A Reflection for the Memorial of St. Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
(The reflection below is for those communities that observe today as a memorial and use the continuous cycle of weekday readings. For those communities observing St. Bonaventure as a solemnity or feast, proper readings can be found here.)
In South Boston, before condos and lab space took over the neighborhood, there used to be a diner called Mul’s on the southwest corner of Broadway and A Street. It was an easy walk from the Broadway Red Line station and close to the main MBTA rail yard and several union halls. Working people of all sorts started their day there, leading the Boston Globe to characterize the place as a “breakfast haven for politicians, union workers, the family down the street, and even neighborhood priests.” This was in fact an apt description during the years when I (a priest) and my 12-step sponsor (a union ironworker) met there weekly for breakfast.
Billy fulfills most of the stereotypes of men in the construction trades. He’s a big guy, both in height and build. He has visible tattoos on his neck and hands. He can be funny or intimidating, depending on the situation, and he has a phenomenal Boston accent. He also has a massive appetite. At Mul’s, I was a fan of the “Number 3” (corned beef hash, home fries, scrambled eggs and toast), but Billy regularly ordered the “Number 5,” two eggs, home fries, bacon or sausage and a side of creme brulee french toast, a sugar-soaked pile of carbs at which even his fellow ironworkers sometimes expressed disgust.
Billy might have a serious sweet tooth but he doesn’t really need the sugar. He naturally has the irrepressible energy of a toddler. I can’t remember how many times I arrived at Mul’s around 5:30 AM, groggy after a long train ride from Boston College, only to find him already in a booth working on his second cup of coffee and blowing up the phones of fellow addicts with text messages of hope and encouragement.
I had originally asked Billy to sponsor me on a whim. I had reached a point in my own recovery when I knew I had to work harder, and part of that work included trusting a sponsor and going through stepwork again. A friend who knew me well suggested Billy. It was a shot in the dark; I had only seen him a couple of times at the Forest Hills meeting in Jamaica Plain. I’m not even sure that Billy and I had ever had a conversation before I asked him to be my sponsor, but my friend had given me good advice. Billy immediately agreed to do it, and he has been my sponsor ever since.
Billy had been my sponsor for a while before we started meeting regularly at Mul’s. It was during these breakfast conversations that I came to appreciate his best features, which the tattoos and brash personality might have otherwise obscured. He has profound emotional intelligence. He can express unconditional love in ways that have saved my life, he can also be abrasive and challenging in ways that have been just as life-giving, and he’s good at gauging which technique a given situation requires. Likewise, he is good at making decisions. He would probably laugh at that claim, and I've certainly seen him get into some ridiculous situations (one of his nicknames in our recovery fellowship is “Unmanagea-Billy,” a play on “unmanageability”) so I can imagine what his life was like when he was still using drugs. That being said, he is remarkably good at knowing the right thing to do and finding the courage and energy to do it. I suspect that this character asset is the reason he is still alive and now free from active addiction. It was that aspect of his recovery that I wanted most for myself when I first met him.
Recovery from substance abuse has been a rebirth for me, as it has been for so many others. Just as children absorb all sorts of character traits from their environment, so I picked up new habits of thinking and acting from the positive examples in my new life. Although I had been clean for a while before I met Billy, around the time I met him, I was trying to make dramatic changes. I saw him as a man of confidence and conviction who attended to his own spiritual growth with zeal and I wanted to make that way of life my own.
“Whoever receives a righteous man because he is righteous will receive a righteous man’s reward.” It is easy to treat Jesus’ promises in today’s Gospel passage as anodyne encouragements to be nice. Who wouldn’t respect a charismatic leader or offer a cup of cold water to a humble person who asks for it? And what kind of God wouldn’t reward someone who does these things? Yet the more I have reflected on this passage, the more I have come to believe that it bears a more radical message. The people we let into our hearts are the people through whom God transforms us. Jesus did not tell us to love our neighbor so that we might make a show of our goodness, but so that our neighbor could become a mystical icon through whom we might catch sight of heaven. “Whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.”
It was the sad reality of many in the early church that this transformation did not often occur within the family. Choosing to follow Christ upended households and, for many, led to the loss of home and security. Matthew knew he needed to help his fellow Christians sensitize their hearts to new channels of grace. Our situation today might be different, but what remains the same is God’s power to change our lives through the people who love us. I realize now that, through the action of God’s grace, those many breakfasts at Mul’s were a contemplative process. As I paid attention week after week to the goodness in Billy, I was able to catch sight of the new man God was creating in me, and to discover that both Billy and I were on a path taking us ever deeper into the kingdom of Heaven.
