By Katie Ostgren
Director of Development & Stewardship,
Diocese of Lincoln
One of my favorite books to read to my young kids is a book by Catholic authors Maura Roan McKeegan and Lindsay Carpenter. It is called, “Where is Jesus Hidden?” The introduction to the book reads like this:
“Where is Jesus Hidden?
Jesus has a face like yours,
With eyes and nose and ears—
But sometimes we can’t see Him
Even though He’s very near.
Sometimes He is hidden,
Or He’s wearing a disguise,
But we can learn to find Him
If our hearts will help our eyes.”
I mostly love this book because it is as much a reminder for me as it is my children (probably more) of the places we can look for Jesus as we seek to follow Him with our whole hearts ever more closely. Each page has a bit of a “Where’s Waldo?” feel, but instead of a man with a red hat, striped shirt and funny glasses, we are searching for the place that Jesus is hidden amongst a variety of backdrops that depict “common” scenes from everyday life.
The part we love is that we are not searching for a picture of Jesus, so to say, but we are searching for Him “in disguise,” or in the places He tells us in the gospels we can find Him. So, on one page, we are looking for Jesus in the pages of a Bible. On another, we are searching for Jesus in the Eucharist exposed in a monstrance. On another, we are looking for a priest acting in persona Christi (or “in the person of Christ”) as he hears confessions or celebrates Mass.
We look for Jesus hidden in Mary’s womb as a baby, in the heart of a little child, and in a person who is sick in the hospital. And on yet another page, we are asked to find Jesus hiding in the person of a poor, homeless man, sleeping on a bench in a busy downtown neighborhood.
With Lent now upon us, I am reminded of the Church’s guidance that during this time we should focus not only on fasting and prayer, but also on almsgiving, or—more specifically—giving to the poor and needy. What a beautiful invitation from the Church to focus on this during this liturgical season! By giving alms, we encounter Jesus in the poor, being ever mindful that when we care for those in need, we are truly caring for Christ Himself.
From Catholic social teaching, we are instructed that the Church has a “preferential option for the poor.” This means that in whatever we are doing or deciding as a Church, in every apostolate and on every level, we should always think first of those who are most in need and most vulnerable. This preference, or priority, placed on caring for the needs of the poor is baked into our faith just as much as the Church’s teachings on the Eucharist and sacraments, the dignity of the human person, marriage and family, and our obligation to care for God’s creation.
But much more than an obligation, the Church’s preferential option for the poor is truly an opportunity for us to encounter Christ Himself. And when we encounter Jesus, our lives change.
Pope St. John Paul II wrote, “It will be necessary above all to abandon a mentality in which the poor—as individuals and as peoples—are considered a burden, as irksome intruders trying to consume what others have produced.... The advancement of the poor constitutes a great opportunity for the moral, cultural and even economic growth of all humanity.”
Perhaps this Lent could be an opportunity for us all to examine our attitudes about the poor, and to think and plan more intentionally about how we put the Church’s preferential option for the poor into practice—in our parishes, schools, communities, and world. If we accept the Church’s invitation to practice almsgiving during these 40 days, I am confident we will find ourselves in deeper relationship with Jesus.
In Western society, where we don’t see the abject poverty that much of the world is accustomed to, I think sometimes we can fall into the mindset that we are doing the “giving” and the poor are receiving. And in a worldly sense, that may be so. But, as with many things, Jesus turns our worldly understanding upside down. His ways are not our ways, after all.
Truthfully, when we serve and help the poor, we are the ones who receive. The poor—because of Jesus’s nearness to them—are actually a gift to us, because we get to encounter Our Lord when we encounter those in need.
So, whatever your Lenten practices may look like this year, may I encourage you (and even more myself) to find a meaningful way to give alms? In whatever we do in the Church—at the family, organizational, parish, or diocesan level—may we be mindful of Christ’s longing to encounter us in the hearts of those in need, and may we never forget the reality that Jesus truly is hidden in the poor, loving us and waiting to be with us.
