Seeing and Believing

Villae Populi, Romania: One year ago, on a pillowed green hillside overlooking a rural orphanage, our students were encouraged to think of an abstract — service— and to make it specific through their actions and observations. For the rest of the week we cuddled with babies, we played soccer on a makeshift field with the youth of the orphanage, and we worked to hand-pour a concrete bridge.

For me, there is one particular moment. Late afternoon, sun baking streaks of wet cement on our burning arms, we have poured our final concrete pillars into their metal reinforcement skeletons. A group of visiting Carmelite nuns begin to walk across the solid part of our bridge in a single file line, floating swans in their flowing white garments resembling that of Mother Theresa. The last nun in line strays from her group, lingers by me, and with both of her thin, ebony hands, cups my face to look me in the eye. She smiles. “Good Teacher” I hear her say, but her lips do not move; she hasn’t uttered a word.

An invocation. An undeserved harvest. More than the title of an educator of children. Her hands, soft and strong, bestow an anointing, as though I were divine. As divine as these lost children of Villae Populi, seeing instead, the face of the one she serves in each of them,

and now in me,

on that humble bridge, crossing an even humbler stream.