Starting
Point Present as love to all times and all places
By JAMES STEPHEN
BEHRENS
His name I cannot remember, though
his face is as vivid to me as it was when I last saw him. He was 9 years old
back then, so he would be about 34 years old now. I wonder if I would recognize
him. I hope he is doing well.
He came to early Mass with his mother almost every morning. They
sat in the first pew, and I soon realized that she was coaching him to be an
altar boy. She poked him every few minutes to make sure he caught this or that
routine.
The morning came for the first meeting for altar boys, and his
mother dropped him off before any of the other kids arrived. She told me that
he was so eager to serve Mass, but that he was very nervous and she worried
that he might not get along with the other kids. I asked her why, and she said
that he was a loner.
He was so friendly with me and eager to please. I noticed that he
did keep his distance from the other kids.
Over the months that followed, he always showed up on time and
could not do enough for me. He desperately needed to do and be right. I sensed
that something was hurting in his life.
I asked the pastor about the boy. The pastor sighed and told me
that the boys father drank and that he had been arrested several times
for beating his wife. I then understood the need of their son to find a warm
spot in his life. Other things I had noticed then became clearer to me. The
little boy looked undernourished and sad, even though he smiled. It was the
kind of smile that was asking for something, asking for help and recognition.
Asking for more attention and love than his parents were then able to give
him.
Several weeks ago, I thought about him. His face simply
arrived in my minds eye one morning as I sat in church. I
could think of nothing that would have summoned his face. And yet it was so
clear to me.
I thought back on those first months after I met him. He did fine
as an altar boy and then for some reason moved away, and I never saw him
again.
That little boy was a window through which I saw someone who
exists in each of us.
It is said that human pain is an invariant. It is one of the few
constants that all people experience. To suffer pain is to be human. Pain is
not only something that happens to us, as if getting hit by it from the
outside. At a more lived and fundamental level, pain is very much a part of how
we simply are.
We are estranged from God and each other and most of the time we
hide that well, especially in our own culture. We are hit from all sides with
the message that pain is abnormal. We assume that when and where it exists,
pain can be eradicated if we take the right medication, find the right
therapist, think the right way, find the right group, read the right book,
listen the right way. And so we smile our way from therapy to therapy, from
dream to dream, all the while feeling oddly distanced from that ever-present
sense about ourselves that we are not quite at home here and that something
about that hurts.
That little boys face spoke volumes to me. In it I saw the
hurt of his mother and the pain of his father, a man and woman whose anger and
hurt scarred a young life. I know they never meant that to happen.
He was hurting and he smiled and so wanted to please. He was young
enough to attempt to negotiate with the new and fresh experiences that were
flooding into his young life. There were places that were good and holy and not
hurtful -- like the church. And he would go to there and to school, to
playgrounds, asking for something and not understanding quite what, asking out
of hurt.
Dorothy Day believed with all her heart that prayer could change
everything in time -- even the past. I was astounded when I read that, and the
more I thought about it, the more fantastic it seemed to me. She was a firm
believer in the fantastic. She believed in God who is present as love to all
times and all places -- as God was and is to that little boy.
So I prayed. I prayed for him as I remembered him. I prayed for
his parents as I remembered them. And I prayed that God be good to them.
Wherever that boy is, he is now a man. When he looks back on his
past, may his gaze be softened by love. May he see his parents as God does. May
he know how hard it is for each of us to know and give love when there is pain
and anguish. And if he has children, may they be happy with a father who
somehow grew to be a man who loves more and more the older he gets.
Trappist Fr. James Stephen Behrens lives at Holy Spirit
Monastery in Conyers, Ga. His e-mail address is
james@trappist.net
National Catholic Reporter, February 9,
2001
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