Psalm 121:7

Father O’Reilly was a busy man. As a hospital chaplain who ministered at four local hospitals, he was on call twenty-four hours a day, and he had witnessed a lot of pain, heartache, and misery during the course of his ten years of service. To replenish himself and seek respite from the grinding schedule that occasionally wore him down, he often retreated to an abandoned theological seminary building where he had studied in his youth. Here he engaged in prayer, meditated, read, or simply allowed his mind to wander, his muscles to relax. He always felt renewed after a visit to this building. It was deserted, crumbling, and in a state of disrepair, but for him it had become a true sanctuary.

Late one afternoon, after a particularly taxing and difficult day, Father O’Reilly decided that a visit to the seminary building was in order. He yearned for its quiet and tranquil air, and his soul urgently needed to withdraw. He craved a place where he could breathe, think, and dream … alone. He entered the old building, which had been forsaken long ago, but whose doors remained open to the few pilgrims who still sought its solace. He inhaled its musty odor of abandonment and smiled in rueful recollection as he envisioned the hundreds of hurrying students who had raced down its corridors with such life, such vitality. “Everything changes,” he thought.

Just then, his hospital pager went off. “Oh, no,” he sighed. “Just when I was beginning to unwind.” He tried to retrieve his message, but for some reason it was strangely garbled. “That’s odd,” he thought. “What’s the matter with the pager?” Someone had paged him, but he couldn’t figure out whom. Which hospital needed him?

The old seminary building had no operating telephones, so he had to leave its grounds to make his calls to the four hospital chaplaincy departments that had his beeper number. No, said everyone he called. We didn’t call you. Try the other hospitals. He tried them all, but the staff in each hospital was as perplexed as he was. No one who had his pager number had given him a call. “The pager must be malfunctioning,” he mused, as he returned to the old seminary building to continue his disrupted retreat. “I’ll have to bring it into the company tomorrow to be repaired,” he thought as he entered the seminary grounds. Then he stopped and stared in disbelief. During his absence, a wing of the old building had collapsed onto itself. The very wing in which he had stood only minutes before.

Comment:
“God is watching over you” is a beautiful song by Phil Joel. It recounts the many ways God protects and nourishes you. God created you because He loves you; and out of love He watches over you and protects you from danger as He protected Fr. O’Reilly in today’s touching story.

Fr. Hugh Duffy