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Stephen Zerfas
Summer Service Learning Program (SSLP)
Hope Ministries
Notre Dame Club of St. Joseph Valley
Project Description:
I served as a live-in Adult Education intern at Hope Ministries, a non-traditional faith-based transitional homeless facility. I had my own room for the first seven weeks and shared a room with the men in “the Cave” for the final week. During the day I attended all community meetings, ate all meals with the residents at the Hope community kitchen, and walked the kids to the boys and girls clubs. Specifically, though, my role as an intern was centered on assisting the Adult Education Directors with GED tutoring, resume building, designing and implementing a basic computer skills curriculum and a few other initiatives underneath the Program Director, including teaching an anger management course and initializing a tobacco cessation program
Reflection:
Despite seemingly ample experiential support for universal love, there seems to remain evidence that loveless people exist. In South Bend, Hope Ministries is a nontraditional, faith-based, transitional homeless facility located in an inner city riddled with crime and homelessness. I believe Hope, with its fantastic programming and “equal brokenness” of staff and residents approach, is really a crowning gem among homeless shelters nationwide. In a brief eight weeks there I met, worked with, saw great progress, and got to intimately know people ranging from desperate, starving “woodsmen” to mentally ill who felt disliked by their family to victims of sexual and physical abuse since childhood. Such a varied collection of heartbreaking stories is shocking. Consider the following examples:
After spending over six months at Hope Ministries making incredible progress on drug addictions and domestic violence relationships, Mary, mother of two, left Hope one night to meet up with a guy she had been sexting over the internet. After drinking and getting high, Mary essentially sought out, mainly through her own understanding and will, what amounted to a night of gang-banging and physical abuse.
Chuck and his five siblings were abandoned by their mother when he was six. She left to be a prostitute. He ended up in the ghetto in the sixties and through various prejudices and cultural divides, was taught the only way to get what he wanted was to take it by force. For thirty years he did the only things he knew how to do: deal drugs, rob, assault, batter, gang-bang, and possibly even rape.
Brock, at age 52, has been addicted to a large number of drugs for 45 years. He was physically and sexually abused by his father for as long as he could remember and thought himself lucky for finding tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and many others at the ripe young age of seven to ease the pain.
One day at Hope, Jack’s alarm clock woke James up. Frustrated, James threatened to break the clock. Immediately, the two were at each other’s throats, daring one another to leave first so the second could follow them into the street and they’d handle it the “street way”: they’d fight bare-handed until one was left dead or unconscious.
One Hope mom threatened to beat her kid every time she got annoyed.
Another mom apparently moved out of Hope and kept her two children at home while they were supposed to be at youth programming and she did cocaine in the living room.
A block away from Hope two men got into an argument over whether or not a woman in question was good looking. A few minutes later one of them had been stabbed seven times. He died before the professionals showed up.
Altogether these stories, especially when told or seen firsthand, are overwhelming. If love really is what humans are designed to do, how can stories like these and countless others happen every day? Even more disturbing is the understanding that most of the situations happen regularly around infants and children, effectively conditioning them to do the same by the time they are ready to have their own children. Consider the mom who confines her children to the house as she does cocaine, or the mother that leaves her children for a night seeking a gang-banging, only to come back bruised, tattered, and beaten the next morning. It is hardly possible to expect the children in these situations to learn anything different. If the environment is completely saturated with this behavior, you can hardly blame Chuck for living as he did for so long. From the moment he was born he never had the chance to see anything else, and if he truly never learned anything else, how is it possible that he was created and designed to love and be loved?
Initially, the dark hole of these stories seems to snuff out the promise of universal love of Christianity. They provide evidence far too intense, far too extensive, and far too widespread to continue to believe such a thing. But as a familiarity with these situations grows and the initial shock value begins to fade, the Christian claim begins to regain some ground. Consider those same people:
Mary fought passionately to keep custody over her second child and she smiles frequently around friends and her son.
Chuck calls his latest child (the only one he knows) the “light of his life.”
Brock’s mother was proudly present as he graduated from Hope Ministries’ Core Classes.
James apologized sincerely to Jack later, and Jack’s alarm clock never went off again. A few days later I was laughing in conversation with both of them.
That same mother who threatened her child regularly hardly ever left his side.
That mother who allegedly did cocaine brought her children back a week or so later and set to work on getting her degree from Ivy Tech.
After such unsettling accounts of neglect, violence, and even hatred, it isn’t easy to spot these latter examples of brighter moments in the lives of these people. Nonetheless, a careful examination reveals that even in some of the most depressing life stories there are glimpses of love. They are certainly small, but they are enough to support the idea of universal love.
All in all, the fundamental Christian hallmark of creation designed to love is certainly plausible with its extensive and balanced support from religious heritage and personal experience. As such a broad, absolute statement, though, it only takes a single example of a loveless life to undermine such a claim. Frighteningly, stories of loveless acts are ever-present. On the margins of societies there exists a community in which extreme and shocking accounts of loveless acts are a part of everyday life, and under the initial shocking impression of these acts, it is easy to lose sight of smaller forms of evidence that love is still present in the lives of these people. Over time, though, the Christian claim stands true. As the shock-value fades one realizes that love still is and always has been there, and small as it may be, it is enough to continue to support the idea that as humans we are simply designed to love and to be loved.
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