nun is gone. Putting down the pen, he asks the clerk, “Who was that nun that just passed by?” “I beg your pardon monsieur. What was that you said?” “That nun, who was she anyway? The one that just went by and smiled at me.” The clerk arches his eyebrows. “You are mistaken, monsieur. A nun, in a hotel, at this time of night? Nuns don’t go wandering around town, smiling at men!” “I know they don’t. That is why I would like you to explain the fact that one came up and smiled at me just now, here in this lobby.” The clerk shrugs: “Monsieur, you are the only person that has come in or gone out in the last half hour.”
Not long after, the traveler who saw that nun in the Paris hotel was no longer an important French industrialist, and he did know something about religious habits. In fact, he was wearing one. It was brown: a brown robe, with a brown scapular over it, and a thick leather belt buckled about the waist. His head was shaved and he had grown a beard. And he wore a grimy apron to protect his robe from axle grease. He was lying on his back underneath a partly disemboweled tractor. There was a wrench in his hand and black smudges all around his eyes where he had been wiping the sweat with the back of his greasy hands. He was a lay brother in the most strictly enclosed, the poorest, the most laborious, and one of the most austere orders in the Church. He had become a Trappist in a southern French abbey.6
God No Matter What
In the grand scale, life is not as serious as people think it to be. Life is holy and valuable in its ordinariness as long as folks are forthright and define themselves by faith rather than by successes and accomplishments. The things that diminish Christian identity also diminish insights, creativity and energy. The way individuals relate to God has a distinct connection with the way they respect others. The dignity they display toward others and themselves reflects the respect they have for God.
We strive to live by faith no matter what happens in life. Faith is believing in that which is unseen, and is the foundation for a sound self-image so basic to life. It is the light that guides our days when our days are like nights and nothing makes sense. It sustains a sense of security amid all the ambiguities of life. Yet, faith can be difficult. In her book Sister Wendy on Prayer, Sister Wendy Beckett gives us this illustration to help us along: “The holiest person I know has never had the slightest interior intimation that God exists. All she gets back from her prayer is doubt and darkness. She experiences a terrible fear that her life with God is all imagination, that there is no God, that living as a nun is a mockery. With this agonizing sense of her own personal weakness and her own absolute absence of felt certainty, she chooses. She chooses to believe. She chooses to act in accordance with that belief, which means in practice a life of heroic charity. This woman—and others like her, because she is not alone in this heroism—is giving to God the real sacrifice of faith. This woman chooses to love God and to serve him and to believe in him, even if she gets noting back. It is a glory to know that she exists and that there are others like her.”
Mary is the unsurpassed example of a faith-filled person. She shows that with God nothing is impossible. She welcomed the angel Gabriel’s message. “Be it done unto me according to your word” is a response to say each day of our lives. All through the circumstances and events of her life, Mary continued to say “yes.” Her faith never wavered. She shows all people how to know and love Jesus better. She helps everyone understand Jesus who cannot be contained or limited by human definitions. She shows people how to pray by opening their minds and hearts to the power of the Holy Spirit. In order to be students in her school of faith, it is mandatory to deeply understand the need for silence, recollection and how to live and grow in faith by being responsive to the mystery of God in ordinary life. Mary walks ahead of us as we walk through the dark confusion of our time. The light from her lantern of faith helps us see situations with trust in the Lord. She is forever reassuring that Divine Presence is always with us. Mary is the best of all role models there is to show everyone the myriad of beauties along the road of holiness and most of all, the magnificent beauty of her son.
Mary, help of Christians,
Hasten to our aide:
Pray for us in sickness
To your Son who died:
He who healed the lepers
Will not fail to heed
You, his honored mother,
Bearer of our need.
Mary, help of Christians,
Hear our urgent pleas
For your wounded children,
Broken and diseased:
He who bled to heal us
Will not fail to heed
You, beloved mother
Bearer of our need.
~Magnificat magazine, February 2011
4. Pat Nyquist, OSB, in Spirit & Life magazine (Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, Tucson, AZ), March/April 2007.
5. Ciszek, He Leadeth Me, 186.
6. Merton, Waters of Siloe, 13–14.
Hope: Evergreen
C. S. Lewis wrote:
My own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary, contentedly fallen, and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspaper that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first, I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys. I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.7
Does this scenario remind us of someone? With today’s continual development of new technological toys, people can become destructively self-absorbed. They neglect, or do not believe in, God. They live for the here and now, and their hope ends at the grave.
Hope is not wishful thinking or unfounded expectation. It embraces the plentitude of the present as well as the possibilities for the future. Hope is essential for taking appropriate risks that go beyond safety and security. Christian hope gives us confidence in the goodness and love
