Time is a beggar
Sudden morning rainstorm pushed the wife and me into a church. A vigorous wind made fun of our umbrella, drenching me more than the wife whom I shielded. I was dripping with rain when we entered the church.
A Mass was in progress. When it was finished, a couple who stood behind us and witnessed my waterlogged condition, rushed to their residence, which was close by, and brought me a clean shirt. Their thoughtfulness impressed me and has remained with me, especially as I failed to return the shirt, which the wife and I kept in the car for purposes of restoration, which never happened because its owners had moved out of the church area and ultimately, with neither of us knowing how, the shirt just disappeared.
Here comes Luke, writing about John the Baptist, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and warning the crowd that if they did not repent and produce good fruit, they would be cut down and thrown into the fire.
Moved by his words, the crowd asked John, “What then should we do?” In reply John said to them, “Whoever has two tunics should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.”
Reading this, how could I not think of the couple that gave cover to my back and stifled my fear of catching pneumonia? Coincidentally, I received a call from a kind-hearted friend, whom I call “Monsignor,” who asked me if I had clothes that I was excessively fond of (meaning, which I still keep in the cabinet but no longer wear, or, because of age and diet, I cannot don without a wardrobe malfunction). I got his drift and began peering into the cabinet and pulling off from the hangers whatever I could spare for the victims of the recent typhoon in Mindanao.
Perhaps the most popular exemplar of giving one’s clothes to the needy is the fourth-century saint, Martin of Tours. He was a soldier in the Roman army. One day he met a beggar who practically had no clothes on. Martin cut his cloak into two and gave one part to the homeless man. That night in a dream Jesus appeared to Martin wearing the half-cloak he had given to the beggar, and telling the angels, “Here is Martin, the Roman soldier who has clad me.” When he woke up, Martin saw that his cloak was in one piece again.
Martin’s cloak was long revered as a sacred relic, and gave to the chapel in which it was kept the name “capella,” or “little cloak.” In time, little churches began to be called “chapels.”
Somehow it all added up when one day the wife and I went to a little chapel near the courthouse for prayers. There was a woman waiting outside it, begging. We had been going to the place regularly, and I recalled that she always stood outside the door, to ask alms from the people coming out. I realized that the words of John the Baptist and the spirit of St. Martin of Tours resides in every house of prayer, in fact in prayer itself, whose validity is tested by love in action. And so I decided to give some money to the woman. But when we came out, she was not there anymore. Actually, she had transferred to the other side of the entrance where the afternoon sun had moved the shade. Which inspired me to write this poem:
AT THE CHAPEL OF THE DIVINE MASTER
As we passed by, the woman smiled,
She sat in the shade just outside
The entrance – she could not have chosen
A better place for begging – prayer
Would not be prayer which did not make
A person kind, and so when we
Came out after an hour, my hand
Instinctively fished for a coin,
But she was not there anymore,
And when I was about to put
The coin back, I saw her on
The other side, with the same smile –
The shade had moved and so had she.
Waiting turned time into a beggar.
