Hearing the Fourth Word

For a quickly passing ten years we lived in a century-old farmhouse on the property of Manresa,  the Jesuit Retreat House north of Detroit.  While on weekdays I worked with students and faculty at the university with our service-learning program on weekends I would do woodworking projects in exchange for our rent.  I worked in a large workshop in one of the old white-painted barns on the property that had been an orchard and “gentleman’s farm”.  Heat was provided by an old black wood burning stove in one corner of the shop, making it a cozy place to work during the winter, its windows providing views of the bare trees and the Tudor-style retreat house across the snow-covered rolling landscape. 

On one particular early Saturday morning I was working on a walnut altar, using a mallet and a large, spoon-shaped chisel to surface the base of the piece, to give it a sense of age appropriate to the chapel in which it would serve, a chapel honoring Our Lady of Montserrat, whose heart won that of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits in 1500.  There in the ancient Monastery in the mountains of northern Spain, he knelt before the stature of His Lady through the night of his pilgrimage, and he changed everything.  Laying his sword at the feet of the statue, he forswore his life of wealth, took on the rags of a beggar, and began to live as a mendicant preacher, sharing the good news of Jesus and relying on alms for his survival.  North of Montserrat in the Basque country of his birth, the Loyola Castle where he was born, and the room in which he was nursed back to health after his leg had been badly broken by a cannon ball in a battle at Pamplona in service to his King, would be without him forever.  Instead he would sit on the steps of the church of Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona and preach to whoever would listen.  He would see the poor, and feel their poverty.  He would notice these feelings inside himself and how they moved him to act, to reach out to them.  And he would recognize how in their sufferings he would come to know his suffering savior, Jesus.  Eventually he would be moved to write down what he was learning, in a cave in a little town of Manresa, where the nuns would feed him and watch over him until his writings had become the Spiritual Exercises, the foundation of the Jesuits who would grow from the little band of men who began to follow him.

Here in my comfortable workshop, I was mystically content.  My hands felt at home on the mallet and chisel, my eyes delighting in the reflection of the wood fire flames on the surface of the walnut altar, the muscles in my arms and shoulders happily swollen with blood that was pumped generously from a heart strong and healthy, at my age when my dad’s had begun to fail.  I was grateful for this moment, this place, this life. Like John Lennon slipping out of his warm bed and his wife’s falling-asleep talking to write his refrain “nothing’s gonna change my world”, contentment with my life here was palpable. 

But I had decided to do something that would turn out to shake me from this contentment.  After a year of enjoying the see-feel-help model that I spoke of yesterday, I had decided to listen again to the audio tape on which I had discovered it, to enjoy it again.  Fr. Howard Gray had presented a workshop there at the Retreat House several years ago entitled “Spirituality and Social Justice,” and had used the Good Samaritan story as its basis.  While it played on the little boom box on the workbench, I smiled and enjoyed hearing it again, anticipating what he would say next, feeling good to know, to be familiar with his words, to hear them emerge from my heart as well as his mouth.   But after he had gone from the Samaritan seeing to the feeling of compassion that he had to helping that came as a natural response, I realized that he was not finished that the tape continued on the other side.  I turned it over, clicked the door shut, and hit play.

And I heard the fourth word, and felt revulsion, and then heard its truth, and began to weep.  The word was change.  “As humans, we are called not simply to help, but to make things better for when we’re gone” he was saying.  The words stopped me in my tracks: “for when you’re gone.”   I had been at the university for more than 35 years.  I was loved and respected, I was free and trusted, and I had a life that had grown as fitting to my spirit and psyche as my hands had to the mallet and chisel.  Everything was just right.  I imagined leaving my work, leaving the university where I had spent my entire adult life, leaving the comfortable nest of Manresa.  I turned the tape off, put on my coat, and took a long walk, my warm tears turning immediately cold on my face, in my beard.  Change things; make things better for when you’re gone.   Yeah.  Jesus was gone, wasn’t he!  And when he had realized that he had to leave his friends, he had wept too.   I was stunned.  Everything . . . changed.  Fr. Gray’s words had cut into me like that chisel had cut into the surface of that walnut.  The world looked different to me, reflecting differently off the surface of my changing self. 

It was days later that I recalled Joe Barrett’s exploding at me with a spitting caveat that I now understood; after ten years of thinking it was just his temper, I understood that it was our truth.

Tomorrow.  Come back.

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