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During her time in Hebron, Palestine, Cory Lockhart carried alcohol pads in her pockets to counter the effects of tear gas and tried to make sure that Israeli soldiers saw that she, a Westerner, witnessed their actions.
As a member of a Christian Peacemaker Team, Lockhart lived and witnessed in six-week stints with the Palestinian people, devoting herself to nonviolent peacemaking.
In unguarded moments, she says, those young soldiers reminded her of the faces of the Catholic students she taught for 14 years before getting her master’s degree in spirituality from a joint program betweeen Bellarmine University and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
When she managed to catch their eyes, she silently prayed: “I wish all of us love in our hearts, a love that is generous and vast.”
That sense of vast love, she says, is what drives her understanding of God and her mission in the world. “I want to operate from love and trust. That’s the central message of the gospels—to love your neighbor.”
Lockhart’s job at JustFaith Ministries (which asks on its home page, “Are you called to change the world?”) allows her to continue her volunteer commitment to Christian Peacemaker Teams.
JustFaith runs programs that bring the church’s social justice teachings to parishes and satisfies her desire to live a life of mission in the world—albeit with less risk and heartache.
“I use the word ‘calling,’ ” says Lockhart when describing her work. “We’re trying to engage people so that they are living out the gospel message of being Good News to the poor, feeding the hungry—and also raising questions about why people are hungry.”
The oldest vocation in the book
Lockhart is part of a wave of Catholic women living out their faith in the world. She joins a burgeoning number of women in the United States and worldwide who work for nonprofit organizations and volunteer for groups that address injustice through social activism.
This career choice is not an arbitrary one; these women describe their work as a vocation. This is what God is calling them to do. Continue reading
Sources
- U.S. Catholic, from an article written by Kristen Hannum, a freelance journalist based in Denver, Colorado.
- Image: Marist Asia Foundation
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