by Albert Holtz
Over the years since that night in 1972 when we took the leap, God has indeed “caught us” over and over again. The school has a fine reputation for academics, sending graduates to excellent colleges, and its athletic programs are known throughout the state and even the nation. We have been able to buy urban renewal land and create playing fields next to the school, renovate the monastery, the abbey church, and three other buildings, and build a chapter room, a monks’ health care facility, a gymnasium, and a library. Someone recently called St. Benedict’s Prep “the jewel in Newark’s crown.”
That leap, however, is not a one-time effort but a way of life—not just for monks but for anyone seeking God. In the face of prosperity the temptation is to try to take back control from the Lord and start depending on our own efforts. To help keep us in shape, then, the Lord is always offering us new opportunities to trust, such as the lack of new vocations to the abbey—“I get scared when all there is left is a successful school and no new monks!”
The Lord keeps sending us a constant stream of marvelous role models like that tithing welfare mom to remind us to keep relying on God rather than our own efforts. If we learn well, we can approach the future with the same trust that allowed the Waymaker to work miracles for us in 1972.
The next time the welfare checks come out I keep watching the bulletin board for a note from the tithing welfare mother, silently rooting for her, hoping she won’t lose her nerve. Finally, a note appears on the board.
Dear Father Ed,
It was a little easier this time.
Enclosed with it—almost triumphantly, it seems—is twenty-seven dollars.
SCRIPTURAL REFLECTION
[Jesus] sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.” (Mark 12:41–44)
Place yourself beside Jesus at the noisy entrance to the temple treasury. Crowds of pilgrims are surging in. As each one drops an offering into one of the trumpet-shaped receptacles, a priest calls out the amount of that person’s offering. You notice the widow, stooped over with age, shuffling up to one of the boxes clutching something in her hand. “Two cents,” announces the temple official. When you hear this, how does it make you feel? She had two coins, so why didn’t she give one to God and keep the other to buy something to eat? Continue the meditation.
Reflect on the various kinds of “letting go” you’ve done in the past. Which experiences of letting go were voluntary? Which ones were beyond your control? Can you name one thing you’d like to let go of? What would it take for you to be able to do so?
RULE OF BENEDICT
“Place your hope in God alone.” (Prologue, v.41)
GENEROSITY: MARITZA
God can make someone a great teacher at any age. Maritza, I remember, was only about four.
“Next, please.” A voice calls through the little window that connects with the back room of the food pantry. A heavyset woman heaves herself to her feet and shuffles wearily up to the little window to get her groceries. “Remember, now, I got three kids!” she warns. Then she adds right away, “You got any meat?”
Thirty people are seated in five neat rows of folding chairs in the food pantry’s crowded, low-ceilinged reception area waiting to be called up to the window to get a bag of groceries and, if they’re lucky, maybe a small turkey for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving dinner. Most are bundled up against the bitter cold that pours in every time someone comes through the door that opens out onto the sidewalk.
I notice a young woman who has just come in, standing in the back of the room with three little children. They all have her olive skin and dark eyes. Her thin coat tells me that she’s probably only been up from South America for a few weeks. As I walk back to say hello, I try to imagine what it must be like to be poor, to have to scratch for everything, to ask for food to feed your babies.
We monks practice a certain frugal lifestyle, not owning anything ourselves, avoiding fancy material luxuries that could distract us from our spiritual goals. But this woman’s kind of poverty is something else. It’s grinding, discouraging, and deadening.
“¿Dulces?”
A tiny voice interrupts my thoughts. I look down at my right elbow into a little face that is turned up toward me expectantly. She repeats her request,
“¿Dulces?”
“Do you have any candy?” she wants to know. It’s one of the three children. I burst out laughing, captivated by the wide, dark eyes and the billows of black curls.
“¡Hola, chiquita!” I greet her, and ask her her name, “¿Como te llamas?”
“Maritza.”
“Encantado, Maritza.” Pleased to meet you. I introduce myself, “Me llamo Padre Alberto.” Pointing to the tired looking woman next to her shepherding two younger boys, I ask “¿Es tu mama?” Is this your mommy? The young mother returns my smile and nods yes.
“¿Dulces?” The voice has moved around in front of me now.
“Lo siento, niña,” I’m sorry, Honey, but we don’t have candy here, I explain. I picture the gray steel shelves in the back room lined with cans of lima beans and grapefruit sections, and cellophane bags of pasta and rice. No candy.
If Maritza is disappointed, she doesn’t show it. She turns confidently on her heel and looks around the room until she spots the door that leads to Sr. Magdalene’s office and the back room. Patrons of the food pantry are never allowed through that door—it’s one of the few absolute rules Sr. Mag has. I wince as the four-year-old skips blithely toward the forbidden inner sanctum. Some curious heads turn to watch her disappear through the doorway.
Turning back to the mother and her two boys, I see that they can use more than just food. The littlest one is wearing sneakers with holes in the toes. As I approach the two toddlers, they hide bashfully behind their mother’s skirt at first. I bend over, hands on knees, and make a few silly faces. They stare at me poker-faced.
Suddenly, looking past my shoulder, they start to smile and wave. I turn around to see Maritza standing in the forbidden doorway, smiling from ear to ear. She’s holding her arms over her head like a champion who has just won an Olympic medal—and in each hand she’s waving a hard candy wrapped in cellophane.
“¡Dulces!” she announces triumphantly. Not only has she returned from the inner sanctum alive and unscathed, but has actually come up with some candy! And not just one piece but two. I clap my hands a few times in appreciation of her success, and congratulate her, “¡Bien hecho!”, “Well done!”
She scurries back past the rows of folding chairs, curls bouncing, leaving a trail of smiles behind her, rounds the last row, and comes right up to me. She stands there looking up at me, with one little hand stuck straight out in front of her. I stare down for a few seconds at the yellow sourball in her upturned palm. Then I realize that she’s offering me one of her two pieces of precious candy! Her smile explains what’s going on: she is so happy at her good luck that she wants to share it with a new friend she’s just made. For her, it seems, this is just a natural response.
“¡Gracias!” I stammer, blushing and smiling uneasily. I want her to have the candy; I feel like telling her to put it in her pocket and save it for later. The obvious thing to do, though, is to just accept the gift gratefully. We each unwrap our candy and pop it in our mouths. I roll my eyes toward the ceiling in mock delight and say, “¡Ay! ¡Que bueno!” Maritza’s face lights up. She’s enjoying the sharing more than the taste of the candy. She couldn’t be happier.
Maritza’s delight this morning makes me think. There is clearly something deep down in us that loves to make others happy by giving. Maybe that’s part of the image of God in each
of us—the God of self-giving. This image can get quickly crusted over, though, in a consumer culture where what is prized is getting, not sharing. But this little girl has obviously been introduced to the God of giving somewhere. She must have seen somebody acting this way. I glance at her mother, and figure that she is probably Maritza’s model of selfless generosity.
We each have opportunities to allow others to meet the God of Giving. It may be cheerfully spending ten minutes of our time with someone who needs our help, or using one of our talents as a gift for someone else’s benefit. Or it may be contributing financially to some cause to the point where we actually feel the sacrifice. The generosity of goodhearted humans is one of God’s favorite ways of coming into our lives.
“Did you get some candy?”
Sr. Mag has come over to say hello and fuss over the children. Maritza, baffled by the English, stares up at her silent and wide-eyed, her cheek showing a large, telltale bulge.
“Yes, she did, sister” I answer for her.
“And what about her brothers?”
“Maritza,” I whisper, “vaya buscar dulces para tus hermanitos.” “Go get some candy for your little brothers.”
She scampers off without a word, disappearing a second time through the forbidden door in pursuit of the God of Giving. Her day is made. So is mine.
SCRIPTURAL REFLECTION
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him may not die, but have eternal life. (John 3:16)
Has someone else’s generous deed ever given you a glimpse of this God of infinite giving? In what ways has God been particularly generous to you?
RULE OF BENEDICT
“Your way of acting should be different from the world’s way.” (Prologue, v.20)
THE POWER OF THE WORD: JOHN
The first time I met him, he was a rambunctious freshman, just out of eighth grade, full of fresh answers and wisecracks. John was the kind of kid that everybody in the school knows, the kind of kid who would need a lot of “straightening out.”
It was the last day of school of his freshman year when John decided to play hooky, hopping on his bike instead of heading for school. A few blocks from his house, as he was riding across an intersection, he was struck by a speeding van and flung through the air. The rescue squad delivered his shattered body to the hospital with barely a trace of life left in it.
Fr. Ed, as headmaster, got the phone message. John was in critical condition and was not expected to live. When he got to the hospital, Fr. Ed found him in a deep coma. The doctors said the young victim wouldn’t last very long, but when Fr. Ed returned the next morning, John was still hanging on.
Over the next days and weeks the headmaster continued to go faithfully to the hospital every day. Taking his cue from the nurses, he kept talking to his comatose student, sometimes joking, sometimes scolding, sometimes telling stories. There was never any response from the once-talkative freshman. But Fr. Ed kept on speaking to him anyway, hoping that his words would somehow reach John. Since he kept hanging on to life, the doctors now revised their prognosis: John would live, but would probably never regain consciousness. But still Fr. Ed kept visiting and kept talking.
Finally, after more weeks had passed, he returned to the monastery one afternoon with the news, “John wiggled a finger today. He’s starting to respond!”
Soon after that I visited him in the hospital. He lay perfectly still, with his eyes closed. I gently lifted his right hand off the stiff white sheet and held it in mine. It felt alive, but in a strange way—it certainly wasn’t the hand of someone who was asleep.
“John,” I said, “This is Fr. Albert. You awake?”
He gave my hand one deliberate squeeze. One meant yes.
“You feeling okay today?” I continue.
Another single squeeze.
It was like talking to someone through a brick wall or through tons of rock after a mine cave-in. There was no voice, no facial expression, no words: nothing but a squeeze of the hand. Disconcerting at first, but gradually I got used to it.
We followed his progress all summer long. Finally, in September, three long months after his accident, John opened his eyes. Progress was still slow, but every day Fr. Ed kept visiting and talking. Then one day John actually started to speak! He would remain paralyzed from the waist down, but he had been pulled back out of the valley of the shadow of death, literally talked out of his coma by the power of people’s loving words.
It’s some years later at the end of a school day; John is sitting in the school entrance lobby in his sturdy wheelchair, an island awash in the swirling stream of students, parents, salesmen, and poor people looking for canned goods. “John!” I call to the heavyset thirty-year-old bearded man, “What are you doing here? Looking for Fr. Ed?” The two of them still keep in close touch, so I figure that John—who has learned over the years to stand with the help of braces and two canes—has decided to stop by to visit his special friend.
“Sure I’m looking for Fr. Ed! Where is that man? He told me he’d be around, and now he’s not here!”
In the monastic tradition, “the word” is tremendously important. The Holy Rule begins with the word, “Listen!” The monk’s spiritual life is nourished by the Word of God both in lectio divina (holy reading) and in the public praying of the psalms and listening to readings from scripture or the spiritual masters.
On the other hand, Benedict, like most monastic fathers, warns that words can also cause problems. Wise people don’t speak very much, he reminds his reader, adding that permission for a monk to speak should be given only rarely. One story from the lives of the earliest monks of Egypt gives a powerful if slightly tongue-in-cheek lesson on how deadly words can be:
One day a disciple of a well-known hermit did something wrong. The hermit got so upset that he said to the young man: “Go drop dead!” Instantly the disciple fell down dead.
The hermit, filled with horror, started praying: “Lord Jesus Christ, I beg you to bring my disciple back to life and from now on I promise that I will be careful what I say.” And the disciple was restored to life on the spot.
The lesson here is not just for monastics: any Christian would do well to respect the awesome power of words, and never speak hastily or in anger.
“Listen, I can’t wait any more. You tell my man Fr. Ed that John was here.” He wheels himself out the door to the top of the steep stone steps. He struggles to his feet, and, with the help of his braces and two canes, actually “walks” clumsily down the stairs to the sidewalk. As I watch him, I think about the miracles that we can do for one another with words. Do I really believe that my own words have that kind of power of life and death over the people around me? Can an angry comment when I’m in a bad mood really make a brother monk drop down dead? Can an offhand remark of mine in French class really be so momentous in some student’s life? I look at John and think, a little uneasily, “Maybe.”
“Tell him to give me a call, okay?” John is hoisting himself into the passenger seat of a friend’s car.
“Okay, will do!” I call down from the top of the big stone steps, “Have a good day!” Some teenagers passing on the sidewalk have stopped to stare at the cripple carefully sliding into the car. They don’t know that they’re looking at someone brought back from the grave by the power of the word.
SCRIPTURAL REFLECTION
Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not weep.” Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has risen among us!” and “God has loo
ked favorably on his people!” (Luke 7:11–16)
Has anyone ever called you to life through a loving word or deed? Recall the circumstances of when and where this happened, and how it made you feel. Is there someone in your life whom God expects you to call to life with a word?
Have you ever seen anyone deeply wounded by a word?
RULE OF BENEDICT
“There are times when good words are to be left unsaid out of esteem for silence. For all the more reason, then, should evil speech be curbed so that punishment for sin may be avoided. Indeed, so important is silence that permission to speak should seldom be granted even to mature disciples, no matter how good or holy or constructive their talk.” (Chapter 13, “Restraint of Speech,” vv. 2–3)
PASSION: GOSPEL SINGER
A slender woman about twenty-five years old steps out of the front row of the choir and up to the microphone. She looks around at the congregation, smiles for a brief moment, then, arms straight at her sides and fists clenched lightly, she closes her eyes and sings in a soft, passionate voice:
“I don’t feel no way tired!”
I’m sitting in the fifth row of benches in a little Pentecostal church. The place must have been a store at one time, but a dropped ceiling, some red carpeting, and dark wood paneling have changed it into a church.
