The House We Live In

What 
We speak 
Becomes the house we live in.
Who will want to sleep in your bed
 If the roof leaks
 Right above
It?
Look what happens when the tongue
 Cannot say to kindness,
“I will be your slave.”
The moon 
Covers her face with both hands
And can’t bear 
To look.
Hafiz

“What we speak becomes the house we live in.” The word of Persian Sufi poet Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz (c. 1320-1389) guide much of the preaching and counseling of Father Roger Tobin. We hear them often because, thankfully, he repeats them often.

The call came about three years ago.

Nice, mid-20s kid.

An abusive mother and maternal grandmother for whom I have made reservations at the Purgatory Motel 3 (an upgrade from the Motel 1.5 they deserve) in Eternity – despite any confessions they might make and absolutions they might receive. As a child and in his early teens he was emotionally and physically beaten for years.

Of course, he had alcohol and addiction problems.

Only through grit and the heroic interventions of his father had he managed to survive as a barely functioning human being, get through college and begin to establish himself as the profoundly good young man I believed him to be. In business, he was succeeding.

And he was “recovering but….”

Distressed.

Not quite desperate, but getting there – quickly.

Not quite “struggling” with “spirituality,” but having a disturbingly difficult time because, in his words, “I don’t know if I believe. It’s hard. Almost impossible.”

“My friend! Given the abuse you suffered for way too many years, of course it’s ‘almost impossible.’

“Stop struggling. Just be good, be kind, be just and let God take care of the rest. He really doesn’t care about your believing. He cares about your living the goodness and kindness that you’ve managed to preserve and nourish so deep inside that you’re afraid to let it out for fear of losing the last little rays of yourself.”

Be good. Be kind. Be just.

The roadmap to salvation.

“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

“There are none so blind as those who will not see.
John Heywood (1546)

These are stories I’ve closely guarded and shared only with three of four prized friends and probably as many times.

But, this week, thinking of my young friend and being good and being kind, I recalled…

In September it will be fifty years – half-a-century – since I first saw the Living Christ, the Living God.

And I’ve seen Him twice.

I was a seminarian assigned to a poor barrio parish in Santiago, Chile when – just days before my twenty-eighth birthday - a bloody, America-back military coup overthrew the government on September 11, 1973.

Thousands were swept-up and incarcerated and many “disappeared” in the days that followed.

The nationwide that began that Tuesday afternoon was lifted – for only a few hours – on Saturday and again on Sunday.

Despite not being a deacon [It’s said that missioners sometimes think of themselves as their own pope.], I preached the Sunday morning Mass. After Mass, I was overrun by terrified parents reporting that their sons and daughters had not yet returned home from the Technical University – the poor kids’ school – and they believed their children were prisoners in the National Football Stadium. Would I, safe because I was an American, go to the Estadio and see what news I could get.

Less than two hours later, on entering a home of American Catholic Maryknoll Missioners near downtown, I walked into a raid being conducted by the military and secret police (and, we would be told some time later, probably under the direction of the CIA). Within hours, an American Maryknoll Brother and I had been arrested, interrogated and transported to the Estadio and a locker room that, memory has always told me, was perhaps twenty-five by forty or fifty feet and crowded with one-hundred-and-fifty-three men and boys.

Each day we received a hard roll and cup of coffee for breakfast (just my luck, I’ve still never had even a sip of coffee in my entire 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 rooms from the dirt.

One morning, we could hear an officer berating the young soldier guards: “Be very careful. These prisoners are dangerous foreign extremists who have come to Chile to kill Chilenos.” Wow!

That afternoon, I was sick, literally 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 men and boys. 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 Brother Joe and me, college and high school students; some were twice our age and others were somewhere in between. Most had been held days longer, rounded-up in the first hours after the coup almost 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.

Twenty steps. Turn. Twenty steps. Turn.

Suddenly, from among the prisoners came a plea for a cigarette. Then another voice joined the plea and another and another.

The soldier paced. Twenty steps. Turn. Twenty steps. Turn.

And 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.

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 God.

I’m sorry. Even as I write this I am overwhelmed. I cry.

And I am so grateful.

----------

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 two 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, it was suggested that I pay a visit to the Tanner home in Secaucus. I doubt that, 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 Chile and Ken, dealt with our PTSDs, and moved toward resurrections.

One afternoon, Maryknoll 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.”

After years living and working in La Bandera, a whole massive 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, Carla 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 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-person, heavy wooden dining room table. Mary sat at the far end.

As she saw us climb the front steps, she simply 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 to Carla, a woman she didn’t even know but who, she knew, was broken. And they just hugged.

Two broken women hugged. And I saw the Living, Broken Christ.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us.
And we beheld his glory.
John 1:14

__________

Be Good. Be Kind. Be Just.

Speak Goodness. Speak Kindness. Speak Justice.

What
We speak
Becomes the house we live in.

Allow Them To Show You The Way

Texas Ranked Worst And Highest

Who We Are