Christmas to Epiphany X: Getting Closer – the First Step

On this tenth day of Christmas, we continue to reflect on Fr. Alfred Delp’s question, what difference it makes in our lives that Christ is born.  And we return to the model of the good life provided by Pope Francis in his Midnight Mass homily as we look toward Epiphany, the opening to that good life: The patience of God, the closeness of God, the tenderness of God.

LEARNING AN UGLY TRUTH ON RETREAT

Yesterday’s posting began to look at the closeness of God by proposing that being close with another calls us beyond fear and self-doubt through the gift of “actual grace”, a gift given freely to us as we begin to act, to reach out.  And I promised to share the story of my own becoming close with people who are homeless…despite my strong aversion to it!  Here’s the story of the first small step.

In my first 8-day Ignatian retreat, my director had given me a story to enter in prayerful imagination. 

There I was in the crowd as Jesus walked down the road, the crowd attracted by his healing and his speaking. By now I had been on retreat for a few days, and felt very close to the person Jesus.  And as I saw him coming closer to where I was, each of us being moved by the crowd, I felt in myself a desire to walk with him, right next to him, like the white minister I recall walking next to Martin Luther King in a march in the 60’s. 

But the crowd was thick and aggressive, pushing toward Jesus, saying “Touch me, Jesus!” “Love me, Jesus!”  “Heal me, Jesus!” 

I looked at Jesus, flanked by some of his closest followers, who were trying to give him room to walk.  I wanted to be one of them, one of Jesus’ friends.  I found myself next to him, on his left, and as he looked straight ahead, I said “I want to touch you, Jesus.”  “I want to love you.”  I want to heal you!”

He looked at me deeply, calmly, and with the pity of someone who loves one who does not understand, and gently said to me, “Don’t touch me, touch them!  Love them! Heal them!”

I looked down, to where my heart sank. I felt revulsion for the crowd. They were dirty.  They smelled, like the baskets of dirty laundry that I remember my grandmother bringing for my mother to wash when I was a small child. I literally sobbed to Jesus, “I don’t want to touch them!  I want to touch you!”  I realized that I was pleading with him.  But he looked again at me, kind but firmly repeating, “Touch them. Love them.  Heal them.”

In my revulsion of the crowd despite Jesus’ clear mandate to me, I knew that my contemplation had taken me to a truth in myself. Where Jesus was calling me to compassion for the crowd, I was stuck with my revulsion, my distaste for them.  I did not come to resolution on this.  I took it home with me.  If one can look at “sin” not as a shameful act deserving punishment, but sin as distance from God, I would say that I went home knowing my sin.  I committed it to prayer, but I did not resolve it.

BEING MOVED A FIRST STEP CLOSER

Some months later I was in the kitchen of our church hall making sandwiches for the guests of our rotating homeless shelter, with other members of my prayer community.  I was concentrating on being productive, spreading the peanut butter and jelly, bagging the sandwiches, there in the clean, bright kitchen, so I could get back to my afternoon’s work across the street at my job on campus.  I was in the huddle of my friends doing something charitable.  Our quiet conversation paused as we realized that the evening’s guests had arrived on their bus, and were walking single file down the hallway outside the kitchen. We could see them through the narrow opening of the door.

Suddenly I was back in that retreat chapel, and they were the crowd, and I knew that Jesus was telling me to touch them, but I was glad to be separated by the kitchen wall.  Again I decided to retreat with my sin in place.  I finished my work and got back to my job.  But I knew that I needed to get past that wall.

The next day I went to the woman coordinating our rotating shelter and told her I’d like to cook and serve a meal. We did not serve the hot breakfast from the kitchen, but from long tables out in the cafeteria.  There was no wall to separate us from the shelter guests.  After serving breakfast on that first morning, I hesitatingly took my own breakfast and as directed joined the guests at table.  They were speaking to each other, and I felt incapable of being of any use to them.  My eyes seemed glued to my plate.  I felt like a failure.  On the second day I took my plate and scanned the room for someone sitting alone.  Malcolm was a slight light-skinned African-American perhaps in his late 30’s.  His eyes were glued to his plate too.  I felt so different from him.  I had no words.  But I told him my name, and he told me his, and despite the fact that no more was said, I felt that I had taken a first step closer.

On the third morning, I watched for Malcolm to come through the line, repeating his name in my head. Malcolm…Malcolm…Malcolm.  I wanted to remember it despite my jangly nerves, feeling so out of place, so ineffective.  It was toward the end of the meal when he did come in, and my heart leapt.  He glanced at me as he held his plate out for the scrambled eggs I was serving.  “Good morning, Malcolm,” I said, smiling.  I weep as I recall the transformation in his face, his slight brightening as he looked at me fully and said, “You remembered my name.”  I told him I’d been looking forward to seeing him, and each of us continued with our tasks – him to getting his breakfast and me to serving others.  I joined him again with my plate.  A third person was at the table, and conversation did not grow much. 

The week ended after a few more mornings.  Malcolm and I said little to each other, but he gave me a gift that took me to more and more steps closer and closer to others who had previously been the crown I’d passively resented as getting in the way of my getting close to Jesus.  Malcolm had let me see his face, and had let me look into his eyes as he looked into mine.

While I felt better about taking that step, I knew it was still about me.  But Malcolm remained with me as a person as real as myself, and his gift of being companion at that breakfast table soon had me taking another big step.

Tomorrow: a next big step closer. my walking the streets in other people’s clothes.

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