The Shoreline: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 10 out of 30

            It was just about a month away from my graduation from Holy Cross, and I was driving a minivan with 7 other undergrads down towards the southern shore of Virginia. Our destination was the peacock motor-inn, where we would meet the community organizers from District 10, where we would be doing service for the week.

            That week we helped clean up a house that had burnt down,  we tore down a porch that had rotted away from an older woman’s house, and tutored the children at the local Baptist church. That time tutoring would be the one and only time I have ever attempted to teach math. During the course of that week, though, one of the members of the community who was most welcoming to us was a man named John, who had organized a good number of the projects, and showed us around the southern shore. Then there was the one night that we went down to the beach with John at sunset. There on the western shore of the bay, looking out over Chesapeake bay, we stood and watched the sun set into the water. At one point John you could just tell how proud John was of his home. Here we had come into this community that we as college kids thought was poor and in need of help, and we stood there with john on this beach at sunset and something occurred to me. 

John, looking out over the bay. 

            The truth is that whenever one goes on one of these trips, especially when we are young, we go expecting to help someone out. We go expecting to march in and in youthful exuberance make a real difference in the work that we do there, but the only thing that ever really changes in the end is ourselves. On that beach that night I watched as John taught us something, not just about how beautiful the beach was, but about not taking things for granted. The surroundings around us can become so common place. Even living in Rome, there is something that has become commonplace about walking past the rooms that St. Ignatius used to live in, because they are here in the house. I walk past them a few times everyday to go to the dining room. Today I went for a walk with a friend and we just sort of ended up strolling down to St. Peter’s. When I lived in Boston I knew that, in its own way, even Dorcester Bay was beautiful. The question is, when faced with the extraordinary beauty that surrounds us, do we find the time to be still and be grateful in front of it?

            That day, along the coastline of the eastern shore, John taught me something that I am still learning to this day, to not lose our gratitude just because the extraordinary becomes something that we normally witness, but to find ways to still be in awe and still be grateful.