Things happen if we let them. There is so much good that wants to happen, that sits on our shoulders waiting for us to do it if we just… well, do it. This Lent has been a time of minor miracles. There is the slip of paper from the other day when I took my laptop to Saint Mary’s College and didn’t know how to get onto the Internet. A girl there showed me and then she scribbled down her passwords so that whenever I come to the school I can use their wireless network. She just did it, with a shrug and a smile.
There was Crystal, my new favorite barber at the Vogue. I sat down in the chair and said, “What’s that music they’re playing?” It was Saint Patrick’s Day and they had some faux Irish music piped in.
“It’s bullshit,” she said. “That’s what it is,” she told me when I started laughing. “I don’t know what else to call it.” I wanted to get a hair wash before I left, but was limited for time. I told her that and she said, “I tell you what? I’m going to wash it once, but I’m going to wash the SHIT out of it, okay?”
At Mass, on Sunday, the fellow next to me doesn’t take Communion. When I come back, and the choir is in the loft, chanting the motet while the servers in their white robes come out with more chalices and the crystal ewers of wine for the endless line of congregants, he moves over for me. I hear him sniffling, like his nose is stuffed. Or like he is overcome by some terrible emotion. And then I put my arm around him quickly, and he looks up and I smile and he smiles back, cheered momentarily and lifted from whatever private hell he was going through, may be going through again. And so in the end he is in the Communion, he is not excluded from this grace where God comes down into humanity and fills our moments with wonder by filling them with himself, with his simple power. And that is incarnation.
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