Starting
Point A
woman of rare beauty shares words of rare grace
By JAMES STEPHEN
BEHRENS
It is said that the true nature of
being is veiled. The labor of words, the expression of art, the seemingly
ceaseless buzz that is human thought all have in common the need to get at what
really is so. The hope to draw close to and possess the truth of being can be a
feverish one. In some cases it can even be fatal, if pleasure is ones
truth and its attainment more important than life itself. In other lives,
though, the search for what is truthful gives life.
I used to find notes left in the collection basket, beautiful
notes about my homilies and about the writers thoughts on the daily
scriptural readings. The person who penned the notes would add reflections to
my thoughts and would always include some quotes from poets and mystics he or
she had read and remembered and loved. The notes fascinated me. Here was
someone immersed in a search for truth and beauty. Words had been treasured,
words that were beautiful. And I felt as if the words somehow delighted in
being discovered, for they were obviously very generous to the as yet anonymous
writer of the notes. And now this person was in turn learning the secret of
sharing them. Beauty so shines when given away. The only truth that exists is,
in that sense, free.
It was a long time before I met the author of the notes.
One Sunday morning, I was told that someone was waiting for me in
the office. The young person who answered the rectory door said that it was
the woman who said she left all the notes. When I saw her I was
shocked, since I immediately recognized her from church but had no idea that it
was she who wrote the notes. She was sitting in a chair in the office with her
hands folded in her lap. Her head was bowed and when she raised it to look at
me, she could barely smile without pain. Her face was disfigured, and the skin
so tight from surgical procedures that smiling or laughing was very difficult
for her. She had suffered terribly from treatment to remove the growths that
had so marred her face.
We chatted for a while that Sunday morning and agreed to meet for
lunch later that week.
As it turned out we went to lunch several times, and she always
wore a hat during the meal. I think that treatments of some sort had caused a
lot of her hair to fall out. We shared things about our lives. I told her about
my schooling and growing up. She told me that she had worked for years for an
insurance company. She never mentioned family, and I did not ask.
We spoke of authors we both had read, and it was easy to tell that
books are a great love of hers.
I have thought about her often over the years and how she
struggled in a society that places an incredible premium on looks, class,
wealth and all the other fineries of life. She suffered from a disfigurement
that cannot be made to look attractive. I know that her condition hurt her
deeply.
Would her life have been different had she been pretty? Chances
are it would have. And yet there were a sensitivity and a beauty to her that
had nothing to do with looks. She was one to be listened to, whose words were
so easy to take to heart. Her words came from a wounded but loving heart, very
much like all hearts, but she had more of a need to be aware of it, to live
with it and learn from it. She possessed a fine-tuned sense of beauty. Her only
fear in life was the loss of a friend.
How long does it take most of us to reach that level of human
growth, if we ever get there? We get so consumed and diminished, worrying about
all the things that need improving, we can easily forget to cherish those
things that last. Friendship, so rare and so good, just needs our care -- maybe
even the simple gesture of writing a little note now and then. Or the dropping
of some beautiful words in a basket, in the hope that such beauty will be
shared and taken to heart.
The truth of her life was a desire to see beyond the surface for a
glimpse of what it is that matters. She found beauty and grace and they
befriended her, and showed her what is real.
Trappist Fr. James Stephen Behrens lives at Holy Spirit
Monastery in Conyers, Ga. His new book is Grace Is Everywhere: Reflections
of an Aspiring Monk (ACTA, 1998).
National Catholic Reporter, January 15,
1999
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