behind me. So here I am literally in the middle of two people talking past me.
The woman in front of me tells the woman in back of me that she forgot it was Sunday, therefore the buses didn’t travel as frequently as weekdays and her boyfriend was waiting for her. She was almost an hour late. She said her boyfriend offered to just call her a cab, but she refused.
“Hundred bucks for a cab! I told him. Are you crazy?”
“Hundred bucks? Really?” asks the woman behind me.
“Naw. More like twenty-five bucks, but still,” she confessed before changing the channel.
“I love your jacket! Is that down? Must be warm on a crazy cold day like today? Where’d you get it?”
“Burlington Coat Factory,” says the lady behind me. “Everything was like 70 percent off. Serious! Seventy percent off!
“I love your gloves too. Where’d ya’ get ’em?”
The lady behind me hesitated, said she couldn’t remember. Looking out the window, trying to be invisible, I’m thinking she didn’t want to say.
The lady in front of me owned the remote to the conversation and changed the channel again. “Yesterday, I saw a bus driver get out of the bus and chase after a guy who dropped a hundreddollar bill out of his pocket on the bus. He ran after the guy just to give him back his money. Made me a believer again. Made me a believer in people. Good people. A hundred-dollar bill!”
“Good deeds come back to you,” says the lady behind me. “Always comes back to you. Always.”
Short silence followed. I noticed it.
“I found a wallet once,” the lady in front of me said softly. “Kept the money. Left the wallet and everything else. But I took the money. That was over twenty years ago. I was sick over it for ten years, but I had kids, and I had no money. I felt so bad …”
The lady behind me offered solace: “You were meant to have it. Gawd wanted you to have it. He knew you needed it.”
But the lady in front wasn’t buying it: “It was wrong. I felt bad for so many years. Now I try to pay it back whenever I can help somebody else out.”
Witness the way our solitary mistakes stay with us. Witness the way one or two of our regrettable choices purchase a condo in our conscience. Witness the way no one else knows except us. And witness our struggle to let ourselves off the hook.
I know this is can be a noble dynamic. I wonder when it can be a crippling one.
We passed a trailer park on Airline Highway and the woman in front of me changed the channel again. The New Orleans weather was unseasonably cold. Everyone was bundled up in layers of clothes not really made for winter. Locals on the bus didn’t have winter clothes like “people up North.”
I had on a vest with my collar zippered up and my old baseball hat pulled down near my ears.
“City’s tearing down this trailer park,” she announced as she pointed her nose to the one outside the bus stop. “I know a lot of people who won’t have any place to go.”
“People need places to go when it gets this cold,” said the lady behind me.
“For real,” said the lady in front of me. “I hear that they still got rooms down on Josephine and Magazine.”
“You got a place to stay?” she asked.
I was still looking out at the trailer park, wondering how people will move on when it gets torn down. I noticed the pause in the chatter and looked up. The woman in front of me was staring at me.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“How ’bout you? You got a place to stay tonight?” she repeated.
“I’m good,” I nodded casually. “I’m good.”
The middle-aged lady holding plastic grocery bags filled with who knows what, draped in layers of fall clothes to combat the bitter New Orleans cold had soft eyes. The tone of her voice was warm and sincere.
Without saying anything I took a mental picture of it and put it in my memory box, in case I ever needed a moment to believe.
3
Some grace lasts for life
I sit here with sixteen Catholic lay ministers. Three generations in the room, like always. Young ones in their mid twenties, others in their late forties, and some a little older than that. We are gathered in rural Louisiana around a rectangle made up of white plastic folding tables. We are here to discuss the benefits of the training they have received. Almost half of these laypeople are in the midst of getting their master’s degree in pastoral theology, and the rest are in the midst of completing the detailed certification required to serve their community. Bona fide. Serious. And lacking funds.
I’ve been invited here by the Diocese of Baton Rouge, which has good news to share: a grant from the Our Sunday Visitor Institute will provide these lay ministers with the funds they need to complete their education.
After introductions and Subway sandwiches, everyone takes a few minutes to share what this training has been like for them
Today I listen extra hard. I lean in. For over two hours.
It takes no time for me to be reminded of something we all know to be true. Education done with inspiration contributes to one’s formation. Education done with a blessed combination of intellectual quality, fierce conversation, soulful reflection, critical thinking, human touch, and a happy heart leaves its mark on you. For life.
What I hear today is nothing new. I hear this all the time from laypeople who have gone through integrated and inspired programs. When we experience this kind of education as part of the necessary preparation for our work, we remember it, describe it, testify to it.
For life.
Today, I hear one person after another use familiar phrases describing “growth” and “being challenged past their comfort zone.” One after the other describes how new knowledge about this or that “opened my eyes,” “helped me understand things,” and “gave me some clarity.” When one or two use the word “miracle,” a couple of others smile and nod strongly. One even qualifies a miracle as “a real miracle.”
We laugh.
We know.
A lot of what I hear today is vocational stuff. A couple of people mention being called to this ministry by someone who saw something in them. Some mention being called by God “inside me.” A few describe the vocational surprise a lot of us can relate to: “I never would have thought that I would be doing this”; “If someone would’ve told me that I would be doing this, I would’ve told them …” But I am struck by the quiet joy I hear in their voices every time they say things like, “Now I can serve this community,” or, “This ministry is the way I can serve my community here.”
When someone talks of the inner peace they enjoy because of the “chance to do this ministry,” heads nod again. Lots of
