Sippy Cups for Christ
by Marion Fernandez-Cueto in Faith on Monday, January 18, 2010 6:00 AM
The week of my 18th birthday, I squashed everything I owned into two suitcases and left our Connecticut home—and two breathlessly anxious parents—to volunteer at a Catholic shelter for homeless and battered women in Houston. Intoxicated with that adolescent cocktail of idealism and invincibility, I lived and worked at the shelter five years.
They were glorious and heartbreaking. We volunteers had a mantra we’d repeat to one another when the going got rough: “Matthew 25! Remember Matthew 25.”
Matthew 25 refers to that passage in the Gospel where Jesus describes the Last Judgment, how He will separate out “like sheep from goats” those who have faithfully served Him. “Come, blessed of my Father,” He tells the saved, “inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and imprisoned and you visited me.” He then turns and condemns the others for failing to do those same things.
There’s an exhilarating relevance to Matthew 25 when you’re a perky, inner-city volunteer helping needy families find food, clothing, medical care and restraining orders. But nine years later, now a stay-at-home mother, I found the same passage put me on edge. Those words which had once guided and encouraged me now provoked only a restless sense of guilt: they resembled my daily activities not one jot.
Safe in our comfortable home, flanked by my rosy-cheeked, privileged children, I sometimes felt like a sellout. What had happened to my ideals? What if I were still meant to be serving the poor downtown, not feathering my own little nest in suburbia? Compared to the raw adventure, the bracing faith-in-action of my youth, family life and its workaday routine appeared petty and confining. Diapers and naps and playgroups and teddies—Matthew 25 doesn’t work in this context, I thought. If that’s how God is going to judge the world, moms like me are in a boatload of trouble.
I hadn’t been reading very carefully.
What’s striking in Matthew 25 is the sheer incredulity of the just and the damned alike at Christ’s judgment: both groups are stunned to discover their love for God has been measured very simply: by how they treated those around them while on earth. No one seems able to grasp that all the little things they did to and for others were actually done to Christ Himself. “But when did we see you, Lord?” both groups protest, and their mutual astonishment is by turns wonderful and terrifying.
One morning at Mass last year, I experienced that incredulity myself. The Gospel reading was Matthew 25, and as the familiar passage rang out, I had a revelation so abrupt, complete and unbidden it felt like a vision.
“I was hungry, and you gave me food, thirsty and you gave me drink,” read the lector, and I saw, not my usual image of a soup kitchen, but the breakfast I had cooked that morning for our hungry clan, my toddler’s waving sippy cup, the baby sweetly nursing.
“I was a stranger, and you welcomed me,” the reading continued, and instead of the homeless shelter, I recalled my pregnancies, when I’d struggled to embrace the arrival of a new and unknown little person.
“I was naked, and you clothed me” (God seemed to be whispering right in my ear now) and I saw my children piling wet and giggling out of the bath, snatching up clean pajamas from a stack of freshly folded laundry.
“I was sick and imprisoned”—my son, grumpy and bedridden with the flu—“and you came to me”—all those trips upstairs with soup and stories and juice ...
I was about to roll my eyes (sippy cups and pj’s for Christ? Really?) but I found they had filled instead.
“As surely as you did it to the least of these, my brethren, you did it to me.”
That’s how the reading ends, and as I heard the words, I grasped for just one ravishing moment the sheer scandal of the Incarnation, so wondrous and devastating in its particularity. The mystery we have just celebrated at Christmas means not one thing we do on earth will ever have the same meaning again. God walks among us, and whether the hand stretched out in need belongs to a starving beggar or a member of our own dear family, we make our response to Emmanuel Himself.
As Dorothy Day once wrote, “it is no good to say we were born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ.” He is here, now, and as in Matthew 25, He seeks to purify our human notions, even our most cherished ideals, about what it means to love God. Every moment, every action, can be given to Him, for all are freighted with stupendous significance: a chance to serve Him in the flesh.
For moms like me, that’s the Good News indeed.
—Marion Fernandez-Cueto writes from Houston, TX. She was baptized into the Catholic Church in 2000.
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