What Waits for You by Joseph Schneider

Author:Joseph Schneider
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2020-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

15

Father Ruben Duong was a balding man of sixty, and so thin his parishioners often arrived at Mass pressing bags of food into his arms—homemade coconut sponge cakes and sweet corn pudding and bánh patê sô, a savory puff pastry filled with ground pork. Duong always accepted the gifts graciously, then made the short trek over to Skid Row, where he handed them off to any of the thousands of homeless roaming Downtown LA.

Duong had been a child when Saigon fell, plucked from a Catholic orphanage—and a likely death at the hands of the besieging Viet Cong—by President Ford’s Operation Babylift. He almost made it onto the first transport, but gave up his spot to a friend who needed medical care. The plane, a Lockheed C5-A Galaxy, crashed just after takeoff. Most of the orphans aboard were killed. Duong never learned if his friend was among the dead or if he’d survived.

The orphanage had saved him from abandonment, Ford had saved him from the VC, and fate had saved him from the crash. If God was trying to tell him something, He’d gotten Duong’s attention.

Father Duong tolerated no frailty. Whenever he felt a desire beyond selfless service to others, even a physical need, he quashed it. His mind and body were important only to the extent that they furthered his work, but neither was going to be his master. Conquering oneself wasn’t merely virtuous; it was essential in being an agent of God, Whose voice could not be heard over the constant din of the ego.

On both of his knees, hidden below his long Roman cassock, were tattooed the initials “M.K.” These stood for Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish friar who’d volunteered to be starved to death in Auschwitz to spare a fellow prisoner—a total stranger—from the same punishment. Duong had learned of him while studying at the Fuller Theological Seminary, and considered him a perfect servant of the divine. When he saw that Kolbe had died on August 14, the same date records showed he himself had been abandoned at the Saigon orphanage, Duong resolved he must follow Kolbe’s example of pure selflessness.

After being assigned to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Downtown, Duong had devoted himself to the problem of human suffering. He ran a soup kitchen in the church’s parking lot every Sunday, volunteered as a chaplain in the Men’s Central Jail and as a counselor for the California Youth Authority. He allowed runaway teens to sleep in the rectory while he himself lay on a foam mattress in the utility closet. When an ex-con he’d been counseling couldn’t afford to pay for his mother’s funeral, Duong sold his own car and covered the bill himself.

Duong was also responsible for several gang ceasefires. If a dispute erupted, he was brought in to arbitrate, and his rulings were final. Both the Vatos Locos and Sureños dubbed him “El Santo,” while the Crips and their associates called him “Gandhi.”

In 2005, when tales of his deeds made their way to the LA

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.