A student asked, “Brother, have you ever seen someone perform a miracle?”

“I have, said Brother Weeps.

The student’s eyes opened wide. “You have? Was it seeing someone walk on water or watching a healer straighten a woman’s crooked leg—”

“or someone making a blind man see?” another student interjected.

“No, nothing like that,” said Brother Weeps.

“What, then?” asked the first inquirer.

“Something more amazing,” said Brother Weeps. “I saw a man who had been deeply betrayed and hurt by someone forgive that person even though the person took no responsibility, felt no remorse, and offered no apology.”

~ Dan Miller, © 2020. All Rights Reserved.

NOTE: Long after I had penned the above, I read a story in Jim Forest’s memoir Writing Straight with Crooked Lines. It took place at Thomas Merton’s hermitage in 1964 when Merton gathered with fourteen members from the Catholic Peace Fellowship and the Fellowship of Reconciliation respectively for a three-day retreat titled “The Spiritual Roots of Protest.” One day Merton was speaking about the monastic life as a life of protest and nonviolence, emphasizing that a genuine monk is not cloistered “by monastic architecture or special clothing but by a cloistered heart.” By way of example he told the others of “St. John Gaulbert who, before becoming a Benedictine, forgave the man whom he had intended to kill, the murderer of his brother, instead throwing his sword into the river and embracing his would-be-victim”(p.150).