outward sign that symbolized what we hoped would be a growing inward reality and, as such, we were very aware that they should be an ever-present reminder.
It has been several days, almost a week, since I have tried to dictate a new section of this manuscript. I have had quite a few visitors in the meantime and, although I enjoy seeing people very much, their presence drains me. I find that I have less and less energy as time goes on, and I remind myself regularly that it’s only natural to feel that way at my stage of life. Natural or not, it’s frustrating. I have, however, been eager to get back to work because I find I enjoy recalling and speaking about this particular part of my life very much.
Reflecting on my days in Huntington causes a clutter of images to cascade through my mind, and they all compete for my attention. These memories seem like old friends who have been ignored for too long, and each one of them seems to spark others, to resurrect recollections long buried, but never truly forgotten. Perhaps there is some logic in the way this is happening, but I cannot discern it, nor do I care to try. I am content simply to enjoy the progression of such memories, to travel where they seem intent on taking me. It is like watching a stream of water flow by or clouds traveling through the sky, propelled by strong wind.
Right now, although I am in my reclining chair, it is as if I am standing in a large room, and I must inform you that this is no ordinary room. It is the refectory in Huntington, the place in which countless Capuchins took their meals for many, many years. It is the place in which I ate every day for my entire time in the novitiate. I can see the tables. I remember the assigned seats for the novices so well that I could tell you who sat where without a second thought. I can envision my own place just a little more than halfway down one long table as if I were there only yesterday. I can even see the plain food that was our daily fare back then. Let me tell you, no five-star restaurant ever had to feel threatened by our monastery kitchen. Yet the food was good and nourishing, if not particularly inspiring. Most of it came from the things we had grown on our own land. Most of it was organic, I think, although nobody would have used that word in such a way back then. Maybe that means that we were ahead of our time—in the vanguard, so to speak.
I cannot imagine the meals in that room without also hearing a voice. As is common in most monastic houses, there was a lector at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, someone who read aloud as everyone else ate in silence. It was firmly believed that in the life of a religious, time should never be wasted, and the mind must be focused as much as possible on spiritual things. So the custom arose many centuries ago of having some spiritually edifying text read aloud during mealtime. Meal after meal we worked our way through one book after another, listening closely as we ate (most of the time, at least).
Some of those books were captivating. Others were less so. There is one book that I will never forget. It had such a deep impact on me that it literally changed my life. Saints for Sinners was the title, and it was by Archbishop Alban Goodier, SJ. In it he told in a rather lively way the stories of a good number of the saints, and not just the ones everyone is familiar with. He told of some saints whose names were not well-known at all and even of some whose names were virtually unknown.
It was during the reading of this book that I first heard of a little-known saint, a wanderer, a tramp like the tramps whom I remembered from my childhood. These were men whom life seemed to have treated with exceptional cruelty—those whom life seemed intent on crushing. As the book was being read I recalled being a small boy, hiding behind a bush and watching one such man make his way down our street. I had realized at the time that he was different from all the adults in my life, and I had understood that this difference was a disturbing one. I can remember crouching low so he wouldn’t see me, as something about him seemed frightening. Perhaps on some level I understood that he was also terribly sad; perhaps I did not.
I saw other such men as I grew older, for they were not really uncommon in the late thirties and early forties. Often their lives had been destroyed by the Great Depression; often they were the ones who could not recover, could not go back to a normal life. They carried all that they owned in a bag or two. They had no fixed abode; they were always moving on, as if condemned to travel endlessly in search of what? Acceptance? Love? Peace? My mother would never fail to give them food, as did many people in our town, and they would never fail to be greatly appreciative. Some of them—more than a few actually—turned out to be real gentlemen.
They had seemed to me to be the forgotten ones, the invisible ones, the ones whose lives no longer mattered to anyone. To the world they were no more than leaves being buffeted from place to place by cold autumn winds. As I grew older, seeing them ceased to be frightening, but it started to become troubling and eventually almost painful. Why didn’t anyone help them, I wondered. Why did no one take them in as they wandered from disappointment to disappointment? Their presence, their very existence, seemed to me to expose the truth of our world in a very stark and unpleasant way. It showed how far we really were from what Christ wants us to be.
These wanderers became for me the mirror of our failure, of our indifference to the suffering of others, of our ability to ignore the pain that is right in front of our eyes. I wanted to help—felt a compulsion to do something. Yet all I could do was to offer them the food that my mother had made or sometimes, perhaps, some money. It was something, but it was little—far too little when measured against all they really needed. Perhaps it was the sight of those lost ones that first awakened in me the desire to serve the poor.
I recall how startled I felt all those years ago in the refectory as I discovered that Archbishop Goodier had actually included such a wanderer—a little tramp—in his book on saints. Before that moment I don’t think I had ever imagined that such a person could achieve so much; I guess I had considered men like him to be too damaged to be capable of rising to real spiritual heights. That realization felt shameful, because it showed me that, like the people who ignored such men, I too perceived them as being somehow less than others—almost, but not quite fully human. I had allowed their sad and disturbing exteriors to obscure the fact that they were made in the image of God, that they were the ones for whom Christ died. I felt ashamed, but also excited. Listening intently, I began to see in a way that may have been new to me at the time that God’s grace really can enter wherever God wants it to enter, can transform even the unlikeliest of human lives. I must say that it was a rather thrilling realization.
The vagabond saint about whom I was hearing became utterly fascinating to me, so fascinating that I forgot to eat, which I can assure you was not a common occurrence for me at that time. As I pushed my carrots around my plate, I began to visualize him on his wanderings, and in my imagination his face began to take on the features of the men I had seen as a boy, the ones who had disturbed me so.
Yearning for a life of holiness, yet rejected by one religious order after another, this saintly hobo (for when I was a boy, that is what we called such men) traveled on foot throughout France, Italy, and Spain, making his way from one shrine to another. Denied a monastery, he made the world his monastery. Denied physical possessions, he still engaged in constant acts of charity, giving to others the very food he needed to survive. Denied friends, he devoted himself to the one Friend who would never desert him, and spent countless hours in Eucharistic devotion. Denied a home, he died on the streets of Rome. Denied in this life almost everything the world values, he received everything of real value in the next.
He was a perplexing kind of saint, and there is a very real possibility that if he had lived in our times he would have been considered mentally ill.
