Reminds me of a time back in the mid sixties when my father went over to an elderly neighbor’s house to fix her boiler. She could not afford to pay a professional to do it. When he came back he asked my Mom to buy a sack of groceries and give it to her as she had nothing to eat in her house. I have read the New Testament some 48 times, but I think my Dad was better than me at living the Gospels.
God Bless Him
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Giving without agenda. Without counting. And using ones common sense! That’s the mark of true Christian life lived well. God Bless your father Don. And this plumber.
There is something to be said for salt-of-the earth type of people who do salt-of-the earth jobs.
A friend of mine recently told me a story of how she once had to rescue a bunch of consecrated host from her daughters school trash after her daughter innocently told her they’re were asked to minister Eucharist at their school Mass (a elite “private Catholic school”) and some of the hosts fell on the floor. The girl and her classmate put them in the bin. They were unsupervised and blame is on the school not the students.
Her mother was horrified! She turned the car round and went straight to the school to retrieve them from the outdoor commercial trash bin and she put them inside a tissue, got her daughter to hold them and took the hosts straight to her Parish priest who told her he would dissolve them in water for a while and drink the water. She told him they were in the bin with all sorts of dirty stuff. He told her to leave it with him.
She came back the following week and asked what he did with the hosts? He told her the young assistant priest drank the water the host was dissolved in.
In turns out that assistant priest was a plumber in a former life and had no problem giving the consecrated body of Our Lord the dignity it was lacking, at the expense of his own dignity.
I’ve known a pious plumber in my time too. One a devout Orthodox who was always blessed with an abundance of work.
There may be something about the job that makes one either humble or scatological. Almost all the plumbers I’ve known gravitate toward one of those poles.