facing a stylized altar festooned with colorful banners. Not exactly my kind of religious motif, but I knelt and prayed for a while, then sat back in the pew, closed my eyes, and let my mind be still and quiet. “Contemplative prayer,” St. Teresa called it, as opposed to “vocal” prayer. Wordless, imageless, just a stillness, an interior silence. That kind of prayer had been my hobby, my passion, my addiction since I’d been old enough to speak. I found it a strange and wonderful fact that saying and doing nothing had so much joy in it. We’re a society of doers, people who believe contemplation is suspect, the province of the lazy and foolish, but that stillness always lit a fire of pleasure inside me, and it does so even now.
After a time I heard footsteps, and after another few minutes I opened my eyes. A small man in jeans and a T-shirt, with crew-cut gray hair, was walking across the altar with a polished candelabra in one hand, and I knew, somehow, that he was a priest. There was something refreshing in the way he was dressed—like an electrician or a taxi driver—and in the way he crossed the altar without the slightest self-consciousness or fuss, as if it were a place exactly as sacred as every other place on Earth. I felt an immediate kinship with him, one invisible person to another, and decided, right then, that I would try going to Mass at his church.
The Paulist Center, it was called, and I knew from the first Sunday that I’d made the right decision. The small priest’s name was Father Welch, and his sermon might have been taken from Father Alberto’s notebook. Inclusiveness. Kindness. Charity. Openness. “These qualities,” he said, “are precisely what the term ‘imitation of Christ’ actually means.”
I loved it when priests took a biblical phrase I’d been hearing my whole life and turned it in a slightly different way, allowing a new light to shine on it. I remembered Father Alberto doing that with “in the fullness of time.” “Think about that,” he’d said, so happily. “
In
the
fullness
of
time!
There’s two parts to it. First, if we’re really living, if we are hearing with our ears and seeing with our eyes, as Christ told us to, then the day has a richness and fullness to it that gets diluted if we spend the hours worrying, doing five things at once, or desperately hoping for something that might or might not happen. If you spend all day thinking about being rich, for example, then time isn’t full at all. It’s just a rickety bridge to some imagined future. You don’t care about
now,
all you care about is some imaginary
then
when you’ll be rich. It’s like a child wishing away his youth so he can be grown up enough to drive or go to work every morning!
“And second, by
the
fullness
of
time
the biblical writer could have meant eternity. God’s eternity! Think about it! Year after year, century after century, filled with all kinds of different opportunities to move closer to Him. There’s your free will. That’s what it means, if you ask me. Absolute freedom in how we use the time that’s been given to us. Now, you might say, Father, I don’t have no freedom of time. I gotta be at work at nine a.m., Monday to Friday, fifty weeks a year. Sure, okay. But when you’re at work, when you’re cutting that two-by-four for a new house or filling a tooth or answering the phone or selling a chocolate-glazed donut, where are you, really? What are you doing? Are you
there?
Or are you picturing the beer you’re gonna have in front of the TV that night or the new dress or car or swimming pool you’re gonna buy after you hit the lottery? You see my point here? You can do those things creatively, see? In a way that brings you more in touch with God’s world.”
It was almost as if I could hear Father Alberto’s voice there in the modern surroundings of the Paulist Center, almost as if his spirit, or a kindred spirit, had taken possession of Father Welch and was
After a time I heard footsteps, and after another few minutes I opened my eyes. A small man in jeans and a T-shirt, with crew-cut gray hair, was walking across the altar with a polished candelabra in one hand, and I knew, somehow, that he was a priest. There was something refreshing in the way he was dressed—like an electrician or a taxi driver—and in the way he crossed the altar without the slightest self-consciousness or fuss, as if it were a place exactly as sacred as every other place on Earth. I felt an immediate kinship with him, one invisible person to another, and decided, right then, that I would try going to Mass at his church.
The Paulist Center, it was called, and I knew from the first Sunday that I’d made the right decision. The small priest’s name was Father Welch, and his sermon might have been taken from Father Alberto’s notebook. Inclusiveness. Kindness. Charity. Openness. “These qualities,” he said, “are precisely what the term ‘imitation of Christ’ actually means.”
I loved it when priests took a biblical phrase I’d been hearing my whole life and turned it in a slightly different way, allowing a new light to shine on it. I remembered Father Alberto doing that with “in the fullness of time.” “Think about that,” he’d said, so happily. “
In
the
fullness
of
time!
There’s two parts to it. First, if we’re really living, if we are hearing with our ears and seeing with our eyes, as Christ told us to, then the day has a richness and fullness to it that gets diluted if we spend the hours worrying, doing five things at once, or desperately hoping for something that might or might not happen. If you spend all day thinking about being rich, for example, then time isn’t full at all. It’s just a rickety bridge to some imagined future. You don’t care about
now,
all you care about is some imaginary
then
when you’ll be rich. It’s like a child wishing away his youth so he can be grown up enough to drive or go to work every morning!
“And second, by
the
fullness
of
time
the biblical writer could have meant eternity. God’s eternity! Think about it! Year after year, century after century, filled with all kinds of different opportunities to move closer to Him. There’s your free will. That’s what it means, if you ask me. Absolute freedom in how we use the time that’s been given to us. Now, you might say, Father, I don’t have no freedom of time. I gotta be at work at nine a.m., Monday to Friday, fifty weeks a year. Sure, okay. But when you’re at work, when you’re cutting that two-by-four for a new house or filling a tooth or answering the phone or selling a chocolate-glazed donut, where are you, really? What are you doing? Are you
there?
Or are you picturing the beer you’re gonna have in front of the TV that night or the new dress or car or swimming pool you’re gonna buy after you hit the lottery? You see my point here? You can do those things creatively, see? In a way that brings you more in touch with God’s world.”
It was almost as if I could hear Father Alberto’s voice there in the modern surroundings of the Paulist Center, almost as if his spirit, or a kindred spirit, had taken possession of Father Welch and was
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