The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [175]
For many years his theater provided disabled actors for various auditions. Once, a casting director called and said, “We want a double amputee for a role in a television show.” Rick asked, “Do you want someone without his arms or legs?” The casting director said, “I’m not sure. Does it matter?” And Rick said, “Well, it does to him!”
But I want to tell you another story about Rick. When he was a little boy, in the 1950s, the preserved right forearm of St. Francis Xavier came to Philadelphia. Strange as this may seem to non-Catholics, this relic is particularly well known: it’s the arm that the Jesuit used to baptize thousands of people during his missionary days in Africa, India, and Japan.
Rick’s first-grade teacher, a Catholic sister, thought it would be a good idea for Rick to see the arm—though she didn’t expect there would be any sort of miraculous outcome. Neither did his mother, though she wrote a letter to permit Rick to be excused from class to see the relic.
But his Catholic-school classmates were praying hard for a miracle. Maybe Rick would be healed—and become like all the other children in his class. So when Rick’s mother picked him up to drive him to the cathedral downtown, his class was thrilled.
A huge line wound up and down the aisles of the cathedral. Because of the crowd, officials announced that visitors would be able only to touch the reliquary, the glass box that held Francis’s arm. You wouldn’t be able to kiss the reliquary, as some pious Catholics had hoped. But when several priests saw the boy without a right arm, they said to his mother, “Oh, no, he can kiss it!” Rick, however, desired no such “healing.”
So he kissed the glass case, but pressed the stump of his right arm against himself—hoping that it would not grow.
On his way back home, on the trolley car, he kept checking his arm. There wasn’t any change. No miracle. When he returned to class, his classmates told him how disappointed they were. Perhaps, they said, he wasn’t worthy of a miracle.
But someone else had a very different reaction. When he returned home that night, his sister Denise, who would later become a nun, was hiding behind the drapes of the living-room windows. She peeked out. When she saw Rick, she was delighted. “Oh great!” she said. “I’m so happy that nothing happened. Because I like you the way you are!”
This is the way that God loves us: as we are.
Rick never forgot that affirmation. It helped him to see his disability as a gift, as an entry into the humanity of others, and as a reminder of the call to be grateful for all of life. He told me recently that a disability was a negative “only to the extent that you absorb the negative impressions of others.”
So maybe a miracle did happen that day.
Self-acceptance is the first step to holiness. But for many the path to self-acceptance can be arduous. Men, women, and children in ethnic or social minorities, with physical disabilities, with dysfunctional family backgrounds, with addictions, or those who feel unattractive, uneducated or undesirable may struggle for many years before accepting themselves as beloved children of God.
But the journey is essential. Many gay men and lesbians, for example, have told me that the real beginning of their spiritual path was accepting themselves as gay men and women—that is, the way that God has made them. Coming to see themselves in this way, and, more important, allowing God to love them as they are, not as society might want them to be, or think they should be, is an important step in their relationship with God.
“For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb,” says Psalm 139. “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” God loves us as we are because that’s how God made us. This is something of what the psalmist may have meant, and what Rick’s