The Beautiful Exchange
In early 1997, I was in the final stages of my reconciliation with the Catholic Church, a process that had begun in earnest eight years earlier and which would be consummated at the Easter Vigil that year. During those months, I had a spiritual director, a Carmelite hermit named Fr. John of the Trinity, whose hermitage was the third story of a tenement in a rough area of New Bedford, Massachusetts.
One day, I visited Fr. John and he agreed to hear my confession. I had not yet received First Communion, but my baptism had been recognized by the Church and I was permitted to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation. On this day I made a long and intense confession to Fr. John. When I finished he looked at me, sighed, and said, “You are so arrogant.” (He actually used stronger language that I’ll spare you.)
Naturally, I was taken aback. “What do you mean, Father? I think that was a pretty good confession!”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “The confession was very good, but it’s the way you deliver it, as if you’re saying ‘Father, you won’t believe it, but I actually did this! Me! Isn’t that crazy?’” He continued, “When are you going to realize that you love sin. We all love sin. That’s what’s wrong with us. We love sin more than we love God or one another.”
He went on to give me absolution, of course, but we talked a long while about my intellectual and spiritual arrogance, the besetting sin that has always been a part of my life, both before this encounter and right up to this writing. And having diagnosed my problem, Fr. John gave me a directive that changed my life. He said, “For your penance, you are to find a way to provide sustained, intimate service to the poor.”
I was stunned by this command, and had no idea how I would fulfill it. I didn’t even know where to start looking. Then, a couple of weeks after the Easter Vigil, an announcement appeared in our parish bulletin that a Conference of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, a lay ministry dedicated to serving the poor, was being formed at the parish. I joined — and 27 years later, I’m still a member, still trying to serve my brothers and sisters in need, still trying to grow in holiness and humility. I still struggle with my besetting sin, but after all these years it feels like I’ve gotten a little better.
If that is true — and please, God, let it be so! — it is because at the heart of the Vincentian vocation is what I call the “Beautiful Exchange.” In becoming Christ to the person who cries out in need, we discover, often to our surprise, that they have become Christ to us. After all, Jesus said, “Whatever you do for one of these, the least of my brothers and sisters, you do for me.” The great privilege of being a Vincentian is that we get to minister to Jesus in what Mother Teresa called “his most distressing disguise.” And in the economy of the Beautiful Exchange, we receive far more in terms of consolation and spiritual succor than those we serve.
My favorite definition of a Christian, which I first heard years ago from an old friend, the author Gil Bailie, is this: A Christian is a beggar who just told another beggar where he got his last meal. We are all beggars. Some of us beg for utility bill payments and a bag of food. Others of us beg for grace and forgiveness. All of us beg for simple human dignity. Different “asks,” but all beggars just the same, and positionally indistinct from one another. In Romans, Chapter 5, St. Paul writes, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
It is essential that those of us who share the Vincentian vocation always remember that we serve others because we were first served on the Cross. In fact, our service to our brothers and sisters is nothing less than our grateful response to Him who loved and saved us before we even knew we needed saving.
Naturally, St. Vincent de Paul himself put it best when he wrote, “Let us, my sisters and brothers, cherish the poor as our masters, since Our Lord is in them, and they are in Our Lord.”
Yours in Christ,
Mark Gordon
National Vice President, Northeast Region
