Path to Grove City
Chapter 3
I passed a church presently and bowed my head for the presence of the Blessed Sacrament and raised it again to find an elderly woman before me, working over an embroirdery. Her art showed a bucolic scene of man and woman riding horses with a pony between them, as if guiding it to a greener pasture.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but I’m walking to Grove City and was wondering how far to Ponderosa Avenue?”
“About a mile or so,” she said, exuding sereneness and a quiet joy. Her back was noticeably humped and for the first time I realized she was blind. Appearances can be eschewed with the blind and I felt freer.
“What is that you’re stitching? It’s quite beautiful.”
She laughed softly and said she wasn’t stiching it but merely fingering it, a gift from a parishioner at the church I was passing. I wondered what it meant to get a gift you couldn’t see and marveled at the care with which it was sewn.
“You see the riderless pony? It wasn’t always so, this was the return trip. Blessed Margaret of Castello was born blind and lame and hunchbacked and her parents took a trip and left her behind. Like they used to do with unwanted cats and dogs. My parents left me on these church steps for much the same reason.”
“And yet this must remind you-- aren’t you bitter towards them?”
“Bitter, no. ‘Though my father and mother forsake, yet the Lord will take me up.’ says the Psalm. God's love is far greater.”
Infused love given the bereft of example or experience? Interesting, I thought, how those with the least excuse to believe God’s love for them tended to trust it most. I thanked her and continued towards Ponderosa with renewed vigor.
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