A couple of scenes, I think they are basically parables, an invitation to look beyond what took place and try to discern God’s presence.
Scene one. They seemed young, two persons, a man, and a woman pushing a grocery cart across a parking lot. Made a U-turn and entered the parking lot. The grocery carts were not by a liquor store, the young woman siƫng at the curb. She jumped up and opened the door, she was trying to be helpful, but she did not realize that the bags of groceries were for her. It had rained the previous night, there were plenty of mud stains, and her tears of gratitude when she received the bags of groceries, were humbling. No mud stains in her heart.
Scene two. Heading south on Cesar Chavez, more or less where the street reverts to Harris, there has been a man walking, sometimes in one direction sometimes in another. He wears all black, including a hoody drawn closed, just his eyes peering out. He is also barefoot. This day, again, the day after another night of rain, he would also receive a bag of groceries. On approach, he raised his hands and clearly said, “go away, I have a home, I am not homeless”. Perhaps he did have a home, perhaps his one home, closer to him than to many was the Father’s home.
St Vincent de Paul, the founder of the Vincentians, the Daughters of Charity, the inspiration of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and through Father Thomas Augustine Judge, CM, the inspiration that led to the founding of the Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity, seems to have said, “may the poor forgive the poverty of your charity unless there be love”.
Only with love, scenes such as these become revealing of God’s presence in uncharted ways. They urge us to consider, with gratitude, that our very existence is God’s loving intention; we need God’s love in a radical way and it is granted unconditionally. And maybe the mandate to love as we have been loved is like a desert that seems to transform itself into a multicolored tapestry
after a downpour of thunder and rain. So too, because we have been loved, we might blossom and transform the desert into life.
All of this so often seems too obvious, the question becomes, why do we hold back? For some of us, it just might be that our lives are always on the go. Sometimes it is an addiction, just don’t know how to stop and when we do stop, can’t wait to get going again. It is just crazy, we miss out on so much! The other thought that enters my mind is quite simply fear. We are afraid
of not fulfilling expectations, we are afraid of being judged, we are afraid of commitment, we are afraid to fail, we are afraid of love coming at us, and we are afraid of loving others.
I suppose, at least for some of us, we have to step on the breaks, pay the price necessary to step away from the activism that robs us of life, and then be fearless.
Father Francisco Gómez, S.T.