Compassion

A min­istry of pres­ence makes up the core of the mis­sion of Heart’s Home, for this reason Mary standing at the foot of the cross is the model and example of the Heart’s Home charism.

“In the vast array of desires that may fill our hearts – desires for mate­rial things, power, sta­bility, lib­erty, sex, sur­vival, any­thing – the fun­da­mental desire, underneath all the noise, residing in the deepest cham­bers of our heart, is the desire to be loved and to love; and in the end, to be known and loved com­pletely and thor­oughly, not because of what we do but despite it all – to be loved without con­di­tion.
This is where the vol­un­teers of Heart’s Home find their mis­sion, in the middle of this drama of the human heart. (Heart’s Home, by the way, is the English trans­la­tion from the French Points-Coeur, the crit­ical point of the heart). We split our time between the chapel and the streets of Villa Jardin, com­mu­ni­cating love and friend­ship as (hope­fully, with your prayers) signs of the ulti­mate Source of love that knows and loves us thor­oughly and uncon­di­tion­ally. Our mis­sion is not to change the people around us, start pro­grams, or give mate­rial aid, though those actions may cer­tainly be char­i­table. Primarily, our mis­sion is to be an abiding pres­ence: to be with the people in their lives and to listen to them. My first six weeks here have been a tumul­tuous ori­en­ta­tion to this life, whether that be speaking and lis­tening to our friends and neigh­bors in my (thus far) clumsy Spanish, spending part of the day with the kids in the Villa, sit­ting in on their Catechism classes and playing soccer with them, or vis­iting the elderly or the AIDS and tuber­cu­losis patients in the nearby chil­dren’s hos­pital.”

Grayson Heenan in mis­sion in Argentina, 2010