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I can’t really say for sure what time it was. Or if I was having a bad hair day. It was just an ordinary day—with one exception. Something was whispering in my heart. Nothing fancy. Just a still small voice.
I was already a couple years into trucking. Many mistakes were behind me and many more were yet to come. But something was different. What if I didn’t turn on the “noise”?
I was dispatched on what’s called a “gravy run”: to drive from Woodstock, Ontario to Louisville, Kentucky then back to Hamilton, Ontario. How far could I go before the silence became too much?
Anyhow I took off—and did not turn on the radio.
Mile after mile I drove. No music. No talk-radio. No noise but the sound of the big diesel engine and the hum of the tires as they sped along the open road.
Freedom.
It was a hot summer day. The window was rolled down and the wind was rushing through my hair. Little did I know that my life as a truck driver was about to change.
After I had made two more trips in the silence of the road, another word came to me. “Poustinia.”
But how could this be? I was sure a poustinia was a little cabin somewhere up in the backwoods of Combermere, Ontario. Not on an 18-wheeler. Perhaps I was wrong?
I’m OK with being wrong. As long as being wrong means something like “God writes straight with crooked lines.”
I see a lot of lines in my work. Some you stay between; others you cross. And now I had crossed a line. In some strange way, I had gone from truck driver to poustinik-in-the-making.
It sounds strange, even as I write this, but that’s how it was. How it is.
Every day that I chose to not turn on the noise and travelled instead in the stillness of heart that only Christ, through Our Lady, can offer, my work became holy. It became a silent prayer on 18 wheels.
“For the sake of his sorrowful passion, have mercy on us.”
The truck offers other opportunities as well.
Whether it’s the Mr. or Mrs. who is in a hurry and cuts me off or a grandma or grandpa struggling to hold on to the threshold of the speed limit without letting me pass, the opportunities to grow in grace and holiness are endless. And the opportunity to be loved by God is limitless.
Work doesn’t seem so much like work anymore. It seems more like praying, becoming a prayer.
I’m not sure if it’s because I’m on the cusp of forty or that I’ve just learned to be present in the moment and slow down, but the gentle, hidden work Our Lady has started in this simple man is beautifully beginning to bear fruit.
It’s not my work, but Our Lady’s work in me. It’s not what I get by my means of work but who I am becoming through it.
The words I keep returning to and cherish very deeply come from a holy Madonna House priest who died a few years ago—Father Emile-Marie Brière.
“Open your mind to more. Accept loneliness and rejection as a way to God. Then comes joy. And then people don’t reject you anymore, and you’re no longer lonely. As a matter of fact, you’re able to fill the loneliness of others. You acquire that peace of heart which no one can take away from you.
“That peace of heart, which is far more than that. The peace of Christ in a person is the most healing medicine in the world. There is nothing that heals the emotions, that heals the body, that heals the mind, more than a person who radiates the peace of Christ.”
And so it goes. Like most people, my life is taken or better yet, offered, with baby steps. Absorbed in the duty of the moment. Prayerfully, peacefully making those wheels turn. “Plugging along, doing the best you can,” as Jim Guinan, another deceased member of Madonna House, so wonderfully put it.
As I write this, I am sitting in my “poustinia.” It’s been a long day, one that started at 3:30 a.m.
If you think that’s early, well, so do I! I wanted to press that snooze button just one more time so as to rest peacefully in the warmth and comfort of my bed. But life isn’t always comfortable.
And so, each morning the alarm goes off. As my feet touch the floor, I sign myself with the Sign of the Holy Cross. Another day in paradise. Or at least another opportunity to taste the goodness of the Lord.
