Kerry Weber - Mercy in the City: How to Feed the Hungry, Give Drink to the Thirsty, Visit the Imprisoned, and Keep Your Day Job

And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all.

Pope Francis, America

I sit on my bed, lace up my shoes, and assure myself that if the nuns reject me on the basis of my footwear, I dont want anything to do with them anyway. After sifting through my closet, I decide to wear dark jeans and a black sweater with a white collar sewn into the neckline, so that it looks like Im wearing a button-down shirt. This decision has come largely by default, as this item of clothing is more professional-looking than 98 percent of my wardrobe, which Ive purchased mostly at thrift shops. However, the shoes Im lacing up are new. And yet Im still unsure if they are appropriatewhite faux leather, with black stripes on the sides. They would be professional-looking if I were a professional bowler, or perhaps a golfer, but I am neither. In fact, I am not feeling particularly ready to be a professional anything. I am a college senior about to graduate. I am an English major without a specific career plan (which is to say, I am an English major). I am going on my first job interview, and I am searching for some feeling of control. So I decide I am going to wear whatever shoes I damn well please.

The interview is a couple of miles from campus, so I climb into the 1993 Camry I share with my younger brother, Matthew. A few minutes later I pull up in front of a white, multifamily house with a small front porch. Sister Carol Mary, a Sister of Mercy with a long, dark ponytail, lets me in. I am immediately charmed by the eclectic nature of the furniture and religious imagery scattered about the house. A meal is being prepared by another Sister of Mercy along with a few other women, one of whom wears a sweatshirt with a nature scene on it. They are reheating leftovers from a recent Easter dinner. Mixed vegetables sit in a glass dish beside slices of baked ham and crusty bread.

As an interviewer for the Mercy Volunteer Corps, Sister Carol Mary is my first contact with the Mercy sisters full-time volunteer program. If all goes well, when I leave the house, I will be one step closer to joining a community of fellow volunteers who have a desire to serve othersto give back, as I and countless others, Im sure, have said in our applications. Although I, for one, am not quite certain what Im giving and to whom.

Id spent hours flipping through a cross-referenced guide to domestic and international volunteer programs, as well as various brochures and pamphlets Id picked up at my schools volunteer fair. Then Id opened a simple brochure printed on bright yellow paper. Among the sites listed, one caught my eye: a group of volunteers would live in trailers on the Navajo reservation in the high desert of Arizona, it said. They would work at a school for children with special needs. I was struck by this description, because although everything in it would be new to me, it still felt like a place that was familiar, somewhere I could belong. And somehow this feeling had led me to this two-family house and this dinner and this interview, where I sat trying to convince a sister from a religious order Id never heard of to let me join a bunch of people Id never met so that I could travel to a place Id never been and try to do a job for which I wasnt sure I was even qualified.

I sit down at the table, and we say grace together. The food is warm and comforting, and later in the evening the women clean up the table and I am led to the living room for an interview. As I walk out, one of the women, the one in the sweatshirt with the nature scene, looks at me and wishes me good luck. And then she looks down at my feet, and she says with genuine enthusiasm: I like your shoes. For the first time that evening, for the first time in a long time, I really feel like everything is going to be OK.

This was my first prayerful encounter with the charism, or animating spirit, of mercy. I certainly didnt realize then the impact the charism eventually would have on my life, how it would begin to settle into my consciousness during my time on the Navajo reservation, how it would motivate me even before I could explain what it meant. Or how years later, after moving to New York, it would push me to seek out the Sisters of Mercy and that spirit again. How, in a city with twenty-four-hour stores, eight million people, and infinite possibilities, it would help me find peace.