Supplements

Commentary

By Liz Quirin

Of Dentures and Other Things

Reading through the list of grants to be awarded for the Fund for Ministry with money from the diocesan appeal, I was stopped by one in particular. It was a request for three sets of dentures for the poor in one of our deaneries. As with almost every request across the diocese, this one was given only part of the money requested. For the most part, the fund doesn’t have enough money to fully cover every request. This request was for $900.00, and the organization was awarded $300.00. What to do — give uppers or lowers to each of the three people or give one set of dentures to one person and put the other two on hold? What a dilemma.

We often hear the expression “the poor will always be with us,” but we never expected them to be so close to us. We need to take a reality check. The poor are not only with us, they are standing in the checkout lines ahead of us in the grocery stores, buying clothes at a second-hand store instead of dropping them off, deciding whether to make a mortgage payment, pay a heating bill or fill prescriptions at a pharmacy and sitting in the pews with us at church.

Until this hits us personally and we are forced to deal specifically with people we know, we can’t fathom how desperate the situation has become. In fact, we don’t really want to know how difficult it is for people to survive from a.m. to p.m. We prefer to read about the folks in Third World countries or at least in Appalachia because we can sympathize with their plight so very far away from us. When it’s “up close and personal” it makes us squirm a bit more. It’s no longer “them and us,” it’s all of us in this together.

That would be the point. While it has always been “all of us,” but we didn’t realize it until recently. The poor that we must open our eyes and see speak English as their first language, generally don’t live in thatched huts or walk for miles to carry water back to their villages. They may be living in a place where the water has been turned off, where they can’t afford to keep the lights or the heat on, and they don’t generally have enough to eat every day.

We have a wonderful opportunity right here, right now. If we want to make a difference in someone’s life, we don’t have to send our money to another country or even another state. All we have to do is talk to people at our parishes, let them know we want to do something, to answer each of our baptismal calls to reach out and become Christ to one another in a very personal way. All we have to do is believe we can make a difference, and we can. Even if we’re too old to do heavy lifting, we can send our prayers out for those who must live without. Storming heaven has always been a good idea, and beginning today, I’ll be praying for money for dentures for two more folks.