Recently I stayed in Dublin with a friend who, during the course of our visit, told me how she’d once been seated during a transatlantic flight beside a nun from a Catholic religious order called The Little Sisters of the Lamb. When the sisters are out evangelizing, they walk from place to place and beg for food and lodging. They carry no money.
When the meal came, the sister ate a reasonable amount, then pushed her tray away. Noticing an uneaten roll, my friend urged her to take it. “You’ll be hungry later!” she remonstrated. “Pack that up and put it in your pocket.”
But the nun just smiled. “Thanks, but it’s okay. I’m not hungry now.”
The story was intriguing enough that my friend still remembered it years later — and I, too, was fascinated. My own way around food while traveling is the polar opposite. I save not only the bread, but the butter, the extra creamer, sugar, and Splenda packets, the crackers, the fake cheese in a tiny plastic tub, the recyclable utensils, the bottle of water, and the napkins.
“Regard the lilies of the field,” said Jesus, and, “take nothing for the journey, neither walking stick, nor sack, nor food, nor money, and let no one take a second tunic.”
I admire such trust. But I come from a working-class family of eight children and have never been able to shake the hard-wired impulse to stockpile, the fear that there won’t be enough, no one will have your back, you’re on your own, and if there’s not enough, you’ll die.
Then again, I’ve read way too many Holocaust memoirs. In “Cold Crematorium” (St. Martin’s Press, $11.50), József Debreczeni describes lying on his fetid bunk at Auschwitz, hearing a weird crackling noise, and realizing that his cellmate, all but dead, was eating the lice off his own body. So to throw away a roll just seems wrong.
Or so I tell myself.
People often think religion is a choice, a philosophy, a set of rules. But religion isn’t a formula.
That’s why what’s waste for one person won’t necessarily be waste for another. What’s pathological for one person will be sacrificial martyrdom for another. St. Maximilian Kolbe offered himself up to die in the starvation bunker at Auschwitz in place of a fellow prisoner, a husband and father. The anorexic and Kolbe both willingly starve to death, but their motives are totally different.
Religion is a relationship with Christ, a love for Christ. Without Christ, nailed to the cross, we couldn’t sleep at night, knowing of all the people who are hungry, being trafficked, raped, tortured, killed at any given moment. Without Christ, resurrected, we would never dare to feel joy.
Recently I heard an interview with a woman who’d escaped a religious cult and was, understandably, profoundly traumatized. “Hell is a fiction!” she spat. “And if there is a hell, why aren’t all the so-called religious people praying for the people there? Why don’t they pray all day for the poor people who’ve been consigned to it!”
Oh but we do, we Catholics, I thought. That’s exactly what we do. My friend’s house was across from a convent of contemplative nuns who dedicate their whole lives to praying, among other things, for the salvation of souls. Every late afternoon they had adoration, then evening prayer, then 5:45 Mass.
I’d hosted a writing workshop the previous week, and not having to talk to anyone much now was a relief. I spent a lot of my time in Dublin at the National Botanic Gardens, one of my favorite places on earth. Silence, surrounded by living things. A heron standing stock-still on the path. Magpies. Flowers in shades of butternut gold, violet, russet, bronze. A touch of autumn.
On the first leg of the return trip, a 10-hour flight, I had an aisle seat next to an enormous guy who couldn’t help taking up half my space. Why if you were that big, I wondered, would you sandwich yourself between two people? I guess if you were on the aisle you’d spill out, and if by the window you’d be trapped on one side, I decided — or maybe the dear man had just nabbed the last available space.
I helped him with his seat belt. He offered me some candy from a bag of fruit jellies (I took two reds). When our meals were delivered, I gave him my dessert (a piece of chemical frosted cake wrapped in cellophane), carefully stowing the crackers and water for later.
We smiled at each other.
Then I leaned back and reflected that there are different ways of not bringing an extra tunic. We suffer our ongoing compulsions, bewailing our weirdness and weakness even as we try to offer up our entire selves, like Kolbe. Perennially on the outskirts, we trust there will be enough companionship along the way, enough friends. Along with The Little Sisters of the Lamb, we know that Jesus is our deepest family, our deepest home.
In “The Joy of Believing” (Sophia Institute Press, $19.95), French laywoman and lover of the poor Madeleine Delbrêl wrote:
“In each person there is something that will never be understood by anybody. This thing is the precise cause of our solitude, of this solitude which is intrinsic to us. Our first task is to accept this ‘primordial’ solitude.”
