surroundings is the natural prelude to awakening the heart. In high school, I had a wonderful teacher for freshman English named Margaret Henley. Miss Henley was something of an aspiring poet, as well as the faculty advisor for the school literary magazine and thus a group of us girls who fancied ourselves emerging writers. All writers, she would say, begin as observers. She challenged us one day to recall the eye color of the bus driver who took us to school that morning. I should have known this. I knew the driver’s name. He was a regular along my route. He had even taped a piece of cardboard onto the corner of the bus’s front window that said, scrawled in sparkle ink, “Wishing You A Good Day, Your Driver Sam.” But the color of Sam’s eyes? I could only guess. Blue?
Ever since that day in class, I’ve tried to not only notice, but also truly observe the people I pass in the street, the grocery store, or sit next to on the bus—not to mention the people I interview as a journalist. Still, I fall down on the job. As a young reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, I was sent to write about a man who, over the years, had portrayed Santa for something like ten thousand children. He was a jovial fellow, just about the right size for Santa, with a seemingly inexhaustible well of patience. He appeared to experience deep joy in being around children. He spoke lovingly of his own grown children.
At about eight o’clock that Christmas Eve, the phone rang at my home. It was Joe, the man who played Santa. He was in tears. He told me how much he appreciated the article I had written about him. He thanked me for being so kind to him. Because of my kindness, he wanted me to know it was all a faade. He in fact hated Christmas. His wife had divorced him. His children didn’t talk to him. Every Christmas, he found himself alone. In fact, all the while he was volunteering at hospitals, stores, and children’s parties as Santa, he had been living out of his car because he couldn’t afford an apartment. He said it was all he could do to not think about killing himself as he took off his red Santa suit for the last time of the season.
Why hadn’t I seen any of this coming? How could I, a trained observer, have missed picking up on even an inkling of this man’s pain? I called my parents and told them I’d be late coming over to their home for Christmas Eve dinner. With a friend, I drove over to the part of town where Joe was sitting in his broken down car on that cold December night. We tried to convince him to come back with us to my parent’s house for a meal. He didn’t want to come, but thanked us for spending time with him. You could say my best gift that Christmas Eve was that I woke up.
What is not possible to us by nature, let us ask the Holy One to supply with the help of grace.
—FROM THE PROLOGUE
In his autobiography, Chronicles, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan says one of the greatest influences on his life was his maternal grandmother. She once told him something he never forgot: “Everyone you’ll ever meet is fighting a hard battle.” Joe is a prime example. To truly see Joe, I first had to break out of the tomb of my own self-absorption. I had to climb out from my own battleground so I could see someone else’s “hard battle.”
Joe’s story has a somewhat happy ending. About a year later, I ran into him. He was dressed in a business suit and said that with the help of a social service agency, he was able to scrape together enough money to begin making belts and other leather goods for sale. The business wasn’t exactly booming, but he had customers among the people he met over the many years he had played Santa. St. Benedict asks us to awaken to the whisper of the sacred in our daily lives. And then he asks more. He asks that we wake up to the people around us—to truly see them. In a beautiful scene in the musical version of The Bridges of Madison County, the main character at one point asks her lover to look deeply at her hands, her mouth, her shoulders. She says, “talk to me, like there’s something to say.” One of the greatest gifts we can give to others is to let them know they are seen and heard.
The Benedictine Abbot Jerome Kodell writes about partaking of “the sacrament of the present moment.” That is what I felt I was doing that Christmas Eve with Joe. It is an attitude of awareness I try to cultivate toward the people I meet every day who are fighting their hard battles. It is a way to run with the light, and live.
For Reflection:
Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die.
—FROM CHAPTER 4, “THE TOOLS FOR GOOD WORKS”
I have always had a terrible fear of death. It often grips me in the middle of the night. At those times, I wake seized with the anxiety that I will one day no longer occupy the chair at my work desk, my place at the kitchen table, or my side of the bed.
This fear began at an early age. It may have something to do with having parents who were older when I was born. They looked like my friends’ grandparents. Grandparents had the unfortunate habit of dying. I feared my parents would die and I’d be left alone.
I was also haunted early on by a sense of life’s brevity. One New Year’s Eve as I watched Guy Lombardo’s orchestra on TV with my parents, a band member sang, “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think).” When he got to the line about how the years go by “as quickly as a wink!” I began to weep uncontrollably. I was four years old at the time.
No wonder, then, that when I first began reading The Rule, few passages leaped out at me more than Day by day, remind yourself you are going to die. As an adolescent, I liked characters in literature who refused to sleepwalk through life: Larry Darrell, the spiritual seeker in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge; Eugene Gant, who yearns to leave the emotional confines of his small town and fractured family in Look Homeward, Angel; and of course, the insouciant Zorba the Greek. In a notebook where I kept all my favorite quotations, I dutifully copied Zorba’s observation that, “All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven’t the time to write, and all those
