In the early 1960s, inspired by The Seven Storey Mountain, our dad decided to follow what he thought was his calling and go join the Trappist monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani, the Kentucky monastery made famous by Merton.

My family is like millions of others in the United States who come together this time of year for the holidays and struggle to put their passionate differences aside for a few hours. Of course, these divides always existed, but recent years have been different for two reasons. First, major shifts -- generationally and ideologically -- have left many feeling left out of the party, so to speak. Second, politics is the ugliest it's been in modern history. There are plenty of hurt feelings all around. A lot of fear gets stirred up.

In couples counseling, it's an axiom that the most toxic thing to a relationship is not when the partners disagree, or even fight, but when they stop respecting each other. For several generations now, there has been little trust and respect in the political sphere. Both sides have demonized the other, have assumed ill motives on their opponents' parts.

But of all relationships, the deepest and oldest, next to our relationship with God, is family. So, how sad when distrust and lack of respect attacks relationships with literal brothers and sisters.

Some turn to formal volunteer service organizations (think Catholic Volunteer Network or Jesuit Volunteer Corps). Leah M. Nusse, recruitment and marketing manager for Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest, said that groups like hers play a role in addressing the need that comes with rising poverty levels. (Statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau show 46.2 million people or 1 in 6 Americans living in poverty.)

"With an increased need for services and a diminished level of giving and support of the organizations responding to the need, Jesuit Volunteers can help fill a critical void and increase the capacity of our partner organizations to provide their much needed services," she said.

Day one

Small plane to airstrip in Dadaab, a tiny, broken-down town in northeast Kenya. Blinding clouds of dust billow from the car in front of us as we make our way to our local partner's compound. Dust instantly coats everything we carry. The same dust has swallowed up any hope of growing crops or raising livestock across the border in Somalia, where the drought and famine are worst.

I usually associate the birth of a baby with fuzzy booties, not machine guns. But I was in a southern area of the Philippines called Mindanao, where vendettas out of Sylvester Stallone movies happen -- a lot.

I was talking to a woman named May; she'd married into a family that was haunted by the years-old murder of a grandfather. May's mother-in-law couldn't read or write, but would send audiotapes to her son when the couple lived outside the country. "She'd say they needed money for guns. She'd say, 'Come back to the Philippines and kill these people!'"

In Mindanao, three groups -- Christians, Muslims, and indigenous people -- have suffered for decades at each other's hands. All three groups have valid grievances rooted in the area's seriously troubled history. But at this point, learning to get along -- to stop the massacres, abductions, bombs, and hijackings -- is pretty much the only option.

As the latest victim struggled in her cat's jaws, Devidasi -- a recent Hare Krishna convert -- turned to her budding faith for a miracle. She chanted, "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna; Krishna Krishna..."

Suddenly, her cat let the bird go. "And he just flew away," she says. "My cat never freed a bird before. Never." Two months later, when she turned 18, Devidasi moved into the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) ashram in Hawaii.

That was 1969. Wearing a colorful sari and swaying with the music at a recent festival at the Los Angeles ISKCON center, this self-described former "motley hippie" with nose ring says she still hasn't lost her '60s groove and passion for Krishna. "My body may be older, but my soul is still adventurous and young in Krishna."

Leveled neighborhoods as far as you could see were indescribable. Trees stripped of their familiar bark now had steel contortioned among their limbs like pipe cleaners. There was the occasional semblance of "what once was" among the destruction -- kitchen tables still poised without kitchen walls, children's toys strewn on debris-cluttered lawns, the nativity set salvaged from the vestry. These are the physical marks that comingle with the grief and mourning for the shared loss of the tornado's death toll, the stories of miraculous survival, and the superhuman acts of rescue.