By Jeff Barnet

It is the end of a long, hot day in southern New Mexico. Father Pablo Straub has already zigzagged across half of Doña Ana County in a day full of meetings, but there’s still one item on his schedule: the blessing of a house near the town of Mesquite.

Father Straub says that he thinks the blessing will take about 10 or 15 minutes, then we’ll be back in Las Cruces where Father will say Mass, and then a short meeting, then dinner. This will just be a regular day for him: one starting at 9 a.m. and ending around 10 p.m.

There are five of us —two Sisters, Bruce Brown, Father and myself— packed into a tiny Honda Civic. As we travel the back roads to the colonia (unincorporated land without infrastructure) where Susana lives, we get turned around and lost. How did this house blessing get on Father’s schedule, someone asks.

Many weeks ago, out of the blue, Susana called the Mission Helpers of the Holy Savior, thinking we were Holy Cross, a local Catholic Church. Her two-year-old son had been badly injured in a car accident a year ago, and now she needed to get him to a specialist 225 miles north in Albuquerque. But her husband, she said, had been out of work for six months, and she had been living in the homeless shelter. She was broke and needed help.

Susana did get her son to Albuquerque, to the specialist. When she returned, she began to call the Las Cruces office every few days, asking when “the priest” would be back. I told her that the priest, Father Pablo Straub, actually lived in Mexico, and he would be here for a day or two in a month’s time, but that he is very, very busy and I could not promise her anything.

“I need the priest to come and bless my house,” she stated. And she kept calling, very pleasantly and persistently, a couple of times every week to ask when the priest would come to her house—not if, but when.

“Of course, we’ll bless her house,” Father Straub said as soon as he arrived in Las Cruces.

By the time we find the mobile home, rusted and dilapidated, up on blocks on a dirt lot, Father Straub has fallen asleep in the back seat. The New Mexico sun —a blazing ball of fire lowering to the horizon— is beating down on the dust. The four of us leave Father to nap for a while in the car, and are warmly greeted by Susana and her mother-in-law and Susana’s three young children. We are invited into the living room where soon we are joined by three more young women and their children. Susana’s husband shakes our hands and invites us to sit.

The desert wind rocks the mobile home as we make small talk. Above the large television is a painting of the Virgen de Guadalupe in bright day-glo colors. In the kitchen is a similar painting of Jesus Christ, fringed with sequins. Susana is a young woman, dressed in a t-shirt and sweat pants, with a large black-ink tattoo on one side of her neck. She is smiling. She waits expectantly on the edge of a sofa.

Father Straub, clad in his black habit, 20-decade rosary, white socks and black running shoes, is awakened by a Sister, who helps him up the wobbly wooden steps to the door of the mobile home. He greets everyone with a smile and a handshake, his blue eyes radiant with kindness, his white hair tousled. Susana and her mother-in-law rush to offer him water, and set him down on an orange sofa.

Father Straub looks at the painting of the Virgen, and then begins to talk very softly, very gently to Susana and her mother-in-law. The conversation flows back and forth in both Spanish and English. Father learns that most of the people gathered in the room have not received the Sacraments for a long, long time. Susana’s eyes, brown and huge, sparkle when she looks at you directly; but now she is looking down at the carpet.

Bruce, leaning against the wall, asks Susana why she wanted her house blessed.

Her response comes pouring forth: the six months her husband has not had work, no money, the little boy sick, arguments in the house, her depression and sadness; and sometimes she does not how she will go on.

“There have been a lot of fights in this house,” she said. “The house needs to be blessed. To calm things down.”

Outside the window, we can see that more people are coming to see the priest. Susana’s husband, a strong young man, is carrying what appears to be a young child wrapped in a blanket. He enters the house, and lays the child down on the sofa beside Susana and Susana’s mother-in-law. But this is no child: he is a young man, 37 years old we are told, his useless limbs bent into stick-like shapes, his misshapen head contorted to one side, his mouth perpetually open as if he is in the middle of a scream. He is Susana’s husband’s brother, and lives with his mother and her live-in companion in another nearby trailer.

Father Straub says we are going to bless the house, but we are also going to pray.

He begins to sing softly a song in Spanish, about the Guadalupana. The two missionary nuns, Sister Ana Maria and Sister Maria Guadalupe, in their bright blue habits and white veils, sing with Father. It is a beautiful song, famous in Mexico and the Southwest, and everyone in the room immediately joins in:

Desde el cielo una hermosa mañana
Desde el cielo una hermosa mañana
La Guadalupana, La Guadalupana
La Guadalupana bajó al Tepeyac.

Susana’s mother-in-law’s voice lifts above the others with great emotion, and Susana, standing now alongside her, begins to weep. As the tears stream down her face, she continues singing:

La Guadalupana, La Guadalupana
La Guadalupana bajó al Tepeyac.

There are more songs, more singing, all in Spanish, and then Father offers a prayer.
Again, he looks at the painting of the Virgen de Guadalupe.

“There’s a story behind that painting,” he says. “Would anyone like to hear it?”

Susana nods her head yes. And everyone sits down.

Very slowly, but with increasing force and drama, Father Straub tells the story about Saint Juan Diego and the Virgen de Guadalupe. He tells the story in Spanish, how the young Juan Diego encountered the Virgen on the mountain of Tepeyac, but the Bishop did not believe him. And then how he carried in his ankle-length poncho the roses, and when he had emptied his poncho to show the Bishop the roses, the image of the Virgen was emblazoned in the cloth: “An image from God,” Father says.

Everyone in the room is spellbound by the story and by the storyteller. Every detail, every person in the story, comes to life. Susana laughs at times; she gazes at Father in pure joy at other times. The way he is telling it, with such detail and passion, it could have happened yesterday. He tells it so dramatically one feels one is there, seeing it happen, hearing the conversation between Juan Diego and the Bishop.

It occurs me, as I stand in the kitchen listening to Father Straub, that he is something of a Bard: the kind of encyclopedic storyteller and carrier of tradition that existed in ancient cultures, but is now almost gone from all corners of the Earth. He is a Catholic Bard, I think to myself, steeped in the Bardic Redemptorist tradition, carrying the Gospel of Jesus Christ to people all over the Americas.

Father opens his hand toward the painting, and he explains the meaning of all of its elements, how the story still lives in this painting.

And then he asks if everyone would like to pray, and in Spanish again he teaches Susana and everyone how to say the Divine Mercy Chaplet:

Por Su dolorosa Pasión, ten misericordia de nosotros y del mundo entero.

For this, the Sisters and everyone in the room kneel and face the Guadalupana, and with the Sisters leading the prayer, we all pray for Divine Mercy.

By now, we have easily been here more than an hour, and Father has yet to bless the house.

After the prayer, as we wait for Sister to bring the holy water from the car, Father talks more with Susana’s mother-in-law about her disabled son, who is wrapped carefully in diapers and again in his blanket; and Father speaks gently with Susana and her husband, and he asks them about their lives, about Church, the Sacraments. Everyone talks very openly, sincerely, and then Father leans back in the sofa. Then we are all quiet.

When Father Straub blesses a house, he blesses it. With a strong, bellowing voice he blesses it. In his slightly off-kilter gait, he walks to every window, every door, every room, and he hurls holy water on them, and he shouts, in Spanish, in Latin, and he blesses the house, and he blesses every person, and he sends streams of holy water in every direction. He makes sure every person is doused, sometimes twice, and he bellows with great fervor and joy, and he does not finish until he has thrown holy water over his shoulder, without looking, and he blesses the house completely. And with this last backwards toss of holy water, everyone laughs and Father laughs.

The atmosphere of the house, which had been formal and solemn until now, becomes relaxed and suddenly it is like we are at a party, and everyone sits on the edge of sofas and crowds together and tells stories. We learn more about Susana’s struggles, we learn more about the youngest brother, now sleeping, over whom Father prayed and blessed him with holy water, and as we are talking, we realize Father has disappeared.

The person who expected Father to be at his house for Mass two hours ago calls me on the cell at this moment. He is wondering if Father might be showing up soon.

Well, I tell him, it’s like this: Father is hearing confessions now, in a side room of the mobile home.

In that case, he says, we’ll wait.

The gathering is spilling out into the dirt plain the mobile homes share: Susana, her children, the Sisters, Bruce, Susana’s husband, all who gathered to hear the story, to sing, to pray, and to be blessed.

Watching the sun setting behind a thatch of trees, I have no sense of time: rather, a sense of eternity beyond time. At this moment, as Father hears a confession, someone’s soul is being healed, someone’s soul is being transformed by God’s grace, someone is being saved.

When we finally all pack ourselves back into the car, Father Straub is surrounded by the crowd, all waving goodbye to him, like a beloved relative come to visit. And sad to see him go, they keep waving as we begin our drive back to Las Cruces, heading out of the dirt road of the colonia.

So, that’s it, I thought, as we found our way back to the Interstate. That’s what Father Straub does. It was the first time I saw Father Straub doing what he has done for 50 years: simply evangelizing the poor: telling the story; preaching the gospel; bringing Jesus Christ, through the Word and the Sacraments, to the poorest and most abandoned.

In the car, I ask Father how he decided to tell the story and then do all that singing and praying.

“Well, after I talked to the mother, and after I learned what this family has been going through, I knew we really had to stay and pray with these people,” he said.

I said to Father, “I know this sounds naive --like, intellectual nerd finally gets it-- but it really struck me how all this talk about Catholicism, all this talk about evangelizing and the Church and all that --it’s just about praying with people, loving and praying for them. If we don’t pray, it doesn’t matter what else we do.”

Bruce just shakes his head and laughs in camadarie at the obtuseness of all of us overeducated Catholic intellectual wanna-be’s.

“Yeah,” he jokes. “I’m beginning to think there’s something to this prayer thing.”

And Father said: “Once they asked Pope Paul VI: What is the Catholic Church? And the Pope answered: The Catholic Church is the Church that prays.”

And so that was the day I learned the great mystery behind why Father Straub is always so busy and why he is always running late and why it takes so long to get a phone call through to him.

What Father Straub does is simple; but what matters is how he does it: with humility, with reverence, and with obedience to God, to the Church, to the Truth. In total service to God’s people he preaches, he tells the story, he administers the Sacraments.

In other words, he is a holy priest, as everyone always says. One who is sent.

And because he goes where he is sent --with faith, hope and love-- God’s healing and God’s grace are there.

How strange, yet how beautiful, that Jesus Christ wants to be known through frail and broken human beings. Amazingly, He trusts the ones He sends to tell the story and to love His people. How mysterious it is that the healing of Jesus Christ is brought to people in this slow, human and curiously ancient way, of one person telling the story to another in some lonely forgotten place.

And that is how that Father Straub made his “10-to-15 minute” house blessing. The day finished with a great meal of homemade lasagna around midnight, which of course had to wait until after Father said Mass, and then of course he also gave the Sacrament of Healing to as many people who needed it.

Because that’s what he does. He does the work of one who is sent, simply and faithfully. And people are healed. And they come back. To God and to the Church.

Note: Names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. The blessing of the house in Mesquite occurred at sunset on April 24, 2007. Upon reading this article, Father Straub remarked: “Once upon a time I wanted to be God’s Bard. Now I’m content to be God’s burro.”