The Richness of Grace-filled Poverty

The punch to his face must have hurt. In the darkness of night shortly after hitchhiking from Arizona, a spirit of darkness came upon him. Violent knuckles cracking against flesh is an inimitable sound words cannot describe. It is a violent thud-sound as a soul violates another soul out of greed against someone who has only one possession which he guards with his life.

At first, I had not noticed the purple around his eye as his skin color was burnt like ebony or palo fierro, darkened woods from the hot Sonoran Desert sun. He had an indigenous almost Yaqui character to his face though he said his family came to this country from Zacatecas by way of Matamoros.

The eye was swollen and in the light I could see the injury was not as subtle. But his body swelled not as something visible but rather with an odor, an unmistakable perfume the poor often use to cover up the dense odor of pain, alienation and rejection in their lives.

Norberto, a dark skinned Mexican American, a citizen, a Vietnam Veteran, a former migrant farm worker, had let the wind blow him and his guitar into town last night from Wilcox, Arizona. Norberto said most people call him Robert because it’s too hard to pronounce Norberto. He was there visiting his daughter who has terminal cancer. Ah, a traveling musician destined to be destitute.

I always wonder how Norberto found me. Me? No, I’m not a “bleeding heart” type. I am in fact one of those cold hearts who doubts everything, an invariable skeptic like Thomas the Apostle. And yet, somehow time has eroded the granite stone of my heart into impregnable granules of sandstone, so that the cleansing water of Christ’s suffering could come gushing inward. And as to Longinus, the water of Christ’s wounds washed the debris away from my eyes that I might see Him in the person of Norberto, one who reeks of the road, liquor, and the smell of days without bathing.

I saw tears rolling down Norberto Muniz’ unshaven cheeks. He spoke of meeting Cesar Chavez; that he had been in a family of farm workers in the central valley in California when Chavez came to eat beans and tortillas with them. He recalled how humbled his mother and father were that Chavez would sit with the likes of tomato pickers paid $25 / day. How does a family of 6 even in the early 70′s live on $25/ day? For the young Norberto, it was like a competition, a race picking with his brother. The more you picked, the more you made.

Norberto’s is the human story. Though he has tasted “the grapes of wrath,” his is not a story of class warfare, of rich versus poor. His personal war evokes a battle field that is more on the spiritual plain. It was this unquantifiable thing called “humility” and even “happiness” all within the context of what our culture might call failure. This is a challenge to the prosperous world that “happiness” is the crown of victory that goes to “poor in spirit.”

Beware that the prosperousness we experience might make us drunk and numb. Our inebriated "prosper-essence" becomes a gray, dullness with the decaying smell of "phosphor-essence." Beware; the time of our visitation is ever so brief. Our lives are brief. And the clamors of the whirlwind that clothes us in the illusion of security are clamors distracting us from the deep peace and blessedness of the beatitudes.

In the end, my visitation with Norberto, the musician, called to mind something even more personal to me. I thought of my own son, and how I had always feared that his choice to be a musician might end up in circumstances like Norberto's. I used to tease my son to have a backup career, and that I never wanted to see him playing for pennies under a freeway overpass.

My son is, by this world’s standards, successful. For that I am thankful. However, Norberto is really more successful as my son although in a different and ironically, a more powerful way. Norberto seems to have gained a crown of irreplaceable gold, a kind of inner peace that allows him to journey through the hard surfaced vicissitudes of this world.

The price in this world’s standards? Very high. Truth is that more often than not, to be “poor in spirit” requires a person to be poor materially. Although a paradox, the richness of grace-filled poverty is the power (as novelist, William Faulkner once wrote), “to endure.” Certainly, a “broken guitar” can be replaced, but the music in a heart that I call “grace,” can last through any stone sepulcher placed in our way. Wait for it!