Grace Happens

9 years ago

By GEORGE A. KENDALL

I’m not sure if this quite qualifies as a Christmas article. At least its connection with Christmas is a bit tangential. It is about grace, and the experiences we have once in a while (in my case, once in a great while) of the surprising appearance of grace in the midst of one’s humdrum existence.

The Christmas carol, Silent Night, refers to the birth of Christ as “the dawn of redeeming grace,” and, indeed, every time grace comes into one’s life, sometimes seeming to positively burst in, Christ is born into the world and into our lives. We stumble along through life, through what an anonymous medieval mystic called “the cloud of unknowing,” trying to respond to grace and usually having no real idea how well or how badly we are doing, no “feedback,” just having to trust (Eric Voegelin once said that “uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity”).

But every once in a while a ray of light makes its way through the cloud, and there is a little hint of what is going on, perhaps because God knows that we need a little reassurance, a little encouragement, now and then, a clue of sorts about what the Holy Spirit is up to. Something like that happened to me this year.

A few years ago, I happened to find out that a high school friend of mine, named Mike, with whom I had had almost no contact for many years, was now living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in a town about 60 miles from Grand Marais, where I live (in the UP, 60 miles is just “up the road a piece”).

So I decided to give him a call, figuring we would talk for a few minutes and reminisce about high school and that would be the end of it.

Instead, when he realized who it was, he proceeded to talk my ear off for over an hour. After that, I could expect to get a call from him about once a week and be on the phone for a minimum of an hour. (Actually, I suspect he would have kept on talking all night if I had let him, but after an hour I would come up with an excuse to end the conversation.)

From time to time he would drive over to Grand Marais and we would have lunch at one of the local restaurants. I have to admit that, being only human, at times I regarded him as a bit of a nuisance, but at the same time I realized that he was a pretty lonely guy and needed a friend, and I also suspected that the Lord might have brought him back into my life for a reason.

Mike had had, to put it mildly, a complicated and chaotic life. He was an alcoholic who, by the time we met again, had been sober for a number of years, but I always suspected he had suffered some permanent damage from the years he was not sober. He had served in Vietnam and he came back from there with some scars, like so many of his fellow veterans.

Then his marriage, never very stable, failed completely, and he went through an acrimonious divorce. This was followed by a series of not very lasting relationships with women, during which he lived in a number of places, finally ending up in the UP.

Along the way, he had drifted away from the practice of his Catholic faith. He told me once that he missed being Catholic, and naturally I made the obvious reply: There’s something you can do about that. So I gave him the names and phone numbers of a couple of priests in his area and urged him to go talk to one of them. I’m very used to having people ignore advice like that, so I was taken by surprise when he actually went and did it, and actually went to Confession for the first time in ages.

I would like to say that after that Mike became a model of sanctity and all-round pillar of the Church, but the truth is, I suspected he was not getting to Mass that frequently. Still, the foot was in the door. One of the things that continued to be a spiritual obstacle to him was his resentment toward his ex-wife and his children, who, he felt, didn’t pay enough attention to him.

I tried to tell him, as I had on many previous occasions, first, that, the refusal to forgive harms a person spiritually as well as emotionally and possibly physically too; and, second, that, as Jesus told us, if we don’t forgive, we won’t be forgiven. He understood all this, but said he just couldn’t let go of his anger.

After one of our conversations on this topic, I didn’t hear from him for three or four weeks, which was very unusual, and I got concerned, making numerous attempts to reach him. I have gotten into the habit at times, of making a novena to St. Joseph for people I know who are having problems, and decided to make one for Mike, for the grace to forgive and, of course, for the grace of a happy death.

About this time I found myself in the hospital with a serious infection, but continued the novena while I was there.

A few days after I got home I got a call from a lady named Lisa, who identified herself as Mike’s daughter. Lisa told me that a few weeks earlier a neighbor had found Mike unconscious on the floor of his home. The neighbor, of course, got the ambulance there and he was taken to the nearest hospital, then from there to a more major hospital where he could be examined by specialists.

The specialists established that he was suffering from a very aggressive and far advanced form of lymphoma, which they believed was probably secondary to Agent Orange poisoning from his time in Vietnam. It was too far along for any effective treatment. His daughter got him into a veterans home in lower Michigan.

During his time there, he had several days when he was conscious and fairly alert. He seemed happy and at peace. Both his children were with him, they all talked a lot, and apparently they were fully reconciled to one another. A priest came and gave him the last sacraments. He apparently talked about me a lot and wanted his daughter to contact me, but he couldn’t remember my last name.

Finally, when she was looking over his telephone bill, she came across a number for Grand Marais which he had called repeatedly, and decided to call it and see. At this point he was no longer conscious and was thought to be close to death. He died the next morning — very peacefully, according to his daughter. I have no doubt that he was granted the grace of a happy death. St. Teresa of Avila was right on target when she told people to “go to Joseph.” Thank you, St. Joseph!

Well, what to make of all this? Does it mean that this saintly person (none other than myself) made this heroic effort to save a friend from Hell, and succeeded? That question pretty much answers itself. My credentials as a saint are, to put it mildly, questionable. Whatever happened here, God gets the credit. He decided to go after Mike and save him, and, for reasons fully known only to Him, decided to involve me.

I suspect He may have done that, at least in part, for my sake as well as Mike’s, because I was at a point where I needed some reassurance and encouragement, where I needed to be reminded that God has not forgotten me.

For me, it was a little ray of light suddenly shining in the midst of the cloud of unknowing, letting me know that my life means more than I can really imagine, that, in particular, God puts me into situations with other people for a reason, though I am usually more or less clueless as to what the reason is. Perhaps, too, I was being prepared for things to come in my life. I certainly experienced it as a revelation.

And so the dawn of redeeming grace shines, on Mike and on me, and on all who wait for it, and Christ is born in our souls.

And on that note, a happy and a Merry Christmas to all of us.

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