Steve Oldham, Prep teacher, and I accompanied seven rising seniors from Saint Joseph's Prep on a service trip to Camden. The students were willing and generous and spent the week visiting with the homeless, the disabled, the elderly and people with HIV. They learned a lot about the poverty and lack of opportunity that are a plague in Camden.

Below is my recent reflection on discipleship when preaching on the sixth chapter of Mark where Jesus encourages his disciples to take some time in prayer and reflection away from the crowds of people that seem always to impose themselves:

"My last year of work with a variety of young men of high school age, many of them talented and privileged, underlined what has been my general experience in the past. Young people want to show off their goodness. But many have been sheltered and need to be shepherded in other directions, especially into relationships with those in need. They will respond to these relationships with more compassion than cynicism. They will respond to these relationships with more love than indifference.

In the last century we did much that calls for repentance. But we had celebrated leaders that told us the truth in their preaching and in their lives. The list of great saints, in civil and in church society, often in both, is a litany that leads me to look on the last century as a time of great prophetic work. But we need to ask the question about their heritage in the present century and about their disciples: where are the disciples of Dr. King and Dorothy Day today? Where are the disciples of Mother Theresa and John the XXIII today? Where are the disciples of Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi today?

I think that they are everywhere; whether their work is ecumenical or environmental, whether their work is peacemaking or social economics, we pray that they will hear an invitation from the Lord to take a break and to learn from him about compassion for people and trust in the Father."