The picture is at ten percent. There he is, a figure among many, slivered in the crowd before Mass begins, and yet my eyes fall on him in particular. I suppose it is because he isn’t quite like the others. There isn’t the cake-beater business of the mothers in their unused heels, or the cowboy-nonchalant air of the single men, or the deer-in-the-headlights look of the single women: instead, this man shuffles, and looks down; his clothes are dark and non-descript, his feet like lead upon the dirt in the parking lot.
The picture is now at thirty percent. I notice now that he is shuffling and looking down because he has a little hand in his own. He is taking care of a little child; but intuitively, you can tell he is not the father, because he is taking such care with just this little one, as if this tiny blonde boy were the only child left in the world, the air of a 'special job'. I notice now, too, at this closer range, that he has a large growth above the right eye, like a dark brown cauliflower; this gives him a tree-like look, and I feel slightly repulsed. But the child looks at him with love and confidence.
The picture is now at sixty percent. He sees my little children, and slowly shuffles over with his small charge. “I’m Tony”, he says, “and this is William Thomas.” His clothes are warm in the warm day, and they are slightly dirty. Tony has a few teeth left, but he smiles a big smile nonetheless. There must be some second sight that children have, because my children respond gently and with security, like small flowers in the breeze. They don’t ask me about his mole or his teeth. He wants to show me the bay leaf tree, and smells it. I feel as comfortable with him as with the children; I am as warm inside as he must be in his warm fleece coat.
The picture is now at sixty-five percent. When Tony sees me the next time, a few weeks have gone by; but he lights up like an old friend. He is with the children again in the playground, and he tells me that he lives on the retreat grounds and is the nanny for the children. He smiles, not proudly, not in any way. Just smiles. He brings picture books for the children in church, who are suffering through each minute: after all, they have no sense of when all this sitting and standing and kneeling will end. They don’t know what a minute is, and Tony knows that.
The picture is now at sixty-eight percent. Tony wonders why we aren’t always there on Sunday, but he makes no judgment. He acts toward me and toward the children as he always does; the funny thing is, he does not seem to interact with certain people- it seems the more cowboy-nonchalant or beater-business, the less.
The picture is now at sixty-eight point five percent. I know that I know very little about Tony; for instance, why did he lose his teeth? But what I do think is that he is a Little One, there is a certain light around him, like white glow of the lamb in the green field, innocently standing out next to the large, off-white and black sheep, creatures full of their wool and their purpose. I do know that he has nothing, no power, no ambition to speak of, but of service. And I believe (I don’t know if I am right or wrong) that he brings something of Christ with him, without his knowledge of it. I do know that he seems to be at the top of the Right-Side Up Kingdom in this upside-down world.
I will never reach one-hundred percent, not ever. God only knows a person so well. It is like the problem of parallel lines in Euclid: the closer they get, the farther one is to calculating where they meet- and you are told that they never come together, else the whole structure of geometry must change. But perhaps, God's universe is truly Lobachevskian, in that the parallel lines do, finally, meet: in eternity. And there I hope to rejoice in Tony's glorious court.
