To the Tin Man: Letters from a Parish Priest

By John D. Gabriel

This collection of letters from a parish priest to people of fiction, history, and literature will delight, encourage, and inspire. It is a reminder to us that everything and everyone can speak to us of God if we look hard enough.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098075545

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To Albino Luciani:

An Introduction

(Cardinal Albino Luciani, patriarch of Venice, was born in Forno di Canale in 1912. Throughout his long career of service to the Lord and the Church, he was parish priest, religion teacher, seminary professor, bishop of Vittorio Veneta, and cardinal patriarch of Venice. On August 26, 1978, he was elected supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church in one of the shortest conclaves in Church history. His pontificate, like the conclave that elected him, was destined to be one of the shortest in history as well. Five weeks after he assumed the chair of Peter as Pope John Paul I, he died unexpectedly in his sleep.)

An anonymous author once wrote, Death cancels everything but the truth. Dear Holy Father, in 1978, I was a young man living in northern New Jersey. Having just graduated high school the year before and unsure where the future would lead me, I took a job working in a residential facility with developmentally disabled boys. It was a difficult job at first, but one I truly grew to love. During my last year of high school, I had begun to finally take my faith seriously. Although I attended religious education and celebrated the sacraments proper to my age, and even attended mass every Sunday, I still did not know Jesus personally.

It was during September of my senior year that my parish priest pushed me to attend a youth retreat (I tried to work my way out of it up until the last moment), and my life was changed forever. The Sunday evening that I returned home, I remember going to bed and crying for a long time—it was as if the scales fell from my own eyes and I was finally able to see what was so clearly before me, the amazing and awesome love of our good God. I began to attend mass daily (a hunger for the Eucharist was the first sign of this incredible change) and began to volunteer my time in the youth ministry and music ministry in my parish.

One day in late summer of 1978, I remember passing the television in the unit in which I worked and seeing some of the ceremonies surrounding your election as pope. For some reason, I was fascinated with what I was seeing: the incredible beauty of the liturgies, the traditions, and the rituals seemed to be so spirit filled. It was that day, standing before the television at work, that a personal Pentecost flooded my mind and my heart. The Spirit revealed to me what my life should be about (of course, at the time I thought it was my own idea)—I wanted to be a priest! And most of all, Holy Father, I remember your beautiful and gentle smile that captivated not only the world but my own imagination. The Church seemed to me then to be such a joyful place, a place of acceptance and kindness, and an exquisite beauty. That very week, I set in motion the chain of events that would bring me the following January to Saint Andrew’s Hall and the College Seminary of the Immaculate Conception at Seton Hall University. I was nineteen years old, and although several decades have passed since, I have not regretted my decision.

The entire Church was shocked a mere five weeks after your election to the papacy to find out that you had died! So many questions abounded: What would it have been like to truly get to know you? How would the Spirit have guided the Church through your inspiration? Of course, we entrusted the situation to God’s providence and were overjoyed to gain the acquaintance of the cardinal from Poland who, following your lead, took the name John Paul II as our new pope. But we wondered, and those of us who were truly taken with your smile tried to find a clue as to who you really were.

My years at the college seminary were among the happiest of my life, and it was there that I truly fell in love with the priesthood. Listening to the seminarians chant their prayers, I felt like I was living with angels (of course, as I got to know them more, I tempered this feeling a bit). In my college seminary, on the way from our rooms to the chapel, we had to pass a small library. Unfortunately, several years later, during my last year at this seminary, a raging fire would claim both the library and the chapel, and today nothing exists where they once stood except a beautifully kept lawn welcoming seminarians to the half of the building that remains. This library introduced me to two people, both of whom have had a profound impact on my spiritual life to this very day.

At the rear of the library stood a life-size statue of a nun holding a cross amid the roses. Her eyes were so beautiful, and I felt such a serenity just gazing at her. I was told that this nun’s name was Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, and near her statue in the library was a copy of her autobiography The Story of a Soul. After the Scriptures themselves, this book and the spirituality of Therese have had the most profound impact on my life; and since that time, I have truly considered her to be my friend, companion, and spiritual director. Some called her the Little Flower. (You rejected this title and preferred to call her a Steel Bar because of the willpower, the courage, and the decision that seemed so much a part of her life. I agree).

On a nearby shelf, there was another book that also caught my attention. It was entitled Illustrissimi: Letters from Pope John Paul I. Soon after devouring The Story of a Soul, I began reading your book, Holy Father. It was a compilation of letters you wrote during your time as cardinal patriarch of Venice. These letters, published in a local magazine, were written to various people in history, some real, some fictional. In the pages of this book, we began to know who you were: your thoughts, the things important to you, your great intellect, your pastoral heart, and your great love for the Lord and the Church. I have read and reread this book many times since, and not only have I appreciated your insights, but I also became enamored with your style of writing. Many times I thought of those I would desire to write to and what I would say. Many times I fantasized about writing my own book as a way to share some of my own insights and as a tribute to you. Finally, after many years, this book is a result of that fantasy.

In no way could I match your ability to articulate the truths of our faith, your understanding of the problems of contemporary man, your familiarity with classical literature, or the holiness and love which shine out through the pages of Illustrissimi. This is my humble attempt to articulate the reflections of a simple priest on the issues that I have dealt with in the pastoral settings in which I have found myself over the years. They are the fruit of my own prayer and my own thought, and I put them forward here in the simple hope that someone might find something in them helpful. They were written in the few moments I could spare here and there between those things that make up the day of a parish priest in a parochial situation: death, life, sickness, sacrament, administration, counsel, and prayer. But they were written with love.

Holy Father, you once said of yourself, I am only a poor man, accustomed to small things and silence. Death has silenced your voice for all time but not really. In the pages of Illustrissimi, you, too, become a guide, friend, spiritual director, commentator on the world as you saw it (and so much of which is contemporary even thirty years later) but a commentator with hope and happiness. Your reflections have been so enriching and so useful to me, Holy Father. I only pray (and I count on your prayers to help me) that someone may find my reflections to be useful as well.

In May of 1974, you wrote a letter to Jesus, and you entitled it I Write in Trepidation. The last words of this letter form the last paragraph of your book. You said to our Lord,

I have written, but I have never before been so dissatisfied with my writing. I feel as if I had left out the greater part of what could be said of You, that I have said badly what should have been said much better. There is one comfort, however: the important thing is not that one person should write about Christ, but that many should love and imitate Christ. And fortunately—in spite of everything—this still happens.

If my own book can help but one person in this journey of love and imitation, I shall consider it to have been a work well worth the labor.

Beloved Holy Father, I began this letter to you with the words: Death cancels everything but the truth. Your death took you from us too soon, but the Spirit knows how He works and with whom. Death may have cancelled everything, but the truths so important in your own life shine through. May my own meager attempt to keep them shining for others please our Lord. For Him alone we do what we do, and to Him alone we pray all things progress.

To the Tin Man:

Rediscovering Fire

(Character in the L. Frank Baum stories The Wizard of Oz the Tin Man accompanied Dorothy Gale of Kansas on her journey along the Yellow Brick Road to Oz, hoping there to receive a heart.)

Writing at Chicago in April of 1900 in the introduction to the first of his fourteen novels about Oz, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, your creator, L. Frank Baum, wrote,

Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident. Having this thought in mind, the story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written solely to pleasure children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.

While agreeing with your creator on the value of entertainment and the joy and wonder it can provide, his words are a bit puzzling. Perhaps they reflect his ideal of a perfect story for children. Perhaps they are the result of his assessment of the needs of his own time. In reading his novels of Oz, however, it seems impossible to read these wonderful stories and not learn some moral lesson or other. This is something good for my own time since modern education is often suspect of morality (at least in the traditional sense) and its imposition on people today, who are counseled to discover, create, and proclaim their own truth as a substitute for those revealed truths that are eternal. Lamentable as that may be, there are elements of your own story, my dear Tin Man, that are nightmarish, indeed—the stuff of horror; and your own heartaches led you not to repulsion at the idea of owning another heart but rather to desire one.

Please accept my sincere apologies, gentle friend, for if in telling your story I must revisit some of those nightmares that undoubtedly caused you much anguish throughout your life and perhaps still do to this very day. You began life in Munchkinland as Nicholas Chopper. Following in the footsteps of your father, you were employed as a chopper of trees, a bit of bad luck and good luck as your life progressed. Your first heart, a natural one, led you (as natural hearts often do) to fall in love with a Munchkin servant, Nimmie Amee. And she loved you as well! You spoke of marriage, but your life together was not meant to be, for your beloved fiancée was the servant girl of an angry old woman who could not imagine her life without Nimmie’s service. This old woman, with malicious intent, employed the Wicked Witch of the East to enchant your own axe that, outside of your control, it might do you harm. Under the wicked spell, your axe chopped off your arms and legs, eventually turning to its destruction of your very head and body. Thankfully, a kindly tinsmith named Ku-Klip was able to refashion yourself out of tin, for that was the medium in which he worked. But without a natural heart, you no longer were able to love your beloved, and this caused you great sadness. Finally, after paralyzing your heart, the witch paralyzed your body with rust, and you remained in that sorry state until the day Dorothy Gale of Kansas happened your way. Then with the aid of some oil to loosen you up, you were able to join her on her journey to the Wizard. The Scarecrow desired a brain, the Cowardly Lion desired courage, and Dorothy herself wanted to return home to the Kansas prairie to be with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. But you were desirous of a heart with which to love again.

If I had the privilege of knowing you then, Nick Chopper made of tin, I would have proclaimed to you a promise made by God through the prophet Ezekiel when He said, I will give you a new heart, and place a new spirit within you, taking from your bodies your stony hearts and giving you natural hearts. This promise of God Himself to His people perhaps might have brought you some consolation and perhaps a deeper hope. But without this knowledge, you continued up the yellow brick road in pursuit of a mechanism, a furnace by which love could be engendered within you. It is precisely this pursuit which has the power to lead any of us, tin or not, to the contemplation of the God Who Is Love. And so I commend you, my friend, for not giving up your quest, and I am proud of all you were willing to do for love! Already you were teaching us the first lesson of living the moral life: the pursuit of love!

We have been told that God writes straight with crooked lines, and I believe this is most certainly true in your case, Tin Man. When you finally reached your destination (after some time and adventure), that old humbug of a wizard gave you a heart made only of silk and sawdust, a poor substitute for the flesh and blood you desired. And yet, as your life continued through many more adventures, we find in you a Tin Man of tremendous compassion and empathy and (dare we say it) love. In the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi, you loved all of creation—even the destruction of a small insect moved your heart. You desired to find your beloved Nimmie Amee again, but time made your love together impossible. At the end of Dorothy’s story, Glinda the Good Witch kindly transported you through the ministry of winged monkeys to the land of the Winkies who desired you as their ruler, and you ruled over them wisely and well. Would that politicians and governments today had a portion of your heart, to rule wisely and well with love. If they read your story, Tin Man of great love, perhaps they would see what they themselves lack. But for you, through all of the heartache and nightmares you endured for love, we are grateful.

In assessing the many morals inherent in your tale, Tin Man, there is one that I need to question. I pray I do not offend you, and I am certain you did not build your life on this questionable idea. Among your adventures, you were told that a heart is not judged by how much you love but by how much you are loved by others. It is with this sentiment that I must take exception, and I would like to correct it but not for your sake, for you are truly well-loved and loving well. While in some respects I feel disloyal refuting the wisdom of Oz, still I must refute this assessment of the function of love: if it were true, Judas would be a saint. As it stands, nothing could be further from the truth, and I hope it didn’t mislead you in your own life of loving, good friend. To a new heart owner searching for love, God proclaims this truth: it is in our loving of others, not in their love of us, that we find salvation. In relation to our love for one another, it is not enough to sit passively by and allow ourselves to receive. In fact, our Lord goes too far as to suggest that it is precisely in the loving of those who do not expressly love us that we prove ourselves His followers. In other words, when we love our enemies, we truly prove ourselves as a disciple. The amount we are loved by others is only important insofar as it expands our hearts and increases our capacity to love, as love increases exponentially as it is shared. So, my sentimental friend, the love of your friends has certainly had a tremendous impact on the Tin Man you are today, but I hope that your newfound heart has not been stagnant but dynamic in your passion to love others.

I must admit, my friend, one time when the words of your story are, indeed, true: that is, in our relationship with God. Then it is the fact that we are loved that makes all the difference. It is God’s initiative, God’s love given as free gift, that transforms our lives and our loving. But here again, this love should be an impetus for us to continue loving as we realize that we are loved! It seems that there is no getting around it, Tin Man. St. John of the Cross once said, In the evening of our lives, we will be judged on love. Only Christ’s love can love us into salvation. And that love must lead us into all loving, and it is here that we will be judged. May we not be found wanting. It matters not who we love: parent, spouse, child, friend, neighbor, stranger, enemy. What matters is that we love them all!

My dear tin friend, can you remember the last words someone you loved spoke to you, perhaps before death or some other leave-taking, and the impact the memory of those words had on your life? During His resurrection appearances in Galilee, Jesus said, Full authority has been given to me both in heaven and on earth; go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations. Baptize them in the name ‘of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’ Teach them to carry out everything I have commanded you. And know that I am with you always, until the end of the world. With these last words recorded for us in St. Matthew’s Gospel, our Lord gives us two things: a mission and a promise. Our mission is to go, to make disciples, to baptize, and to teach. And then our Lord, realizing that we would scarcely have the courage to undertake this overwhelming mission on our own, gave us the most important promise we would ever receive. It is the promise of an everlasting presence and an enduring love. Know that I am with you always! How would our lives be different if we truly were conscious of this promise at all times? How could we fear anything? We would hazard all, endure all, and avoid sin at all costs if we were aware of Christ with us always. It is only when we forget His presence, when we forget His promise, that we fall into sin, fear, apathy, or the malaise that can overtake our lives of charity and faith.

In a moment of poetic insight, the English martyr St. Robert Southwell described fear as love’s frost. When we lose that awareness of Christ’s love or His presence around us, fear takes over as a frost that no oil can in the world can ease or melt. But it seems to me, Tin Man, that this love is not meant for us alone but rather as an energy source supplying our mission in this world: to love with the love of Christ, to allow that love to transfigure ourselves and others, and to assure our own destiny in the arms of eternal love. One day a friend asked me a question: What is the most powerful quote about love that you have ever memorized? Immediately the words of the Jesuit priest Teilhard deChardin came to mind: Someday after mastering the winds and waves, the tides and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for the second time in the history of the world, mankind will have discovered fire. Has that day come? Will it ever?

In his imagination, the Land of Oz was surrounded by a Deadly Desert, part of which were Shifting Sands, and your creator Mr. Baum envisioned these sands to be cursed so that anyone who touches them becomes sand themselves. These sands consumed the silver shoes whose magic helped to transport Dorothy back home to Kansas as they slipped off her feet in the air. In May of 1919, L. Frank Baum became gravely ill. The next day, awakening briefly from a coma, spoke his last words: Now we can cross the Shifting Sands. Yes, it is, indeed, a perilous journey across the sands of time, a journey that will bring us to heaven if we have lived with faith in this life. We are transported there not by magic shoes, nor even by death, but only by love as we are embraced by the God-Who-Is-Love.

Dear Tin Man, those of us who have loved you know that the love of your friends not only unfroze you but accompanied you on your journey to find your heart’s desire. How wonderful it would be to meet you now, to sit with you and hear your stories of how it feels to love. For doctors, an enlarged heart is a medical problem. For Christians, an enlarged heart is a given, or should be, for when we fail to love we fail Christ Himself. When our love is puny, Christ is too small within us. So continue loving, my good friend; rediscover its fire each and every morning, the energy that moves the world and creates a hint of heaven right here on earth. There is nothing more important we can do in this life, and it will take up all our time in the next. As a saint once said, The way of salvation is easy: it is enough to love!

To the Bees of Heraclea:

From the Mouth of Cerberus

(These bees, from the ancient