If you haven’t listened to Sr. Bernice on the Hallow app you are really missing out, for she has the most magical voice. It’s joyful and solemn and holy all at the same time. I could listen to her talk for hours, but I digress. This week she shared her story about her father returning from the Korean War and starting a soup kitchen in their 2.5 room Baltimore apartment.
Before Sr. Bernice joined the Missionaries of Charity with Mother Theresa, her mama wanted her to read the love letters her father had written her during the Korean War.
It was clear that what kept him going was his love for God and his love for his wife.
Once the war finally ended another two years passed before Bernice’s father was brought home for, they could not find him. Once found and brought back to the VA hospital, her mother was asked, “If she wanted to do away with him?” They said he was delirious and that my Mama could get some extra money if she separated from him.
She would not hear of it and nursed him back to health, although it took nearly 40 years for him to recover. Many women in her situation could have and did, do away with their husbands. They staged other men in their homes so that when their husbands returned home they would be so heartbroken seeing their wife with another man, they would turn to the streets. Most probably wouldn’t blame these women. For the majority were missing limbs, suffering PTSD and couldn’t contribute to the household in any way. But if you believe in the butterfly effect, to think how the course of God’s plan would have been derailed if Bernice’s mother threw her father out. It would be one of history’s greatest missed opportunities.
After the War, Bernice’s childhood street was covered with veterans. Her dad would sit outside, and she would quietly sit with him. Other veterans looked up to her dad, and unable to walk, they would crawl over to him looking for consolation. Her dad would sing hymns and pray with them. Her dad would tell them, “You have been put out of one place, but you will have a better place.” He was pointing them towards Heaven. “Don’t think of where you have been but where you are going.”
These men were not just spiritually broken, they were physically malnourished. Since Bernice and her family barely had enough to eat, she was shocked when her dad told her he planned on starting a soup kitchen in their 2.5 room apartment. When she asked how that would work, he simply said, “God will provide.”
So, they invited people in and it would get so crowded you could barely move. They did not have much to share but as Sr. Bernice says, “If a poor person knows you helped them, and they have something, they will give it to you.” Soon bags of food started showing up at their door and they were able to feed the hungry every day.
And this is how Sr. Bernice got started working with the poor. Because her family came from the poorest of poor themselves. Because within that poverty, she saw a beautiful movement taking place. Sr. Bernice says she always wanted to be with people who were hurting because that’s what she did with her dad in the streets of Baltimore. How beautiful is that?
So, to think, if Sr. Bernice’s mother were to have followed so many other women in taking the easy way out, what the world would have been deprived of. The families that would have gone hungry and the veterans who would have had no will to go on. Sr. Bernice might have never been Sister. The thousands of people she has helped in her work as a Missionary of Charity and the millions that are listening to her story of the number one Catholic app in the world.
I guess when we follow Mother Theresa’s advice and “Love until it hurts,” the possibilities are endless.