Day 2: Compelled to Share
Editor’s Note: On the second day of our 2025 Advent blog series, “Visions of Visitation: Love in Motion,” lay missioner Mary Liston Liepold, OFS reflects on the gifts that she has been blessed with and how she shares them during her time on mission.
“The haste of the young woman of Nazareth is the haste of those who have received extraordinary gifts from the Lord and feel compelled to share them, to let the immense grace that they have experienced be poured out upon others.” Pope Francis, Message for World Youth Day 2022-2023
“Extraordinary gifts.” Hmm. My first impulse is to demur, like Miss Piggy. “Moi?” Little old me? But in fact, even though I grew up poor by the standards of my time and place, giftedness was a message my mother was determined to impart to her children. She sent $3 and $5 contributions to a wide range of global missions every month, and never failed to remind us that we had food, shelter, and opportunities for schooling when many others did not.
In all Franciscan humility, I HAVE been richly gifted. Online sources say only about 2% of the global population reaches the age of 80, though that percentage is increasing year by year. I will be 81 in a few days, and I enjoy excellent health and mobility, as well as relative affluence. I have been generously loved, through all these years, and been able to give love.
In a pioneering 1989 essay, Margaret McIntosh gave us the indelible image of the invisible knapsack. She focused first on the privileges male colleagues enjoyed that she was denied as a woman, then came to see something else: white privilege. She describes it as “… an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious … an invisible, weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.” She lists 26 items in her own pack. My list, when I sat down to write it out some years ago, was longer than hers, and though they’re not tied to skin color, my unearned gifts also include the faith I received from my parents and my vocation as a Secular Franciscan. Pope Francis cites Psalm 71, v. 15: “My mouth shall proclaim your just deeds, day after day your acts of deliverance, though I cannot number them all.” Gracias a Dios!
Being on the US-Mexico border at the intersection of fates and cultures this year, I must add one more unearned and formerly unacknowledged gift. I am free to come and go without fear, while my neighbors are harassed and detained in abominable conditions for being brown and hopeful. So, yes, Lord, I am compelled to share my gifts, and I am gifted to be in a place where there are both needs to be met and a beloved community of helpers who work together to meet them. I can never be grateful enough.
Thank you, gracious God, and please continue to guide me in finding ways to “Awake and arise” each day, as this papal message urges, and to “pour my gifts upon others” in “healthy haste.”
Question for Reflection: What gifts do you have in your “invisible knapsack” that you can share during this Advent season?
