‘Everything becomes beautiful’

According to popular consensus, nothing is more soul-grating and miserable than a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles. The only appropriate response amid the long lines, sterile setting and endless bureaucratic hoop-jumping is apparently to lament that you’re there in the first place.

But not for Lee Horton. The 50-something Philadelphian described his recent visit to the DMV in that city as “the most beautiful time.” He waited in line with his brother and a friend for over two hours, and “all the people were looking at us because we were smiling and laughing, and they couldn’t understand why we were so happy.”

Lee’s secret? He and his brother Dennis had just been released from prison after serving 27 years of a life sentence for a crime they say they never committed.

“When you take everything away from a man, everything becomes beautiful,” Lee explained in a recent interview with National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition. “Everything,” like having an onion to cook with, inhaling the fresh air, seeing a child run down the street. The elder Horton brother said it all was like he had “been reborn into a better day, into a new day, like the person I was no longer exists.”

If anyone had the right to look at the world with jaded eyes and a stony heart, it’d be a man convinced he’d been falsely imprisoned for half his life. And yet Lee expresses nothing but the gratitude of one who knows, through the experience of deprivation, that all is gift. A gratitude so full, that “everything becomes beautiful,” and even a trip to the DMV is an occasion of delight.

It wasn’t lost on me that I heard Lee’s story on Divine Mercy Sunday, a day when we remember and celebrate God’s inconceivable and unmerited mercy toward us. Unlike Lee’s case before the State of Pennsylvania, none of us are potentially innocent before God. None of us deserve clemency. Through sin, we’ve willfully cut ourselves off from him. We “deserve death,” not as some grotesque punishment, but as a simple description of what it is to be apart from the Source of Life and trapped within ourselves.

But in his merciful love, God breaks the bonds of death and releases us from the prison of our self-centeredness. Through our baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, we too have a “new lease on life.” And through embracing this truth in gratitude, we can live life — including its trial and tribulations — with joy and delight.

In Mark’s Gospel, Christ says those who follow him will not only receive eternal life in the age to come, but also “a hundred times more now in this present age” (Mk 10:30). This “hundred times more” is not a quantitative dimension, as falsely proposed in the so-called “Prosperity Gospel.” Following Jesus does not guarantee us more stuff. Instead, by being in relationship of grateful dependence with the Author of Life, the quality of our engagement with everything will be enhanced — “everything becomes beautiful.” In the words of the theologian Luigi Giussani, the man who follows Christ will “know how to enjoy the stars a hundred times more.” And not just the stars, but our relationships, our responsibilities and yes, even our visits to the DMV.

Liedl lives and writes in the Twin Cities.