What was a "phylactery" used by Jews during prayer?

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Last updated on: May 5, 2006 at 1:32 pm by Cathleen Falsani

2006-05-05T13:32:00-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

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GODSTUFF:

THERE’S NO CRYING IN JOURNALISM, EXCEPT . . .

There are a few cardinal rules in journalism.

Things like:

Don’t make stuff up. Spell the names right. No cheering in the press box.

And no crying on assignment.

Well, may the journalism gods be merciful in their judgment because this week, for me, three out of four is going to have to suffice.

Sitting on the floor of a lecture hall at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union, dutifully taking notes in the flip book on my lap as I listened to Jean Vanier deliver an address to a standing-room-only crowd earlier this week, I disintegrated into a sniveling puddle.

Right there in front of all the other reporters and God and everybody else, like a big ol’ weepy marshmallow instead of the detached trained observer that I suppose I’m supposed to be.

If I’m deciphering the sniffles on my recording of Vanier’s talk correctly, I believe this is what switched on my waterworks:

Vanier, the 77-year-old Canadian founder of L’Arche Communities, an international organization that since 1964 has created 130 communities — real homes, actually, including one in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood — where disabled adults and non-disabled adults who assist them live together, was telling the story of a man who was in prison for killing five women.

“He needs someone who will see that behind all those walls that have been created, there’s a little child who has never been awakened,” Vanier said gently, his kind voice colored by an accent that is part British, part continental. “Will one day he find somebody who will reveal to him his beauty? That he is a child of God? That he is precious?”

The idea that a serial murderer is precious in the eyes of God stirred my soul. And the love with which Vanier, a huge man — he must be at least six feet six inches tall — with a slight stoop that makes him appear to be bowing humbly to whomever is in front of him, touched me deeply.

And I began to cry.

There was something about being in the presence of this surely holy man whose whole message was about how much we are loved by God that was moving.

“A saint,” Sun-Times photographer John White said back in the newsroom as he showed me the photos of Vanier he had shot at the lecture. White, the Pulitzer Prize-winning lensman, who like Vanier has the kind of penetrating eyes that seem to peer right into your soul, is a pretty saintly man himself. So I guess it takes one to know one.

Vanier, who was in town to accept the 2006 Blessed Are The Peacemakers award from Catholic Theological Union, was living in Paris in 1964 when, through his friendship with a Dominican priest, he learned of the plight of thousands of developmentally disabled adults spending their lives institutionalized. Vanier invited two disabled men from a nearby institution to live with him in a real home in Trosly-Breuil, not far from Paris.

He christened their home “L’Arche” (which means “ark,” as in Noah), and set about creating communities to “see the person behind the disability.”

“The quest,” Vanier said slowly, enunciating each word with great care, “is not just believing in God, but believing in other people. Believing in ourselves as children of God, and that we are called to see other people as God sees them, not as we would like them to be.”

How is that done? By meeting people, by having the generosity to listen to their stories, by having simple, sacred encounters with another, Vanier said.

“Tell me your story,” he said. “Tell me your story, your pain, your suffering, your cry, your needs. Tell me about your childhood, tell me what you maybe remember. Tell me. Tell me your dreams. Tell me your hopes.”

I felt another wave of emotion coming, tried to hold it at bay for the sake of my journalistic integrity, and lost.

My humanity won.

Nine years ago, I was living in Denver while Timothy McVeigh was on trial for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. My husband, who was my fiance at the time, was one of dozens of reporters from across the country who sat in the courtroom every day of the seven-week trial. It was a grueling, often tedious process.

Until the day when survivors of the bombing and family members of those who perished when McVeigh blew a gaping hole in the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building began to testify. Their stories of pain and loss were unfathomable. And even the most hardboiled journalists in the courtroom wept.

We tell stories for a living, that’s what reporters do. But sometimes we lose sight of the people we’re writing about — precious souls, children of God. All of them.

“You see, the whole of the Christian message is that we have to change to see people as God sees them,” Vanier said. “We have to have our eyes changed. We have to have attitudes that are changed.

“It begins, as I say, with listening. But we can be frightened of listening because it can shake up our certitudes, shake up our system of values because we don’t quite know what to do with it once we have heard the story. What do we do with it?”

To answer his own question, Vanier told another story.

He was on a crowded Metro in Paris when someone got on behind him and started shouting crazily. “Suddenly, I saw a hand in front of my nose and I took it and I looked up at this young, unshaven guy. And I said, ‘Where did you come from?’ And he told me he had been in prison,” Vanier recalled.

“And we talked a bit. I gave him very little — a few centimes. What touched me were his eyes. He looked at me in such a way that revealed to me that he had never had a mother. That is to say, he looked at me as a child looked at his mother, with tenderness. And I know that I wasn’t very well dressed and he said to me, ‘We’re in the same boat, aren’t we?’ Vanier said, as the rapt audience burst into laughter. “And I said, ‘Yeah. We’re all in the same boat.’ “

Then Vanier read part of a letter from a L’Arche member in Bangladesh. It said: “We are discovering more and more that those who are rejected by society because of their weakness or their apparent uselessness to society are in fact the presence of God. If we welcome them, they lead us progressively out of a world of competition and the need to do great things, toward a world of communion of hearts, a life that is simple and joyful, where we do small things with love.”

When the seemingly bottomless need and problems in the world feel overwhelming — where do we even begin? — the idea of doing small things with great love is revolutionary.

“We’re caught up in a culture where we have to do, where we have to run, where we have to have projects and more projects,” Vanier said. “Discover what it means to be human, to listen to each other, to love each other.”

After the event with Vanier concluded, another reporter turned to me and asked if I was OK. She’d seen me crying.

“I’m fine,” I told her. “Everything’s great. Really.”

And that was true.

But it wasn’t the real answer.

What I should have said was, “I’m just human.”

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