For Emmitt

I facilitate Urban Plunge Immersion Retreats. During these retreats students learn about, serve, and hopefully encounter in small meaningful ways, some of the people in our city who have been systemically overlooked because of their poverty. During our introductory conversations we learn about our models of ministry, St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Oscar Romero. I share with students some of my core values, which include authenticity and presence, and ask them to do the same. We review the gift of Catholic Social Teaching, the significance of the universality of human dignity, and pray for experiences of discomfort, believing that when we prayerfully attend to experiences of discomfort God will help us to grow in wisdom and expand our capacity to love.

Recently, in the middle of the second day of a retreat, we had a couple of hours for lunch and rest. I shifted my thinking into the set of tasks that I hoped to complete during this time: I wanted to go for a quick run, run some errands, and check in on my kids after their day at school.  As I was filling up my car at a gas station, a guy approached asking if I could help him get some food from the convenience store. Since I was tired and on a tight schedule, I didn’t even really listen to him and said, “No, I’m sorry, I don’t have any cash on me.” He said, “You don’t need cash, you can just go get it for me.” I said, “No, I’m sorry, not today.” 

Then he said to me, “You know I know you, right?” I took a little closer look at him, and not recognizing him said, “No, I don’t know that.” I turned my attention back to the gas pump.

He walked aside a few feet and sat on a brick wall to rest. Moments later, the gas station attendant came out of the store and started yelling at the man, telling him to leave the premises. A somewhat heated exchange of words began and I wasn’t sure how this thing would turn out.

And then I heard, really heard, the man’s voice.

And I realized that I did know the man.

We had multiple, meaningful encounters in the past: I knew the man’s name, I knew parts of the man’s story, I knew that he had recognized me because our hearts had been connected, and I knew that because I was distracted by the (reasonable) tasks of my life, I had not had the presence of heart to recognize him.

I think now of the person wounded by robbers along the side of the road in today’s Gospel. In a guided meditation of this passage that I listened to the other day, I was invited to imagine that the wounded person, not unconscious as I had always experienced them previously, was awake and aware enough to see… and even recognize… the people who chose not to help. I imagined that the wounded person saw the first passerby and recognized them from a church service they attended. Then they recognized the second person as a person of local prominence. I felt in my imagination the pain and the anger they must have experienced at having been purposefully overlooked by these leaders. 

I realized I was one of those people.

Thankfully, like finally recognizing Emmitt’s voice and being given the opportunity to do better, like the scholar of the law in today’s Gospel, and like Moses who reminded the people in Deuteronomy, we DO know the teaching and the voice of God: “it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out." May we have the presence and the courage to do so.

Today's Readings