Catholic Dads

24:15 The Genuine Article

March 23rd, 2011

We’ve heard it before in many forms. It’s the little things that count. Good things come in small packages. It’s the attention to detail. He who is faithful in small things will be faithful in greater. St. Therese of Lisieux became a saint by the little way. Blessed Mother Theresa said “[D]o small things with great love”. One of my favorite Lenten meditations is the guy at the home improvement store who said, “We’ve got some great fertilizer for less over here”. Wait — what??

I was at the home improvement place trying to get a jump on my Spring yard work. I had a cart loaded down with sand for the basketball hoop and brick pavers, and super-weed resistant mulch for the landscaping. I wasn’t struggling, I didn’t “need” help, I wasn’t drawing attention to myself. If anything I had an abstract look on my face. A middle aged guy with one of those store vests was walking briskly by when he noticed me and suddenly stopped. He asked if I needed anything.

“Well, actually, now that you mention it, I need some weed pre-emergent for the lawn.”

Instead of simply pointing to the weed and fertilizer aisle two rows away, he stopped whatever he was doing and spent the next 10 minutes walking me through the various offerings offerings and their pros and cons. As I wasn’t in a particular hurry, I let him. “This one’s the national brand, this is the store brand; this one has phosphates, this one does not. You might want to consider putting lime down as well, but get the $4 variety not the $16 variety.” And so on. He didn’t try to steer me to a particular product, he wasn’t a manager, he wasn’t on commission, and he wasn’t just looking for someone to chat with.

He just wanted to make sure that I got all the help I needed because that was his job and he was doing it well. “Make sure you tell the checkout counter and they’ll have someone help you load all those bags into your truck. Have a great day.”

A lot of times you can look into someone’s eyes and tell what kind of person they are. The eyes reveal so much. I listened to him, looked him square in the eye and thought, “Nope. Not a nut job. This guy’s the genuine article.” He genuinely cared about me getting what I needed and cared about doing his job well. And not in that needy, clingy fashion or annoyingly over-helpful way. His wasn’t a particularly important job or a particularly important interaction. But in that short space of time, he managed to convey an authenticity that’s hard to fake.

And the realization came to me that this is part of what Lent is all about. We perform small acts of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving to remove the things that are not our true selves, in order to draw closer to Christ who is our true Image. We’re part of His mystical body. We’re called to draw deeper into that mystery. The practice of mortification is for purifying, refining, distilling. It’s a tool for bringing out the true nature, the true essence of what we are and what we’re called to be.

These Lenten sacrifices help us to increase our authenticity. Or as Blessed Pope John Paul II exhorted in his Letter to the Families: “Families, be who you are!”.

So we do these “small things”: small mortifications, prayer, almsgiving, doing our jobs well, being authentic with our neighbor — but we should do them deliberately and with great love like Mother Theresa said. Love of ourselves, love of our neighbor, and ultimately love of God. Love reveals what we are and transforms us into what we hope to be. God is Love, and that’s the genuine article.

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