Last week as I walked, continuing my training for the Camino de Santiago, I found this note, held down by a rock on a bridge spanning the canal. I was intrigued enough to take a picture, but somehow didn't feel like I should read it. It felt so snoopy.
I thought about it as I walked, speculating about what was in it, thinking I would never know.
I passed the bridge on a busy road a couple times during the next few days, craning my neck as I whizzed past in my car to see if the note was still there. It was.
This morning I walked again and this time, I picked up the rock, unfolded the note and read it, still feeling kind of sneaky and embarrassed, like I was reading someone else's mail.
This is what I found.
It was a religious tract from a Catholic believer.
The first paragraph is a badly written poem about believing in God.
The second paragraph explains that the Catholic faith alone produces miracles.
At this point my eyes were glazing over. The messages did not resonate with me. I am a life long Mormon who already has a strong belief in God and who does not believe that miracles are restricted to one particular religion. I have seen my own share of miracles.
But then I read the third paragraph: a quote from Mother Teresa. It rocked me to my core, articulating everything I believe.
Mother Teresa On Abortion in the United States:
America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts -- a child -- as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters.
And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign." (Mother Theresa -- "Notable and Quotable," Wall Street Journal, 2/25/94, p. A14)
The Camino de Santiago is a Catholic pilgrimage, a route taken by the faithful to worship at the crypt that supposedly contains the bones of James, an apostle of Jesus Christ. People walk the Camino for a variety of reasons, many of them not religious at all.
But for me, everything in my life is intertwined with my faith. My home, work, recreation and the daily humdrum all is a part of a life that I believe is leading me back to my Father in Heaven. So I am enjoying the little irony of a Catholic missive, sent to a Mormon pilgrim, training for a route that will lead me to a grand cathedral in Santiago.
This journey is already getting good!
Wow, I just found your blog and read the missive..... how powerful and how true. I think all of us in this nation, due to the patience of God have falsely concluded that perhaps we can escape the consequences of this offence to humanity and to the eternal beings who are affected by it.
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