All this hurrying will soon be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.    Rilke  

A summer morning finds me sitting by an open window in Café Don Diego, a small café near the plaza with the yellow and white La Iglesia de Merced. Homework (tarea) is spread across the small wooden table in front of me. Secure in my upright chair, I am hunched over flashcards, notebooks and my iPhone with its trusty Spanish-English translator and dictionary. In the corner, the mounted TV plays 80’s and 90’s music videos in English. Intermittently, a newscast in Spanish breaks the flashback rhythm.

As I study and sip my café con leche, a shadow comes within my peripheral vision. Outside the open window stands a hunched over Guatemalan man, already small in stature, his skin darkened by birth and sun. His dark blue pants and light blue shirt are worn and slightly tattered. In a leathery hand he carries an angel crudely carved out of blonde wood. He holds it up for me to admire and buy. I shake my head and say, “No gracias.”  It is only my first of four weeks in this country and I’m not yet ready to buy stuff.  He persists in his questioning. I persist in my “no”.

As he turns to walk away, I notice the bundle on his back—a tattered tarp-like blanket– larger than his entire frame and obviously filled with more of his carvings. His handiwork is his means of eating and surviving. He walks on, bow-legged and bent over like a pilgrim whose steps are slow and deliberate, face set against the fierce wind.             

And the questions swirl around me like the newly presented Spanish verbs and nouns:  “What else does he carry in his bundle? What hopes and dreams have dissolved into disappointments and regrets?  What anxieties does he struggle to keep wrapped up?  What weariness persists in his slow pace?”  Or am I merely projecting my own insecurities upon his back while he roams the ancient city with his creative force to be given as a gift?  A gift I refused.  A refusal I came to regret.

Days later, I searched for him. I walked the cobblestone streets and uneven sidewalks of Antigua. I peered into cathedrals, scoured the street corners, tiny alleyways and park benches, but never found him.

What was it I was looking for? What was it I needed?  A crudely carved angel or crucifix?  Or perhaps a simple benediction from the man’s gnarled, holy hands?

Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb.

                                                                                   Macrina Wiederkehr, O.S.B

Burning

There is a hidden kind

Of humble goodness

I love in others

Only a aeon

Of refining fire

Could make it mine

But sometimes it’s as if

I were already burning.

                         Anne Porter, In Another World

Always Mercy

Pamela