Each time we begin Saint Paul’s wondrous reflection on filiation, and our adopted share in it, I’m once again 22 years old with two of my brother seminarians on an old Arab bus bumping along a dusty back road from Tiberius to Jerusalem. I think we must have just fought about something stupid, so I was in the front seat by myself, while the two of them sat behind me.
And an ancient, blind Palestinian man, tapping his white cane on the steps, got on the bus and took a seat beside me. He was carrying a small white metal lunch box, from which he took an orange, which he proceeded to peel, throwing the peels to his left, into my lap. Half way through the orange, my friends were in fits of laughter at my dilemma. He was blind, I didn’t know his language, and I wasn’t about to grab the orange out of his hands…so all I could do was to try to catch each orange peel as he threw it. This is a true story. And then he took out a hard boiled egg.
But that’s not the point of the story. The story is about the five year old boy who next got on the bus, holding the hand of his father. Father and son were Hasidim, complete with dark pants, white buttoned shirt, and a black hat and the ultra-orthodox curls and the little tassels from their prayer shawls hanging below their waists. The father spoke to the boy softly in Hebrew while they moved to stand in the back of the bus, all the seats having now been taken.
As we continued to bump along in this old Arab school bus, half the Israeli countryside crammed into that little aisle, including Israeli soldiers with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders and finally an old man with a goat. Yes, a goat, which stood to the right of the blind Palestinian who by now was finished with his second hard boiled egg.
When the little Hasidim boy at the back of the bus spotted spotted the goat, his eyes grew wide, and overcome with curiosity he pulled his hand from his father’s and fought his way down the aisle as only a five-year-old can do. When he got to the goat he stared, then smiled (I half expected the goat to smile back) and cautiously began to play with the goats beard, then pet him on the head and then conduct an extended conversation with him in their native Hebrew.
But, as five-year-olds do, he soon grew bored with his new adventure, so he turned to go back to him father, who had been smiling at him during the whole course of this wild adventure. But the boy couldn’t see his father from way down there near the goat. All he could see were the big Israeli soldiers with their guns, and the funny looking blind man with his lunchbox and the young Americans all staring at him and he panicked, yelling at the top of his lungs “Abba! Abba! Abba!”
He taught me to pray, that Hasadim boy with the little curls and the tassels on his prayer shawl. He taught me like did when they asked him how to pray, the name we dare to say at the Savior’s command, the cry of our hearts when we are most afraid, at the moments when we are most desperately in need of his love.
It is the cry of a little boy, overwhelmed by the world, lost and alone and afraid, crying through the tears from his heart: Abba!
