Digital artist Sr. Ellen LaCapria, D.C. offers a visual aid to enter into contemplation about those excluded and trapped in cycles of poverty. This image arose from her reflection on Pope Francis’ Gospel of Joy. This is the second installment of her weekly artistic variations on her community seal.

At the margins, like a centrifuge are those who, as hard as they try, continue to be spinning out beyond the opportunities that exist at the center.

54. …the excluded are still waiting.To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.

Those on the margins can be easily forgotten. As children in school, when we do not want to be called upon we think to ourselves ‘if I don’t look up, if I don’t see you, you can’t see me.’ What keeps us hidden becomes a center of abundance which begins to push out those who need us, further away from our grasp. The center of abundance becomes a soft shield to keep us content, feeding us with the false feeling that ‘I have done all that I can do.’ How can I take a walk out to the margins to see and be seen in order to bring back those who are excluded and still waiting, before it is too late? God can help us overcome the soft center as long as we do not carry a hardened heart.

From APOSTOLIC EXHORTATION EVANGELII GAUDIUM OF THE HOLY FATHER FRANCIS ON THE PROCLAMATION OF THE GOSPEL IN TODAY’S WORLD

Father Gregory Gay C.M. urged the Vincentian Family in his Lenten Letter 2014 to recognize and encounter “People on the Periphery” and awaken an awareness to the “Globalization of Indifference.”

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