Category: FaithJustice Fellow Blog

“This is the season she will make beautiful things. Not perfect things but honest things that speak to who she is and who she is called to be” – Morgan Harper Nichols 

This was the beautiful poem that Maggie shared with me this month during our mid-year check-in. How did she know that this poem exactly sums up what my whole being has been longing for leading up to the start of 2021? I’ve concluded: Maggie reads minds.

This year, I will strive to internalize the truth that “beautiful” does not mean “perfect”. I hope to believe that the work that I do, the things I create, and the energy that I put forth in the world can be beautiful; I want to believe that I can “do” and “be” good in this world without frivolously striving for unattainable perfection. 

In this year, I desire to live with more integrity to the person that God has created me to be and is calling me to become. One of the most impactful things that I heard in the past year was shared with our CFJ community by timone davis at our Magdalene Circle event. She said “The more you grow in your faith, the more you grow in your relationship with God, the more you will make the people around you uncomfortable”. This came at a time where our country and Church were very divided. In my personal faith life, it came at a time where I was struggling with questions such as “is there such things as ‘perfect’ Cathloic?” and “can I still be a good follower of Christ and not be the perfect Catholic?” Grappling with the “grayness” of these questions brought some much needed discomfort into my life. 

The “honesty” that I’m called live out this year is to embrace that discomfort. How do I need to lean into discomfort? How am I called to learn and grow through the discomfort? And what discomfort am I called to introduce into the spaces that I occupy and communities that I enter? Last summer, I attended a community organizing training with a nonprofit that does incredible work to advocate on behalf of and to stand in solidarity with marginalized, working-immigrant communities. If I learned anything about community organizing, it is that our job is to make other people uncomfortable. Change, growth, and progress cannot happen when people are still comfortable, and especially when I am still comfortable. So the “honest things” that I am called to make this year may feel uncomfortable at times, may even cause a bit of unrest or discord, but I believe that it is essential for me to live with integrity to the discomfort that I’m invited to participate in if there’s any hope of contributing to work for change and justice.  

The past year has forced me to accept that growth and progress may often be intangible. I admit, I am an impatient individual with a very task-oriented mindset. This leads me to thinking there always has to be something to show for work that I am doing (both internally and externally).  I end up trapped in my own self-inflicted disillusionment for not meeting arbitrary standards of “perfection.” You’re probably thinking what I’m thinking right about now: “How is this helpful to anyone? How is this in the slightest bit productive?” Well, it simply isn’t helpful. And the solution for me seems to not “do more” but to “be more”. To “be” alone, to “be” in community, to “be” with others more intentionally and fully, to “be” unapologetically myself.

Cheers to 2021 and a new administration!

Linh Nguyen

Part of my responsibility as a FaithJustice Fellow this year is to serve as co-youth minister at a local parish. This past Sunday we had our first (virtual) youth group gathering of the new year, and we reflected on the theme of “newness”. We looked at examples from the Gospel of how people received renewal from Jesus as he touched and healed them. I feel that it is an apt theme to continue to reflect on.

As I reflect on the theme of “newness”, I think of a passage from the book of Revelation, “Behold, I make all things new”, (21:5). What does renewal mean to you? To me, it is something different than arbitrary change. I would like to suggest a distinction between “change” and “renewal”. The passage is not, Behold, I change all things, but “Behold, I make all things new.” To me, renewal is a rediscovery and deepening of the original intent and purpose of something. Certainly, renewal implies change, but this change is oriented and directed by an understanding of the original meaning and purpose of a thing. Renewal is a type of change that moves away from and sheds whatever is contrary to something’s true purpose and toward that which makes it most truly what it is. 

I believe that renewal for a human being is a rediscovery and deepening of that which makes a person truly human: his or her capacity to love and to seek the truth, to adore God, and to enter into meaningful interpersonal relationships. For a society, renewal is a rediscovery of the pursuit of the common good: working to ensure that each person has the freedom and the opportunity to live fully and to pursue real happiness. For Christians and for the Church, it is a rediscovery of the Gospel and its power to heal, to unite, and to restore dignity to all. All of this requires a renewed understanding of what a human person is and what is and is not capable of enacting true and lasting happiness. The Christian knows that renewal requires radical dependence on God and on his grace, and that it presupposes our good will.

So for me, in 2021, my intention is to seek renewal. I believe that this renewal will come about through Christ, and that it also requires my cooperation and commitment to search and to live out my humanity and my faith authentically. In all realism, it also requires an awareness and acceptance of my own weaknesses and imperfections, and the trust that God, who makes all things new, will guide me to the renewal that I desire this year.

John Holloway

Have you discovered your peace in the year 2020 or 2021? If you haven’t discovered your peace, what is holding you back from discovering the unknown? We have allowed fear to cripple our society, but the Lord hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and love, and a sound mind”. ~2 Timothy 1:7

It is time for the children of God to walk in our destiny. We have been tramp in our home since last March, but we haven’t been tramp in our creativity.

·         What is God calling you to in 2021?

·         What ideas have God-given you?

·         Where is the plan to start the vision?

Scripture tells us, where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he. ~Proverbs 29:28

It took a conversation with my spiritual brother Clarence Oliver, to understand the phrase ‘go back to the drawing board”. We talk about his outreach plan that He wasn’t able to start because of excuse. In that conversation, he made up his mind that we are both going back to the drawing board to look at all the promises that God has given us in 2020 & 2021. 

Go back! Go back! Go back!

There is more for you, but you must be willing to walk in the unknown like Abraham, Noah, and John the Baptist, Paul, Timothy, Ruth, and the women with the alabaster box. Individuals may not understand why they took a step of faith, but the Lord understood the journey. So, stop waiting for people to understand the vision and the calling God has placed in your life. They will never fully understand the vision and the calling until they are in a place to see and view from a different perspective. 

Lastly, it is written: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” ~1 Corinthians 2:9

What has God prepared for you?

We all need to take some time and ponder the question above. I believe in spiritual direction, family restoration, and student debt paid in full in 2021. These aren’t easy tasks to complete by myself, but I asking the Lord to send people who can understand the vision and the calling on my life. 

Have you taken the time to pray and seek the Lord, for direction in 2021?

If you haven’t, what are you waiting for? We have nineteen days left in January, and we need to spend that time seeking the Lord on our face. Scripture tells us, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. ~2 Chronicles 7:14

I understand 2020, has been challenging for all of us, but now it is time to go back to the drawing board and seek the Lord for a plan in 2021. The reason why we don’t fulfill understand the promise of the Lord because we lack execution. We need to find someone who has already paved the way by connecting with them for insight and tools you can use in your toolboxes.

Go discover your peace! 

Go discover your passion! 

Go discover your spiritual gifts God has placed on the inside of you! 

Jermaine Clark

When I read the prompt for the November blog post, “What are three things that you are grateful for?”, it called to mind a line from the Eucharistic prayer at Mass that has always stood out to me. After the dialogue where the priest invites the people, “Lift up your hearts,” and everyone responds, “We lift them up to the Lord”, the priest continues, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God,” to which everyone responds, “It is right and just.” 

Immediately after this dialogue, the priest recites the following line of the Eucharistic prayer: “It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Father most holy…”. This line has always struck me as something deep and important, like a glimpse of wisdom from God. Our duty and our salvation have to do with giving thanks to God. 

What does that mean for me in the context of my actual lived experience, with the gifts and challenges of every day, and those that span the course of my lifetime? To me, I receive this gift of wisdom as something very liberating, and something that challenges me to grow profoundly in my trust in God; a call to believe more and more in the absolute goodness of God. 

If it is right and just… to give thanks always and everywhere, that means that even in the circumstances of my life that seem difficult, those that I least understand, my salvation and my freedom lie in giving thanks to God. How can I give thanks to God, when faced with something extremely painful or difficult? I think it means believing in the victory of God over sin and death, and over every form of evil, even before I can see it with my own eyes. It means believing that his love is and will always be victorious over evil.

If Mary is the perfect model of Christian discipleship, then it would be interesting to consider how she lived out this truth, that it is our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give thanks to God the Father through Jesus Christ. One poignant example of this in the life of Mary is her presence at the foot of the Cross of her son Jesus. What must have been her inner attitude at that moment? Was she thankful in that moment, the darkest and most painful of all the moments in her life?

 I believe that her motherly heart must have been completely broken, just as our hearts break for all that is sad, violent, and evil in this world. However, I think that her heart broke, without despair and without doubting the goodness of God, even if she must not have understood everything at that moment. It has been said that even at the foot of the Cross, Mary sang the Magnificat from the depths of her soul, and I believe that to be true. 

Through his Resurrection, Jesus won the ultimate victory over all that causes us to suffer, sometimes very deeply, in this life. This light of the Resurrection is the only light that can guide us through the most challenging, painful, and incomprehensible moments of life. It is the light that reminds us that God is good and that he is victorious over every form of evil, no matter how painful or obscure.

Truly it is the Paschal Mystery of Christ that turns our mourning into dancing and our sorrow into joy. How many times throughout the Gospel did he bring light to those in darkness and heal those afflicted by every kind of evil. He calmed the storm at sea and he cast out demons. He turned water into wine and gave every proof of his power and his goodness, even to the point of laying down his own life in order to conquer death itself. 

So no matter what, I do well to remember to give thanks to God always and everywhere, even in difficult and obscure moments, just as Mary sang the Magnificat at the foot of the Cross, even from the depth of her natural sorrow and devastation. As long as with God’s help I remember to renew my faith and trust in the goodness of God and my hope in his victory I can find freedom and salvation by giving thanks to God who loves me, and who gave his life for me.

Jermaine Clark

I am grateful for the ways that I am being challenged to grow as a professional, as a practicing Catholic, and as an individual by my current environment, my work, my community members and co-workers, and by the youth whom I accompany. I’m grateful for the many insightful, sometimes tough, conversations that I’ve been a part of since the start of my fellowship here at CFJ – they’ve proven to be vital to my ongoing formation and providential to where I am in my personal journey. 

I am grateful for my support system (both old and new): my direct family, my spiritual family, my lifelong friends, my companion, my co-workers and supervisors, my spiritual mentors, and community members. Thank you for being witnesses to God’s love, His peace, and His promise in my life – you all know who you are. 

I am grateful for the Faith that God has given me and helped me to cultivate. Without it, I would have nothing. My faith has given me hope where meaning has not yet revealed itself for life’s many unexpected changes and outcomes. It has helped me navigate internal and external challenges, including grief and spiritual desolation, and informs how I “live” and “wait”. This year especially, faith has been my life vessel. 

Linh Nguyen

Hello everyone! The first month of my fellowship has really flown by. I feel much more settled in now to my living space, community life, and the different roles that I am working in for my time here as a fellow. I’d like to share with you some of the gifts and challenges from this first leg of my journey.

Community life is ever evolving. Jermaine, John, and I have come up with several variations by now of what we hope for our community life to look like. Right now, we have two community dinners each week and our Sunday evenings are dedicated to an alternating spirituality or social night. Each week, one of us gets to facilitate either a community social activity or a reflection and prayer experience. I find doing spirituality nights to be a true gift because each of us prays and worships in different ways. During spirituality nights we not only get to share this with each other but are also able to share a bit of what’s going on in our own spiritual lives and journeys with each other. Each of us are in such different places in our faith live, so we offer different perspectives, carry different “weights”, and need different things. It has been important for me to be mindful that, although community life calls us to live in the spirit of accompaniment, we each need to embrace the truth that we cannot be everything for one another in this year. 

My role as a youth minister at St. Ann’s Parish and as a campus minister for Rider University has proven to be quite difficult, as one would expect during a global pandemic. It is nearly impossible to plan traditional youth ministry experiences with the restrictions in place to ensure everyone’s safety. However, John and I have not stopped trying to come up with safe and innovative ways to meet the youth where they are in this time. What’s been made very clear over the past month is that young people really crave quality human interaction. We’ve been fortunate to have some outdoor programming with St. Ann’s youth this Fall and hope that it will lay the foundation for our virtual programming during the winter months.  When I feel discouraged, it has been important to remind myself that this work takes time, and that these are unprecedented circumstances. Intentionally, we’ve chosen Matthew 18:20 as the mantra for our Youth Ministry programming this year – “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am with them” – because at times, it may just only be two or three kids that show up. Regardless of the number, I continue to trust that God is actively working, and to remind myself that God has called me to “feed His sheep”, not count them.

I look forward to seeing what this next month holds in my community life, in the different projects I get to be a part of at CFJ, and in my personal faith journey. 

Linh Nguyen

King Solomon wrote, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths”  Proverbs 3:5-6.

Often, a new endeavor or a new path allows us to rely on the previous knowledge we have obtained for our educational, cultural, and economic background. We tend to wrap our head on the things we can view, but the Lord wants us to focus on the unseen things. Can you imagine what would have happened to Abraham if he would have focused on the tangible? God spoke to Abram in Genesis 17, saying, “If you obey me and always do right, I will keep my solemn promise to you and give you more descendants than can be counted. Abram bowed with his face to the ground, and God said, I promise that you will be the father of many nations. That’s why I now change your name from Abram to Abraham” Genesis 17:1-5. 

First, God is asking all his children to be still. We live in a culture in the United States, where individuals highly desire control and instant gratification. We ask for a microwave fix, but the Lord wants his children to spend intimate time with Him during the day. We have got conformable with Sunday Service, Bible Study, Mid-week Prayer Meeting, etc. We are adding band-aid to temporary procedures, where the Lord wanted to perform heart surgeries. For the last couple of weeks, God had allowed me to be still. God has allowed me to visit the Heavenly Doctor for supernatural procedures within my spirit. Jermaine Lee Clark ran toward a direction where my heart and calling was trying to fix into a small box society has formed. I had to be reminded that I couldn’t squeeze into those boxes because I was meant to be outside the box. I never saw the potential God has for my life until I embrace the journey within New Jersey. I experience an Identity crisis, but God changes my name during the process of stillness. Abram had to come to terms with the words that were spoken over his life. Abram didn’t believe God until his ears were in tune within the heaven frequency. Often time, our stillness requires us to listen during the chaos. Even though we are encountering a pandemic, our stillness is critical to unlearn the church’s social teaching so that we can rebuild, restructure. It will renew our inner core values and belief based on the Basic Insturcibe Before Leaving Earth (Bible). 

Second, God is asking his children to get back into the posture of bowing with our face to the ground. We have got accustomed to surface-level relationships with our Heavenly Father. For the last couple of days, I have been questioning God on why I’m not receiving any assignment within the organization. God spoke, saying, you are in a season of birthing, and I need you to revisit everything the African Methodist Episcopal Church has taught you under the leadership of Rev. Ella & Minister James Edwards. Often, we have spiritual amnesia, but God needs us to remember our faith’s foundation. 

• If you were raised on hymns, go back and listen to those songs.
•  If you were raised on praying The Holy Rosary, go back and enter your prayer closet. 
• If you were raised on fellowship or community, find fellowship and community within a virtual environment. 

Even though things have changed, we must remember the original manuscript of our life. Paul taught us in Romans 12:2, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is–his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Lastly, accept the new endeavors. It’s has been over a month since I walk into Catholic Charites, Diocese of Trenton. In the first few days, I met the staff and had a virtual conversation with the Executive Director to figuring out how I fit into this big picture of the non-profit organization. The Executive Director was eager to have another fellow for the year. I was anxious to start a project within a confusing system for the organization volunteers. It’s was a great couple of weeks sending email and answering phone calls, but the passion was missing from it all. I hit many roadblocks throughout the weeks and currently experiencing those roadblocks because of the high demand within the organization’s leadership. I am still expiring frustration, but the Lord reminds me to enjoy the little movement and embrace the new endeavors with a different lens. God had me take Abram’s posture because He couldn’t see all God was doing behind the scene. Abram had a lot of questions but listened during the time of quietness. Abram heard the voice of God and entered into a posture of praise and worship. “No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you a father of many nations.” When we listen to the voice of God, we will rise with new instruction, vision, dreams, songs, prayer, sermons, business ideas, etc. 

Be Still, and know that I am God!

Psalm 46:10

Jermaine Clark