Faith, Hope, and Charity?

I am probably one of the most naïve 20 year olds on the planet, which is extremely odd considering my personal history. I really should be far more jaded and cynical than I actually am. But, being the naïve idiot that I am, I decided a long time ago to take my naiveté in stride and to be happy about the fact that I am so optimistic, and gullible, and positive. I’m generally very slow to see problems that most people would see almost right away. So, generally, when I see something right away and think that it’s very, very wrong, it really is. Something has to be pretty screwed up for me to notice right away.

I recently started working at a shelter in Nogales, Arizona. I need to acknowledge first that the shelter does very good work, and that it’s the only place on the American side in Nogales that gives people food and a place to stay. It’s very important, and I don’t want to deride that. However, I have several problems with it already. I feel like I have to question why the shelter exists. And I don’t think it’s because there’s a need in Nogales, although there certainly is a need here. It seems to me like the directors of the shelter started it because there religion told them to. I went to Catholic school, but this shelter is the most “Christian” environment I have ever been in. Before I began working here, I had never been asked for my “salvation story” before. (I still don’t know if I even have one of those, or if I do what it is.) I suppose part of my problem with this place is my own personal history with religion and with overly religious people. My own crises of faith have left “indelible” marks. Religion, or rather, my lack of it, killed what was once a very close friendship and I still sort of regret my own part in that.

Despite my previous troubled interactions with religion, however, I’m still extremely ambivalent about it. I realized a while ago that religion (or at least Catholicism) was never going to play the part in my life that I wanted it to and that it did in my friends’ lives. For several years, I felt as if I were religiously incompetent—that the reason religion didn’t mean anything to me was because of some inherent flaw I had, and that’s why I “couldn’t” pray, why I lacked the faith and personal relationship with God that everyone around me seemed to have. It’s hard to tell now how much of it was a crisis of faith and how much of it was something entirely different, but that was one of the hardest times in my life. And religion and that time are intrinsically linked in my head, which is probably slightly unfair. However, and I’m not entirely sure where this comes from, exactly, I still see religion in a fairly positive light. If I’m completely honest, part of me is still extremely jealous of “people of faith” because part of me still wants what I was never truly able to have. Despite all of the problems it’s caused me, and, more importantly, the world in general, I still see religion as inspiring acts of great good.

But a discussion I had with a friend a while ago made me think about whether motives matter. Is it a problem that people do good work because they think Jesus told them to, instead of out of compassion for their fellow human being? Does that even matter? Is the only important aspect the work that is done? After all, if it weren’t for Christian beliefs, all of the people that I helped feed today wouldn’t have had lunch, and they wouldn’t have been given food to take home, or beds to sleep in. The small utilitarian part of me thinks that the work is so important that it doesn’t matter why it was done. But the rest of me, while I still acknowledge the importance of the work, sees a problem with giving people a side of Jesus with their soup. These next two months should be very interesting…