INTERVIEW: Meg Hunter-Kilmer on Stories of Faith, Hope and Love

In our third CV Connect Webinar we were joined by Meg Hunter-Kilmer, a cradle Catholic and revert to the Faith, who credits her reversion to a grace-filled Confession, and what she calls the supreme logic of Catholic doctrine. She has a bachelor's and a master's degree in theology from the University of Notre Dame. Five years into her career as a religion teacher she quit her job, packed up everything into the boot of her car, and then set off driving around the country as a full-time missionary. You can find out more about her at her blog Pierced Hands.

Meg Hunter-Kilmer is a speaker, blogger, and ‘hobo for Christ’. She travels the world speaking to groups and sharing the love of God.

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Catholic Voices (CV): You live one of those lives that is a real challenge to me, because I meet people like you who – I would say – are abandoned to divine providence. How did you arrive at that decision of just going in your car from place to place as a lay missionary? What has that looked like for the past few years?

Meg: I was a teacher for five years and I knew that God was calling me out of the classroom; I had really loved teaching and all of a sudden all of the peace and all of the joy was just gone. I'm not just saying that about when things are hard to run, but when things are supernaturally hard, pay attention. If everything external is the same, and the internal has changed, you got to listen to that.

So I took it to prayer and I just felt like the Lord was telling me it was time to move on. I was, like, ‘Great, but what does that even mean? I have a master's degree in theology – that and a winning personality will get you a second interview at McDonald's – this is not a lucrative degree.’ And I took it to prayer, and I took it to a priest friend of mine, and asked him what I was supposed to do, and he said ‘Well, you're good at public speaking, why don't you do more of that?’ I was, like, ‘That's cute – you can't quit life and be a public speaker, that's not a thing.’ And I prayed about it and I just felt the Lord was saying, ‘Tell me why not.’ I don't hear voices when I pray – some people do and that's cool – but sometimes you just know exactly what the Lord is saying. It seemed like a good idea to be homeless and unemployed indefinitely.

And I'm not a bohemian type: I'm very 'type A', very achievement-orientated, very focused on impressing people, so I was sitting here thinking ‘Oh yes, I should definitely go to my ten-year reunion at my high school where a dozen of my classmates literally work for NASA and be like “I live in a car.”’ And when that seemed like a good idea I said that's got to be the Holy Spirit because there is zero possibility that I came up with that. I thought it was going to be for a couple of months; it'll be eight years next month, and so far so good.

CV: The coronavirus pandemic is challenging all sorts of people depending on their states of life, but presumably you're stuck in one place now, which must be a change. What are the challenges and opportunities that you're finding now in this season of your life?

Meg: You know, God is so good. In October I had been sort of praying – I don't really plan things out more than two or three months in advance, sometimes like ten minutes in advance, depending on what the Lord is doing, but I usually have a vague sketch a few months out. In October I was looking ahead to January, and I had these invitations and was thinking where should I go, and I just felt like the Lord was saying ‘No, I want you to pull back, I want you to take some time off and get some writing done.’ 

In January-February I ended up having a little bit going on, but I was like ‘March and April are sacrosanct – I'm going to find a place, I'm going to stay there, and I'm going to write.’ And then March and April hit and it turns out one has to find a place and stay there because otherwise one will be arrested. Well, almost – we're not quite at that level yet!

At one point I was like, ‘Maybe I'll go to Europe and write there,’ so I had been toying with buying a plane ticket that was going to end up leaving me in Italy in early March, which as it turns out would not have been a great time to be in Italy.

I had had to buy the ticket on a certain day when there was this big sale, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to get it by 2am when the sale ends,’ but I ended up spending the entire day just pouring out and loving people in their brokenness. At the end of the day, at three o'clock in the morning, I was like, ‘Well, I missed the window to buy the ticket but I was being who God's asking me to be, and if I miss an opportunity because I'm being faithful to the present moment, that is the will of God.’

So then, when corona hit, it turned out that it was definitely the will of God that I not be in northern Italy in early March. Okay!

CV: Some of what you're describing would terrify people, this being so ‘presently’ oriented and the lack of control and security. Could you share any insights from your experience of ‘living in abandonment to divine providence,’ of trying to be more attuned to the present moment?

Meg: So this is not natural to me – I am a planner. I love control – if you had asked me when I was seventeen years old, I could have told you the names of my future children and the profession of my future husband. I didn't think that I had met him, I just had come up with what I thought would probably be best for our family life as missionaries.

I like plans, and that is why I live out of a car, because the Lord knows that I just grasp control and I cling to it, so he’s spent years just prying open my fingers to keep them from atrophying. I think a really big thing for me in trusting that God is at work in the present and that he's going to take care of me in the future is letting go of the past. It's very easy for us to be sitting here right now, and maybe you feel really helpless and useless in this whole pandemic, and you're like, ‘Why did I drop out of med school? I should have got in my degree.’ But you didn't, and you can't go back in time and fix that, so what does holiness look like right now? Or people who are like, ‘I made this decision and so I'm stuck in this spot – I shouldn't have.’ Okay, but you did. God doesn't work in 'what ifs?' He works in the reality of our present moment, so I think that's right now, when we can't plan.

I think that right now is a really beautiful time to begin to recognise that we never actually have control over the future.  We only ever have an illusion of control over the future, and there are elements in our lives that are so consistent we can assume that they will continue to be true, but, like... Tomorrow's not promised, so in quarantine we can work on saying ‘Alright Lord, I have no idea where I'm going to be three weeks from now, I have no idea. But you know, and you are asking me not to be holy three weeks from now, and not to be holy four years ago, but to be holy right now, to feed this child right now, to close this website right now, to read this book right now, and all I can do is be holy for right now.’

If you've got kids you're always thinking about what's next, and what's the next step, and how can we form them – I think that probably we'll all be fine, but maybe in twenty years we'll all be living in the woods. Who cares about GCSEs right now? Right now, be holy today, and figure out what it looks like to become a saint right now in this moment. I think maybe in this time of quarantine we can practice that, and maybe we'll learn to live it when we're back in a world where we have more control. 

CV: I love being Catholic, because there’s a patron saint for everything, apparently there is actually a patron saint of pandemics, and she’s named St Corona.

Meg: I don’t know if that’s true – I’ve seen it on many websites, but all of the digging I’ve done finds me nothing before 2020. Now she is a saint, for sure, and she was killed by her legs being tied to palm trees and then they let the palm trees go – so that’s unpleasant – she is venerated in northern Italy, and she can be revered as a patroness against pandemics, just like any saint can be a patron against anything because that’s all kind of made up anyway.

There are a tonne of saints who have fought against plagues. St Rocco is a traditional saint invoked against the plague, but there’s a bunch of them. The Fourteen Holy Helpers are really great for that, and also these saints who were actually in the streets, working with cholera victims, working with the Black Plague.

There were a group of saints in Alexandria who were revered as martyrs even though none of them was killed for the Faith; it was in the early centuries of the Church and there was a plague when everybody else in Alexandria ran out and the Christians ran in. Hundreds of them died of this epidemic while nursing these strangers that they didn't know from Adam, and the Church actually canonised them en masse, and in the Roman Martyrology it says they're ‘called martyrs’; it doesn't actually say they are martyrs, but it says they're called martyrs, which is pretty close. 

CV: If patronage can – to a certain degree – be arbitrary, who are you choosing as your kind of patron saint for this crisis? Has there been a particular saint or group of saints that have really been inspiring you in these times?

Meg: You know for me the hardest thing in all of this is being without the sacraments, and I am incredibly blessed; I'm staying in this abandoned presbytery – the priests live in a different house – so I have access to the Blessed Sacrament. Obviously I can't receive, I can't go to Mass, but I can pray in front of the tabernacle, which is just an incredible blessing.

Really the only thing I have going for me and my life is the Eucharist, and so being deprived of the reception of the sacrament and not being able to go to Mass has just been incredibly difficult for me. I know for some people the real struggle in all of this is fear and anxiety, for some people it’s that you're actually working in Healthcare – and thank you for that! – and for some people it's that you're losing your livelihood because of this, but for me it's really looking at these saints who lived for months, for years, for lifetimes without the sacraments.

I did a talk for an online conference, a ‘Be Not Afraid’ conference, where I was talking about the hidden Martyrs of Japan, and I wrote an article about them, so you can kind of catch up on that, but I'm also thinking a lot about the saints of Korea. The Japanese hidden Christians, we don't know any of their names, at least in the English-speaking world – I can't find them anywhere – and none of them have been canonised, but we have a tonne of Korean saints who went without the sacraments for decades.

The Church first begun in Korea by laymen; it's the only country ever to have evangelised itself. Some teenage boys found a Catholic catechism and were like ‘Oh yeah, this is true,’ picked a random day to be Sunday, because they didn't know what day Sunday was, and they just started living as Christians. 

Eventually they smuggled someone out – because the whole country was a closed country at the time – and he came back in and he baptised his friends, and then they went out baptising. For ten years there were thousands of Christians and not a single priest in the country, then they got one priest for six years total. He was killed in 1801, and the next priest didn't enter the country for any lasting period of time until 1836. So we've got 35 years of martyrs, of people being killed for their faith, without ever having been to Mass, without ever having gone to confession.

St Paul Chong Hasang is one of the headliners there: his dad was killed in the 1801 persecution and he was raised by his widowed mother, he and his sister, and Paul left the country around 1815 and was able to be baptised, but his little sister did not receive a single sacrament until she was 40 years old, and was a Christian the whole time, and the daughter of a martyr – her father is now beatified. All those years of loving Jesus and longing for him, and just imagining what it would be like receiving him for the first time.  St Elizabeth Chong Chong-hye is her name, or St Cecilia Yu So-sa, her mother, who had gone 35 years without the Eucharist after watching her husband die – thinking about their lives and how hunger for the sacraments drove them to a deeper longing for Jesus.

For some of us that distance may make us feel like ‘You know what, I can handle life on my own,’ but I just keep praying that this will be a hunger that turns our hearts more profoundly toward the Lord so that after this is all over we're like ‘Right, let's go be saints – let's do this.’

CV: Are you live streaming into masses on Sunday? How are you sanctifying your Sundays?

Meg: Every day I'm going into the church and watching Mass on my phone, so for me that's really beautiful and it hasn't been as hard as I thought it would be because I know so profoundly that the Mass is the Mass is the Mass, whether you're there or not.

When you're at Mass you're at all of the Masses, and you're with all of the angels and saints at the Heavenly liturgy, so when I'm watching it on my phone and I'm in the Church I'm still in the presence of Jesus Christ – I'm still kneeling before his real body, blood, soul and divinity. So that hasn't been as hard for me as I thought it was going to be. Not being able to receive, obviously, is not great, but there is a sense of really participating in the Mass.

You don't even have to watch it to really participate, right: participation in the Mass is an act of the will, and when you aren't able to participate physically you can participate just as well by sitting here and saying 'Jesus, I want to be present at the Mass, I want to unite my heart to yours, I want to offer myself on the altar and I want to receive you in your fullness'. Cool, done! And because this is in obedience to your bishop, that's like triple the grace because it's multiplied by obedience.

CV: What creative ways of expressing the faith are inspiring you?

Meg: I think there's all kinds of stuff that people are doing online these days. I think one of the most profound experiences that any of us had was watching Pope Francis in the Urbi et Orbi blessing, watching him walk through that empty piazza, watching him stand with the light of St Peter's behind him and the darkness of the city in front, blessing the whole world with the Blessed Sacrament. I was not expecting that – I was expecting little Pope Francis at the window, saying 'I'm praying for you', but he was like, ‘Oh no, we're doing drama right now.’And

I think that there's a lot of room for us to speak the name of Jesus into this crisis, If you're not afraid to talk about why you're not afraid, what it is to know that you're held by a loving God.

If you are afraid to talk about how the Lord stands beside you as you deal with this anxiety, I know that in the UK talking about faith is not always accepted – and by ‘not always’ I mean never under any circumstances no matter what – but maybe right now when people are thinking about mortality, when they're thinking about priorities and they're thinking about heroism, maybe now is a time that you can have the courage to speak about your faith to people who normally don't want to listen. Maybe right now they'll listen.

CV: Cardinal Nichols, the English cardinal, is giving two bits of advice to people which are: to make a routine and find some silence. This is wise I think because I'm conscious that while for some people this is really isolating time, for many others it's really overwhelming. If you have a big family, and work and home life are smashed together in a way that is new is can be hard to establish a firm routine and find times of silence. How can one cultivate this sense of routine and silence, especially as most of us are deprived of the ordinary means of the sacraments?

Meg: Yeah, well normally my one bedrock is being able to receive the Eucharist, and so to recognise that this is not a vacation from the sacraments, is this a time maybe for more retreating and recognising that the Lord is inviting me to deeper intimacy but he's trying to prepare my heart, so maybe it's more like a betrothal period?

And I think you're right: for a lot of us, people keep saying you have all this free time because of quarantine, but if you have children you don't, you have so much less free time. And I have so much less free time! I was supposed to be on this break writing books, instead I'm on video calls for two-and-a-half hours every day, which is beautiful because it's a way to serve, but then I need to recognise that as a human being I need to prioritise silence with the Lord.

As a human being in a time of uncertainty, especially for those of you who are packed in with lots of other human beings, you're going to become a murderer if you don't prioritise silent time with the Lord. So just figure out a way: maybe it's something you can do with your family or your roommates, where you say okay, we're going to have these twenty minutes and it's going to be our time where we all retreat from each other and we all sit and are still with the Lord.

I think for a lot of us there's a lot less silence than there usually is: you don't have your commute, you don't get to sit in an office or send your children away to school. But there is an opportunity for us to sort of re-prioritise and say, ‘Prayer is really an essential in my life, not just theoretically because I don't want to go to hell, but really in actual fact: if I'm going to be a healthy and balanced human being I need that time in prayer every day,’ so figure out a way to make a commitment to that.

CV: I'm also really conscious that for lots of pastors and priests I've spoken to a lot of their pastoral work has just been ripped away from them.

A good priest friend of mine, Fr Alexander Sherbrooke is at St Patrick's, Soho in London, where they've set up an outdoor adoration tent, and have been doing a free hot breakfast thing for over 300 homeless people each day.

I've seen similar things with people putting palms outside of churches – and all of this done in full cooperation with the police who knew about this. Have you seen any good examples of creative ways in which priests or other laypeople are being pastorally creativity, aside from digital stuff?

Meg: Yeah, I'm loving the way priests are prioritising Confession. I don't know what the situation is for you over there but we have a number of dioceses where bishops, God bless them, have said no Confession except in danger of death, and that I think is really breaking the hearts of these priests, because they then wonder ‘What even is the point of me? What are we even doing?’

But in the dioceses where the bishops have not forbidden the faithful to be reconciled to God sacramentally we see priests who are doing parking-lot Confessions. I saw a priest who said he drives to his parishioners’ houses and they confess through his closed window – he’s in Canada, so they've got a lot of space! This is not right up against all of your neighbours! Priests who are setting up confessionals outdoors, so that they can be ten feet from you but you can still go if you don't have a car. Most Americans do have access to a car, but in some places they don't and priests recognise that

In Louisiana – and I think other places but particularly in Louisiana which is as Catholic as it gets in the States – they're driving around in the back of a pickup truck with a monstrance, and so these priests are doing nine-hour Eucharistic processions, and they're making sure to hit every home of a registered parishioner. Others are saying they're driving down every street, you've got bishops who are going to the busiest intersections with the Blessed Sacrament. It's very Charles Borromeo: people are looking out their flat windows and they're like, ‘Oh my gosh, Jesus Christ!’

I think those priests who are going to the people are really setting the stage for a rebirth in the Church, an invitation for people to recognise that Jesus comes to us in all of our suffering, in all of our brokenness. It's not just when it's a global pandemic; it's also when you're just exhausted and worn out, or when you're dealing with mental illness, or when you've been laid off: he is with you in that as well.

CV: What is giving you hope at the moment?

Meg: I think what's most hopeful to me is the hunger that I see in people, because I think that we are a world that in the West at least is very accustomed to God being available on our schedule, so we don't tend to make enormous sacrifices to be present to him. You know, you go to Sunday Mass and that might be a hardship, but if you've got stuff going on on Sunday you go on Saturday night, or like, ‘There's probably a Sunday evening somewhere.’ And great, get to Mass where you can get to Mass, but I have a feeling that people are going to long for adoration in a way they never have before. They’re going to long for daily Mass in a way they never have before.

And I'm convinced that in a hundred years from now there are going to be books written about the Corona saints, about people who were made holy through this time. And some of it is going to be priests who died giving the sacraments, or doctors and nurses who contracted the virus, but some of it is going to be people who were lukewarm about the practice of their faith, until they were deprived of the sacraments, until they were stuck with their families all the time and had an awakening.

I'm seeing this from people on social media: just the longing for the sacraments, the longing for holiness, the desire for heroism, and so, honestly that's what's bringing me the greatest hope: seeing the beginnings of what God is doing through all of this suffering, and the way that he is working miracles in the middle of it. 

I'll be excited too to see the number of priestly vocations that come out of this, especially I think we'll see a lot of missionary priests who are asking to be sent to the regions where they don't see a priest ever. I think the answer to the Amazon Synod rests in men right now saying, ‘Oh, is this what life is without the sacraments? No, I can't allow that,’, and then being ordained and being sent to the jungle, being sent to persecuted countries…

There are even places in the United States, not so much in the 48 contiguous states, but up in Alaska you see a priest every six months in some of these villages, and they are villages that are 100% Catholic, every person in the village is a practicing Catholic and they get a priest every four, five, six months.

I'll just be excited to see the people for whom this was the impetus for their priestly vocation. And if that's YOU, I'm excited about you!