Unlikely Saints
In the book, The Strangest Way, Walking the Christian Path1), Robert Barron describes a Saint as a person who knows he is a sinner. I used to hear this saying among the people that I hang around,
“How do you get to Heaven?
You go to Hell and take a U turn.”
While listening to Father Barron on You Tube, I could not help but smile while I considered my friends Hughie and Lloyd. Lloyd, when he was younger had spent “16 years in the prison for the criminally insane”; and yet he was one of the first people, once I moved to college, that I felt I could trust. (He would often stop and give me a ride if I were walking along the road). Also Hughie always had a kind word for me, even though he was less than perfect. (When a group of us were lost in central CT one day in the early 1980s, he knew exactly where the church was, because the dog track was right next door. On more than one evening, he had prayed for his gambling problem to be removed).
With both of these dear friends, I have a deep conviction that I will see them again when I breathe my last breath.
Our Palm Sunday service at my church had its reading from Isaiah 53
“…He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. 4 Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7 He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was punished. 9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked…”
After reading this passage, Reverend Black described the humiliation that Jesus endured. He was rejected by the Church officials, his disciples. Those who had followed intently now looked on him with disgrace. “He was despised.”
Jesus was the unlikely Savior.
In Robert Barron’s Stations of the Cross You tube video, he goes into length about this book and chapter. He describes Jesus to be like a mother hen, caught in a barn fire, who shields her children with her body – sacrificing herself to save them. In his analogy, the barn fire is our sin; that He is willing to sacrifice himself to save us (me).
On a church board on my way to work, I read:
It wasn’t nails that held Jesus to the cross, it was love.
As I listened to the video, my mind’s ear kept on being drawn to the verb tense. Isaiah 52 is in the future tense: “my servant will…” and Isaiah 53 is in the past: “he was…” I was drawn to the many conversations with Paula. She had a way of explaining things that was never arrogant or self-righteous. She would often talk about how time had no meaning. This line of thinking brings me to the prayer:
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
One of Paula’s poems titled “Just So” contains the line: “Only the one will ever belong”
I can’t help but think that my friend Paula had a much deeper understanding of that Higher Power that so many of us call God. In many ways, her insight borders on brilliance.
In one of her journal entries, I read how grateful she was for being short in stature – “I see my feet when sitting on the toilet” I smile and think that she would never be accused of being a scientist. I think girth and not height play a larger role in whether one can view their feet while sitting on the toilet.
In another journal entry that Paula had mailed to me (October 6 2012), she describes the “delight” of being true to that Higher Power in the face of a terminal illness. She says that this “delight” has not made her a better person. She then details some of her failings and shortcomings.
After listening to Father Barron, I think Paula could be classified as a Saint.
All Are Welcome in my Father's House 