Chuck Lathrop was born in California in 1947. From a young age he felt a strong calling to work alongside under-served communities, and in many ways his life was given to the needs of others.
As a young man he served as a volunteer and regional worker with the Glenmary Home Missioners in the Appalachian Mountains, hills he described as being full of lessons and teachers, a phrase that would stay with him for the rest of his life. He later worked alongside Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker in New York. In the 1970s he helped to establish the Maryknoll Lay Missioners.
In 1979 he moved to Ireland, where he made his home: first in Tallaght, and for many years in Raheny, Dublin. He spent his career with Ireland's overseas development aid programme, working in Africa, Central America and South-East Asia, including East Timor, where he represented the Irish government and people. For Chuck, the lessons and the teachings continued.
In his final years, meeting illness with humility, dignity and his own quiet humour, he turned to writing poetry on the Oncology Day Ward at Beaumont Hospital, Dublin. The phrase that had followed him since the Appalachian hills gave the work its name: Lessons and Teachers. There, as across a lifetime of service, he found that everyone around him had something to teach. Again and again his poems return to two words of gratitude: Deo Gratias.