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