What Inspires Me

To varying degrees, they deliver on their promises, and I’ve learned from them. Yet what makes the deepest impression on me is what I call “graced moments”—moments when someone inspires me or teaches me something without realizing he or she has done so. And these moments take longer to tell about than they take to happen.

Three of them that I remember well happened at Madonna House.

The first one happened one evening while I was drying dishes there. Very likely there was a weeding bee that evening and every person able to weed had left for the bee right after supper. At any rate, there were very few people doing dishes. So those of us who were doing them felt pressured and went into high gear. Or at least I did.

I was the only one drying and I particularly felt that pressure as I tried, unsuccessfully, to keep up with the more experienced staff person who was pre-washing the dishes and loading the dishwasher.

Suddenly I looked up, and there was Jean Fox, the director general of women, standing next to me drying a teapot.

Why did this make such an impression on me? Part of it was that she didn’t need to dry dishes. I knew that a lot of people wrote to her. Surely the sheer volume of her correspondence alone could have excused her.

But there she was lending a hand where needed, providing a calm steadying presence, and just being there to see how everyone was doing.

My second “graced moment” happened one evening when I sat at Jean’s table for supper. She was telling stories about the early days of MH and mentioned that there was a young man staff worker whom she hadn’t known very well.

But one day, she said, while returning home in a car with him and some others, she noticed him quietly pull his rosary out of his pocket and begin to pray. She was so impressed by that, she said, that that was all she needed to know about him.

His action made an impression, not only on her, but also on me, when she told the story. Before that, having grown up after Vatican II, I had little sense of Mary or the rosary. That story was one of the events that led me to begin to pray the rosary on a regular basis.

My third “graced moment” occurred when I was working in the MH kitchen. The director of the house happened to be there, and I heard a senior staff worker, in fact an elder of the community, come up to her and ask her permission to buy a cup of coffee during a trip she was going to take that day.*

The staff worker was told “yes,” but I had the impression that had she been told “no,” she would have just said “okay” and simply gone on her way.

This stunned me. Here was someone who had been in Madonna House a very long time, a department head, a woman with strong opinions, matter-of-factly asking permission to buy a cup of coffee!

So it wasn’t just the new people who had to ask permission.

Used to the “top dog” mentality of the world, even among some people who are active in the Church, it was an eye-opener for me to see someone in a position of authority herself submit to authority.

And it happened so naturally. It was no big deal.

And having occasionally seen a newer staff worker struggle to accept a decision from her director, I knew that this acceptance of authority does not come automatically to the Madonna House staff. It has to be learned.

The Natural Thing

And for this senior staff worker obedience had become so internalized that now it was simply the natural thing to do.

Graced moments like that have not only happened to me in Madonna House. They’ve happened to me elsewhere, too. In my parish church, for example, I was very inspired to see a family with school age children and younger every day at early morning Mass. I can’t imagine what it must take just to get all those children ready that early.

Oh yes, I’ll probably read the next article I come across entitled, “Ten Steps to Being Healthy,” and I will probably learn something from it. But my most indelible lessons have come from “graced moments.”

(*One of the ways members of MH practice poverty is to ask permission for any personal expenditure of money, however slight.)