Holy Spirit Catholic Church
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27th Sunday in
Ordinary Time
October 8, 2006
Lorraine Hale pulled up to a traffic light at an intersection in the Harlem section of New York City. On the sidewalk, sitting on the curb, she saw a young female drug addict who seemed to be nodding in and out of consciousness. Cradled in the junkie’s arms was a tiny baby.
The light turned green and Lorraine drove on. Then something told her to go back to the intersection. She turned around, went back and said to the junkie: "Look, you've really got a problem, and you need help. Take your baby to my mother’s house. She will take care of it for you." The junkie looked at her but didn’t understand. Lorraine repeated her words three times. Then she wrote her mother's address on a piece of paper and put it in the junkie's hand.
The next morning the junkie showed up at the Hale house. The baby was shaking, its nose was running, and it had a bad case of diarrhea. The baby was suffering from drug withdrawal. Babies born to mothers who are junkies come into life as drug addicts. They become addicted in their mother's womb before they are born.
Lorraine’s mother, known to her neighbors as Mother Hale, took the baby and nursed it through the painful period of withdrawal. Mother Hale didn’t know it then, but that single act of kindness would change her life. Soon word got around, and other junkies showed up on her doorstep with their babies.
At one time Mother Hale had over 20 babies in her home. And at another time she ran out of money after buying food and clothes for them. But she managed to scrape by. Over a period of 16 years, Mother Hale helped over 600 babies withdraw from drugs. "It usually takes four to six weeks. They reach out to you in pain and cry, and all you can do is hold them and love them," she says.
Then one day something else happened to Mother Hale that changed her life. Someone told then President Ronald Reagan about her work. He was deeply moved and mentioned it in his State of the Union address to Congress in 1985. As he did, the TV camera cut away to Mother Hale in the White House gallery. It caught the 81 year old grandmother with tears running down her cheeks.
That did it. Mother Hale became an overnight celebrity. Newspaper reporters interviewed her and TV talk show hosts invited her to appear on their programs. Money poured in, and Mother Hale’s work grew into a fully equipped center with a full-time staff. Now other cities began contacting her for advice on how to set up similar centers to care for drug-addicted babies.
Mother Hale's story fits in beautifully with today's gospel story, which describes mothers bringing their little children to Jesus to have him touch them. Many of these babies were sick, no doubt, like the babies that the junkies brought to Mother Hale. And no doubt, many of Mother Hale's neighbors tried to protect her from being swamped with sick babies, just as the disciples of Jesus tried to protect him from being swamped with them. But like Jesus, Mother Hale simply said, "Let the children come to me; do not prevent them, for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these." Then, like Jesus, she "embraced them and blessed them" with her loving care!
The story of Mother Hale catches the spirit of today’s gospel as few stories do. It shows an 81 year old grandmother, 2,000 years after the gospel story, living out its spirit and message. And it shows this in a way that inspires us to want to do something similar in our own lives.
When Mother Hale took in her first drug addicted baby, she had no idea that she would inspire millions of people by that single act of kindness. She had no idea that 16 years later it would set off a chain reaction of help for thousands of other unfortunate babies. She had no idea that the chain reaction would extend beyond her neighborhood of Harlem to other cities across the nation. She had no idea that God would use her to inaugurate an important new program for a special group of suffering children in our society. All she knew was that some very sick babies needed her to say to them what Jesus said 2,000 years before her: "Let the children come to me; do not prevent them."
A Chinese proverb says, "A child’s life is like a piece of paper on which every passerby leaves a mark." The mark Mother Hale is leaving on thousands upon thousands of children is beautiful. It is so beautiful that it inspires us to want to leave a similar mark on the thousands of children we meet in the course of our lives. And that is doubly true when those children happen to be our own. We want to leave on them the mark of Jesus himself, so that they, in turn, will someday leave a similar mark on their children.
Let me close with a brief reflection on this very point. It was composed by General Douglas MacArthur, one of the great military leaders of our time. The general writes: "By profession I am a soldier and take pride in that fact. But I am prouder, infinitely prouder, to be a father. A soldier destroys in order to build; a father only builds, never destroys. The one has the potentiality for death; the other embodies creation and life. It is my hope that my son, when I am gone, will remember me not from the battle but in the home repeating with him our simple daily prayer, "Our Father who art in heaven."
Jesus said "Let the children come to me; do not prevent them, for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these." Are we helping bring all the children we come in contact with to Jesus by our words and actions or are we preventing them by our words and actions? That is an important question we need to ask ourselves and honestly answer.s