This impressive story about young lay Catholics in Washington was published several days ago, and I’m finally getting around to reading and posting.

Take a moment and read what these kids are doing. It’s something. Truly.

A snip:

Now for the peekaboo pumps: Do they stay? Or go?

The missionary spins a shoe in her hand, admiring its red sole, slinky heel and winking peep of open toe. She’s worn the pair just once, when she dressed as Tina Turner for Halloween. They were so uncomfortable. And totally impractical: In her ministry work in Southeast Washington, when she’s climbing the stairwells of public housing projects and praying with families in their living rooms, she opts for T-shirts and jeans.

But the shoes are so glam and unlike anything else she owns. She can’t bear to throw them out; yet she cannot keep them — there’s no room. So Laura Cartagena leaves them on her bedroom floor and turns to the other possessions strewn across her bunk bed — the Japanese paper lanterns, the Twister board game, the sleeping bag — nearly all of which she will store at her parents’ house in Maryland.

In two days, her new roommate will be here, moving into this cramped and once decrepit rowhouse in Shaw, unpacking belongings into half of the skinny closet that Laura is now clearing out. For the last year and a half, this small room bisected by bunk beds has been Laura’s private enclave. The bookshelves, the dresser, the floor space were hers alone. In the evenings, when she spoke on the phone, no one could walk in with equal claim to her domain. In two days, all that will change.

And that’s good, Laura tells herself. She’s glad the ministry is growing: It’s exactly what she and Clark Massey hoped for six years ago, when they were plotting the details of A Simple House, their Catholic lay ministry devoted to the poor of Southeast. She knows you can’t take a rowhouse with two female missionaries — plus Lucy, the 72-year-old homeless schizophrenic who came with the house when it was donated — and add four more women and expect it to be easy. After all, the four-bedroom house has only one full bath.

Still, when Clark suggested a couple of weeks earlier that maybe they could eliminate clutter in the bathroom by having everyone use shower caddies, Laura recoiled. “I don’t want,” she enunciated, uncharacteristically fierce and emphatic, “a shower caddy.”

“Maybe you all need one,” Clark persisted. “There’s no way six women’s shampoo, et cetera, will fit in the bathroom.”

But shower caddies? Icky, slimy, always-wet-and-dripping shower caddies? Already, Laura had been weighing how much longer she wanted to remain at Simple House. Now her uncertainty was being aggravated by her impending loss of privacy.

“I don’t want a shower caddy,” she told Clark. He backed off.

Now the two of them are on the third floor of the rowhouse, fixing up a bedroom that will be shared by two of the new missionaries. Clark, who lives in a similar house in Southeast with three male missionaries, tries to figure out how to get paint off the hardwood floor while Laura scrubs at it with a cleaning solution mixed in a red Folgers can.

“There’s some floorboards with wide spaces,” she says to Clark.

“I know,” he sighs, then adds, worriedly, “I mean — your foot won’t fall through them, right?”

Through the windows comes the smell of Lucy’s Newport 100. After lighting her cigarettes on the gas flame of the kitchen stove, she sits on the front steps and smokes. Because there is no air conditioning at Simple House, and no screens, the open windows on this humid-as-a-shower-stall summer afternoon let in every outdoor smell and noise, along with bloodsucking swarms of mosquitoes.

Inside the bedroom, the walls are a freshly painted mint green, but the closet is still a dusty horror. Laura pulls up the Shop-Vac, turns it on, then turns it off. “I was gonna vacuum in here,” she announces, “but a piece of wall just came off.”

***

Laura didn’t grow up in a house like this. Neither did Clark. Laura’s childhood home in Howard County features white pillars out front and a newly remodeled kitchen with two refrigerators, a wine rack and swaths of gleaming granite.

When Laura moved into Simple House in February 2006, it had been a Catholic Worker homeless shelter: The walls were disintegrating; rats roamed the floors; prostitutes had taken over the back yard; and the shed was a drug dealer’s stash house. “I was afraid to touch anything,” Laura says, “and I was so embarrassed to have my friends over.” Her mother brought lunch one day, and when Laura offered a fork, Margarita Cartagena answered, “I brought my own.”

But more than the crumbling house where Laura slept every night, Laura’s mother worried about the part of Washington where her daughter was spending her days — in Southeast, where gunfire, drug dealing and turf wars are a very real part of the landscape. “She’s putting herself in a lot of danger,” Margarita still frets.

Still, no one tried to talk Laura out of the choice she was making. When her best friend, Catherine Corso, first heard what Laura planned to do after college, she says all she could think was: “That is so Laura. So Laura. Service to others and God has always been Laura.”

Laura is a shorter, livelier version of every irrepressible tomboy ever played by Sandra Bullock. She wears green-edged cat’s-eye glasses and often pulls her dark, wavy hair into a messy knot atop her head. She is 25, a bilingual, college-educated child of Puerto Rican parents who has given serious thought to joining a convent even as she hangs out at Adams Morgan bars with her closest friends. Her boyfriend is an accountant with Deloitte & Touche, and she loves him. But she also has an intense relationship with God and a desire to serve the poor. “I personally wouldn’t feel right if I wasn’t living my life for others,” she says, “especially for those most in need.”

Laura’s quest to serve God has meant, in essence, turning her back on the material comforts and professional aspirations of her suburban upbringing. And there are others just like her at Simple House and a growing number of Christian “intentional communities” across the country, where residents share a living space as well as a common spiritual purpose. For the devout Catholics and evangelical Protestants in their 20s and early 30s attracted to these communities, it is not enough to attend church, pray before every meal and spend hours at Bible study. It is not enough to ask, “What would Jesus do?” The preferred question is: “How did Jesus live?”

Read on at the link.