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Blessed and broken

Katie Bahr | Catholic Herald

Rachel Lustig works for Catholic Charities USA in Alexandria.

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Rachel Lustig is in an enviable position. At 34 years old,
she has found a job that fits her perfectly – blending her
Catholic faith and her love of service and social justice.

Lustig, a parishioner of Our Lady, Queen of Peace Church in
Arlington, is a senior vice president of mission and ministry
for Catholic Charities USA. As part of her job, she helps
parishes and ministries work for justice. It’s a job that she
is deeply passionate about, reflecting back to a love of
service she has possessed since childhood.

Lustig grew up as one of eight children in a “very strong
Catholic family” in Alexandria, Ind. She learned the
importance of service from her parents, who involved the
family in pro-life rallies, food pantries and a local camp
for migrant workers.

“My parents really exposed us to a lot of the depths our
church has to offer,” Lustig said. “They helped us see the
synergy between a life of faith and a life of service and how
we grow in the love of God as we grow in the love of each
other.”

For college, Lustig attended the University of Notre Dame in
South Bend, Ind., where she studied corporate finance. While
at the university, she became involved in the school’s
service learning program. The combination of what she was
studying – markets and businesses – and what she was learning
from her service work about the local community was
eye-opening.

“It was an interesting juxtaposition and it opened up a lot
of questions for me,” she said. “It got me searching very
deeply at what it is to be a person of faith in today’s
world.”

While in college, Lustig spent a summer teaching as part of a
service learning project in Denver. There she read about
Catholic social teaching.

“Sometimes things just strike you at the right moment,” she
said. “It articulated a lot of things close to my heart and
as I was reading this, I was being exposed to the incredible
work of Catholic Charities across the world. I was just so
proud of who we are as people of faith, how we grapple with
some of these really tough questions, but we also live it out
and create these really great ways to care for one another.”

Deeply inspired, Lustig spent her first two years out of
college working with Notre Dame’s Holy Cross Associate
program as director of finance for an orphanage in Chile.
That time was a major leap of faith for Lustig, who still
thinks of herself as “a small town girl at heart.”

“It afforded me the opportunity to see people whose
experiences were very different than mine, but we have so
much in common – the desire for love, the quest for God and
the desire for family,” Lustig said. “The things we have in
common are infinitely more important than the things that
separate us. I have always really loved having that
opportunity to make that connection with people.”

In 2003, Lustig took a job working for Catholic Charities USA
as a parish social ministry associate. In that position, she
worked together with Catholic Charities agencies to help them
better serve their local communities and parishes.

“I had no idea that this kind of work existed, but it was
astounding how good of a fit it was,” she said.

Since then, Lustig has been promoted to her current position,
as senior vice president of missions and ministry. In this
position, she still helps work with agencies to help them
understand the Catholic faith and help parishes understand
what Catholic social teaching is all about through
conferences, speaking engagements and resources. It’s a job
Lustig finds deeply rewarding and one that has earned her
outside honors. Recently, she was named to National Catholic
Reporter’s list of “12 Catholic women under 40 making a
difference.”

“I think that it’s such a beautiful thing to be able to help
people make that connection with their faith and the work we
do on a daily basis,” she said. “I could spend all day on
that.”

In her spare time, she is a lector at her parish and serves
on the Arlington Diocesan Peace and Justice Council. She also
volunteers with Friends of Guesthouse, a transitional home in
Alexandria for women coming out of jail and prison, and
Beyond Borders, an organization that works to reduce child
slavery and increase education in Haiti. Recently, she and
her four siblings visited Haiti on a trip sponsored by Beyond
Borders.

“I really love to work with people from different
backgrounds, especially people who are on the margins, people
who are hurting, the people of brokenness,” she said. “The
volunteer work that I do in the community affords me the
opportunity to be with the people on the margins, which I
think has to ground the work I do with Catholic Charities.”

What is most moving about her volunteer work, she says, is
how it brings her face to face with her own brokenness.

“The scary part is not other people, the scary part is that
you see yourselves in them,” she said. “You see yourself in
the homeless person, in the addict, and that’s the scary
part. You realize your own vulnerability. Then, where can you
go but to find wholeness in God?”

For her, that connection with her own sinfulness reflects the
faith.

“When we talk about the Eucharist, one of the things I’m very
drawn to is the idea that it’s blessed and broken,” she said.
“I believe we’re all very blessed and very broken. I think
when we step outside of ourselves and allow ourselves to be
in a place of brokenness, it can be scary because it exposes
ourselves to our own brokenness, but it’s only through facing
ourselves that we truly come to rely on God.”

That faith connection is what she likes most about her work
with Catholic Charities, a position in which she feels
completely fulfilled.

“It’s such an honor to be able to be in a place that is such
a good expression of who I am,” she said. “There’s a lot of
diversity to my work, but to be able to come together with my
colleagues in prayer at Mass in a small community is so
important to me. To be able to pray together with the teams I
work with and then to jump into things like the data on how a
program is working, it seems like they are becoming more
integrated and there’s God in everything.”

For others looking to get involved in service, Lustig advises
them to keep their eyes open for something that will fit
their personality and passions.

“Don’t be deterred by the fact that you’ve never heard it or
seen it,” she said. “There is just so much depth and breadth
to our faith and to the church, sometimes it’s there and you
don’t even know.”

There’s an expression she attributes to St. Ignatius, which
says the world’s deepest need from each person is the truest
expression of who they are.

“I think that’s my hope for most people, that they find that
opportunity to be the truest expression of themselves,” she
said.

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