Love? Meet Brother Bob

Love, love, love: all we need is love.  Songs of amorous delirium relate to the dizzying mix of pheromones, dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, of the drive to procreate, that relate to romantic love.  Birds do it.  Bees do it.  Even educated fleas do it.  Ask Ella Fitzgerald and Louie Armstrong. 

But what of the love of caritas, charitable love, the giving of self out of compassion and care?  What of a love that seems to simply give and give and give?  I’d like you to meet Brother Bob.  I met this Capuchin Franciscan  on a panel of people who came together to discuss service to the tens of thousands of homeless and hungry in Detroit.  Brother Bob was there representing the Capuchin Soup Kitchen  .  He’s called the Pastoral Director.  That means he’s not the hardworking guy who keeps the doors open, he’s the guy who serves the people who walk through them.

I was moved by Brother Bob’s face as I reached out to shake his hand.  I seemed to feel love just being emitted from him.  The feeling made me look hard to figure out why.  A saw a face without a wrinkle, a face that seemed completely relaxed.  His eyes were comfortably open, looked calmly at me without any judgment or – as mine must have betrayed – analysis.  Even the smile on his face seemed to be there without muscular effort.  It seemed, as I took this in, that his face was a smiling face.  But the smile was not a grin.  There was no mischief in it, no unspoken joke, no challenge or dare.  Here in this brown-robed man’s face there seemed to be a delight in me, a stranger to him. 

I asked Brother Bob what his job was at the soup kitchen that serves 2000 meals daily to Detroit’s hungry.  He tilted his head to the side a bit, reflecting, and opened his palms, almost shrugging, as if to say “it’s nothing.”  “I’m the person who tries to do what others are not already doing for them.”  He went on to explain that there are staff and volunteers who cook and serve food, who see that showers and phones and toiletries are provided, and help with finding jobs, with clothes and shoes.  “But these days we don’t get as many donations, because with the tough economy, our usual donors are not replacing their own clothes as often.” 

“Sometimes we don’t have shoes for them.”  The hands are rising again, the palms upward, the shrug, and I put his gesture into words: “What do you do when you have no shoes for them?”  Again the tilted head, a smiling, humble reply “Sometimes I take them to the store and try to get them shoes.”  I picture Brother Bob in his worn brown robe climbing into his simple car with this stranger, driving to a shoe store and doing what – begging?  “They see me coming, I know.”  Now his shoulders fall a bit, his back arches a little, his body becoming just a bit a beggar’s body, smaller, vulnerable, shedding any sense of dominance or power.  “Somehow, we usually get the shoes.”

Love, the first “fruit of the holy spirit” is to me the most elusive indicator of living in the spirit of our creator, the sign most of us would fail to exhibit.  Brother Bob sees an endless line of poor, looks into countless pairs of eyes, greets them with the same calm face and warm gaze that he greeted mine.  How does he do it?  How does he walk from his simple cell down the street to the soup kitchen and “do for them what others are not already doing for them?  I realize now that there’s another physical characteristic that Brother Bob has.  He’s thin, not emaciated, but without an ounce of reserve.  He doesn’t carry anything for tomorrow.  He gets by from day to day. 

Maybe Brother Bob's the only way to love, really, to practice caritas love.  The Spirit blows in his ear, and he follows.  He gives not from himself, but from the love he is given.  He provides from an endless Source to the endless need of the poor of a city that used to proudly turn out cars from its factories, but now shamefully turns out people from their homes.  If you'd like to help, here's a link.    

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.