HOLY WEEK

I had a job in college working as an orderly in a Catholic nursing home. Every week, I had to go up to the men’s ward and shave a bunch of old guys, who were World War I Vets. These guys could curse like no one I’ve ever met since, especially when, digging into the valleys of their wrinkled faces, I’d capture a whisker and nick their leathered skin. After an hour of being chewed out by this roomful of drill sergeants, I’d be sent out to get a can or two of “Sneaky Pete”—the boys’ chewing tobacco of choice. Back up to the ward, I don’t know what I dreaded most—chewin’, spittin’ or repeatin’. The nuns had begrudged the guys spittoons, which defied and mocked their aim, just as I endured and smirked at their stories—the same stories over and over again. To the guys, it was still the Great War, the war of Black Jack Pershing and the AEF; they told of battles and places with names as butchered as the young soldiers who fought there—Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood in the Aisne Offensive, Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne.

Places I never heard of, people I never met and a struggle that wasn’t mine. The know-it-all kid in me was at first disinterested, then bored and finally amused. Until I got it and it got me. These guys trusted me with their stories—with the places they had been, the friends they had made and lost, the struggle that had become their own in what they dared to suffer and dared, even more, to remember. They trusted me not only with their stories, but with their very lives.

And that’s why we prayed the Stations of the Cross this week with all of our kids at KidsRelig. A story of places not known, people never met and a struggle not our own. But we have been trusted—trusted with the story of Jesus and his Passion and Death; trusted to know the places he knew and the friends he loved; trusted to make his struggle our own, to dare to suffer with him and to remember. Trusted not only with the story of Jesus, but with his very life.

Love,
Deacon Charlie