The Sun Still Shines

Written by Bill Alt on Saturday of the Fourth Week of Lent

Lent is not an easy journey to take. I find myself too often like the people of last Sunday’s gospel preferring the darkness to the light and yet, incredibly, the light still shines for me. It has been, unlike St. Paul’s sudden and blinding light, a steady beacon pointing me back to where I belong. My road to Damascus has been a slow and hesitant journey, two steps forward for every one step back. It is stumbling in fear and forgetfulness and it is long. But God finds me there along the way, brings me out of the darkness, and calls me home to be embraced by loving and merciful arms.

My friend Bill went home not long ago, dying on an early spring day when the creek was thawing. Though it sounds harsh, you couldn’t lay upon him the epitaph of a well-lived life. I loved him but Bill was a hard man to love. In his younger years, he drank and caroused. He could tell you wild stories of bar fights with miners or high-speed chases to elude the police. He had reprehensible and racist views and held onto grudges as if they were his only possession. He married twice but he never learned to love his wives and they left him. In his last days, he was living in a nursing home in a room by himself because any roommate he was given was driven away by his hostility and coldness. Bill was flawed and broken but God loved him and found him. His was a story of redemption, a story of Lent.

Now whether it is Bill’s redemption or mine or the hundreds of young people from around the country who met him, I don’t know. I like to think that in the end Bill found some peace with us, that the light slipped under the crack beneath his door and shined upon some small part of his darkness and he knew he was loved.

Every Tuesday, he came to supper with us at Nazareth Farm and no matter what the temperature was he always wore his farm hoodie. Bill was a master checkers player and well into his 80s he could beat any challenger regaling his opponents with a stream of smack talk. If you caught him in a quiet moment, however, he would reveal how much he needed us and how much he was afraid to die having misspent his life. He often said there was only one place better than Nazareth Farm and you had to die to get there.

I was not living at the Farm when Bill died, but I said a prayer for him. I prayed that whatever bound him in fear would no longer hold him. I prayed that in the end he knew that love is all that matters. I prayed that he knew he was a friend.

Bill rests today beside a little white church on a hillside overlooking the farm he loved. When the morning sun rises above the mountain it shines its light upon that hill. May Bill know, may we all know, that the sun still shines for us.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dz-hXCIWhU]

Question for reflection:
How have you been directed towards the light?

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Bill Alt
Bill is the coordinator of St. Mary’s Alternative Spring Break program. He lives with his wife Angie and two sons, Jacob and Patrick in Ypsilanti and they have worshiped at St. Mary Student Parish since 2012. They miss the mountains of West Virginia but have found a home in Michigan.
Email: walt@smspnewman.org