This was originally posted two years ago. For some reason it tugged on my sleeve today, got my attention, and asked if maybe it could get yours as well. I said okay.

MANY YEARS AGO, when I was in my mid-twenties, I drove once a week from Princeton, New Jersey into Philadelphia to do a therapeutic and ministerial internship at The Methodist Home for Children. This facility provided various community-based health, education, counseling, and nutritional services to children, families, and individuals. In addition, its staff housed and cared for the well-being of abused and neglected children ages five to eighteen. While there I participated in staff meetings and an interpersonal sharing group. I joined the permanent staff in offering individual counseling, chaperoned outings, assisted in arts and crafts projects, coordinated outdoor sports and activities, planned and led ecumenical worship services, and hung out with and modeled a healthy, caring relationship with one pre-appointed child.

I was assigned to work mainly with the younger children ages five to ten. It is no exaggeration to say that most of the children had seen and experienced more of the underbelly of life by the time they were ten than I had by the time I was twenty-five. Many of them had only one parent in the picture and that one was often incapable of adequately caring for their child or children. Some of them had been sexually abused and removed from the home. More still had been physically and emotionally mistreated. A few had lived on the streets with an addicted mother, keeping one step ahead of the law and Child Protective Services. In the worst cases, a few youngsters with no parent due either to death, incarceration, or addiction lived on their own, roaming the streets of Philly late at night, foraging for food, and dodging the police.

One sunny afternoon it was my responsibility to organize and officiate a game of football for boys somewhere between the ages of seven and twelve. The words “organize” and “officiate” are gross exaggerations of what I was able to do, just as the word “football” turned out to be a grandiose misnomer of what actually took place. The episode of I Love Lucy comes to mind in which a young boy she agreed to babysit turns out to be one of a pair of evil twins who, while playing Cowboys and Indians, proceed to gag Lucy and tie her to a chair as their prisoner. I organized and officiated the munchkins with as much success as Lucy had babysitting the twin terrors. Marching down the field toward the goal line to score seemed incidental and of no visible interest to the youngsters. The fine art of throwing spirals, making quick laterals, catching passes, making graceful cuts on long runs, and zeroing in on and pulling the flag from their opponent’s backside were replaced with other athletic feats not seen on the gridiron since the Vikings battled the Bears — and I mean since real vikings fought real bears. Things like biting, kicking, cussing, yelling creative vulgarities about each other’s mother, piling on, spitting, pulling each other’s hair, yelling creative vulgarities about each other’s mother, and goosing each other’s groins at the bottom of piles that looked like a conical pyre of dislocated arms, legs, necks, heads (some with faces attached), kneecaps, elbows, footless sneakers, rear ends (some with faces attached), sneakerless feet, bent glasses, and mud, all while yelling creative vulgarities about each other’s mother. Each play culminated (after the whistle of course) in what looked like a twisted mound piled high for a bon-fire of boys. It was Mad Max meets the Bad News Bears.

One evening, after a meeting that was after dinner that was after the ball game (or should I say after the scrum, free-for-all, mosh pit, riot, massacre), I happened to be in one of the cottages as the kids were getting ready for bed. This night, Mr. Wilson, a grandfatherly houseparent, was the overnight staff person. Unbeknownst to me, each evening when he was on duty, before they went to bed, Mr. Wilson convened the ragamuffins in his charge and performed a simple but sacred ceremony. It was remarkable how the children, normally rambunctious and unruly, quickly settled down, anxious and ready to receive the nightly unction they had been deprived of thus far in their lives. It was only hours ago, that these same rowdy urchins were on the field playing a barbarian version of flag football that easily could have been mistaken for a scene out of Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.

One by one, Mr. Wilson called the children forward by name. Sitting in a straight back chair and with the child standing close and face to face with him, Mr. Wilson poured Johnson & Johnson Baby Oil into his hand. Then he tenderly, amply, lovingly rubbed it into each child’s head of hair, attentively smearing the leftover oil affectionately on the child’s forehead and face. Oh, how even the angriest, bitter, foul-mouthed, damaged waif did glisten and shine. And as I watched, awe had its way with me.

This quiet, unencumbered ritual said more about what a sacrament is and what a sacrament is meant to do than any sacramental preparation class or catechism ever could. It taught more about what God is like, and about who those children really were than any religious education program ever has. Mediated by an older, tenderhearted black man who made each and every child feel seen and special, it said something to those bruised and broken children about the nature of God’s love: that it is generous beyond measure, prodigal, personal, affirming, and pure gift. It said something to each child — regardless of race, creed, or color and despite the day’s misdemeanors and demerits — about what it means to be blessed, and about their own dignity, preciousness, and sacred worth. And without noticing, the simplest of human gestures filled with human kindness transformed baby oil into sacred chrism healing the children of God.

Wherever they might be today, whether in heaven or on earth, if anything saved those children, if anything salvaged their fragile lives, if anything returned them to their loveliness, it was not the daily dose of meds, counseling sessions, art therapy, or group activities. It was the intimate, simple elegance and indulgent superfluousness of this nightly anointing with Johnson & Johnson Baby Oil.

Here’s to Mr. Wilson and the many humble, hidden, holy ones who quietly and unpretentiously go about their business of mediating God’s presence, sacramentalize the common deed, and remind us of the noble possibilities of being human.

Can I get an “Amen?”

© Daniel J. Miller, 2002, 2018. Slightly different versions of this story about Mr. Wilson’s anointing appear in another post on The Almond Tree and in CATECHUMENATE: A Journal of Christian Initiation under the title “An Elegant Sufficiency: Gesture and Symbol in Christian Initiation.” 

ARTWORK: The Embrace of the Father, Sr. Frances Robles, OSA.

FRIENDS, if you enjoy and benefit from these reflections, please share The Almond Tree from THE SACRED BRAID with others. I appreciate it.

You will receive indulgences for your kindness.