God Was Doing a Great Work in Me

Episode 1

Matthew Flynn ’14 M.Div.

“So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13: 13).

As a junior at Notre Dame, I spent a summer in Puno, Peru, helping at a center that served people in need. It was there that I came to understand the real essence of faith, hope, and love.

I had been raised Catholic and attended Catholic school since kindergarten. At Notre Dame, I prayed daily, visited the Grotto almost every day, frequently attended daily Mass, and habitually went to Confession. I was also a joint philosophy and theology major. I thought I had the Catholic thing down.

I was certainly a well-educated and practicing Catholic, but I was self-assured in my faith and in my view of the world. I had faith in the economics, politics, and social theories of our time, and my hope for peace and prosperity in the world rested in them.

The poverty I encountered in Peru unflinchingly challenged me and led me to despair. I could see exactly how people were suffering—lives taken or ruined, livelihoods destroyed, voices denied—because of the economics, politics, and social theories I believed in and had accepted as part of my worldview. These structures offered these people no hope at all. Sharing their reality shattered my worldview.

I could not maintain my faith in the world-as-it-was anymore. My worldview and my confident, self-assured faith were broken. I was stripped of my illusions and was left in darkness.

All I could hold on to were the faces of the people I had met: a destitute old woman sitting in the same doorway every day; a 30-year old man who looked 60 because of his constant exposure to the elements; everyone at the pastoral center; a 13-year old girl who was raped; and all the families, living in the countryside with almost nothing.

I didn’t realize it then, but God was doing a great work in me, answering the questions I couldn’t even ask—questions about meaning and suffering, life and happiness, and how we go on in despair. God gave me an anchor: the simple but profound notion that at the center of everything is love.

Within the poverty, I saw joy, friendship, generosity, and the loving support of families, friends, and neighbors, and it gave me a vision of giving of oneself for the good of another. I was coming to know Christ not primarily as a teacher, model, helper, or friend, but as the one who walks with us in our suffering, shares our yoke, and gives himself away for our own good.

This quiet awakening transformed how I saw the world. It didn’t happen all at once, but I left Peru on the path to being a different man. As I returned to Notre Dame for my senior year, people noticed I was different even though they didn’t understand what had precipitated the change.

I had trouble talking about it—I really didn’t know how to articulate it—but people noticed my priorities had changed. I wasn’t interested in theoretical arguments anymore. I was more withdrawn and slow to speak as I continued to process everything. I had to let the easy answers of my past fall away. I thought about my future differently—not about what I could do but about how I could let God continue to form me.

I knew I had growing to do. I wanted to practice the faith I had been learning and studying. I wanted to be a disciple, to learn a new way of life and be transformed by Christ, instead of fitting my religion into the world I lived in.

After graduating, I decided to join the staff at the Catholic Worker in South Bend so I could practice the works of mercy and grow in love. My universe was beginning, for the first time, to rotate around a single point: Jesus Christ. He had become the foundation of my faith and the reason for my hope for the world. And, to this day, his love animates and inspires me to embrace his life, albeit slowly and painfully.

My hope is that someday, if someone were to consider all my personal qualities, they would be able to say, “The greatest of these is love.”