Messy & Defiant & Necessary

Notes on hands and knives and fingers and love.

By Dave Devine '97

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.

*

They recommended we put away the sharp knives.

Lock them up somewhere.

It was Thursday afternoon at the André House soupline, a Holy Cross outreach project for homeless people in Phoenix, Arizona. I was in charge of that night’s dinner and the volunteers who would help prepare it. I had just hauled four bins of tomatoes, two fifty-pound bags of onions, and three crates of lettuce from the walk-in refrigerator. Our volunteer coordinator met me at the sink with the news.

I laughed. “What do you mean we can’t have knives out?”

“The group this week is from a juvenile detention facility,” she said. “The director called and suggested we limit their access to knives.”

“How many are coming?”

“Twenty. All boys.”

“Any other groups?”

“Nope. Just your regulars.”

I turned to the tomatoes, the onions, the lettuce. All of it needing to be chopped, minced, diced. “But this is what volunteers do on Thursday nights,” I said. “They cut things. With knives. Usually sharp ones.”

“Not tonight,” she said, pointing at the clock. “Van gets here at four. Better start chopping.”

It was nearly three o’clock. I started chopping. With the assistance of some reliable volunteers who arrived early, we dispatched the majority of the vegetables by the time the van pulled up. Only the tomatoes remained. These I distributed to cutting stations around the kitchen, each equipped with a butter knife.

The young men from the detention center were not impressed.

“Hey vato,” one said, catching my shirt, “these knifes aren’t no good, man. They don’t cut for nothing.”

“It’s all we got,” I shrugged, “do the best you can.”

Once all of the preparations were complete we gathered the volunteers in the dining room for a final briefing and a group prayer. I tackled last-minute instructions and Sid, a no-nonsense, crew-cut retiree who came every week, performed the prayer. Sid was strictly old school — lots of thees and thous, hands joined, heads bowed, gentlemen kindly remove your caps — but he prayed better than anyone I’d ever met.

After reviewing the jobs for the night, I turned the floor over to Sid. He took my hand, the hand of the woman to his right, and asked everyone to form a large circle. He bowed his head and closed his eyes.

“Shall we pray?”

I didn’t bow my head. I scanned the faces of the kids from the detention center. Their eyes were dull or hard, scowling or lupine. They were tough Latino kids with shaved heads and tattoo sleeves coiling up their arms. They had smeary blue teardrops inked along their eyes, mi vida loca dots at the thumbs of their clenched fists. Gang signs. Prison tats. They weren’t up for praying with the old dude with his head down.

Sid opened one eye, unhappy.

“Gentlemen, we can’t pray unless we join hands, and we can’t serve this food unless we pray.” He held up his own hand, folded around mine. “Now, we’ve got some hungry folks outside...”
The boys from the detention center just stared at him, arms crossed, not interested in holding hands with another guy, a rival gang member, a kid who might jump them two days later. Not interested in that sort of weakness.

Sid stared back.

Waiting.

I was acutely aware of the time. Of the people growing restless outside. Of the food growing cold on the line. Of the silence.

Sid waited.

Finally, one of the older boys reached out and wrapped his hand around the wrist of the boy to his left. He did the same with the reluctant wrist on his right. He leaned forward and glared at the rest of the circle. His eyes were hard and lupine and pressuring. One by one, the other boys took the wrists of those standing beside them, embraced the sinewy flesh and thrumming veins of rival gang members, of kids who might jump them two days later. They clasped and held onto pulses, tattoos, bracelets, scars.

Wrist by wrist, the circle closed.

The older boy threw a chin nod back at Sid. There.

Sid smiled at him and lowered his head again.

Shall we pray?

*

All day long, I was ambushed by the small things, devastated by details. A twisting businessman, his tie trailing in the pristine sky. A fire department chaplain, crushed while blessing a body. A commuter parking lot, filled with cars at midnight. Images from the edges, broadcast shards, shattered lives. A tragedy in three thousand acts. Our Black September.

I stopped watching television and turned on the radio.

Needing sound, not pictures.

I listened to a reporter interviewing an emergency room physician. She asked the doctor what kinds of things he was seeing, what he was noticing. The doctor described police officers and fire fighters and EMS workers arriving with all sorts of damage — crushing injuries, smoke inhalation, collapsed lungs, cuts, scrapes, breaks, contusions — but the one condition that every one of them was treated for, the thing every one had in common, every one, was abrasions on the tips of their fingers. The skin was just worn clean off. Gone. From digging in or digging out.

Clean off.

“You want to know what I’m noticing?” the doctor said, his voice shot. “A hospital full of people with no fingertips.”

I shut off the radio and tried to sleep.

The next morning, the chaplain at the small college where I worked asked if I would help arrange a prayer service. He wanted me to invite some students, plan some segments, say a few words. I told him I was fine with the first two, unsure about the third. In nearly eleven hours of saturation coverage the previous day, I’d watched intelligent people run out words. Watched Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings and Dan Rather, men paid to speak and analyze and summon cogent phrases, run dry by noon. Watched them struck dumb by the enormity of the ruin. I told our chaplain that I had no idea what I could possibly add.

“You’ll think of something,” he replied. “Just a few words.”

That evening, I stood before a numb chapel, a roomful of faces like spent fuses. I mentioned other times and other places where I had witnessed violence and its aftermath. Street-fighting in Belfast. Killing fields in East Timor. Crack alleys in Phoenix. All of it different and not so different from the last 24 hours. I wondered about the role of patience in the midst of purple rage. I prayed that someday we would find the words to speak with our children about this. I admitted that I didn’t have those words now. That for me, words were starting to feel obscene and redundant and useless.

Then I recalled a squinty, hairy, beaming priest in another chapel with another congregation of college students. He had a useful word. One that might make sense on a night when nearly every other syllable seemed inadequate. And so, on an autumn evening rife with signs of death and signs of destruction and signs of war, I suggested a sign of peace. A sign of love. And in the spirit of that squinty, hairy, beaming, patient man, I requested that we take a generous moment to extend it.

And then I waited.

Out in the chapel chairs, seats filled with students and faculty and staff from New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the levee broke. People stood and turned and embraced one another. They departed pews and crossed aisles and took long minutes to do this. They reached out with hands and arms and fingers.

Peace.

Peace be with you.

Paz.

And then turning and saying it again and again and again.

And holding each other.

Not some brisk, perfunctory sign of peace. Not some puerile expression of kumbaya love. A defiant sign of peace. A fierce, consoling love.

The sort of love that pauses to bless bodies under a rain of debris.

The sort of love that grinds fingertips into buried buildings.

The sort of love that wraps around the thrumming pulse of friends and strangers and enemies and refuses
to let go.

Christ’s sort of love.

Love that is radical and messy and defiant and necessary and astonishingly and recklessly generous. Peace. Peace be with you. Peace.

Dave Devine (dcdevine@gmail.com) earned a master’s in teaching on The Bluff in 1997 and then was the able and deft director of the University’s Pacific Alliance for Catholic Education program, which sends grad students to teach at Catholic schools in Oregon, Washington, and Utah. He was also assistant director of Villa Maria Hall and was once raffled off for $175 in the annual Villa Man Auction. He is now a freelance writer in Portland.