Unworthy by Antonio Monda

Author:Antonio Monda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

23

Don’t think that it’s only love with me and Lisa; it’s also sex, which feeds every sigh, every heartbeat, every thought.

And we play all the time. Lisa says she’s never done it like that with anyone else, and I have never desired anything, anything at all, as much as I desire to take her, to possess her, to make love to her.

Whenever we’re together, I substitute her for Christ, and while we’re doing it, while we’re making love, I think that the Son of God was a man, and that he must have felt the same desire. I’m afraid of those thoughts; I feel more fear than shame. And I’m afraid of myself.

Then there are days when I forget her, and it seems absurd to me that I could be having a relationship with a woman. It disappears completely, because I feel that mine is a different life, and my choice of that life is the greatest joy I’ve ever known, the greatest joy I can ever know. There’s nothing like the serenity of grace and the sense of being a child of God, of his love, of playing an infinitesimal but indispensable part in the harmony of the universe. And nothing like seeing my own joy in the eyes of the others whom I’ve been given the privilege of serving, of helping. Yes, in those moments, Lisa completely disappears, and our relationship seems unnatural, absurd, squalid. Once I even managed to leave her, and for days she seemed insignificant, tiresome, even ugly; I liked nothing about her and quite a bit less about me. And I embraced the rite, as I always do at such times. The rite I saw celebrated in Rome by that pale pope who challenged the world, the rite I see performed every day by so many servants of Christ. I pray there aren’t many of them as unworthy as I am. I pray to find the strength, the way. I pray to know how to pray, and sometimes I think that our uniqueness and our strength lie in this very weakness.

Yes, I embrace the rite, or rather I let it embrace me, because only in that ancient liturgy am I able to find the truth. There’s no separation between the fragrance of incense and the charity I try to practice in the homeless shelters, between the incessantly repeated litanies and the sandwiches Raj prepares for the homeless.

And it’s the truth that frees us—I know the verse by heart, John 8:32. I recite it in almost every homily, and it always moves me. I say, “John 8:32, never forget it, brothers and sisters in Christ: ‘And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’ ”

That was the passage that opened my eyes and changed my life. Ecstatic with joy, I thought that the natural consequence of truth and freedom would be happiness. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as the Declaration of Independence, signed by the dreamers who founded our country, says.

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