A Little Beggar

“There were many beggars on the plaza, and I recall especially a little boy who came up to me. He must have been five or six years old. He held out his hand to me in the classic begging gesture, the open palm imploring a peso from what he thought was a wealthy tourista. I felt badly because my pockets were rather empty and I had nothing to give him. It was a moment of some kind of illumination. As I looked at this child ... I saw that here was a human soul. St. Thomas Aquinas says that the entire weight of the material universe does not equal the value of one human soul...

I put out my hand, placed it on his forehead, and said in English, though he understood nothing of my words, ‘Gold and silver have I none, little boy, but I give you what I have.’ I made the sign of the cross on his forehead and ruffled up his hair. It was probably a bad gesture, culturally speaking, but in my country ruffling up a child’s hair means you feel great affection for him. The child realized that there was no money forthcoming, yet he just stood there anyway, beaming up at me, and his eyes were full of, for lack of a better word, a kind of delight. I felt the same for this little stranger, and there was a bond of love lasting only a few seconds, a moment of a little heart speaking to an old, tired heart—and the old, tired heart speaking back. And then the plaza guards came and scooted him away.

...What that little so-called beggar was to me, that is what I am before God. We are all beggars before God, but we are also—and this is the part which is so often forgotten—we are beloved beggars. We are so beloved, in fact, that even those who are very close to God only begin to grasp the reality of His great love. If we are beggars, we must also understand that the King has come out of his palace, and lived on the streets as one of us, and now to our shock and disbelief he embraces us in his arms, lifts us up and takes us home to the palace, adopting us as his sons and daughters.”

~Michael O’Brien