SAVING LIVES

I was struck, this morning, by the brief sermon of our new (Catholic) parish priest, a small, bouncy Algerian enthusiast (in the complete sense of the word). His liturgies are a little happy-clappy for my liking, but he is utterly sincere and suffused with real joy – which is both unusual and hard to resist.

   His sermon was, appropriately, about joy. As I continue my journey of faith, he said, and it’s been 27 years now, I find myself more and more filled with happiness and light. A happiness and a light that need to be shared.

   There are still, beloved (he said), religious – monks and nuns – and priests, and lay people too, who are steeped in Jansenism. They wear long gloomy faces, and they act as if they were called to bear the whole world and its misery on their shoulders. Well, let me tell you something, he continued: we are not called to bear the world and its misery on our backs. It is God Who bears the world and its misery! And meanwhile, He gives us what is most precious to Him: His own Son, Whom we are about to receive here in the communion. Those two facts alone should make us dance with joy! (I told you he is exuberant.) If we can let that joy flow through us and touch those we come in contact with, healing will take place. Sometimes a smile can save a life.

   Beyond Father Jean-Kamel’s enthusiasm, I was struck by the resemblance of some of this to my own recent thoughts about “flowing through”. I’m increasingly aware that what we can pray for, ultimately, is to be filled with the Spirit. As I said not long ago, aches and pains and contrarieties can open small shutters and windows that will let the Spirit into our carefully-protected egos. And a prayer for that is almost always answered. But then what? As it, as He, fills us, do we just swell like the bullfrog and pop? The point, of course, is that as we are filled with the Spirit, through all those shutters and windows, that same Spirit should flow through us and out of us again. Both upward – back to God – and outward, to all those people around us who are stressed, irritated, miserable, frustrated, exhausted, lonely and – as the French say – “ill in their skin” (mal dans leur peau).

That doesn’t mean that we should necessarily go out looking for sad people. To me, one of the interesting features of the Parable of the Good Samaritan has always been the fact that the Samaritan (we might call him the Moroccan, or the Bulgarian, or the Mexican) was on a business trip; when he found the beaten traveller, he took him to the nearest inn, paid the landlord to patch him up and treat him well, and went on his way. He did not set up a foundation to help robbed and beaten travellers; he didn’t go all over looking for them. He just did what needed to be done for a guy he stumbled upon. The lesson here is that bringing joy to others isn’t a life-changing occupation: it’s a small but enormous sea-change in our daily humdrumlies. As the Facebook sign I shared not long ago said: Be kind, the person you meet is engaged in an enormous battle you know nothing about. But if there is a Spirit flowing through and out of you, it will touch those persons in the middle of their battle, and (to quote Spenser) add faith unto their force. And, your smile having perhaps saved a life, you go on with your trip.

Thanks to Roona-MBH for the image.