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She rises each day at 5 A.M. in her tiny prison cell. She spends the
first hour in quiet prayer; then, fueled by countless cups of coffee, she
begins her rounds of the cell blocks, distributing clothing, blankets and
soap to prisoners. She visits the prison hospital, counsels new inmates,
and meets with families. She has diffused tensions between desperate
inmates and nervous guards; she has made the most hardened con accept
responsibility for his crimes and seek forgiveness from his victims.
She is not the warden. She is not a guard. She is a 78-year-old
nun known as Mother Antonia. Her “home” is Tijuana’s La Mesa
prison, just across the border from San Diego. For 28 years, she has
lived among the 6,000 inmates of what was once one of Mexico’s most
dangerous prisons.
The only member of her order allowed to live inside the prison,
Mother Antonia spends ten hours a day among the prisoners. Sisters in
her community work in Tijuana’s neighborhoods providing support for
families of both inmates and guards, counseling mothers separated from
children, even helping arrange funerals for those who die in prison.
Mother Antonia’s own life and upbringing could not have been
more different. Born Mary Clarke, she was the daughter of a wealthy
Los Angeles businessman. A striking beauty, Mary grew up in a
Beverly Hills mansion with Hollywood stars Dinah Shore and Cary
Grant for neighbors. Twice married, she raised seven children who
adore her. Mary’s many hours of charity work became a source of
tension in her second marriage and eventually led to divorce. In 1977,
with her marriage over and her children all grown, Mary felt a powerful
pull to do more.
With the support of her children, she sold her belongings and drove
to Tijuana, where she had been making church-sponsored relief visits,
and began religious life. She convinced the warden to let her stay and
began the dangerous task of winning inmates over with small acts of
kindness.
(Her journey from Beverly Hills to the barrios of Tijuana is
chronicled in the book The Prison Angel, by Mary Jordan and Kevin
Sullivan.)
“I wanted to dedicate my life to the poor,” she says. “I didn’t want
to just pity them. I wanted to become a significant part of their lives…I
guess you might say I’m in love with these people who the rest of the
world finds unlovable.”
The warden believes that Mother Antonia is the most important
person at La Mesa. “Mother Antonia brings hope to men and women
here. And they find hope in themselves. She spreads the love of God.”
Beloved by the guards, her presence has made their jobs safer and more
humane.
What drives her, she says, is her faith. “[My faith] is what makes
my heart beat. That’s who I am.” Of her work among the prisoners of
La Mesa, she says: “Like a mother, I always search for the best in my
children.”
Mother Antonia models the sower of today’s Gospel, who sows
seeds of encouragement, joy and reconciliation regardless of the “ground” on which it is scattered, and who is willing to do the hard work
necessary to realize the harvest that Christ has promised.
I close: The reign of God is like a seed. That seed is the kindness
we do, the worship we share in, the conversation around the dinner table,
the soup to the sick neighbor, the decisions to put the family first. The
seed is being sensitive to minorities. The seed is making your children
bring back the little things they’ve stolen, and apologize. The seed is
having them catch you at prayer. The seed is your being here.
I like the seed symbol, mostly, I guess, because it fits me. I can
handle a seed. We seldom have the opportunity, or even the courage, to
do the big things, the really big, heroic things. But everyday, like
Mother Antonia, we all have the opportunity to do the small ones that
display our values and the values of Jesus; values, perhaps, small as a
seed, but seeds that will bear fruit thirty, forty, fifty years from now.
Remember this: do the little things well and let God do the rest.

A minister was called to the hospital. Caroline, a beautiful baby
girl the minister had recently baptized, had been diagnosed with a
malignant tumor intertwined with her spinal cord at the base of her
brain. Caroline’s young parents were stunned with hurt and grief. The
minister stayed with the couple throughout the night. But he had no idea
what he could do or say. Say something! He kept telling himself. A
prayer, a verse from Scripture, anything!
But all he could do was cry with the couple.
After some time, the pediatric oncologist came in and outlined a
plan to treat the child. The minister was relieved, of course – but
realized that he had nothing to give this family that mattered. Feeling
helpless, he decided then and there to leave the ministry and do
something more useful and constructive with his life.
Later that night, the child’s parents asked the minister for a favor.
“We’re exhausted. Caroline won’t stop crying. Could you hold
her for a little while so we can step out and take a break?”
The minister took Caroline in his arms and rocked her. She cried,
and the minister cried, and then, having expended all her energy, she
drifted off to sleep. The minister kept rocking little Caroline until her
parents returned, relieved to see their child at peace. They placed
Caroline gently in her crib, and the minister said his goodbyes.
As he stepped into the cold night air, he realized that he would not
leave the ministry after all, that all his preparing for ordination and
ministry was for this very night: to rock a very sick child to sleep, to
offer her and her family whatever little hope he had, to simply love this
family in God’s name.
This minister discovered that, despite his own doubts about his
ability to do anything that matters, he is able to bring the love of God to
a hurting family. Jesus comes to show us how to transform our own
sense of uselessness and exhaustion into the means for mending broken
hearts and heal wounded spirits. Jesus calls us to take on the “yoke” of
hope in the midst of despair and the “burden” of compassion under the
weight of fear and hurt. The “yoke” of the Gospel Jesus is “easy” in the
joy it brings to the generous heart; it’s made “light” by the love of God
that we are able to bring into the lives we touch.

As we prepare to celebrate the 4th of July. I began to reflect over
the last 4 or 5 months how many people I listen to who told me story
after story of being overwhelmed, overwhelmed by bombings and
vicious terrorist acts overseas and in this USA, by senseless school
shootings, cars being used as weapons of destruction, chemical attacks
on innocent babies.
I began to reflect on when I felt like this before. It was after
September 11, 2001. What I wrote then, needs to be spoken today.
When the first crews of firefighters and police raced to the World
Trade Center on that horrible day September 11, 2001, they had no idea
of the enormity of what they were about to see. In those first few hours,
not one rescue worker could find the words to describe the devastation.
When asked by news reporters what it was like, all anyone could say
was, “It was hell…I have seen hell…I have been to hell”.
And we wondered then and continue to wonder today: How could
God create such a hell? How could God allow such a hell to even exist?
The answer is perhaps too simple to grasp. The reality is that God
does not create these hells, then or today. Human beings do. Our
hatreds and self-centeredness form the foundation of hell’s walls; our
fears and angers are its gates. Hell can perhaps best be described as
where God is not: When we allow the worst of our human nature to
triumph, when we have torn down and dismantled the compassion and
justice of God, we have created a new hell.
And the breadth and width of the hells we create can be breathtaking.
So where do we go to escape these hells? Is God’s heaven out of our
grasp and beyond our vision?
In the wake of the September 11 bombings, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner
was asked some questions. He was the author of the acclaimed When
Bad Things Happen to Good People. He responded:
“Where was God? I have to believe that God was at the side of the
victims, hurting and grieving with them so that they would not be facing
death alone. I have to believe that God was at the side of the firefighters
and rescue workers, inspiring them to risk their own lives in an effort to
save others. I don’t believe that God was on the side of the terrorists, no
matter how fervently they may have invoked God’s name as they set
their fiendish plan in motion.
Why didn’t God stop them? Because, at the very outset of the human
experiment, God gave us the free will to choose between good and evil.
Without that free will, humans could be obedient but could not be
good”.
We believe that God is not the God of the dead but the God of the
living. God is not placated by the destruction of sinners but rejoices in
the return of the prodigal. God does not condemn us to hell; God wishes
all of us to be saved. God will love us for all eternity, but there always
exists the possibility that we will refuse that love. That rejection and the
refusal to respond to such love are precisely the meaning of hell. Hell is
not a place where God puts us—it’s a place where we put ourselves.
Christ comes to show us how to dismantle the hells we create and set in
their places the justice, peace and forgiveness that are the building
stones of the kingdom of the Father.