The Pope & the Laborer, a Reversion story

[Denise]

We never know who we will influence by our actions. I suppose this is why all our actions, no matter where, should be holy and Christ-like? Of course!
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GUEST COLUMN
The Pope & the Laborer

May 2011
By Kevin Bezner

Kevin Bezner is a poet, teacher, and catechist who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. He teaches English at Belmont Abbey College.
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Some years ago, I found myself out of work. Since I could not find work in my field, I took a job working at night in a warehouse where I unpacked flowers in the refrigerator room from about 8 PM to 1 AM. The work was tedious, the room wet and cold, but no one bothered me and I enjoyed the steady, repetitive work we did in silence.

The Russian immigrant who was in charge of our two- to three-man team showed me how to open the cardboard boxes we unloaded and remove the long-stem roses, soon to fill vases for Valentine’s Day, without getting too many cuts from the thorns. Once we unloaded the roses, we stacked them on tables for the cutters.

At the end of the night, we broke down the numerous boxes we’d unloaded with efficient kicks and put them out in the trash. If we finished early, as we did some nights, we joined the assembly line and helped the women put the flowers we had unpacked into the vases. I found this work more difficult than the work in the refrigerator room — the vases came down the line very fast for my still cold and fumbling hands. But the women worked flawlessly even as they talked incessantly.

I would get home about 1:30 AM and would welcome the time alone, especially on the nights that had ended on the line. Before I would settle in to read and perhaps write poems for a few hours before going to bed, I would have a beer or a glass of wine and something to eat in front of the television in the kitchen. One morning, while looking for something to watch, I settled on EWTN, the Catholic station I usually passed by. I watched for about ten minutes, the way a curious tourist might stop to watch a street performance in a country vastly different from his own.

I had been away from the Catholic Church for nearly twenty years. Although I called myself an atheist, I also considered myself spiritual and spent time reading books by Buddhist monks and poets. I also spent time sitting in meditation or zazen. Even so, I realized that something seemed to be missing from my life, something Buddhism could not provide. What I found on EWTN that night drew me in. This was the world I had left behind, and while I did not think of that world as calling me back, I felt comfortable watching the station without anyone else knowing what I was doing. Watching EWTN in the early morning after work soon became a guilty pleasure I dared not share with another soul. I was not ready to let others know that I was curious about what was happening in the Catholic Church, a curiosity that had begun to chip away at the atheism I espoused.

What was missing from my life became apparent to me one morning as I watched a news report about Pope John Paul II. I had seen the Pope in Washington, D.C., in 1979, not long after I left the Church, and I was overwhelmed by a sense of his goodness and my own sinfulness. I did not feel worthy even to look upon such a holy man. That experience had left me stricken and confused, and I had felt a desire to hide, perhaps similar to the way Adam and Eve felt after they realized the extent of their disobedience.

What I saw on EWTN that morning was Pope John Paul II in prayer. He had not placed himself on display like the Pharisee in Scripture. He was deep in prayer and the cameras had captured his holiness. I could see through the television screen that he was experiencing a calm and peace I had never known. He was also very clearly in communion with something I could not yet call God. Even as an atheist, watching the Pope in prayer through the distance of a television screen, I could see that what he encountered in his prayer was not what I encountered in meditation. It was something more, far more, than I could imagine at the time. I could not take my eyes off him for the entire segment. When it was over, I wanted to know what Pope John Paul II knew, to experience what he experienced.

Some months later, I was in Jacksonville, Florida, for a job interview. I had lived and worked in Jacksonville twice in the past; it was the place where I had fallen more deeply into sin, despite many opportunities to choose a different way of life. Before my interview, I did something I had never done when I lived there: I went to a Catholic church. Even though there were numerous Catholic churches near my home, I did not feel comfortable enough to step inside one. Alone in Jacksonville for a job interview, in a city where few still knew me, and in the middle of the workday, I felt I could risk entering a Catholic church to see how I would feel. Even so, I worried that I would feel the desire to run and hide.

The church I visited, Immaculate Conception, was only blocks from the site of my job interview. It was early afternoon, probably not long after midday Mass. A beautiful old church in downtown Jacksonville, it was founded in 1854, the year Pope Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. I approached the church timidly and was relieved when I opened the door and entered the darkness: No one had barred my way and I had not felt like running away. I was alone. I settled in a pew and sat quietly, looking up occasionally at the images of Jesus and Mary.

While I was sitting, I heard a man enter the church. I could see that, unlike the suit and tie I wore, he was dressed in humble work clothes. I watched him get on his knees and pray. I saw in him something of what I had seen in John Paul II. He seemed to have come for a particular reason. He seemed to have entered the church in a rush. Now, he seemed calm, at peace, in communion with something beyond his own concerns. After about a half hour passed, I watched the man get up, make the sign of the cross, genuflect, and light a candle before he left the church, genuflecting once again.

Before I left, I put some money in the poor box, something I had not done since I was a child. My spiritual poverty overwhelmed me. I had seen the Pope in prayer on television. Now I had seen a common laborer in prayer in a church. I knew that each was far richer than I could imagine.

My experience in that church that day can be likened to a small miracle. I had visited a church named to honor our Blessed Mother built in the year the Church recognized the truth of her birth. I was there because I had witnessed Pope John Paul II in prayer, who had a great devotion to Mary. I had been baptized at a church in Buffalo, New York, named for Mary: Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I had prayed to Mary at a dark moment in my life as a child and she had protected me from harm. That a humble laborer would enter that church while I sat there alone can only be attributed to the intercession of Mary, and perhaps to the prayer of a Pope who surely prayed for those like me who were away from the Church. Seeing these two men in prayer had turned my heart.

I did not return to the faith that day, but a seed had been planted. When I finally did return to the Catholic Church, one of the first things I wanted to learn was how to pray so that I could become a man of prayer like John Paul II and the common laborer I had witnessed praying at Immaculate Conception in Jacksonville.

I am not alone in having had such an experience. In a collection of commentaries on the Catechism of the Catholic Church and prayer, in an article titled “Lord, Teach Us to Pray,” Christoph Cardinal Schönborn opens with a story about Edith Stein, the Jewish philosopher who converted and was canonized as St. Teresa Bene­dicta of the Cross. What led her to faith, he writes, was her experience of seeing “a simple woman come in from the marketplace, kneel down, and pray.” Stein was a nonbeliever at the time, Schönborn recounts, but the “sight of this simple woman at prayer soon becomes for her a certainty: God exists, and in prayer we turn toward him.”

You never know what God will use in your life to lead you or others to Him. You never know who might be watching you when you pray with reverence in a dark church, on a park bench, on a commuter train after a long day at work, or even in your own home. You can be assured, however, that someone will be watching you in prayer and that your praying might be one of the finest and most profound moments of witness and evangelization in your life.