GOD CHOOSES THE WEAK AND MAKES THEM STRONG

Wednesday morning the weather was horrible! The schools were closed (again) and driving was treacherous. The people who plow parking lots were so far behind that the great lots of the Church of Saint Clare had not even been touched.

From my window I looked down to the front drive to see an older lady battling the ice and wind to make it to the early mass. Walking around the back of the Church there was a man with an oxygen tank navigating the piles of snow in order to get into the Church. Inside there were people there who even when the weather is good you almost wish they would stay home for safety sake. Yet who are the one who are always there even in a snowstorm? Who are the only ones who do not complain about having to kneel?

Back in the big storms of the 1970’s my mother looked outside one morning to find the city pretty much shut down. She woke me up, Dad put cross-country skies on my feet and I was given orders to get up to the Church and help Fr. Ozimek say mass. A number of times in that freezing winter I was thusly sent up there (which I took to enjoying as people laughed or cheered while they did their best to dig themselves out from under feet of the white stuff.)

Yet there was more the Fr. Ozimek and I there. Mrs. Baily, the organist in her 70’s was also there unfailingly. When big burly men in their youth with big trucks sat at home watching T.V. for having been spared going to work because the roads were un-navigable, this woman in her 70’s puttered up to Sacred Heart Church and sat down at the organ bench as if it were any other day.

I used to wonder what motivated these people. Why do they above everyone else show up at mass even when the priests think it ridiculous for them to be there?

Someone answered this question for me the other day. “Father,” he said, “When every day you have to push just to get through the day, when everything is a trial, then you don’t stop. You just push on like you always do. It’s just another day.”

Wow.

That puts me in mind of the faith of Mother Theresa and the public’s concern that she experienced dark moments in her life – or Padre Pio’s bouts with spiritual dryness – or any other number of saints. These people did not carry on with the faith because it was easy but because it was The Faith. They pushed on. None of them, not one, sat around and wondered, “Why?” “Why me God?” Why does this have to happen?” “Why can’t I be better?” Rather they ask the question, “Now what?” (I think Rob suggested this months back.) Instead of licking their own wounds and staring at their own navels (a little of that goes a long way) they determine their resources and lavishly spend what they have left on God like the woman in 1 Kings 17 who says, “As the LORD, your God, lives, I have nothing baked; there is only a handful of flour in my jar and a little oil in my jug. Just now I was collecting a couple of sticks, to go in and prepare something for myself and my son; when we have eaten it, we shall die.” Yet she did as Elija asked.

A person without serious faith would have called her stupid or at least not very far sighted. But to those of faith she was pushing forward giving to God what she had just like those who crawl into mass not matter what.

You push on.

There’s a certain amount of glory in that.