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Issue Date:  February 16, 2007

From the Editor's Desk

The holiness of Mary K.

Holiness, I suppose, is like beauty or good art, difficult to describe but apparent when you meet it. So it was with Mary K. Meyer, for the past 18 years director of Shalom Catholic Worker House, a Kansas City, Kan., shelter for as many as 25 homeless men. Mary K. (her name spoken always included both first name and initial) died at Shalom House after a bout with lung cancer. She was 76. It is rare that the house isn’t booked to capacity. Many of the men are immigrants, mostly Mexicans, and others are on their way from somewhere to somewhere else, often between jail and drug rehab programs. The house’s new director is Brad Grabs, a 1992 graduate of the University of Notre Dame who worked with Mary K. for the past nine years.

The description of her work would be enough, in the estimation of many, to bestow hero status upon her. But she wasn’t interested in heroism. She was interested in serving God, in bringing God to the most unlikely places, in seeing God in every circumstance, every person, every situation in her life. And her God was big, limitless in compassion and embrace, a God as far beyond our reach as he is intimate. Hers was not the whittled down, manageable God so many of the culture’s religionists are hawking these days.

A library full of books on piety, spirituality and self-help would not come up with the description of holiness that was Mary K. Meyer’s life. Too risky. It wouldn’t sell.

(Please go to the NCR Web site, NCRcafe.org, and listen to the interview conducted with Mary K. by former NCR editor and publisher Tom Fox. He did the interview in late December, and it is a marvelous recounting of her life and thoughts on spirituality, pacifism, justice, prayer and so much more.)

~ ~ ~

Mary K. was 70 in April 1999 when she joined a delegation of Voices in the Wilderness, Kathy Kelly’s organization that opposed the sanctions and all the phases of war in Iraq. I recall meeting Kelly and Mary K. at a gathering when a trip to Iraq was in the early discussion stages. Kelly was emphasizing, for Mary K.’s benefit, the possible rigors of the trip -- long plane rides, long bus rides, heat, austere living quarters, and a full round of visits and interviews in a disintegrating culture. Mary K. never said much. All she said that day, with a gracious smile, was, “I’ll be OK. I’m going.”

And that was that. More than once, this older woman, her snow white hair pulled back and a lined face about which there seemed always to be a whisper of wisdom, drew a crowd of Iraqis. Kids would gather around her, and somehow language barriers were lowered, and there were smiles. Women seemed to understand.

In a hospital ward filled with kids dying from diseases that would be eliminated in the United States with a quick visit to the doctor’s office and some medicine, Mary K. was approached by an older woman. The kids were dying because the sanctions stopped medicine from entering Iraq. The woman ran up to Meyer, grabbed one of her sleeves and the lapel of her jacket, looked her in the eyes and said: “You’re old. You’ve lived a good life.” Motioning toward rows of beds, she continued, “You can get injections when you need them. Our children can’t. They are dying.”

Meyer later reflected on the moment: “I knew what she meant. She was right in my face, and I understood her the way old people understand each other. Old people understand pain differently. I guess it’s because we’ve seen so much that shouldn’t be. People should not suffer the way they do.” When old people “look into each others’ eyes, we know the frustration and the hopelessness,” she said. “When we look into each others’ eyes, we understand.”

~ ~ ~

She understood so much. She loved deeply. She had such enormous hope. I once asked her if she was ever afraid at Shalom House, which has sheltered its share of the mentally unstable, the violent, the desperate. She was silent, as she often was before answering a question. Silence didn’t disturb her. And then she said, “No, Tom, I’m really not. True love casts out fear. I really believe that.” And that was that.

I visited her in early September, soon after she had received her diagnosis and been told she had only weeks to live. I was going away for a week. We talked, and she told me she was ready, that she’d been ready to die since the year before when she went to the hospital for a heart problem and they had discovered a tumor on a kidney. She had surgery that time. Now, she said, she was foregoing chemotherapy. She’d done her research and the odds weren’t worth the disruption of whatever days remained.

She was ready, she said. She had lived long enough to know she could trust God. “I’m ready. I’m not in a rush, mind you. I’ll take as many days as I can get, but I’m ready.” She still looked hardy and her voice was strong. I asked her for her blessing in case anything happened before I returned.

We were able to talk and meet several times in the months that remained. The last time, little more than a week before she died, she appeared very weak. We mostly held hands and sat quietly, and she said again that she was ready.

Mary K., I know, represents so many others out there who understand so much and who live so fully, though not in the glare of the spotlight. They are the cloud of witnesses who bring the Beatitudes to life, the ultimate spiritual authorities who endow our Christian endeavors with integrity.

-- Tom Roberts

National Catholic Reporter, February 16, 2007

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