When I was a teen, I don’t recall being asked to volunteer. I was just thrown in. Maybe my mother signed me up, maybe one of my older sisters invited me to come along or one of the priests spotted us after Mass and said, “We could use your help Sunday afternoon.” However it happened, those activities were simply part of daily life.
So, once a month, I would find myself helping at the senior dinners at St. Pius X in Rodgers Forge. My sisters and I would climb down the wide, steep staircase into the school gym. Then we’d jump into helping bring the dinners to life, gearing up for our many guests to arrive.
Dozens of senior citizens from the parish would come streaming into the gym for a feast cooked by a few outstanding volunteer chefs. Depending on the week, those cooks would ladle scoops of savory sauces out of enormous stockpots, strain steaming vats of pasta, or – during March – slide corned beef and cabbage onto plates. Then teens would make sure the meals made it to the tables.
We were young, but we had plenty to coordinate, making sure the baskets of rolls and butter stayed full and that the guests didn’t run out of iced tea and lemonade. We circled the gym with trays of little bowled salads, filling out the meal while the gym buzzed with conversation.
We worked hard to make the dinners happen, but mostly we had fun. We worked that room as if it were a marvelous game, making sure no one ran out of anything, and keeping our chefs in the kitchen updated on how people were enjoying the food. And they were. We gave them a warm, delicious, inexpensive meal while they soaked in time with friends and fellow parishioners.
Once everyone had been served, we sat down to eat ourselves – enjoying the same meal we had given to our guests. As the afternoon ended, we would say goodbye to the diners we knew we would see again in a few weeks and start clearing plates and cleaning up the mess. Cleaning up was never as much fun as delivering food to the tables, but it was all part of the experience, and I remember those afternoons with pleasure.
As I look back, I realize that I never really saw what we were doing as volunteering. It was more of a social event for me one Sunday afternoon a month. I was part of a team, and I knew my contributions mattered. Once I started going, I never would have missed it, because it was so much fun.
Maybe that was the best part for me – not those delicious little salads in the foam bowls or the treats we enjoyed for dessert. The best part was discovering that serving others can be more fun than spending the afternoon doing what you thought you wanted to do.
“If we wish to serve God and love our neighbor well, we must manifest our joy in the service we render to him and them,” St. Katharine Drexel tells us. “Let us open wide our hearts. It is joy which invites us. Press forward and fear nothing.”
As the summer comes to a close and a more ordinary pace of life returns, may this season offer us new opportunities to open our hearts and serve others with joy.
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