The survivors of the Parkland shooting are providing us a remarkable model for Catholic mission.
Over the weekend, I attended the March for Our Lives rally in Chicago. In many ways, the experience of gun violence that the speakers attested to is quite different from the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School. Rather than a single, horrifying event, these young people experience the dread of daily shootings in their communities, never knowing who among their friends and family may fall victim to the proliferation of guns, or whether they will find themselves at the wrong place and wrong time. When a young African-American woman said from the stage, “I don’t want to end up a headline in the news or a statistic on a chart,” she did so knowingly: unlike in many communities torn apart by mass shootings, news stories about the tragic loss of our young people are a nightly occurrence in Chicago.
What is remarkable, then, is that the Parkland survivors are intentionally making room in the conversation for the voices and experiences of other, more marginalized people. With so much media attention focused on their pain and trauma, they responded by pointing to the trauma of others. They are using their privilege as suburban, middle class, predominantly white people (whom the media tend to view with greater sympathy) to amplify voices of those whose pain receives less empathy and more complacency in our culture.
In many ways, these young people are lighting a path for those of us committed to global mission, as well. From a US perspective, mission is a privileged activity: we are people with the means to seek, encounter, and serve those at the peripheries of our global society, who are further removed than ourselves from the centers of economic and societal power. Despite our best intentions, our privileged status means we often place ourselves at the center of the story. Literally: those photos from mission trips feature us front and center, surrounded by the people we meet; those blog posts talk at length about what we have seen and learned, and how we have grown.
And yet, at heart mission is about encountering Christ in our world, pointing to Christ’s presence in others, and lifting up the work of the Living God already taking place. If we think of ourselves as disciples, it helps to put ourselves in their shoes. How often are they truly at the center of the story? Even though the followers of Jesus and not Jesus himself wrote the Gospel accounts, Christ remains at the center. Moreover, it is a portrait of Jesus who is always shifting the center of the story to someone at the peripheries, be it the Samaritan Woman at the well (Jn 4:4-42), the Canaanite Woman on the street (Mt. 15:21-28), or the Man with Dropsy at the table (Lk 14:1-6)—the list goes on. The disciples are observers, who not only follow the example of Jesus in action, but also pass on the stories of the people to whom Jesus looked as witnesses of faith.
For those of us engaged in the work of global solidarity through the inspiration of faith, this spirit of shifting the center is fundamental to our vocation. It requires a recognition, though, that our story of conversion is not everyone’s story. Many of us are somewhat akin to Simon and Andrew, whom Christ disturbs with the call to leave the security of their work as fisherman towards a different vocation. But for those whom we are called to serve, the call is often like that of those mentioned above, who, through Christ, discover a voice and dignity that the world around them too often ignores.
Those are the people whose voices are lifted up in the Gospel, whose voices we need to privilege over our own. They need not only to be at the center of the stories we tell, but, like the Parkland survivors, we need to make space for them to tell their own stories and be heard by those who are only listening to people like us.
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