Ministry and excess things

People have things they don't need, and sometimes other people need those things.  So here are three anecdotes on the intersection of surplus items and ministry.

1.  Clothing and furniture.  This past July, I posted the text of a homily that talked about a large condominium fire in my area.  About 100 families were displaced, many of them immigrants.  Our parish's Outreach ministry organized a clothing and food drive.  The response was amazing - we collected clothing and food all weekend, and filled a classroom with what was donated.  People were pulling up in cars all weekend and unloading trunkloads of clothing to donate.   Other parishes and individual donors also stepped up from all over the suburban area.  So much clothing was collected by parishes and social service agencies that the groups trying to coordinate relief efforts - Catholic Charities and the Red Cross - begged everyone to stop donating, as they had nowhere to store the items.  We ended up donating some of our clothing to the Salvation Army because it was literally the only place we could find that still was accepting donations - and they also stopped accepting further donations a few hours later.  Probably enough clothing came forward to clothe thousands of victims.  I was left pondering the immense amount of excess clothing that people in the community apparently were hoarding in their closets.

A parishioner from a neighboring parish, who works in the commercial real estate business, began to think of what else these families would need.  They'd all need a new place to live - and all of them would need to furnish their new apartments.  Catholic Charities and other social service agencies were making funds available for the families to pay the first month's rent and security deposits, but if the families were on their own to come up with furniture.  So this person asked his employer if he could temporarily use some unused warehouse space.  Then he rented a moving van, and let it be known via Facebook and the parish bulletin that he would pick up any furniture from individual donors who would like to assist the fire victims.

He was buried with furniture donations.  For about six weekends in a row, he picked up bedroom sets, dining room sets, living room furniture, and other items that the owners, all homeowners in the area, apparently didn't need or want.  He stored them in his company's warehouse, and then delivered them to families who requested them.  At this point, it seems the victim families have found other places to live and have furnishings, so he put an end to his operation; he was able to donate whatever furniture items were left over to a municipal government that had another condominium fire.  But he's still getting calls from people who want to donate furniture.  It seems that the amount of extra furniture around here is virtually bottomless.

2.  Cemetery plots.  A recent post sparked discussion about some of the complications around burial arrangements: where to be buried, whether to be buried, and so on.

I do volunteer work with a rather unusual organization called Rest in His Arms.  It's a tiny non-profit whose original mission is a bit strange but, as it turns out, necessary: it claims the remains of infants and children who are abandoned and die (or die and whose remains are abandoned), and provides a Catholic funeral and burial for them.  Typically, this involves taking possession of unclaimed remains from county coroners (or, in Cook County, the medical examiner's office) and then arranging for a funeral and burial.

The organization was started by two women in this local suburban area, strangers to one another at the time, who each read a newspaper article about the body of an infant discovered in a local landfill.   Each of them called the coroner at about the same time to ask if there was anything she could do to get the child properly buried.  The coroner connected the two women, and together they figured out how to claim the child, and find a funeral home and cemetery that might donate the necessary goods and services to get the child buried.   One of those women is a parishioner who asked me if I'd like to attend the funeral - that's how I got involved.

Since then, we've buried about 40 other children, all who were abandoned in the Chicago area.  A number of the cases have generated local and even, on occasion, national and international publicity - most of the children we bury are victims of crimes in one way or another, and a lot of news orgs still have crime beats that are in touch with local police departments.  The publicity has led to a lot of people stepping forward with offers to help.  Most of that is in the form of financial donations, but people offer all sorts of other goods and services - for example, a purveyor of headstones in Georgia told us he'd love to donate headstones for our children.

One unexpected commodity that people have offered to donate is cemetery plots.  It seems that there are any number of folks out there who own cemetery plots, have no intention of utilizing them, and don't know what to do with them.  I admit it's not clear to me how people end up with excess cemetery plots, but it happens.  Several times a year, strangers ask us if we would please take two or four plots off their hands.  At first, our board figured that a cemetery plot is an asset with a monetary value, so if people want to give them to us - why not accept them?  Only now we believe we've accumulated as many as, or more than, we're ever likely to need, so we almost never accept them now.  But still the offers come forward. 

3.  Wedding dresses.  The organization I just mentioned, Rest in His Arms, has also branched off into a new activity.  It was spurred by one of our board members who does volunteer work in hospitals and had observed that, when babies miscarry, sometimes they are treated as, and disposed of as, medical waste.  This upsets some parents and also some nurses and other hospital employees.  So the leader of our org began a ministry to make what she calls Angel Gowns: small burial outfits for babies who miscarry or are stillborn in hospitals.  These are made from wedding dresses, which are broken down, cut up into smaller pieces and then sewn creatively to create the gowns.

She didn't invent the concept - there are other organizations that do similar work - but she's pretty energetic and she's a good organizer.  She's got (for want of a better term) sewing circles organized around the area to make the gowns.  And through Facebook, she let it be known that she is accepting wedding dress donations.  Who would donate a wedding dress?  Well it turns out that there are hundreds and hundreds of women who have wedding dresses hanging in their closets or stored in their attics who will never wear the dress and don't know what else to do with it.  They are delighted to donate it to our organization (and claim a tax deduction).

Our leader's living room filled up with wedding dresses.  Then her garage filled up.  Now she has a storage unit stacked floor to ceiling with wedding dresses.  She's recently had to put a moratorium on wedding dress donations until her seamstress volunteers (to the best of my knowledge, there are no male volunteers - certainly not me, I can't even thread a needle) can work through the current inventory.  The organization has Sewing Saturdays in church basements, in which 20 or 40 or 60 ladies bring their sewing machines to church and go to work.  We've donated many hundreds of Angel Gowns to hospitals around the country and internationally, and demand for them is brisk.