As much as I did not plan this out, the pneuma seems to be driving these past few posts, in a literal sense. This post is being written in “real time.” I am going to try and pull together a few scattered thoughts and let this wind take me where it will. So, along with this word, “wind,” there are two other words that have been popping up in my mind these past weeks. Individually, I know what they are trying to say. However, it is not yet clear (“real time” writing) how they will come together in this post. Those two words are “touch” and “coincidence.”
Tumultuous Winds …
The past few weeks have been tumultuous. My daughter had a reaction to a medication, an ER visit, my overnighter to reach the city where she was interning to check on her, another unrelated allergic reaction, an Urgent care visit, four moves of her home and belongings, a cutting short of her internship for health reasons and bringing her back home. Sometime, somewhere, amid all this we found ourselves at brunch seated next to a family, a grandmother, a mother, and her two children.
The youngest child, a 2-year-old, was in her highchair, right next to me, with her back facing me. She was playing with one of her toys on the table. Every so often, with the utmost innocence, she would turn back towards me, stretching out her tiny little hand, inviting me to hold her hand and join her in a little tabletop playdate. She had no qualms about inviting a stranger, there was no anxiety or trepidation in her eyes. All I saw was that beautiful smile of pure joy and an open hand stretching back toward me in invitation.
A Few Days Later
A few days later, I was at a nearby Cathedral (close to where my daughter was interning), standing in line for Confession. It was a long line and a long wait. An elderly, matronly lady entered the Church. Seeing us all in line, she made her way from the front of the line towards the back where I was. As she passed each person in line, she reached out and touched their hands, gave them a big smile, and moved on to the next one.
At first, I thought she was greeting known acquaintances. When she reached me, she did the same. She reached out with this big smile, and gently moved her palm over my forearm as if to pacify me. My thoughts went quickly from a sense of awkwardness at her gesture of familiarity to a sense of quiet comfort. I was thinking back to that brunch and the 2-year-old at the same time. What was common to both the 2-year-old and that elderly lady, was that sense of innocent joy with which they were reaching out to a fellow human being, to strangers. Confession happened to be right before mass, so we went on to attend mass.
Coincidentally, the Gospel passage for that day was the story of Jesus in his native place (Mark 6), “… curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them”. The following day’s reading (Luke 8) was the story of the woman with the hemorrhages who was healed when “she touched the tassel on his cloak”.
Bursting my bubble …
Isaiah 53:7 describes Jesus’ frame of mind to His Passion & Death as, “Like a lamb led to slaughter or a sheep silent before shearers.” These incidents of the past few weeks got me thinking about my own frame of mind in dealing with life. I must confess that given the incidents of my own childhood and youth; I have developed a rhino hide of defenses that keep me in an insular bubble.
Even the little I exhibit of charity towards my fellow human beings is conducted from within the security of that bubble. I have used the virtue of prudence and a deep-rooted sense of self-preservation, which would include me and mine, as a rationalization towards this insularity. I have long since lost my sense of innocence about the world in which the Lord permits my existence and have turned cynical and suspicious about every little breeze.
For years I’ve fantasized about a retirement to a simple 1-room cottage in the woods. Its seemingly noble presentation rationalized by touted desires of simplicity and minimality. But I wonder now if its romanticization was a flight of fancy to further my insularity. Would I ever act like that 2-year-old or that matronly old lady? Why isn’t my approach to my life and the people I meet in it the same as Jesus’ to his Passion and his sheep. Jesus loved his sheep. I repeat, He loved his sheep. The Son of God touched his sheep by entering their humanity. I like to imagine that the Lord, the great I AM, became as one with his sheep, reaching out to them with the same joy and innocence as the two.
Prudence?
I think I have misused the virtue of prudence as an excuse to preserve my insularity, to limit my entering and touching the lives of others to a remote and distant act. Is it possible that the application of prudence is in the act, in the now, in the reaching out, in its innocence, in seeing what is right, when presented, and entering into it without fear, in the fact that the right act exists in the very good of God Himself?
On the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima, a year, to the day, after the assassination attempt by Agca, St. John Paul II said, “In the designs of providence, there are no mere coincidences.” The coincidence that the attempted assassination happened on the feast day led him to declare, “One hand shot, and another guided the bullet.” I need to break out of my bubble and deal with the “bullets” of life, head-on, knowing and trusting that they are guided by the Pneuma.
Mel Gibson’s Passion has this scene that was imprinted in my mind, of Christ clinging the harder to the cross on his road to his death. It is as if he loved the cross more than his life. He loved what it would do for his sheep more than any sense of self-preservation. The curve balls and bullets of life aren’t just “bad luck”. Yes, they happen because this world is a fallen world. But they are precisely the means of my salvation; that the people, the happenings, and the wind’s gentle movement of my soul through it all, is no mere coincidence.
If I can trust this great “both/and” for a second, then I just might be able to burst out of this insular bubble I’ve built for myself, and reach out and touch the lives of my fellow human beings, when and where I am called upon to do so, with the same innocent joy as that 2-year-old, as that matronly lady and as Christ clinging to His cross. Amen.
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