Our deliverance

Our Creator moves through us.

Or so it is said. I read and pray and listen and believe that the immutable force we call God, Allah, or Yahweh, the pulse of being behind and within both the everyday and the extraordinary, the energy flow for good, for betterment, for being, the guiding influence that binds and unites, that this presence and power for tomorrow moves through me today, like it moved through you yesterday, and I am humbled, amazed, and sometimes, regretfully, resistant. Because I am a poor conduit for the Almighty, an unreliable channel for universal love. Pettiness and internal conflict, disapproval and external judgement, doubt and easily fatigued faith – these things course through my veins and neural junctions with more frequency than I would like to acknowledge. My penchant for selfishness, for viewing the world through the lens of my own needs and experience, seems unbounded. Glimmers of something greater than my own ego occasionally shine through, yes. But these rays of release are too easily enshrouded by the clouds of self-consciousness. If the Creator needs me to do her work, if God depends on me for reliable daily performance of his holiness, than our collective purpose seems in peril. For despite the occasional best of intentions, I am a flawed and inconsistent contributor to the common good.

Last spring, I sent a message to an elderly Catholic priest who befriended and supported my father during his last years of life. A monsignor by rank, this gentle soul has an Irish wit and a calming wisdom. He also has the same last name as I do. We are common descendants from the same brick makers who helped build sections of west Philadelphia. And we possess similar flawed pride in the knowledge that, one hundred years ago, bricks were occasionally made with the outline of the family name on the front of some bricks. In fact, just prior to my father’s death, the Monsignor had told me that he had one.

“Please tell the Monsignor that I am waiting to see that brick,” I texted another of my dad’s friends, someone who spends regular time with the semi-retired priest. It was one Irishman’s way of teasing another, an only slightly serious probe enwrapped within a deliberate twinkle of uncertainty. Did he really have one of this rare bricks? I had never seen one. And I frankly did not much care whether any bricks existed or he had one. I simply wanted to say hello and perhaps receive some sort of riposte to my thinly veiled disbelief in his claim.

Weeks passed, as did the memory of that text. And then, in the first week of May, the universe sent me its reply. A letter arrived from the Monsignor one day following a well-wrapped box. No – the Monsignor had not sent me a brick. Instead, his hand-written note mentioned the presumed loss of the brick, as it had been lent to someone who was, it seemed, unlikely to return it. More importantly, the letter extended me warm wishes and a kind outreach that my baiting message sent through an intermediary may not have deserved. Deeply enmeshed in the regional response to COVID19, and awaiting word on whether anyone would make an offer on the house my wife and I had just put on the market for sale, I was a bit distracted; I read the Monsignor’s letter but forgot, for a few days, to open the box.

My uncle, another Irishman with a penchant for humor, has the same name as the Monsignor. I say “has” because, despite his death three years ago, I like to imagine my uncle staying busy in the events of our world. It appears he does. “I sent you something you should have,” his widow, my aunt, texted me that week. It was nice of her to think of me but, really, I didn’t need anything – except perhaps to sell the house and avoid getting the coronavirus. And so Tuesday turned to Wednesday, and Wednesday slid through Thursday to Friday. I was warmed by the Monsignor’s letter, appreciative of my aunt’s outreach, and wondering if we had made a mistake trying to sell our house during a pandemic. I completely forgot about the box on the front porch.

Then I opened it. Yes – indeed – enfolded in a sea of bubble wrap I found a named brick from my ancestor’s Philadelphia brick yard.

“Where did you find it?” I asked my aunt on the phone. “You know your uncle,” she replied. “Who knows where he got it.” But – no – she did not know the Monsignor, nor was she aware of the running communication I had with him, nor knew of my gentle probing with the Monsignor about our common ancestors and the evidence of their constructive contribution to west Philadelphia. She had just found the brick in her yard the week before and decided that my uncle would have wanted me to have it.

Huh. Wow. I smiled and set the brick on the mantle. And, within twenty-four hours, we received an offer for our house.

This is a season when we celebrate deliveries: the renewal of daylight, the release from a rather terrible year, the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem, the birth of Christ. If you are like me, you may long for rescue, for a guarantee that somewhere, somehow life is more than “this”, that I am more than “me”, that you and I can be more than who, where, and what we’ve been. As I write this, I look at the brick sitting on the hearth of our new home. My heart glows under the evidence that the universe and all its mysteries are not to be bounded by the uncertainty of one single traveler in human time. And I sense that renewal, restoration, and renascence are always within our collective reach.