Against the wind roaring up from the valley floor, the ruddy Australian priest steadied a sloshing chalice, pinned down the Body of Christ with his free hand, and launched into a prelude I’d memorized through years of altarboying the dreaded dawn Mass: and Jesus said to his apostles, I leave you my peace, my peace I give you, look not on our sins…
Only this wasn’t the weekday service at a parish in Pennsylvania. This was Mass at 10,000 feet, a windblown sacrament on the peak of Mount Ramelau in the decimated nation of East Timor. I had traveled here with a team of Australian students to offer relief in the wake of genocidal violence that erupted in the autumn of 1999 — Black September to those Timorese who survived. Our mountain pilgrimage came at the insistence of our hosts, returned refugees who believed with equal ferocity in the future of their country and the power of prayer before labor. They had summoned, as guides and guards for our passage, a handful of men most intimate with this geography — Falantil guerillas who had battled their Indo-nesian oppressors from the very mountain holds we now traversed.
Moving like wraiths through the mist, our procession reached the summit at dawn on the second day. There we huddled on an exposed slab of shrine, drew coats and legs close against the gusts, and listened to a hoarse, lilting voice call us to something ancient and profound.
Now let us offer one another some sign of Christ’s peace.
It was an unlikely place to hear those words. An unlikely congregation to receive them. I looked across at the Falantil rebels, at their weary, obsidian eyes. Their spare, relief-agency clothing. Their chattering teeth. I caught the glances of my Australian companions, wondering how this would unfold. Some sign of Christ’s peace? What would that mean to these guerillas? Wagers of a grim war that left only their own land scorched and devastated. What sign would they offer, these men of the machete?
Standing and steadying themselves like sloshing chalices, they offered the same thing that soldiers and sinners and saints and senators and servants and students have offered for ages: their hands, their arms, their bruised and cracked and white-knuckled fingers.
Paz.
And paz again
And again.
Over and over and over until they had moved through the entire windtorn circle.
*
I’d never been to a hall Mass before. I didn’t even know what it was — church in the hallway, liturgy in the lobby? Yet here was a guy I’d met four days ago, a guy named Doobs from two doors down, insisting that I attend. Sunday night man, you should come. It’s pretty cool. It was January of my terribly disjointed freshman year of college. I was newly transferred to a snowed-in midwestern university from our nation’s Air Force Academy, assigned to a closet of a room with a former seminarian who devoured potato chips while I attempted to sleep. I was lost and uncertain and stilted. I was five months behind the social curve.
“Okay,” I shrugged. “If that’s where people go…”
That’s where people went. Nearly three hundred of them, every Sunday night in the chapel of this looming, Gothic dorm known as “The Manor.” They arrived early, to lean coolly against the walls, or late, to crash the opening prayer and collapse in cross-legged clusters. They abandoned pressing responsibilities, Nietzsche or Nabokov, mathematics or Madden Football, to make it to Mass. There were no pews, just a carpet, a lectern, an altar, and a chair for the priest. The congregation sprawled haphazardly at his feet.
The celebrant that first week was a hairy, squinty man with a radiant smile who lived in residence on the third floor. I’d heard he’d been a missionary in Kenya. That when it came to liturgy, he wasn’t exactly tied to
the text. That he didn’t mind coloring a little outside the lines. Late in the Mass, after we had responded and also with you, he beamed through a tangled mustache and said now take a generous moment to give each other a sign of Christ’s peace.
It was the word “generous” that got me.
Where I grew up, the Sign of Peace was anything but generous. It was a brisk affair, a clipped choreography of handshakes: Left Side Right Side Two in Front TURN Two Behind ZOOM Lamb of God. If you were quick, you could catch the priest by the second have mercy on us.
At the hall Mass, however, it appeared the Lamb of God would be taking its own sweet time. All around me, students were lumbering to their feet and sharing enthusiastic handshakes. They were weaving and dodg-ing and spinning and hugging. Their embraces were warm or cursory or awkward or lingering. There were manhugs and sidehugs and bearhugs. It lasted for minutes. I stood and some-one I’d never met put an arm around my shoulder. Peace bro. I turned and there was another hand. And a hug. And more people than I’d met all week, all of them wishing me peace.
*
Over the next three and a half years, the generosity of that first moment would multiply into countless moments. Those signs of peace would cement friendships, heal wounds, offer solace, extend apologies that testosterone or pride prevented from forming into words. Nearly every Sunday night, right after the Our Father and immediately before Communion, I would embrace hallmates who had lost parents, guys I’d hacked in pick-up basketball games, female friends struggling with relationships, residents I’d referred to alcohol counseling. Those were important moments. They were never rushed moments. Never perfunctory or parsimonious.
They were generous.
Heaving, messy, swirling, generous moments.