Note: To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Northwest Catholic reconnected with some of the people whose stories have resonated with readers over the years.
When readers met Christine Schoeler in our March 2019 issue, she was serving up soup in the kitchen at St. Hubert Parish in Langley, on Whidbey Island.
It was a community ministry inspired by a Scripture reading during the Easter Vigil: “Come without money, come without price,” Schoeler said, paraphrasing the verse in our story (“Soup’s on! Christine Schoeler warms souls with her soup ministry and joy-filled spirit”). “It has everything to do with feeding people,” she said.
And that’s what she wanted to do. So Schoeler and her husband Bob began going out in their car, giving water, then food and other items, to homeless people living on Whidbey Island. That morphed in 2015 into the parish-based St. Anthony’s Kitchen, where any member of the community could come for a weekly soup meal.
Bob died unexpectedly in 2017. Despite the void left in her life, Schoeler kept the ministry going. At one point, she thought about moving to Mexico to do missionary work. But during a pilgrimage to Mexico, an encounter with Jesus during Eucharistic adoration left her with the message to continue her work back home.
“The soup kitchen was going great, and then we had the pandemic and so we weren’t allowed to do anything for a while,” Schoeler said when we caught up with her recently.
Eventually, the soup ministry opened a pickup window, later starting the weekly “A Smile and Meal” to connect with homebound parishioners. Meals are made in the parish kitchen, and the Knights of Columbus do the deliveries.
“It was a parish thing. It was so great,” Schoeler said. But by the end of 2022, feeling “a little burned out,” she cut back to just making the Tuesday soup. Schoeler said she wanted other people “to have the grace of making meals.”
She answered the call to serve in a different way — helping a parish friend who almost died regain his health. In June, he moved from a rehabilitation facility back to his home, where Schoeler brings him Communion and stays with him while he continues recuperating.
The two, she said, are in agreement: “We’re angel friends.” That’s “a really good thing,” Schoeler added.
Read more Northwest Catholic 10th anniversary content. To read the complete August/September 2023 issue of Northwest Catholic, click here.