Last fall, some of you enjoyed meeting Fr. John McNamee, of St. Malachy Church in north Philadelphia. John was with us at St. Stephen one Friday evening, reading from his volumes of poetry and journals.

St. Malachy is located in a lower-middle class neighborhood of Philadelphia, and is only blocks away from neighborhoods of poverty as bad as any I've seen (including my recent trip to Africa). John has been in the neighborhoods of north Philadelphia for decades. Much of what he does is to respond to the needs of desperately poor people who show up at his door each day.

The other day I came across his "Pastor's Message" on the St. Malachy website. There's a photograph of the open front doors of the church, and this text, written in John's inimitable style:

Once there was a description of the great Dom Helder Camara, the Archbishop of Recife in the impoverished northeastern area of Brazil, how he would descend to his diocesan office everyday which was more a meeting room than an office and how he would everyday allow the people, mostly poor peasants, overwhelm him all day, everyday with their needs. This image of Dom Camara shaped this photograph of Saint Malachy's entrance in the hope that Saint Malachy Church and School and Rectory and Meeting Room and Staff could be this kind of welcome, this kind of place for any who come near. Thus this image of an open door. We hope that is what we are. Simply.

Wow. That sounds very much like the attitude of so many I met in Tanzania. That radical hospitality and availability.

Could I even approach such a level of hospitality? Instead, I have such a strong need to feel as if I am accomplishing something! John McNamee told me long ago that he doesn't worry about that; he simply does the work God gives him to do each day. That describes the attitude of other heroes of mine in the faith: St. Francis, Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day. (Dorothy Day never once worried about even putting together a budget for her Catholic Worker movement!)

It seems to me that this is life lived according to the model of Jesus, and I feel far away from that.

And how different it all is from what our dominant culture values: prioritizing and strategizing, setting objectives and measuring one's performance by them, making lists and checking off tasks accomplished.