A few afternoons a week I spend time with children, youth and young adults who live and/or work the busiest downtown train station and transportation hub in Buenos Aires. Hundreds of thousands of people pass through the Retiro station every day. Because of this, many youth and young adults living in situations of poverty come to Retiro to seek out opportunities to make money to live. When I first arrive to Retiro for the afternoon and greet my friends, the first question is almost always the same, “Did you bring …

The Gospel message, as I see it, is that we are loved without us having to earn or deserve it, and that this makes us free to love in the same way.  And community life is, for me, a great school for learning to love this way.
For one thing, it’s easy to love my neighbor gratuitously from 9 to 5 at work, but it’s a lot harder to exercise patience and generosity with those little-things-that-drive-you-crazy before having my two cups of coffee in the morning (my cup of justice, and …

For progress in living out my life in Christ will be in proportion to the surrender of my own self-love and of my own will and interests. [189] St. Ignatius, from the second week of the Exercises.
As an Ignatian Associate, I have made a promise of ‘Apostolic Availability’ (one of three promises an Associate makes.) Discerning how to live out this promise has been challenging for me at times. I am not really part of an order with a superior to whom I could make myself readily ‘available’ to go …