"I Have Seen the Lord."
Declare this in the house of Jacob and proclaim it in Judah:
“Hear this, O foolish and senseless people,
who have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear.”
Jeremiah 5:20-21
Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news:
“I have seen the Lord.”
John 20:18
Jesus said to Thomas,
“Because you have seen me, you have believed;
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.”
John 20:29
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
John Heywood (1546)
I’ve seen the Living God, the Living Christ.
Twice.
As I recall, during those days in September 1973 when I was held as a political prisoner in a locker room of Chile’s National Football Stadium and expecting my (promised) immediate execution, we received a hard roll and cup of coffee for breakfast (just my luck, I’ve never had even a sip of coffee in my life) and another hard roll and a cup of beans/stew in the late afternoon.
At “meal times” (yeah, I’m being sarcastic), prisoners were directed out of the locker room and onto the dirt under the bleachers; a concrete path that probably circled around the inside of the stadium separated the entrance to the locker room from the dirt.
One morning, we heard an officer berating the young soldier-guards: “Be very careful. These prisoners are extremely dangerous foreign extremists who have come to Chile to kill Chilenos.” Wow!
That afternoon, I was sick, too sick to stand in the dirt to eat – probably a combination of claustrophobia, dehydration, malnutrition and living in such a confined space with so many sick and coughing prisoners (by my memory, 153 men and boys in a room maybe twenty-five by forty feet). I grabbed my hard roll and cup of “stew” and sank down against the wall immediately next to the entrance.
Many of the prisoners were younger than my fellow prisoner Maryknoll Brother Joe Doherty and me - college and high school students; many were twice our age and others were somewhere in between. Many had been held days longer, having been rounded-up in the first hours after the coup a week earlier. And many of them were smokers going through nicotine withdrawal.
A young guard paced back and forth on the walkway between the prisoners and the entrance to the locker room. Maybe 20, 21 at the most. Well under six feet, his sun- and wind-burned complexion on high cheek bones made it obvious he was Mapuche, from one of the indigenous communities of south-central Chile. It was more than probable that one day a military caravan simply arrived in his village and announced “You’re in the army now.”
Rifle slung over his shoulder, he paced. Twenty steps one way. Turn. Twenty steps back. Turn.
Twenty paces. Turn. Twenty paces. Turn.
Suddenly, from among the prisoners came a plea for a cigarette. Then, another voice joined in and another and another.
And the soldier paced. Twenty steps. Turn. Twenty steps. Turn.
He reached inside his tunic, pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and threw it away at the feet of the pleading prisoners who grabbed it and passed it one to another.
Twenty steps. Turn. Pull out a cigarette. Light it. Throw it away. Turn.
Twenty steps. Turn. Pull out a cigarette. Light it. Throw it away. Turn.
Finally, the order came for the prisoners to return to the locker room.
He pulled out all of his cigarettes and simply threw them to the feet of the prisoners.
And in the face of that young Mapuche soldier I saw the face of the Living Christ.
I’m sorry. Even as I write this I am overwhelmed.
And I am so grateful. I have seen the Lord.
Mary Tanner
Mary Tanner was broken.
For my last two years before ordination to priesthood, I was assigned to parish ministry at St. Joseph of the Palisades in West New York, New Jersey and to teach and serve as a chaplain to the high school. On my first day, even before I had unpacked, I was directed to attend the wake (memorial) service for Ken Tanner, Sr., who had died days earlier after a valiant battle with cancer.
Mary became the single mother of Michael, a graduating senior and quarterback of the football team; Kenny, a junior and the center for the same team; Renee, a sophomore and, when school started a few days later, one of my students; and four-year-old twins Nicole and Maria.
Two weeks later, I visited the Tanner home at the end of Maple Street in Seacaucus. I’m not certain that, especially with three popular teenagers who were the centers of their social circles, the two-panel glass door of the Tanner home was ever locked. I do know that when I walked in the twins were whirling dervishes and Mary appeared to have given-up on the struggle to get them to bed.
“Do you know what time it is?” I barked in my very best and loudest Marine Corps drill instructor voice. “I’ll give you until I get to five and you’d better be in bed and under the covers. One! Two! Three!” No need to go further. Then, off-key (I can only sing off-key) I sang my best version of “Good night, ladies.”
For the next two years, Mary and I grieved, dealt with our PTSDs, and moved toward resurrections and my ordination.
Sister Katie’s voice was quiet but a tsunami of concern. Sister Carla Piette had come back to the States for my ordination, she was coming down from Maryknoll, New York to visit Katie, who lived in the convent of the West New York parish, and “she’s broken.”
Sister Carla Piette, M.M.
After years living and working in La Bandera, a whole neighborhood built on a trash pile, Carla, who often referred to herself as a “rag picker,” was broken. “Los traperos,” (“rag pickers”) was the phrase used to describe the folks who lived in La Bandera and sustained themselves scavenging through others’ trash. On coming back to the States, she hoped to reestablish her relationship with her mother, only to find her mother in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s Disease and unable to recognize her. Years in La Bandera serving the families of the regime’s political prisoners, the beaten, broken poor and now this.
Carla was broken.
Katie called me, suggesting Carla and I might spend the evening together to reminisce.
I called Mary – “I think my friend needs some help. Needs a break.”
“Come on over.”
The Tanner home really was at the very end of Maple Street – the side yard was bordered by a huge concrete support wall for a turnpike into NYC. You couldn’t go any further. From the front porch and through the two-panel glass and wood door you could see directly across the living room to the eight- or ten-person, heavy wooden dining room table. Mary sat at the far end.
As she saw us climb the front steps, she turned slightly, pulled a bottle of Scotch from the cabinet next to her and directed “Kids, get us some ice and glasses please.”
Then she stood and walked across to Carla, a woman she did not even know but who, she knew, was broken. And they just hugged.
Two broken women hugged. And I saw the face of the Living Broken Jesus.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us
And we beheld his glory.
John 1:14
Today we see the Lord – broken, struggling, falling three times on the Via Crucis, and, by God’s grace “raised from the dead by the Glory of the Father.” (Romans 6:4)
Today we see the Lord in undocumented immigrants working shoulder-to-shoulder for barely livable wages in butchering and packaging plants to put food on American tables in the midst of a pandemic.
We see the broken Lord in beyond-exhausted doctors and nurses intubating, resuscitating, holding the hands of patients in corridors and overcrowded ICUs and in fathers and mothers working remotely and still finding time to tutor, comfort and parent their children.
The struggling Lord is volunteering to load box after box of canned foods and rice into hundreds and thousands of car trunks of the now unemployed.
The falling Lord is there – unrecognized but directly in front of us – in the struggling poor who return day after day to mop and clean hospital floors and nursing homes where our elderly and infirmed are dying, too often alone and frightened.
The Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) is lived by firefighters and EMTs, kids stitching face masks or decorating sidewalks with messages of hope and food delivery persons who smile at the frightened man or woman on the other side of the door.
Today the Way of the Cross is completed in struggling small business owners who are doing everything possible to make certain loyal employees receive some part of their salaries, the contemporary Simon of Cyrene who waits patiently to donate blood, and the understanding landlord who, like Joseph of Arimathea, offers a place of rest to the needy.
Today, like the tomb, St. Peter’s Basilica and churches and chapels around the world are empty. And today we understand the Lord “has been raised and is going ahead” of each of us.
We need only dare to see him.
As the People of God declaring the Lord “has been raised and is going ahead” of us, ours is an Incarnational Faith. God acts in and through us and the Risen Lord has told us we are to be His Body, living in this world, doing His work and His will. We must make Him real and visible today, and tomorrow and all of tomorrow’s tomorrows.