Mahatma Gandhi is quoted as saying, ‘Some people are so hungry that they only see the face of God in bread’. One can witness this every day on the news from Yemen, Tigray, refugee camps in Kenya, Bangladesh, Haiti and closer to home in shelters for migrants in Western society.
Sometimes when I watch the news, I weep with the mothers who are desperately seeking food for their starving children walking hundreds of kilometers in hope. Some stories are particularly poignant and remain with me: a mother who set her dead baby by the side of the road, too weak to bury the body, as she struggled to get her remaining children to a camp in hope of help. Mothers who do not have the luxury of grieving the death of a child because her other children are looking to her for survival. The story of the father who had to make an unconscionable decision to leave his near dead child on the side of a road himself depleted from hunger and responsible for carrying his other children who were too weak to walk while being pursued by gruella warfare. Doctors at camps who cannot hold out hope for pleading mothers because they no longer have medicines or food for these extremely malnourished and starving children.
This is the chaotic world we share brought on by human activity: war, climate crisis, greed, and indifference. However, it need not be the end of the story if we, you, and I, choose to make a difference, step out of our comfort zone and do that one thing of which we are capable and which we have been avoiding. Listen to your heart and act now - later will be too late.
-Sister Ann Marshall, csj
Resources of note:
The Bible & Poverty - There are over 2000 references in the Bible to the poor.
Remember your local Food Bank this season.