SMALL MIRACLES

 

My bedtime reading the last few nights has been very pleasantly occupied with a book of essays by Ann Patchett entitled These Precious Days. I was struck in one of the essays, The Worthless Servant, by the truth and wisdom contained in a quote by Robert F. Kennedy that she includes. It goes like this:

Robert F. Kennedy

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

I’ve had first-hand experience with this. When I first started working for the Buenos Aires Herald as a young idealistic writer-wannabe in my mid-twenties, believing in “the power of one” was a mere act of faith—a platitude that I repeated as a high ideal but that was, in the end, hard to seriously believe in at any practical level.

Former Buenos Aires Herald Editor Robert Cox

But as the difficult years of my earliest days in South America went on, and as I watched Editor Robert Cox take on first the right-wing death squads working undercover with the elected government of Isabel Perón and then, the ruthless power of the military regime that was to follow, I began to see that one small voice, one small newspaper, one small but courageous editor, could make a difference. He could, single-handedly, change minds. He could influence foreign policy in Europe and the United States. He could, in the end, save lives and shine a spotlight on something heinous and morally wrong. He could defend his rights and the rights of others simply by not being too afraid to raise his voice in their defense, while accepting that the risk to his own life was worth it in the larger scheme of things.

In this essay, Patchett was telling the story of an assignment she once accepted to write about a saint. At first she rejected the offer because she couldn’t see the value in writing yet another glowing tribute to some long-dead individual, canonized by the Vatican and afforded the official honor of sainthood. She told the editor making the offer that if she were asked to write about someone she considered a living saint, it might be different. But one more story about a long-accepted saint? It seemed like an overkill to her.

To her surprise, the publication acquiesced, asked her to submit the story of “her saint”, and Patchett took up the challenge. She decided to write about a Nashville priest whom she’d known since childhood. This priest, this man, was someone who had devoted his entire life to helping the troubled and destitute in any way he could.

Ann Patchett

This was a lot more than mere “thoughts and prayers.” This was about finding homes for the homeless, lifting people out of abject despair and hopelessness, helping the destitute, the forgotten, the addicted, the morally and spiritually crushed to take a first step in a series of baby steps that could lead them to “something better” even when a smashing success might never be a possibility.

Father Charlie, Patchett’s priest friend, refused to throw up his hands and consider certain social situations hopeless. He settled instead for the small miracles that could be worked by doing something even when it was next to impossible to do everything to solve the problems of the world—his world. You had to start at your own doorstep in exercising humanity. You chose to help or not to. But you couldn’t be a true Christian if you failed to love your neighbor, no matter how “undesirable” that neighbor might seem to you. That was his message.

Patchett’s Nashville priest reminded me of one I’d known in Buenos Aires, back in the late 1970s. His name was Padre Argentino. Or at least, that was his nom de guerre. He was, at the time, the subject of persecution, which began in the mid-seventies when the Triple-A, a far-right splinter of the vastly eclectic Peronist movement, in the person of former policeman José López Rega, had usurped the government of an all too accommodating President Isabel Perón, and was purging just about everybody left of Adolf Hitler from the party of Perón. They considered Padre Argentino—along with scores of other so-called “third world priests”—to be dangerous Marxists, who were seeking to incite revolt against the “Western and Christian” far-right.

Father Carlos Mujica, murdered by the Triple-A

A Triple-A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance) thug had already murdered unabashed third world cleric Father Carlos Mujica, whose work in the slums of Buenos Aires and his philosophy regarding empowering the poor had caused him to run afoul of not only López Rega and far-right Peronism, but also of Buenos Aires Archbishop Juan Carlos Aramburu, long a champion of Catholic conservatism, to whom Mujica’s fraternal relationship with the poor and his chapel’s unfettered service to them he found dangerous, distasteful and offensive to the Church hierarchy. The Triple-A would also, shortly before I met the padre, slaughter seven priests and seminarians of the Pallottine Order while they were at prayer at Saint Patrick’s Parish in the Belgrano neighborhood on Buenos Aires’s North Side. 

For his part, Padre Argentino had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt while running a soup kitchen for the homeless in midtown Buenos Aires. He was no more a communist than I was. He was merely a priest doing the job that he felt God, not the Church, had set out for him. He identified with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and with the likes of Saint Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, not with those of the upper-class, conservative, Argentine Catholic hierarchy and their friends in the military establishment. And as such, he found himself consistently threatened with death at the hands of the Triple-A and with being defrocked by the Church leadership, which was equivalent to a death warrant in the climate of the Peronist far-right’s war on leftist ideals.

After the failed assassination attempt, friends helped him escape to Bolivia where he hid out for a short time, but his mission to the poor in his native Argentina seemed far more important to him than his own safety and he slipped back across the border under the radar. He set up a new mission in an impoverished industrial suburb of Buenos Aires, where he was never known as anything but Padre Argentino. It was a neighborhood where overcrowding, incest, chronic alcoholism, poverty and ubiquitous toxic industrial waste tended to foster an inordinate number of birth defects and cases of retarded brain development in children. Padre Argentino saw that these were kids who simply fell through the cracks, who had no place to go, were rejected by the education and social welfare system, and seldom received sufficient care and guidance at home.

He took the bull by the horns, commandeered an abandoned, shot-up, half-burned house that had once been the hideout of a gang of delinquents summarily wiped out by the provincial police, fixed it up as best he could with the help of a few friends and scant cash and material donations, and created the Little School of St. Francis of Assisi. The school’s main lesson was love and caring. He fed the children and taught them whatever their distinct capacities permitted them to learn. He also became the spiritual leader of that interurban subsistence community, creating his own ad hoc parish for people disenfranchised and disdained by the official Catholic community, performing marriages, funerals, confession and any other services and rites his presence called for, ever assisted by a Down Syndrome boy called Minguito, who was his loyal superhero acolyte—and who, whenever he wasn’t occupied with ecclesiastical matters, was busy being El Zorro or Batman.

He did all of this in a climate of abject poverty in which every plate of soup, every loaf of bread, every pencil and sheet of paper, every storybook depended on his ability to effectively beg every day of his life in the very best of Franciscan traditions. His days were eighteen hours long and utterly exhausting, but he did it all without complaint, though with not infrequent fits of rage at the injustice of the system and at the complete apathy of Mother Church.

A few years back I wrote a series of pieces about how I was responsible for wrecking Padre Argentino’s mission. I can’t recall right now the titles I put on those essays, but collectively they could have been called No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. It’s a long and complicated story, but the long and the short of it is that, in the brashness of my youth at that time (I first met and wrote about the padre when I was twenty-nine), I thought I had all the answers. I could solve everything. It was easy. I’d just go to the people with the money and get them on board. Nobody better for this, I figured, than the American expatriate business community.

I took Padre Argentino’s case to the American Society of the River Plate, enthused a critical mass of the community and we set to work forming a foundation to fund the Little School of St. Francis. Thing is, nothing like that happens in an expat American community without the US Embassy finding out. And since the wife of the military attaché was one of the most enthusiastic promoters of the project, it wasn’t long before the ambassador’s wife was involved, and then the ambassador himself.

When I told Padre Argentino what I’d been up to, he looked worried. “This could backfire, m’hijo,” he said.

He was right. It wasn’t long before I got a call from the military attaché, Colonel Skip McDonald. Skip said the ambassador had wanted to get involved.

“Great!” I said.

“Well, maybe not. He’s not going to be able to get personally involved. When we ran a background check on the priest…”

“Background check?”

“Well, yeah. You know, Dan, the ambassador can’t be associated with anybody we don’t know anything about.”

“So, tell him not to get involved,” I said, starting to get irritated.

But it wasn’t that simple. The background check had been done already and it seemed that Argentine military intelligence had the padre on a list of “suspected subversives”.

I was like, well okay, so no ambassador. Who cares? But Skip was quick to make me see the light. “Before, the Argentine Army didn’t know where this guy was. Now they do. We’ve shined a light on him. If he’s your friend, you might want to give him a heads-up.”

So off went Padre Argentino to exile again and furious with me for my infernal meddling. But not without telling me that it was my responsibility to fix what I’d broken. I told him I had no idea where to begin. He told me not to worry, that God would provide. I rolled my eyes and said, “Yeah, right.”

For a while the fate of the school hung in the balance. The folks at the American Society were still willing to back the project if I would run it or would find somebody else to do it.

Almost on cue, a young Canadian woman called Martha Thompson showed up at the newspaper where I worked. She was living with her Argentine boyfriend in Buenos Aires now and was looking for something to do involving social issues. I said perhaps she could do some writing for us in that area and asked what her background was in the field of social work. She said that although she had most recently been recovering from tuberculosis, which she’d contracted while working in India, she’d gained a lot of previous experience there. What was she doing in India, I wanted to know?

“Working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta,” she said, as casually as she might have said, “Working at Burger King.”

I said, “Girl, do I have a job for you!”

So things sort of worked out in the end—but not for Padre Argentino, whose mission I ended in one fell swoop. The point being, that sometimes a willingness to help isn’t enough. You have to know how to help without ending up being a bull in a china shop.

That was the lesson that this experience taught me, and from then on, I’ve taken a much humbler approach to helping when I think I can make some difference. And I’ve learned too that those tiny ripples that Bobby Kennedy talked about do indeed have an effect. But the more thought you put into each pebble of care you cast, the more effective those tiny ripples will be.   

Juan Bautista Bairoletto

I have a neighbor in Patagonia with whom I’ve been friends since he was fourteen and I was forty-three. Back then, he was a wild kid riding a horse bareback and raising hell with his other roughneck buddies everywhere. They liked to think of themselves as modern-day Billy the Kid type characters, or, more accurately, as the new embodiment of Argentina’s legendary Juan Bautista Bairoletto, who roamed the pampas as an outlaw after he shot and killed a rural policeman in a fight over a prostitute whom both men were courting—an almost mythical character known to the rural rich as a dangerous bandit and killer, and to the poor as a Robin Hood hero.

The young adolescent had it rough, growing up without a father and having to help his mother make ends meet as she struggled to bring up his seven younger sisters and brothers. Despite being barely more than a boy, when I first met him, he was already an extraordinary horseman and was working, whenever tourism allowed, out of the riding stable of a well-known member of the Anglo-Celt community. In spite of his youth, he was leading tourists on long horse-trekking excursions along mountain trails that he already knew like his own backyard, for fees that were meager, to say the least.

As I got to know him, he admitted to being very nearly illiterate, never having had time to attend more than a few years of school, despite federal laws making grades one through six compulsory, and only on a hit and miss basis even then. The majority of his time was devoted to survival—his own and his family’s. As the eldest male, he was the man of the family at fourteen, and then as now, he commanded the respect of his siblings.

He started doing some work for me when he was seventeen. But he always came as the assistant of a Chilean boy of the same age who hailed from a farming family, was much better educated, and had accumulated considerable skills working with his far older stepbrothers who were all handymen and proficient as carpenters, brick masons, gardeners, lumberjacks and fence-builders.

The better I got to know him, the more I realized just how intelligent my young neighbor was. He wasn’t just smart. He was unimaginably bright, a careful critical thinker, a super-quick learner and a guy with a highly creative mind. What he lacked was confidence in himself, often describing himself as “an ignorant jerk like me” and fairly content (or perhaps relieved) to let others lead while he labored under their orders.

After my experience with Padre Argentino, I found myself being highly critical of my first impulses. Who the hell was I to meddle in other people’s lives, to tell them how to improve themselves, to grab them by the scruff of the neck and drag them kicking and screaming to “empowerment”, whether they liked it or not? I mean, after all, was I such a smashing success that I could now devote my efforts to giving others life-lessons? This kid already knew many times more about life and survival than I would ever be able to learn.

Still, if I knew I could make suggestions that might change his life for the better, wasn’t it wrong and selfish of me not to get involved? So one day when I saw him alone, I struck up a conversation with him. I told him that I’d watched him work. That I couldn’t understand why he was always the assistant when he had skills of his own. Fence-building, rustic construction, lawn care, land-clearing, logging, painting…he seemed to be as good or better at them than the people he worked for. But he didn’t seem very convinced that I was right.

Nevertheless, I started hiring him directly for certain jobs, both at home and in the seventy acres of natural forest for which I was the private warden. He responded to my confidence and did an excellent job at everything I assigned him. He created a team with his two younger brothers. I recommended them to the handful of other neighbors that I had at that time. Back then, there were no services of any kind in our area except electricity. People had to heat with firewood. And there were only a few of us who gathered, sawed and chopped our own. The rest bought theirs from providers elsewhere. My young friend and his team got in on the unloading and chopping but were not equipped to handle any other stages of the firewood process because they didn’t have a chainsaw, this despite the fact that they often were given firewood as part of their pay on land that they cleared for construction. But they had to saw in situ only as much as they could use, because they had to borrow their clients’ saws to cut it. And then they had to pay somebody with a truck to haul it to their homes.

I couldn’t afford to buy him a truck, but I could indeed buy him a chainsaw and did. I gave it to him unconditionally. Suddenly, he was an entrepreneur, cutting and selling firewood, pruning dead branches from trees in people’s yards, cleaning up fallen timber, cutting rough-hewn lumber from felled trees and doing just about any job that called for a chainsaw and the skill to use it. My recommendations to anybody who asked me whom they could hire for firewood, lawn care, fence-building house-painting and so on, placed their minds at ease about hiring him since most of them only knew him as a wild little bandido-wannabe who ran with the wrong crowd.

As he got more and more work, he invested in the other tools of his trade. He improved himself personally as well, taught himself to read and write, learned to drive, bought a car with a hauling trailer and then a full-sized pick-up. Soon, I no longer had to be his promoter. His work and his seriousness spoke for themselves and he and his team eventually had more work than they could handle.

I’ve watched over the years as he has grown from an underprivileged kid putting on a brave face as he struggled to help his mother make ends meet, into a skilled handyman, with a family of his own and a thriving rural services business in which he is now seconded by his eldest son, and hires others to work for him. At forty-two, he is a respected member of our growing mountain community, where every new family that comes to settle here is a likely new name on his satisfied clients’ list, since everyone who has used the services of him and his family is sure to recommend him above any outsider.

He owes nothing to anyone for this success. But I have the tacit inner satisfaction of knowing that when I saw someone I knew had the potential to overcome the insecurity into which he was born—to leave behind a path that could only have led him to delinquency, to seek to improve himself in every way imaginable and to build a life of dignity for himself and his loved ones—

I stepped out of my comfort zone and gave him the tiniest of nudges in the right direction. Little ripples that cross over each other and exact inexorable change for the better.

These are the ingredients that small miracles are made of, and observing how the ripples from one small pebble I once threw into the water had such a far-reaching trajectory, I never again doubted the wisdom of reaching out wherever I could make the tiniest of differences. I haven’t done much. But I’ve done something on one occasion after another. And doing something because you can always seems to have a multiplying effect.

The point that Ann Patchett makes in The Worthless Servant is that the person who truly benefits from every act of service we perform out of love and/or empathy for our neighbor— simply because we can—isn’t the receiver but the giver, whose life becomes so much richer every time we realize how lucky we are and share our abundance instead of clinging not only to all of our stuff, but also to the idea that we need so much more.