There were a sensitivity and a beauty to her that have nothing to do
with looks. She was one to be listened to, whose words were so easy to
take to heart.
It is said that the true nature of being is veiled. The labor of words,
the expression of art, the seemingly ceaseless buzz that is human
thought all have in common the need to get at what really is so. The
hope to draw close to and possess the truth of being can be a feverish
one. In some cases it can even be fatal, if pleasure is one's truth and
its attainment more important than life itself. In other lives, though,
the search for what is truthful gives life.
I used to find notes left in the collection basket, beautiful notes
about my homilies and about the writer's thoughts on the daily
scriptural readings. The person who penned the notes would add
reflections to my thoughts and would always include some quotes from
poets and mystics he or she had read and remembered and loved. The notes
fascinated me. Here was someone immersed in a search for truth and
beauty. Words had been treasured, words that were beautiful. And I felt
as if the words somehow delighted in being discovered, for they were
obviously very generous to the as yet anonymous writer of the notes. And
now this person was in turn learning the secret of sharing them. Beauty
so shines when given away. The only truth that exists is, in that
sense, free.
It was a long time before I met the author of the notes.
One Sunday morning, I was told that someone was waiting for me in the
office. The young person who answered the rectory door said that it was
"the woman who said she left all the notes." When I saw her I was
shocked, since I immediately recognized her from church but had no idea
that it was she who wrote the notes. She was sitting in a chair in the
office with her hands folded in her lap. Her head was bowed and when she
raised it to look at me, she could barely smile without pain. Her face
was disfigured, and the skin so tight from surgical procedures that
smiling or laughing was very difficult for her. She had suffered
terribly from treatment to remove the growths that had so marred her
face.
We chatted for a while that Sunday morning and agreed to meet for lunch later that week.
As it turned out we went to lunch several times, and she always wore a
hat during the meal. I think that treatments of some sort had caused a
lot of her hair to fall out. We shared things about our lives. I told
her about my schooling and growing up. She told me that she had worked
for years for an insurance company. She never mentioned family, and I
did not ask.
We spoke of authors we both had read, and it was easy to tell that books are a great love of hers.