January 8, 2014
Normally when I go home to Canada, I encounter the most frustration at the customs office. But lineups aside, the border crossing was actually quite smooth on both ends of my recent visit to Ontario for winter break. (Last year they asked me where my religious “compound” was in D.C.)
The major frustration of this trip was with the water access in my parent’s Brampton apartment building. The water access was frustrating, insofar as we didn’t have any. The main line into the building froze and subsequently burst. I’ve heard a few other stories of that kind of thing occurring this winter. Things have been tough (and cold) all over.
So, for a good few days we had no water coming into the apartment. It developed into a significant drag as Christmas Day came around. Cooking certainly became a tricky proposition, especially with no clean pots, pans, plates, etc. Then, on Christmas Eve my Mom came down with a nasty case of the flu. Terrible timing.
To get some water, we all had to bring our buckets and pails to the laundry room sink of the adjacent apartment building. On our third waterless night, I walked into the laundry room with 5 large bottles to fill. At the sink was a very nice man I had encountered earlier that evening in the lobby where the management was serving free Tim Horton’s coffee and doughnuts. (This was a cheap apology for the delay in fixing the problem, but it was at least a comfort for this usually Tim Horton’s-less Washingtonian.)
Back to the nice man. He had his own buckets to take care of, yet as other tenants entered the laundry room, he kept putting his own buckets down to help others fill up. I was toward the back of the line, and after a short time watching this man helping others and jovially interacting with them, I stepped forward and offered to take a shift.
As families, parents and elderly came forward to get their water, I found myself content in a striking, unmistakably spirit-filled way. Truth be told, the water issue was making a lot of people, including myself, cranky. But there was something about the simple action of filling up some buckets with water that just did the soul good.
This next point could be theologized in greater depth I suppose, but I’d hate to ruin the rawness of the moment itself. As I encountered sets of parents who had to get back to their families, I suddenly found myself pondering how the vocational path I am on categorically excludes the possibility of rushing to another building’s laundry room sink, in the dead of winter, to get water for my children.
Now I hope I am clear in saying that I don’t think being a parent means less dedication and sacrifice than the priesthood will likely entail for me, but I must affirm that something about filling people’s buckets with water – people that really needed that water for themselves and their families – has given me a perspective on priesthood, and in a special way, celibacy, that hadn’t hit be before. It makes sense that the guy filling buckets for all the other people not be the guy who has a family to return to – a family who needs and counts on him to get that water home. Yet someone still has to help fill buckets. We need bucket guys.
I know how naive, irritatingly un-jaded I can sound when I say things like this, but I think some people are just called to be the bucket guy.
I think I could see myself happy as the bucket guy.