Changes on the job

Bob was a big guy and nobody liked him. He worked for a trucking company and all the workers in the place couldn’t stand him. He was a loudmouth. He intimidated everybody he came into contact with, and he especially intimidated Frank.

The think Frank had inside of himself about Bob was horrendous. Anger, outrage. Frank didn’t even want to be around Bob. Bob would come in from taking a load and Frank would go to the other side of the terminal to avoid making contact. Or Frank would hurry to get his work done and be out the door just to keep out of Bob’s way.

It wasn’t really just Frank, though. Bob was such a blowhard, there wasn’t a man driving a truck that wouldn’t just as soon Bob went out and never came back. With Frank, the case was more severe, because Frank knew in his heart that the reason he had so much anger toward Bob was because he was afraid of him. Frank was absolutely scared of the man, big, dumb bruiser that he was.

One day, Bob got sick and went to the hospital. The atmosphere at the terminal was decidedly different those days. Suffice it to say, unkind comments were made about Bob being in the hospital, things like good riddance, dressed up with other unsavory vocabulary words.

Frank was glad Bob was out, too; but he still had anger about the man, and he didn’t know what to do about it. The thing about Frank, he had come to a new place in his life, trying to make a few changes, trying to stop living the way he had been living, trying to make some kind of attempt to do what he knew was right in the eyes of God.

Driving home that night, Frank came to a T in the road, and sitting directly across was a card store. Something inside Frank said stop and go in, which he did, and there he found a card to send to Bob. Frank called back to work and got the room number and address of the hospital. He addressed the card right there in the store and bought a stamp from the guy behind the counter because he knew if he didn’t do it now, he wouldn’t do it. Frank signed the get-well card, “Your friend, Frank.”

Immediately outside the card store was a mailbox. The instant he let the card drop in the mailbox, Frank’s anger left him. Just like that.

Seven, eight weeks later, Bob came back to work. The first thing he did was walk up to Frank and stick out his hand. “Thanks,” Bob said. Frank’s was the only card Bob had received from work the whole time he was in the hospital.

Frank did a little investigating after that. He found out Bob had five kids and every one of them was accident-prone. It seemed like one always had something wrong: a broken arm, a broken leg. To top it off, Bob’s wife was a sickly person, along with having emotional problems. The point was that Bob was coming to work every day out of an atmosphere of pressure. He had no easy life.

It was several years later and Frank had a different job by that time, 60 miles away in a different state. He was a used car salesman now. It was a warm day and business at the car lot, which was on a busy highway, was slow. Frank was walking around the lot outside hoping for a customer to come in.

All of a sudden, Frank heard the gasping of air brakes behind him on the highway and the hollow bump, bump, bumping sound of the trailer end of an empty big rig skidding to a short stop. Frank turned and looked up and who should it be but Bob dodging between lanes of moving cars with a smile on his face, waving and hollering, “How ya doing, Frank! Good to see ya, Buddy!”

Bob had stopped his rig in traffic to say hello to his old pal. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on December 6th, 1987

Faith in the family room

Jamie was a young man, just 15. He sat in the family room in the back of the house, alone this night as he was frequently in those times. Jamie lived with his Dad and his older brother. His Mom had died about a year before.

What had been a house full of kids and a Mom and Dad in the young fellow’s lifetime had become an empty place. Neighbors didn’t come. Meals were attempted but the effort mostly abandoned. It was empty and quiet.

Jamie had determined this night to be honest with himself once and for all. He would decide what he truly believed. It was a young man’s way of dealing with things. So much had happened so soon, but he could not say that then; he could not be wise and knowing about the meaning of his experiences.

Taking a pen and paper, Jamie wrote, “I believe in God.” He pondered the statement, questioning himself rigorously if he sincerely believed what he had written.

Dad had gone out, probably to the Elks. Dad was pretty lonely since Mom had died and Jamie didn’t begrudge his Dad’s need for companionship and relaxation. Jamie loved his Dad, but he couldn’t articulate the numbness in his own spirit. Did he believe anything anymore, anything at all?

Brother was out, too. It wasn’t long ago they had fought, Jamie and his brother. It was a real fight, one with wrestling and temper. Brother told Jamie he’d better start helping around the house, but Jamie wasn’t going to do that. He didn’t care about the damn house. You’re going to care, brother said, and whacked his sibling with the kitchen towel. Jamie grabbed the towel to wrest it away, but found it tight in his brother’s grip. They wrestled with it tensely to the floor.

Jamie’s eyes streamed with tears and anger and a hollowness he himself could not understand. From his center he cried: “I don’t care!” “You’ll start caring!” brother rejoined. And so it went until they both lost their energy, lying side by side, weeping, weeping, anguishing about a power guiding their lives to such an emptiness.

Jamie hated. He didn’t know why, he just hated. Jamie hated Dad, and loved him. Jamie hated God, and loved him. He could not see that his hate was anger, and that his anger covered up his hurt. Love was in him, but it seemed to him to be a painful contradiction.

The boy thought of the fight with his brother as he peered at the words, “I believe in God.” Quickly, there was a shuffling at the back door, and the quiet was broken by the sound of people entering. Immediately the air was pungent with a strange perfume. Jamie’s father, and a woman he had never met, entered the room. “Oh what a pretty boy!” the woman exclaimed.

After pleasantries and a short visit, Dad and his date left and quiet returned. The smell of perfume lingered in the air as Jamie resumed his thoughts, feeling the urgency of deciding what he truly believed, feeling deep longing for the basic, the absolute, the unequivocal. There was indeed something solid about “I believe in God.”

Against all expectation, Dad was home again soon, surprising Jamie in his exercise of discovering the substance of his faith.

Dad sat in the family room. “What you up to, son?” he asked.

Jamie said, “I’m trying to decide what I truly believe, Dad. I’ve begun by saying I believe in God,” feeling the urge to engage his father in discussing this pursuit.

His Dad nodded vacantly. He said, “Did you like that lady I brought by tonight?”

“She seemed like a nice lady.”

“Well, she might be your new momma.”

“Really? Gee, Dad, that’s great.”

Outside, the young man expressed happiness for his Dad. Inside, he retreated in fearful confusion. Barriers and walls went up that imprisoned the emptiness he could not understand. He stopped trying to decide what he truly believed. He began trying instead to repel the pain of the certainty of his doubt. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on December 6th, 1987

Hungry

A special place is reserved in my heart for people whose own hearts are hardened and ugly and black with sin. The reason is quite simple: Takes one to know one.

I thank God for the profound blessings He has given me in my life. I thank Him especially for the opportunities I have had to love and show compassion for others like me: the bums and derelicts, the haughty, the selfish, the lustful, the greedy and indifferent, the addicted and desperate, the lazy and morose, the liars and thieves. I am not set apart from these. I long for their fellowship with me in our saving, loving, forgiving Lord. I want them to know about the victory that can be ours, not of ourselves, but in Him.

I can’t help it and I can’t explain it, but I feel drawn to those who have cut themselves off from God’s grace. Somehow there’s an urgency inside me for them to know that I understand, I’ve been there; I’m there now; I know the struggle; there’s hope.

I don’t boast of sin. St. Paul says, “What, then, are we to say? ‘Let us continue in sin that grace may abound?’ Certainly not! How can we who died to sin go on living in it?” My boast is that God loves us sinners.

The sinners I find most difficult to love are the proud, the arrogant, the puffed up. The reason, again, is apparent. I find pride to be my most debilitating defect. Pride puts me at a distance from those most in need of my authentic concern. Pride blinds me to the beam in my own eye.

Once more, St. Paul: “…Every one of you who judges another is inexcusable. By your judgement you convict yourself, since you do the very same things. (People say) ‘We know that God’s judgement on men who do such things is just.’ Do you suppose, then, that you will escape His judgement, you who condemn these things in others yet do them yourself? Or do you presume kindness and forbearance? Do you not know that God’s kindness is an invitation to you to repent?”

I bring all this up today because I believe it’s important for me not to become smug or self-satisfied, to fail to recognize myself in the coal-blackest sinner. There, but for the grace of God, go I; and in my case – there I go.

As I bask in God’s favor in the Church and in the availability of the Sacraments, somehow hunger has become a growing part of that experience. A hunger for souls – not for the good guys, but for the bad guys.

God loves the poor and our hearts go out to those in need. But it strikes me that sometimes those in most need are the fat cats, the complacent, the stuffed. We sinners need more than a meal.

Whenever the subject of sin comes up these days, somebody always seems to fret about having a good self-concept. For my part, I have no trouble knowing that I am a person in love with God, longing to do His will, striving to follow Him, to obey Him, to love those He loves. I also know I fail in that. I’m aware that parts of me are revolting and embarrassing and dark. I deliberately choose evil. Al Capone had “My Jesus Mercy” chiseled on his tombstone. I wonder if people think, “Good thing Al prayed that prayer,” or if many don’t quietly pray it for themselves. I know I do.

Today, I don’t kneel and thank God that I’m not like the rest of men. On the contrary, it is my kinship with my brothers and sisters which stirs my soul to appreciation. This is why I am grateful: “It is precisely in this that God proves His love for us: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Now that we have been justified by His blood, it is all the more certain that we shall be saved by Him from God’s wrath.” - T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 22nd, 1987

Two friends with a longing

One of my favorite people in all the world is my friend Billy. We first met in the Army at Fort Benning, Georgia, 17 years ago.

Billy’s an unusual person as persons go. He certainly follows the beat of his own personal drummer. He’s at once eccentric and ordinary, spiritual and worldly. Only in the past few years have I made the acquaintance with his spiritual nature.

The Lord has his ways, and when Billy and I met we both were very much indifferent to matters of faith. One might say we had a scoffing attitude in those days. What mattered were good booze and good times. Now that we both sport decidedly balder pates, we find ourselves having been on a pilgrimage together. Somehow now the Lord matters a lot.

Billy and I have been great ones for pilgrimages. Hindsight helps me to identify the longing which was in both of us, longing for what we didn’t know, but thought we did. A couple of pseudo-artists-poets-vagabonds. We spoke amusedly and often of abandoning all vestiges of our former lives, of traveling to Denver. Denver! we’d say, and that would open great vague auras of significance, memories of reckless freedom and hopes for amusements and satisfactions as yet unexperienced in the human condition.

We had a longing all right, but not for Denver.

My friend Billy is not a Catholic, and I doubt he ever will be. (Who knows, maybe someday you’ll get that straightened out, William.)

Billy and I have both come to a new relationship with Jesus Christ, though, and surely that has given our friendship a whole new dimension.

I can’t describe the affection I have for my friend. My kids think he’s great and always enjoy his visits. My wife loves Billy, even though he can be awfully obnoxious. I’ve just never found it difficult to accept him the way he is, however that might be in a given year. Sometimes he is a flush high roller with a new artistic achievement under his belt.

Sometimes I worry he’s not going to make it, but he’s a survivor. He worked for a while with a Friends group in Chicago helping older people: driving them to town, doing their grocery shopping for them, cleaning their houses, tuning in to such wisdom as he could find among those he served.

No, I can’t describe this fellow to you. Whenever we meet we take up from there. Last Christmas morning he called and said he was coming in from Chicago if his car could make it. His car didn’t make it, so we got him on the Air Wisconsin. He had crafted gift packages for the children from pasteboard; one was a house, one was a pyramid, one was a book. The next day he went back home on the Amtrak. That was the last time I’ve seen him. He could show up tonight, though; and that would be wonderful.

Well, William, I would say. So good to see you. And he would laugh: a hearty, glad laugh that would send feelings of warmth to the very spirit. The kids would run to him and he would call them all by their middle names. And day would turn to night and night to morning with conversation and eating and fierce determined competition in a game.

I missed you, Tommy, he would say. I missed you, too, Billy, I would say.

Along the line I’d ask, how’s your spiritual life, Billy? And he would say, never mind about me, Tommy, how’s yours? And that would launch the writing of the latest chapter in our pilgrimage to Denver. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 15th, 1987

The real educators

The great educators of American youth may not be the pastors or principals, not the parents or the teachers, but with all due respect to these important individuals – the real educators may just be the school janitors.

I remember the janitor from my elementary school, Ss. Joseph and Paul, although I honestly don’t remember his name. I’m not really sure I ever knew his real name. I always called him Yogi Bear and he always called me Booboo. All the other kids called him Yogi Bear, too; and all the other kids had the same name I did. However, I knew in my heart and in fact that Yogi knew me personally, and that my name meant something very different from all the other Booboos.

So what about the education I received from the school janitor? Volumes could not hold these treasures.

Yogi Bear had a watch, a beautiful gold pocket watch with delicately detailed black hands. It was more than a watch, however. It was a tool. The school ran on it. Mass began by it. Important people may have set the times when things would happen, but they nevertheless happened by Yogi’s watch. He set the classroom clocks and the one in the principal’s office, too. The principal’s important timepiece determined many grave events, but its importance depended on a higher source. Sister Dorothy Marie may have taught me to tell time (or was it my mother?), but Yogi Bear, the school janitor, taught me about time itself, and the sway it held in people’s lives. I learned about time from the timekeeper.

Many privileges and responsibilities came my way in my education; patrol boy, president of the C.S.M.C., student receptionist. There was no task I approached with more awe, however, than those reverent occasions when Yogi Bear handed me the rope (me! imagine!) to pull the Angelus bell. As we awaited the famous watch to tell us just the right moment, Yogi gave me my instructions: the right tension, not too hard, let the rope slide for the second ring before pulling again. Wait. Rhythm is important. I, Booboo, made mistakes, but Yogi Bear had confidence in me. I learned from him that I could have confidence in myself. It might be odd, but I grieve for the boys and girls of today whose churches’ electric chimes deny them the opportunity to learn the mystical lesson of ringing the church bell. Honestly, I still feel its weight and response.

Yogi was a quiet man. He had his own niche in the boiler room, and I suppose I envied him that spot. Niches in boiler rooms are fertile ground for the seeds of contemplation. Yogi moved at his own pace, but always seemed to be working. He was kind to me, always ready to share his knowledge, but perhaps more importantly, his experience. Yogi didn’t necessarily teach the lesson, he was the lesson. He was nobility of character; he was humility – humility in touch with his own intrinsic worth. He was patience and calm.

Yogi shared important, lasting things. He knew about boys and pocket watches, boys and church bells. Gladly would he learn, and gladly teach; but he wasn’t the teacher. He was the school janitor. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 8, 1987

What happened to courtesy?

Courtesy does not come to us naturally. It’s artificial, learned. It’s a lubricant in society that eases our relationships with one another. It’s artificial, but it isn’t phony. I believe it’s a necessity in an ever shorter supply.

Having been brought up in Kentucky, one might say I have been influenced by the southern traditions of high congeniality. Huck Finn’s “Yes, ma’ams” come to mind; and I do indeed still say yes, ma’am. The night they drove old Dixie down was a night no doubt duly accounted for in Divine Providence, but good manners began to die, too; and I’ll call that a shame.

Courtesy is right and important. St. Paul says in Philippians, “…Let all parties think humbly of others as superior to themselves, each of you looking to other’s interests rather than to his own.” If I push in ahead of you, grunt when you speak, in general fail in civility, much less pay deference to you dignity, I have done more than abrogate courtesy, I have harmed you. That makes it a moral matter.

I’m not talking about knowing which fork to pick out of a line of forks at a state dinner, but the common greeting, the consideration and respect we as individuals owe to one another.

Something grates against my bones when I hear a youngster respond to a teacher with “yeah.” Something goes to war inside me what a failure to hear is rejoined with “what?” Something wrinkles my brow when overfamiliarity occurs where unfamiliarity exists.

Words are, too, important. It does matter that people say please, that people say excuse me, that people beg people’s pardon. Addresses like Mr. and Mrs. and Ms. and Father and Sister and Brother and Bishop all matter. Children do need to learn to say thank you, and not just grab the candy and run. Courtesy is tightly linked with words – they are tools of respect; they erect it where it did not stand.

There are times of course, when words are obnoxious. Someone obstreperously butting into a conversation would do well to keep silence. There’s a time for reverent quiet; there’s a time to make noise.

It’s true, manners can be carried to ridiculous extremes. The French, in their précieux period, were loath to refer to teeth, for example, considering the word too earthy. They preferred “the furnishings of the mouth.” They disliked “feet,” preferring “les petites souffrantes,” the little sufferers. Sometimes discourtesy can be disguised in preciosity. A friend one filing through the college cafeteria line told one of the cooks: “Madame, this fare is a gastronomical felony!” To which she replied, “Why thank you!”

Courtesy, for all its sometimes culturally affected oddities, nevertheless has a certain core value, an intrinsic place in any time period. For all the funny distortions that can occur, we need cultural mechanisms for getting along. For sure, the gentility of the South is gone. Going, too, I’m afraid are the sentient good manners of the North, East and West.

Lord, thank you for giving us one another. Lord, please guide us in our ways. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 1st, 1987

On being a misfit

One of the things I hear my Bishop say with regularity is that Catholicism is counter-cultural. He has spoken of the counter-cultural choice young men and women make when they enter religious life. He emphasizes the counter-cultural lessons taught in Catholic schools. He makes a point that our faith, the core message of our evangelization, is counter-cultural.

Just between you and me, I haven’t meditated very deeply nor very often about being counter-cultural; but I guess the Bishop has said it often enough now that he has my attention. As I spend a few ergs on the subject, I don’t find the fruits of contemplation altogether pleasant. What I hear the Bishop saying is that who we are and what we do don’t mesh very well with society.

Catholics, it seems, spent the better part of the last 200 years trying to fit into the American mainstream. Now we’re affluent (statistically, anyway). We’re well educated. Studies indicate that people actually like having us for neighbors. We made it; we’re in.

Now that we’re in, however, good golly, Miss Molly, it looks like the thing to do is to get out – and particularly while the getting is good. More properly the expression is: be in the world, but not of it.

Now I don’t want to be putting words into the Bishop’s mouth, but what I hear him saying is that good practicing Catholics are a bunch of misfits. He would never say that, probably, but that expresses for me what “counter-cultural” means.

Perhaps the popular connotation of misfit evokes images of green whiskers and opium dens. Misfit is a harsh sounding word that makes people uncomfortable. Even so, is seems a verbal shock helps me to get the idea.

The idea is that nobody can follow both God and Mammon. To that assertion comes a round of qualifications and denials – not necessarily “O yes you can,” but “You can’t have too many clothes or too much money,” or the running assumption that acquisition of wealth is devoutly to be wished.

The gospel of the modern world is relativism: you do your thing and I do mine and moral standards are what I say they are. The Catholic Church rejects that idea, no matter what the degree of acceptance Catholics have found. And while the Church repudiates the simplistic yes/no codes of scriptural literalism, the Church also rejects that there’s no such thing as right and wrong. Right and wrong still do exist.

The key premise of the best-seller The Closing of the American Mind illustrates the position well:

Americans have becomes so relativistic that not to have a moral position has become a moral position. Somehow it’s become immoral to have convictions, because that means that I’m asserting that I’m right, which means that somebody else is wrong, and that’s not right. Don’t laugh. This hogwash is becoming a deeply ingrained American value system.

So, we Catholics have made it into the American mainstream, and look what we’ve found. We know that to authentically practice this faith of ours we now have to be misfits again.

Perhaps we can assert enough moral influence to change all that, but I suppose I’m skeptical. I appreciate the way the Bishop lets us in on the truth of the matter. “Counter-cultural”: that says it nicely. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on October 25th, 1987

Too much, too soon

Already they’ve started hawking Christmas wares. This is the first day of October! You’ll pardon my Grinch persona, but this early trading on the Spirit of Christmas does anything but inspire a festive mood. A TV ad on Oct. 4 with Bing Crosby wearing a wreath around his head singing the much-beloved White Christmas and all for only $12.98 plus shipping and handling does not give me a warm glow.

This early and offensive Christmas-theme commerce is linked intrinsically to the money god, not the Son of God. Christmas is a sacred celebration. The observance is gentle and quiet – full of the silence and serenity of awe. “He was known to be of humble estate,” the Scripture says. But where is the regard for the holiness of Christmas in this loud exploitation?

Celebration, of its very nature, implies waiting, anticipation, implies confining a particular focus to a particular time. Celebration also implies accomplishment. Things have to come to fulfillment before we celebrate them. Otherwise our celebration is empty, devoid of its reason for being.

My kids look forward to their birthdays, and rightly so. We do not, however, begin celebrating their birthdays three months in advance; nor do we emphasize the celebration until much closer to the date itself. We don’t want our children to be deprived of the celebration they deserve by causing it to be a vapid afterthought to a running hype.

I will grant that there is such a thing as the Christmas season. However, this ain’t it. We celebrate the harvest season during harvest season. We do not, however, celebrate bringing in sheaves in July! or June!

Frankly there is something decadent about beginning the Christmas celebration on the first of October. It’s an unfair assault on people’s sensibilities, and all this razzle-dazzle – particularly so soon – is a clear example of modern idolatry: the worship of money.

Sometimes I think that money has become the only real value in our society. If it has to do with money, people will take notice, act, be concerned. It’s the first good. Spiritual matters, affairs of conscience, issues of the heart and soul have become irrelevant, expendable – nice, but who cares? What matters is money. Money has become literally a god.

Merchants declare that if they don’t make it at Christmas, they don’t make it – and heads bow in sympathetic assent. Let the unbridled consumerism begin! No matter that people become numbed into indifference. No matter that the standard of right conscience is whether the right gift has been procured, indeed that the right number of gifts have been purchased. No matter that people become callous and frayed and pressured – Buy early! Buy here! Buy now! Buy more!

Does the Babe in Bethlehem desire that people incur unconscionable debt, panged by some materialistic guilt to give the very best somebody else’s money can buy? And what of gift receivers? Do we droop in disappointment if we don’t get enough, just what we wanted, just the right thing? I read the truth in my own heart. I feel the struggle. I’m not immune or above it all.

It is, of course, pointless to protest these proceedings. We have no defense save in the quiet place God gave each of us within. We know that retreat, but we forget about it sometimes – forget the sweetness and truth and light we have found there.

Giving is good, but a gush of extravagance is a distortion of that goodness. Receiving is a blessing, but tempered with anything but gratitude is an insult to that blessing. Celebration is natural, but unnatural if unrelenting and lacking fulfillment.

Pope John Paul II, in a message to the laity while in San Francisco, said that we will be a witness to Christ by the way we live and by the way we refuse to live. I refuse to allow Christmas to become an empty, giddy, hyperactive succession of weeks for me and my family. I opt to wait.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on October 18th, 1987