Learning Just To "Be" With People

When I was at a Catholic Bible School in rural Alberta, the local priest once preached from the altar that people with disabilities were created by God so that we would learn to love.  Having worked one day a week for almost a year with the Missionaries of Charity, I have learned that not only do they teach us to love, but that we are loved and indeed, loveable – just as we are, not for anything we do or say, but who we are in our very presence and essence.

Presence is one of the charisms and values of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word and of the IWM missionaries.  I have to admit that this Christ Incarnate presence is something I have struggled with.  In our orientation it was stressed that it is not only the things we do, but actually our physical and spiritual presence to people that is important.  I am a doer and not a very good ‘be-er,’so whether it is hanging out in the kitchen at the parish, or staying for extended amounts of time after our youth group meetings, or sitting with God just trying to ‘listen’ for more than about 3 minutes, I struggle big time, because I feel like my time is being wasted.  I am not doing anything productive. 

Working with the Missionaries of Charity, has helped me with this a lot, and little by little I am learning just to ‘be’ with people.  The Missionaries have 3 sections at their location in Santa Fe, Mexico City.  Upstairs in one of their buildings they care for babies and young children.  Downstairs in the same building they have about 15 niñas (girls) which are young to middle aged women with varying degrees of mental and physical disabilities.  They also have a section for older women.  I have concentrated mostly downstairs with the niñas and abuelitas (older women) putting cream on their faces, cutting their nails and feeding them, but most recently have stuck with the niñas.

Their ward, as institutional and drab as it is, gives me peace.  Usually, I cut their finger and toenails, clean their ears and feed them . . . but sometimes, as awkward as it feels in moments, I just ´am´with them.  I communicate, but do not talk with them, or I dance with them. 

Let me describe to you some of the incredibly loveable people that I have met there – Lupita is a young woman whose legs and arms are so short that she moves around on a skateboard, but her mind is perfectly sound.  She can write with her toes, is an associate of the Missionaries of Charity and is now working on finishing her schooling.  Her best friend is Cande (pronounced Cand-eh), who is a middle aged woman with the spirit and face of a child -- kind but usually doesn’t talk much until she is in a really good mood and chatters away like Father Salvador’s pet birds and orders the other girls around in her soft tones.  Cande keeps a stash of collectible junk under her mattress, and when something goes missing she is the first that the Sisters and collaborators ask.  Linda is an obese egg shaped and mute girl with Downs who has this incredibly quirky sense of humour and a strong character that comes and goes in spurts. One day, Linda had been made up with a very cute – but very unwanted -- little red clip bow in her hair.  She took it out and wrapped it up first in the baggy for my left-hand silicone glove bag, and then in the one for the right one, and then put this perfectly neat package in the tin box that was holding the nail-clippers that I was using on the other girls.  I took it out and put it back in her hair and she repeated the exact same meticulous hiding process as the first time.  At that point I decided she should be able to exercise the right to veto the paraphernalia that goes in her hair each day.  Another day, I tried to steal some of her food for Ines, another girl with Downs, not knowing why they gave Linda so much to eat in the first place.  But, let me tell you, there was NO WAY I was taking any food away from her.  She threw my hand away each time I tried, continuing her fixation on her sub-divided plate.

Ines, is another girl with Downs who can walk, but is too weak to stand up straight and so requires that you attach her as a train car to your waist and walk with her.  But, Ines has the most innocent huge brown eyes that look at you so intently as if she is searching your soul, and when she feels loved she lays her head on your lap in the most gentle way.  Corazón (heart) is another girl with mental and physical disabilities, who also can walk but with stiff difficulty and as if she is a bit tipsy.  Her eyes just sparkle and she always wears these cute little red shoes, as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.  She always greets you with the hugest smile and her sweet guttural sigh.  She really likes to dance and can breathe her vowels in sequence if you prompt her.

There are several of the girls that are bed ridden at least to their reclined wheelchairs.  The emaciated limbs of these young girls are twisted in all sorts of strange positions, and they cannot speak – except with their eyes, their crying, sighs and moans.  One such girl, Edith Grande, spoke to me one day.  The girls used to pray the Rosary every day, and so I sat cross-legged on the floor in the back, having returned from putting something away in the bathing area.  One of the full-time workers said that Edith was saying that I shouldn’t be sitting on the floor – with her sparkling eyes, her facial expressions and her innocent smile.  She was saying that I should take the chair that her foot was on.  We settled on sharing the seat.  I was blessed by her generosity and pure love.

For almost twenty years, my mom has worked as the accountant at a complex of a workshop and housing units for the mentally and physically challenged.  I always felt I needed to work with this minority of people in some capacity, to prove to myself that I had that kind of love for the ‘other’, or to see if I did.  I found out that I do have this kind of love, even though sometimes, perhaps too often, I have to walk away and compose myself -- and my gag reflex.  But, I have learned something equally or more valuable -- that I am worthy of this kind of love in all of my brokenness, and in all of my selfishness; that my presence is enough regardless of what I say or do.  I have learned, as Henri Nouwen learned at the Daybreak community of L’Arche, that I too, am the “Beloved [daughter] on who the [Father’s] favour rests” (The Return of the Prodigal Son, 16).

Tara Hurford, Incarnate Word Missionary