“Is life not hard enough, padre, that you must heap on sin after sin, so that it is impossible for you to live?”

Henriette Browne “Did you love her a long time?”

He looked at her and then looked away. “It is so obvious, Maria?”

“Yes. To me it is.”

“Now she is dying. She no longer has the church and she doesn’t have me. She’s alone in the world, Maria, and she will be dead soon.”

Maria thought about what to say, thought perhaps she would be going too far, then went ahead anyway. “Is life not hard enough, padre, that you must heap on sin after sin, so that it is impossible for you to live?”

He smiled cynically at her. His Maria. He saw it the first day, back when he caught her stealing the candlesticks. She had the wisdom of the ages about her. “It is not so simple as all that, Maria.”

She harrumphed. “I am an ignorant girl, padre. But I am not stupid. There is a difference.” She looked him over, looked into his sad eyes and continued. “My life has been very hard, padre. I know this, and I don’t know why God has made my life like this. But it is the only life I have and I will live it the best I can. But you, you make all this too hard. You make sins where there are no sins. You make sadness where there doesn’t need to be sadness. Does Jesus really want us to go around with sour faces all day, all day looking so sad that you could make a baby cry?”

He smiled at her and was embarrassed. “I…, I’m sorry, Maria.”

He looked out the window as if seeking out someone waiting for him in the courtyard below, someone who could perhaps give him the answers to her questions. “She and I met when we were young. I was a new priest and she a new nun. We fell in love. I was going to leave the church for her, but she could not. She said that she could not leave the church and that she could not be with me.”

“I see.” Maria thought hard about it. He was the poor Crisanto and the nun was Maria. “So, this terrible thing, this sin, will it make her go to hell when she dies?”

The priest grinned and looked up at her. Maria was so wonderfully black and white. There were no shades of grey with the girl. He shook his head from side to side. “I don’t know, Maria.”

“Well, you need to let her go. You need to be with her when she dies and you need to tell her that she’s forgiven and that she’ll go to heaven. If you don’t know then you have to tell her the best possible outcome for her. It might be that she goes to heaven and it might be that she goes to hell, but if you do not know, then you need to tell her it is heaven. She’ll find out soon enough, but she needs to think, believe right now that it will be heaven.”

He loved her simplicity and her kindness. She was a thoroughly good person and he smiled at her. “If only a fraction of my parishioners were so good and wise as you, Maria.” Maria's Trail