Excerpts from a St. Vincent de Paul Retreat
June 6, 2026. Orangeville, Ontario
By Deacon Doug McManaman
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I’m sure you know already that the work you do is hidden from the public gaze. You quietly serve those in need, and of course more and more people are struggling with the rising cost of living, the increased price of gasoline and groceries, and all these have been the result of unjust decisions made by those in power, i.e., the conflict in the middle east, the war in Iran, which affects everyone in this world. There is nothing we do that does not have far reaching social repercussions. And this is where you come in. You are stepping in to serve the needs of the most vulnerable, the victims of these decisions that they did not make. They certainly did make some decisions in life that brought them to where they are now in their lives, but we don’t know what those are nor do we know all the factors behind the decisions that people make, their backgrounds, their upbringing, their unconscious drives, etc., and so we really cannot pronounce judgment on anyone. When we are young, we tend to be more judgmental. I know I was. And the reason is we tend to believe that “what we see is all there is”. It’s a cognitive bias that is very prevalent, otherwise known as an availability heuristic bias. We make judgments on the basis of information that is readily available to us, but we assume that all that is not available to us simply does not exist, and so we tend to think we have an all-comprehensive grasp on reality. As an example, a teaching colleague of mine from India said that when he came over to Canada and entered a classroom for the first time, he assumed that all the students would stand for him as he entered the classroom, because that’s what they do in India. But they didn’t; they just sat there talking with one another, some were on their phones, and he was shocked. He assumed that what he saw in India is all there is to see.
And there is so much about the poor we serve in this town that we don’t see, so much about their lives, their upbringing, their emotional wounds, the psychological and emotional conditions that they don’t have that would have enabled them to make different choices, and it is so easy to assume that if I don’t see it, it’s not there. And when that happens, we tend to make judgments, even in our own hearts. We have to catch ourselves doing that and reject that habit of thinking in order to become more comfortable with not knowing. Jungian psychotherapists Robert A. Johnson and Jerry Ruhl describe hubris as “a limited knowledge, a partial perspective coupled with the presumption that one knows the whole story. It is a self-deception, …” They write: “When you think you know the whole of what is going on, you most likely are acting out of a complex (a one-sided inner pattern). The story we consciously know, or believe we know, is never the whole saga that is unfolding within and around us. In the first half of life most people suffer from hubris. Given time, life has ways of correcting this human fault through suffering…”
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In the St. Vincent de Paul Society, you are helping to carry the burdens of those who struggle among us. And this is at the very heart of what this life is about. It’s certainly what life in Christ is about. He carried our burden and calls us to take his yoke upon ourselves: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light” (Mt 11, 28-30).
Economists tell us that the economy is not a zero-sum game. If someone prospers economically, it does not necessarily mean that someone else is becoming impoverished–both might be getting more prosperous. But I will say this: life in the community of Christ’s body is very much a zero-sum game, a series of trade-offs, as it were. We carry one another’s burdens. If I want a life of ease, someone will be left behind to suffer alone. We are not merely private individuals existing side by side without any mutual indwelling or co-inherence. And so, a person might wonder at times: “Why is this happening to me?” “Why am I suffering like this?” Of course, I don’t have the specific answer to that question, but only a general one. Such a person might very well be relieving another person of his burden, a person he or she does not know, because he/she exists in Christ, and Christ suffered, the righteous for the unrighteous, and this person is sharing in Christ’s life. And others in that same mystical body have carried my burden throughout my life, so that I could enjoy momentary relief from suffering, and I don’t know who they are.
So, although your suffering might seem pointless, useless, meaningless, you will be delighted to discover in the fullness of God’s kingdom that you were actually carrying someone else’s burden and providing them with much needed relief. And that is why as chaplains we pray that God join the sufferings of this patient to the sufferings of Christ, for the sake of someone else. We share in Christ’s redeeming work when we suffer, and this suffering is precisely a matter of carrying one another’s burdens. Our sufferings are never pointless.
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Now, I don’t know why some people are poor, but I know their suffering is holy and the relief you provide is holy. They are carrying our burdens, and when we enter into their lives, we help to relieve their burden. We have a share in their mission to redeem the world. And what you do is genuine priestly work. You have a priesthood, the Royal Priesthood of the Faithful, a baptismal priesthood; for after you were baptized with water, you were anointed with Sacred Chrism, anointed Priest, Prophet, and King. You share in this threefold identity of Christ. A priest is one who offers sacrifice, and you live your life in the Person of Christ, the great high priest. In the letter to the Hebrews, we read: “Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession”. You are genuine priests, because you offer yourselves, your life, as a pleasing sacrifice. The ministerial priesthood serves this larger priesthood of the faithful, not the other way around.
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Mother Teresa was always fond of saying that we can do no great things, only small things with great love. I have an appreciation for hospital ministry at this point in my life that I did not have at the beginning, especially after working with dementia patients, those who will not return later on to thank you and express how much you did for them. Every apparently insignificant thing we do will exit this world and enter into eternity. It will exit this world because it will be entirely forgotten. But these small acts have an eternal significance, because they enter the heart of God. And when you think of it, how much do we really know about the life of Mary or Joseph? Very little. There are so many details that are hidden from us, but you know that every day of Mary’s life was filled with providential significance. Every apparently insignificant act of hers had eternal significance and a weight we cannot measure, because we have no access to the details. Think of the individuals whose lives she was involved in, either momentarily or for a longer period, the words she said to them, the advice she gave, the things she did. She spent months with Elizabeth while she was carrying John the Baptist. We don’t know what she did or the words that were exchanged or the effect she had on her cousin. We can only imagine. But we will know in eternity, because her apparently ordinary and insignificant acts and words have entered into eternity. The ordinary has become extraordinary. Or, we could say that the two have been joined, and this happened when God the Son joined a human nature. The apparently insignificant has become profoundly significant.
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We have to be very careful of the dualism that we’ve inherited from the Greek world, especially the dualism of the “sacred and the profane”. Jesus spat on the ground and made a paste of mud to heal the eyes of the blind man. That mud is holy. The earth has become holy; matter is now holy. His blood dripped from the cross onto the ground and he entered into the Jordan to be baptized by John. Thus, the ground is made holy by his blood, and water is made holy by his entering into the waters of the Jordan. He inhaled and exhaled the oxygen in the air. There is nothing profane about the earth. Only sin is profane, but nothing God created and assumed in the Incarnation is profane. The extraordinary, namely God Himself, becomes ordinary; the extraordinary is now hidden in the ordinary. These ordinary and apparently insignificant acts we do daily, especially those directed to the poor and the disadvantaged, are really extraordinary and have eternal significance. The world doesn’t have to know about them to be extraordinary.
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Just after we completed our taxes, I lamented to my wife that we really did not give enough to charity last year. My daughter was in the room and heard me say this, but said nothing of course. And then I saw that my neighbor was having new shingles put on his roof, and so I began to wonder about our own roof. I’m sure it’s been over 20 years since we had our shingles done. But when the roofers removed the shingles on my neighbor’s house, they discovered rotting wood and asked him if he wanted it replaced. Of course, he had no choice at that point. So, the cost went from $6,500 to $25,000. That scared the heck out of me. What if this happens to me?
Fortunately, I have a friend who is a brilliant entrepreneur and who flips houses. I told him about my neighbor and he was sure he got robbed. He called up some roofers that he contracts out and asked what it would cost to replace an entire roof, not the shingles, just the wood underneath. $4000 max. And then the $6,500 on top of that for the shingles. So, $10,500, as opposed to 25,000.
I decided to get my roof done, so he gave me the name of a company he contracts out. I called them up, the roofer came to give me an estimate; he was Chinese, barely spoke English, his name was Jimmy (I’ll make up a last name, Lee). Jimmy was a good man; he looked at my roof and said I did not need new shingles, that they would last another 10 years. But he said my vents were plastic and damaged from squirrels, and there were some damaged shingles. So, he said he could just replace all the vents and repair the shingles around the vents and anywhere else where there was damage, and I said I wanted to put on de-icing wires, which I used to have. He said he would do it. His estimate for all that, including the wires, was $1,380.00, which my friend says was a very good price for the work that is to be done. So, I said I’d like you to go ahead and do the work. They came and did the work on the following Saturday. When the work was done, I spoke to Jimmy’s wife, who handles the finances, and asked if they accept e-transfers. They do. She sends me the email address by text: jjmmylee@hotmail.com (that is not the actual email address, but similar). Now, when you look at the email address, you might read: jimmylee etc. So, I set up my bank to send an e-transfer, and I get a notice via email that the deposit went through. She calls me the next day to say she did not receive the payment. I said I have proof that I sent it. I sent her a screenshot of the email I received from the bank. She asked me if I sent it to the right email address. I said I sent it to the address she provided. I called the bank and they assured me that I had sent $1,380.00 at 7:20 am. But, as I was talking to my bank, I looked closely at the email address she sent me. It does not say jimmylee…., but jjmmylee (two j’s). When hyperlinked, the second “j” looks like an “i”. So I just sent Jimmy Lee, whoever he is, $1,380.00. The bank assured me that they cannot do anything about it. The money is gone. So, I had to send another e-transfer to the roofing company. My wife and daughter came home and I told them about what had happened, and my daughter says to me: “Well, that takes care of the charity issue, doesn’t it?” Yes, I just donated $1,380.00 to some unknown person. I hope he needs the money. I thought to myself: perhaps I’m lightening his load in some way, carrying a part of his burden. I had to begin to practice what I’ve been preaching.
But after sending the roofing company the proper funds at the proper email address, I sent this mysterious Jimmy Lee an email saying that I mistakenly sent him $1,380.00 and how that happened. I did not hear back and did not expect to hear back.
I finally came to accept the fact that this money is gone. Now, I happened to have been reading a book on patience by a 19th century bishop who is a direct descendent of St. Thomas More, and it has helped me a great deal in dealing with this frustration. And at Mass that Sunday night, I decided to offer this frustration for a woman who is having cancer treatments. Later I sent Jimmy another email with a bit of humor, saying that if you have chosen not to return this money, then enjoy it. But know that you will have to answer to the Lord one day.
At Mass that evening, I also said deep down in my heart that if by some miracle I get this money back, I’ll give it to my favorite charity, since I hadn’t given that much to charity in 2024. Now, that’s easy to do when you are convinced that you’ll never see the money again, so don’t be too impressed.
Well, lo and behold, the following morning I get an email from Jimmy Lee, who is out of the country at this time, thought my email was a scam until he checked his bank account. He said he’ll be back in Canada later in the week and will arrange to have the bank return the funds. And of course, I did promise to donate the money to my favorite charity, so I’m on the hook–I didn’t want to end up like Ananias in the Acts of the Apostles.
But I told Jimmy that he’s a man of integrity, and that if he is ever in the Toronto area to let me know and I will take him out to lunch. I also expressed my frustration to the roofing company that they would have such a misleading email address. But it is interesting to look back and marvel at divine providence. The Lord knew my regret for not giving enough to charity in 2024, took care of that problem right away, and in some ways restored my faith in humanity. There are some genuinely good people in this world, namely Jimmy the roofer, and this mysterious Jimmy from who knows where.
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My wife was at the return line in Costco the other day, and next to her was a Muslim woman, and they got talking. This woman lost her husband and raised her three kids on her own. They are doing very well now. But my wife said she was a lovely woman. And this woman said: “It’s all about love. This life is all about love. That’s it”. And of course, she is right.
And love means getting involved in the lives of others. It means willing to enter into the sufferings of others. And this is the meaning of the Incarnation. God enters into human suffering.
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Let me call attention to something St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions way back in the late 4th century.
O You Omnipotent Good, you care for every one of us as if you care for him only, and so for all as if they were but one!
In other words, God loves each one of us as if there is only one of us in existence, as if you are the only being that exists, the only thing in existence to love. And that would mean that God’s entire attention is on you at every instant of your life. If you knew the love that God has for you right now, you’d die of joy. And of course this life is about learning to receive that love, to experience it, to allow ourselves to be loved like that.
But there is more. Each person in heaven will love you like that, as if you are the only person to love, sort of like the love of a mother for her newborn. Now, it is frightening to think of this. The reason is that we are so far from that point. When I’m standing in line for a Tim Horton’s coffee, that person over there is a non-entity to me, and I’m a non-entity to him. When I walk downtown Toronto, virtually everyone is an It, not a Thou, to employ the vocabulary of Martin Buber. That’s kind of how I like it when I go downtown. I’m surrounded by people who don’t know me and I don’t know them. Now, that may not be entirely true. It is the case that I know virtually no one, but it would be much more beautiful if I knew that I was surrounded by people who cared for me or would care for me if I were to suddenly pass out on the sidewalk. Many years ago on Queen Street one winter my mother slipped on the ice and all she saw were legs stepping over her; no one stopped to help her up. They must have thought she was some street woman passed out on booze.
As finite beings, we cannot really love as God loves us. In other words, we cannot give anyone our undivided attention at every instant of their lives. But in heaven, we will love as we are loved in that I will see and admire the mystery of the other. The other will become for me a Thou, no longer an It. Our love will be divine in so far as charity is a theological virtue, but it will be finite, because none of us are God. Our love will communicate the divine love in a human finite way.
And this life is about learning to love like that. And that affects the way we see people and the world at large. It has intellectual repercussions. The gift of wisdom is rooted in the virtue of charity, says Aquinas. Charity becomes the mother of all virtue, including the intellectual virtues. Our only regret in life will be that we did not love enough.
In heaven, our love will be perfected. The reason is that love awakens love. The love that God has for us awakens us to love as He loves. And so, if God loves you as if you are the only thing that exists, then you will love this person and that person and the other person more than you love yourself, and their happiness will be your happiness, just as a baby’s happiness is its mother’s happiness.
In other words, the joy of heaven is simply unimaginable. It’s unimaginable because we’ve never experienced anything like that here. Again, it is comparable to the love of a mother for her child. But it is even greater than that: “Can a mother forget her baby, or be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you. See, upon the palms of my hands I have engraved you” (Is 49).
Every person in heaven has absolute significance for you, and you have absolute significance for everyone. So, heaven is not like a Club Med vacation where you are still living in this world and where you are enjoying Pina Coladas on the beach, because on the beach, you are still a non-entity to others, and they are a non-entity to you. In heaven, you are the opposite of a non-entity. You are looked upon as having a significance as though you are the only being that exists, which is how God looks upon you.
And this life is about learning to love like that, but more to the point, learning to be loved like that, to allow God to love you like that. And we cannot love like that unless we allow ourselves to be loved like that. And that is the perennial problem with human beings: they don’t believe they can be loved like that. All they see is their flaws and imperfections. And so many devoutly religious people drift back into the Old Testament legalism where they feel they have to earn this love by works, by obedience to the law, by moral perfection, by measuring up to some standard. But we are not saved by our works, as St. Paul says. We are saved by grace. We are saved by faith, which is a grace. He writes: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Eph 2, 8-9).
The good news is that God looks upon you and me with rose colored glasses. Yes, he sees our faults and imperfections, but he also sees us as we are going to be, in all our perfection, when we have finally received perfectly the love he has for us and have become what God has intended us to become from the beginning. We will have a beauty that is inconceivable at this point.
But, how are we going to get to this point? That’s the frightening question. I am a long way off from this point. It’s easy to pay attention to people you don’t know, but when you get to know them, I’m happy to say goodbye and leave them on their way. Of course, we will see them in a different light when in heaven. They will see us in a different light, and vice versa. But it is important to think about how far we are from that point and how easy it is to treat others as non-entities. Compared to what we will be in the kingdom of God, we are rather loveless at this point. Our love is rather minimalistic. It’s certainly not heroic, at least for most of us.
But I do think we begin by paying attention to ordinary human beings. Looking for the extraordinary in them. Seeing them from God’s point of view. This is the advantage you have as members of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, serving the most insignificant people in this region, insignificant from the world’s point of view. But this is the entire purpose of theology, liturgy, sacramental preparation, life in the Church, etc. What is it all ordered to? It’s ordered to the service of the least of Christ’s brethren. That’s why the parable of the Last Judgment is so important. We are not going to be judged on our orthodoxy, nor are we going to be judged on our piety or our liturgical choreography, etc. We are going to be judged on how we achieved the very purpose of the Catholic faith, which is to find Christ in the poor and the forgotten and serve him there. He identifies with the least, hides himself in them, they are his disguise, and very few people have the eyes to see behind the disguise. It’s like a father dressing up as Santa Clause and fooling his children. But with a bit more experience and a sharper perception, the older child sees that this is not Santa, it’s her own father, but she says nothing. She plays along.
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You are the finger-tips of the body of Christ, so to speak. The muscles exist to move the humerus, which moves the radius and the ulna, together known as the forearm, which moves the hand, which moves the fingers, and the fingers actually do the work, they feed, or they provide medication for the patient, or clean the patient, etc. What can a nurse without fingers do? What is Christ’s Church, his Mystical body, without you? It’s like a hospital of nurses without hands and fingers. What good is that? All the medicine stays in storage cabinets, and everyone remains sick.
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Some people love pomp and ceremony. I don’t, personally. I avoid it. That’s why I loved Pope Francis. He knew poverty, he lived in the midst of poverty. He rejected bourgeois Catholicism, which is really a type of Catholicism that caters to the values, comforts, and economic structures of the middle and upper-middle classes and does not in any way challenge such values. But it is here, in the very unromantic service of the poor among us, in parish groups like yours, where you find faith and charity and the wisdom that stems from the supernatural virtue of charity.
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There are three priests in my life who are widely beloved. One day I decided to reflect upon why that is. What makes them so widely beloved. The one is a retired priest who now lives in Guelph. The other is a well-known priest from the archdiocese of Washington DC, who picked me up hitchhiking when I was a teenager–I told you about this story last year. And the other is my spiritual director, Father Frank Kelly, S.D.B., who died this past December. Why were these priests so widely loved? The answer is very simple. They were people who were interested in you, genuinely interested in you. They asked about you when they met you. They were interested in the work you do, in your perspective on things. I can’t tell you how many priests I’ve met in my life, who I’ve known for years, but who know virtually nothing about me. Why? Because they are not interested. They were not taught to be interested. This is what Pope Francis referred to as a self-referential Church. That’s one of the negatives of clerical status. The cleric begins to think he’s important, or has an importance that is greater than the non-cleric. The reason is that everybody treats him as such. And this is something Pope Francis exhorted the faithful not to do: put clerics on pedestals. Soon we begin to believe what others believe about us. But these three were not like that. They were interested in people, genuinely interested.
But this is where you come in. You awaken others to their own goodness by taking an interest in them.
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I used to point out to my Theory of Knowledge students that you could be standing in line at a Tim Hortons and you see this old guy sitting alone with a coffee, and as I mentioned earlier, he’s a non-entity to you, and you are a non-entity to him, but if you were to sit down in front of him and ask him to tell you about himself for the next hour or two, a whole new world would open up before you and you wouldn’t see that person the same way again. He’d have a definition and a life that would radiate.
And think of a cemetery, so many tombstones, but each one represents a rich world that is beyond us. Even if a thick biography were written about one of them, the biography would not capture all there is to know about this person, but only slivers of that person’s life. And yet there are billions of tombstones.
There is no doubt in my mind that the first few eons of heaven, which will be joyful beyond our imagining, will consist in the reading of biographies, not necessarily in print, of course. We will spend ages of ages, eons, (the Greek word is aionios) revealing our world to others and receiving their offering of their world to us. Just think of how much fascination there is in reading a good biography, and yet the ones we read are always so incomplete. We don’t even know ourselves, except very imperfectly. And think too of the joy of being understood, of having someone pay serious attention to us.
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The joy of heaven is inconceivable. But the way we begin to prepare for that joy is to pay attention to the forgotten, the unrecognized, the ones the world pays no attention to. We need to begin reading biographies now.
