In the modern world of good works, there seem to be two pertinent types of people: those who help and those who need help.
You can tell the ones who help by the mailing lists they are on, and the momentous moral choices they face when they open the daily dunning: “But we can’t do it without your generous assistance . . . “
You can tell the ones who need help by various little hints about them in those fundraising letters: the places they live, their tales of misfortune and the nagging implication that they are virtually paralyzed by their circumstances.
So which kind of person is Marlee Benton?
On one hand, Benton grew up in the Lathrop Homes, a Near North Side public housing development. She attended inner-city public schools. She faced the kind of obstacles that make it difficult to graduate from high school, much less get a chance at a college education.
On the other hand, she found time as a teenager to tutor younger children, to counsel against drug use and to volunteer at the Lathrop Boys and Girls Club. Since then, she has helped to build affordable housing for poor people in the Appalachians and to deliver meals to homebound AIDS patients in New York. Now she wants to focus her efforts back on Chicago, volunteering at a women’s shelter and getting involved with Habitat for Humanity.
In short, Marlee Benton is the kind of person who needed some help to get where she is now, but still saw it as her responsibility–and her opportunity–to help other people along the way.
In a few weeks, Benton will be the first student to graduate from DePaul University under a four-year-old scholarship program named for Monsignor Jack Egan.
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Egan, 81, now runs DePaul’s Office of Community Affairs. But for much of his career, he was the Archdiocese of Chicago’s point man in the inner city, a Catholic priest who believed that his church’s teaching demanded that he fight for those who had the least.
When DePaul decided to set up a scholarship fund in his honor, university officials wanted to honor Egan’s commitment to Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.
They also wanted to encourage students who would follow Egan’s example in service.
So they did both. The Egan Hope Scholarship gives academic support and up to $10,000 a year to students from public housing and the city’s worst neighborhoods, covering the difference between government grants and the full cost of private college tuition, on-campus housing, books and expenses.
To qualify for the scholarship, students must demonstrate their need. But they must also have established a track record of volunteerism in the service of the needy. They commit to community service throughout their college years and must profess a desire to continue working for others after graduation.
The program currently has 17 students enrolled, growing by a few students each year. Despite the demands, only one has dropped out.
Some have an overtly religious motivation for their service, including one student who is a Baptist minister and another who directs a gospel choir. Others pursue more secular causes. But that all fits well into Egan’s ecumenical approach to his Catholic faith.
“Not only did Jesus go about doing good, but he created a church where all those who followed him would be committed to one another, no matter who they were, Jew or Gentile, rich or poor,” he said.
If you approach it that way, it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish between those who are obligated to help, and those who need help. Broadly speaking, faith in God leads one to believe that no person is so poor they have nothing to offer, and nobody is so rich they couldn’t use a hand.
But then, those who devote themselves to community service often say they have a hard time figuring out who benefits the most out of these arrangements anyway.
“I was so fortunate to meet those people,” Benton said of those she has volunteered to tutor, counsel and serve. “And I hope they feel fortunate to meet me; it’s definitely been a two-way street.”
Sign of peace: In advance of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. general assembly, June 13-20, church leaders are proposing something radical: no fighting about sex.
After 20 years of conflict, recent general assemblies have culminated in a flurry of conflicting constitutional amendments on the issues of marriage, sexuality and homosexuality, followed by 11 months of grinding debate at the local level.
This year, however, all three candidates for churchwide moderator are making a plea for no new action on sex. At the same time, leaders of some of the church’s most influential coalitions on both sides of the question–including Rev. John Buchanan of Chicago, representing the Covenant Network of Presbyterians–have issued their own appeal for a “sabbatical” on issues of sexuality.
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