The police chief and mayor have been in news pleading with parents, church ministers and citizens to change the young men in our community who are committing senseless acts of violence. We can preach giving up violence to young men all we want, but children and young adults learn more from what we do than what we say. When a young African-American male is stopped in car because the policeman thinks he is suspicious or a an African-American man is arrested by 8 police officer for begging, a long Christian tradition, on the Marquette University campus they learn more about how others think of them than from any words preached to them.

A long time ago human beings learned that they cannot effectively change other people but can really only change themselves. John the Baptist called for a “change of heart” to prepare for the Way of Jesus. Ammon Hennacy, a Christian Anarchist and Catholic Worker probably said it best in his book “Book of Ammon”. “We really can’t change the world. We really can’t change other people! The best we can do is to start a few thinking here and there. The best way to do this, if we are sincere, is to change ourselves!” In the same book he says: “Too many of us dissipate our energy by being “for all good causes,” attending meetings and passing resolutions, organizing and presenting petitions — all this effort to change others, when if we really got down to it we could use this energy to change ourselves… We become tired radicals because we use our weakest weapon: the ballot box, where we are always outnumbered, and refuse to use our strongest weapon: spiritual power.” Ammon lived before the digital age which has intensified this false sense of change.

Now, if we ask ‘how do we change ourselves’ Gandhi has a simple statement: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Now living in a world spinning with information, a world of radical individualism, where right and wrong is not very clear defined, where some lives matter more than others and where the gap between rich and poor is widening. There are just so many distractions. Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement showed us the way to revolution. “The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?”

Today I helped a friend who lives in poverty help another friend get the medication she desperately needed. It took my friend all day to help her friend. It took me just a little while to get the money for prescriptions. As the lady was leaving the pharmacy she thanked me for my little help. My friend who lives in poverty also profusely thanked me. I told both of them to pray for me as I have been blessed by God via them. I ask God to apply the grace and blessings I received to a “change of heart” for myself.

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