A few months ago, I asked a member of our community what had drawn her to visit St. Joseph’s, and to keep coming back. I expected she might answer that the location was convenient, or that she liked the small, intimate feel of the church. Her immediate answer, however, was something I wasn’t expecting. “It was the cardboard.” The cardboard? “Yes. When I saw sheets of cardboard leaning against the pillars of the walkway between the church and the parish hall, I knew immediately that this was a church that welcomed homeless people to sleep on its premises. That meant it was a church that was trying to be faithful. And that made it beautiful to me.”
This sister’s Gospel-trained eyes found beauty, not just in the stone façade of our church, or its stained glass windows, but above all in the flattened cardboard boxes leaning against its pillars. She found faithfulness in the most basic welcome the church can offer to people who have nowhere to call home. Her affirmation reminds us of our call to receive with open arms everyone who comes our way, as God has welcomed all of us, and it urges us to continue to practice the joyful, Spirit-filled discipline of loving one another as Jesus Christ loves us.
That way of life is a journey, not a destination, and the church is our starting point and the oasis to which we return again and again along the way. As we travel, we sing with the psalmist:
How dear to me is your dwelling, O LORD of hosts!
My soul has a desire and longing for the courts of
the LORD;
my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.
The sparrow has found her a house
and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young;
by the side of your altars, O LORD of hosts,
my King and my God.
Happy are they who dwell in your house!
they will always be praising you.
Happy are the people whose strength is in you!
whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way.
--Rhonda
