THREE MARVELOUS STORIES...

Mother Teresa

A story is told of Mother Teresa, the saint of the Calcutta slums. She went with a small child to a local baker and begged some bread for the hungry lad. The baker spat full in Mother Teresa's face. Undaunted, she calmly replied, "Thank you for that gift to me. 

Do you have anything for the child?"

Desmond Tutu

When he was a young pastor in Johannesburg, he was making his way along a wooden sidewalk, raised above the muddy street. He came to a narrow section of the sidewalk and was met by a white man coming from the other direction. The man said to Tutu: "Get off the sidewalk; I don't make way for gorillas." Tutu stepped aside, gestured broadly, and responded, "I do!"

The third example I offer is by far the most powerful, at least if we measure power in terms of practical consequences. 

Pope John Paul II

On June 2, 1979, Pope John Paul II came to Victory Square in the heart of Warsaw and celebrated Mass in the presence of hundreds of thousands of people and the entire Polish Communist government. During his homily the pope spoke of God, of freedom, and of human rights—all topics frowned upon by the Communist regime. As the pope preached, the people began to chant, "We want God; we want God; we want God." 

The pope continued, and the chant went on, "We want God; we want God," and did not stop for an astonishing fifteen minutes.

It is said that during this demonstration of the people's will, John Paul turned toward the Polish government officials and gestured, as if to say, "Do you hear?"

Prescient commentators of the time, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor, saw that Communism, at least in Poland, was, from that moment, moribund. In point of fact, that government did fall and a few years later the entire Soviet Communist empire disintegrated with barely a shot fired. If someone had laid out that scenario to me when I was coming of age in the 1970s, I would never have believed it.

In all three cases, an offended person responded, neither with counterviolence nor with flight, but rather with a provocative gesture meant to draw the aggressor into a new spiritual consciousness. And certainly in the case of John Paul and his Polish people, this move unleashed extraordinary transformative energy.

By Robert Barron