priority of the poor in God’s kingdom. He discusses creating a preferential option for the poor by which we display the universality of God’s love for all — a love that, in a world structured to benefit the powerful, extends to the least among us. Using the analogy of the way in which a mother cares most tenderly to the weakest and threatened of her children, he describes God’s care for the poor. The call of the gospel is for us to do the same, to make the same option, to show that God’s love is universal by focusing our attention on the most threatened among us. To do this, we accompany others in their suffering and seek the changes necessary to remedy it.
Thus, by building a house alongside a poor family in Honduras, we’re not only helping to alleviate some of their suffering, we’re also showing them God’s love. The sturdiness of their new home lets them know that we believe that they have a right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of their family. And in returning year by year, we let them know that they are not forgotten.
On our first day of work in 2017, two years since we first met, Fanny ran to me and handed me the very same photo I had sent with my husband the year prior showing me that I was not forgotten either. It’s in Honduras that the universality of God’s love became clear to me through these relationships. A relationship implies that one side is not always in a position of giving and the other the beneficiary. We are equals, and both parties have much to gain from interactions with the other. In the years to come, Kyle and I will return to Honduras for as long as we are able so that we may walk alongside our friends in search of justice and mercy.