A Reflection for Thursday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
“We must consider how to rouse one another to love and good works.
We should not stay away from our assembly,
as is the custom of some, but encourage one another.”
Two years ago, I spent seven weeks in Guatemala learning Spanish. With the hope of gaining a better grasp of the language and becoming proficient enough to minister to Spanish speakers, three other American Jesuits and I left for Quetzaltenango.
Arriving at the language school, I was greeted by my maestra, the woman who would be my personal tutor. She was a native Guatemalan woman in her 70s and stood 4 feet tall. She wore a bright traje with a simple, white crucifix around her neck. She took my hand in hers and, knowing I was a Jesuit, told me how excited she was to work with me. She was born on the Feast of Saint Ignatius, and her name was Loyola.
Loyola tutored me for 5 hours a day, Monday through Friday. We would work on readings and different assignments, but our main focus was conversation. She insisted that while verb charts and vocab lists are a helpful foundation, language is learned by speaking it.
So, my mornings with Loyola began with a cup of coffee. We would sit together and she would ask me questions about my family, life in the US and my propensity to sunburn. As we got to know each other better, she encouraged me to express more complex thoughts and opinions in the language, asking me about my vocation, ministry, and prayer.
Despite the constant struggle to properly roll my r’s and my less-than-perfect grasp of the subjunctive, Loyola’s usual response never failed to fill me with pure joy: Resting her hand on her heart, she would smile and say “¡Qué hermosa!” (“How beautiful!”).
The other day, I received an email from another teacher at the language school letting me know that Loyola had passed away. Seeing the prayer card for her funeral mass moved me and is why I’ve been spending these days resting in my memories of those mornings I shared with Loyola.
As I sift through these moments, tenderness is the word and the grace that comes to mind. To be sure, Loyola taught me to speak Spanish, but it was her patience and care that gave me the space to do so.
My experience with Loyola comes to mind as I read these words in the letter to the Hebrews: “We must consider how to rouse one another to love and good works.” Personal prayer and the reading of Scripture are essential, those are our verb charts and our vocab lists, if you will. But we cannot truly learn and retain the language or life of our faith if it does not grow from there and we fail to speak with or engage one another.
Our faith is sacramental and communal. Love and good works, peace and charity, care and communion are nothing more than ideas if we do not actually embody them in some way. And just as learning a language requires patience and humility, we ought to foster a similar disposition as we walk in this faith and learn how to inhabit it together.
