How you can be the light anywhere and Merry Christmas!
By Jennifer Lindberg
He found me slathering turpentine on a white wall sprayed with black graffiti. I only had one glove wiping off the letters smeared on the convent wall in Tijuana, Mexico.
Father John Tasto’s fortitude was that when any graffiti showed up, he took swift action with turpentine to wipe it off. He had other duties for me, a Mary type girl with a bunch of Martha type women on a mission trip. I was willing to do the hard labor, but this priest knew my heart, pulling me out and having me type out his thank you notes to donors on a clackety- clack typewriter made in 1920. The office was primitive but the love that came out of those convent walls was like a flashlight seeping into the darkest corners of Tijuana.
The other men and women in the group went out to build, paint, and repair depilated homes made of plywood, cardboard, and old tin cans. I went out with the sisters, the Missionaries of the Cross, to meet the people with a rosary and a handshake. Father told me to use my light with my ready smile, and too quick to laugh.
“Oh, there is much misery here in Tijuana,” Sister Guadalupe said, offering no comfort but letting the reality around me settle deep. She’d seen my big green eyes wondering much, surveying the shacks we passed walking up a hill single file on a path as wide as a soda can. Into the homes we went with dirt floors or plywood floors and most with walls as thin as paper but always the television set showing images of American towns, movie stars, and faraway dreams. As the others worked in different parts of the city hammering nails and rolling paint, I worked by looking deep into eyes and praying blessings that I will never know if they came true or not. We went to the parishioner’s homes, the ones who had not sent their children to the free school for a few weeks, or ones the sisters knew needed a visit. That’s all we did — visit and sit with them. Offering me a stained chair from the local dump, I took my seat as a cat ran between my legs and a baby cried in one home. The sisters in their starched white with a red stripe running down their sari took no notice of the dirt or the stains. Somehow their habit stayed white and pure like light that cannot be snuffed away.
My next outing was shopping for sandals for the nuns and haggling over a stove part. The sisters fixed everything they could, and reused what we would throw away. They knew how to make a penny scream. Men made concrete in wheelbarrows mixing it right on the road for minor building projects as we walked past pot holes in the street. Tijuana swirled around me as we went in and out of stores and then back to the convent where lunch was left in the refrigerator for us two who had gone out and about.
That mission trip was long ago, but it has lived in my mind and soul all these years. There were many things I learned from one dedicated priest and determined nuns carving out hope through education and a smile. I found that darkness cracks with a sliver of light from a small smile, a hammer and nails doing a good deed, and a heart overflowing with the tiniest prayer. I walked dirt strewn paths two by two like the apostles of old, going out because I believed in the light of Christ. It did not matter if others didn’t. This Christmas day, I remember those lessons learned on a long-ago mission trip to help others. Light you candle and pray that Christ makes you a light even with the smallest wick or the smallest effort because the larger effort has already been done. Believe when all seems dark because St. John tells us why: “In the beginning was the Word: The Word was with God and the Word was God. What has come into being in him was life, life was the light of men and light shines in the darkness, and darkness could not overpower it.” John 1:1
Merry Christmas!
+JMJ+
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