A young man named Ken is walking along the streets of the busy city of Sydney. Thousands of people pass by him on either side. Suddenly he catches sight of another young man, tall and pale-skinned, with a limp. He seems to be entirely out of place. Something about him is different. Ken forgets about him.
Ken sees the limping young man again in a supermarket, in one of the aisles. Ken stares at him, but the man doesn't notices. The limping young man seems to be so out of place that for some reason Ken feels an irrational hatred for him.
The next day, Ken is walking back from university classes with his friend Mark. He sees the limping man sitting on the busy sidewalk, crosslegged, simply staring intensely, as if deep in thought. Ken suddenly spits at him as he passes by him. Mark asks surprised, "Why did you do that?" Ken beckons him to sit with him in a nearby cafe and relates to him how he hates that man. They order coffee, all the while watching the man on the sidewalk. As Ken picks up his spoon to stir the coffee but accidently drops the spoon on the table, and at that exact moment the man looks at them and gazes intently at Ken. Then presently the man gets up and leaves. Ken and Mark follow. At last they see him sit on a bench in a park all by himself. Ken suddenly slaps the man, and then turns away because of guilt. But he hears Mark gasp and he turns back. The man is looking at Ken with incredible intensity, and after a while Ken realises that it is forgiveness that is in his eyes.
Ken leaves to return to his home, but after a while realises that Mark hasn't come along with him, but is staying with the limping man.
*
A few days later, Ken sees Mark and the man hurry along a street with a few bags in their hands. He follows them, mystified. They walk for a long time until they reach the outskirts of the city, and then they enter a house. Ken follows them, and sees a huge room full of pictures of the Blessed Virgin Mary, thousands of pictures. Mark and the man smile at Ken, and the man introduces himself to Ken, "I'm Hezario."
Hezario and Mark sit on two chairs that are in the room and take out Rosaries and begin to quietly pray the Rosary together. Ken watches them praying Rosary after Rosary after Rosary until their eyes become intense with concentration. He can see that their minds are elsewhere, meditating on God Himself.
After a while, Ken tries to sit on the floor, but Hezario motions him to get up immediately. Hezario brings a third chair, and hands him a Rosary and they continue.
A few days pass like this, in prayer...
*
Mike is one of the big drug dealers in the city. He does his stuff in the day and then parties in the evening. The police know about him but even they are terrified of him. Once a group of policemen came with guns to arrest him in the middle of the street, but he clapped once, hands up in the air, and half a dozen snipers appeared along the balconies of the surrounding buildings, ready to protect Mike.
Mike was at the moment in a very bad situation. He was in a kind of cold war with four of the other dealers, and things were becoming very icy and dangerous. Violence could break out any minute between the gangs.
One evening at 11 pm, he was with eighteen of his gang members when three other gangs, about three dozen in total came and attacked them. There was a huge streetfight and everyone was either cut or wounded. Mike was hurt badly in his leg and had to limp, and his arms were bleeding. He began to scream at his gangmembers, and they could not reply to him as they were terrified of what he would do. It was 3 am in the night now, and after a while Mike stopped screaming and they all walked in silence towards the slums in the city where they lived.
*
Hezario suddenly got up, grabbed a fourth chair, placed it besides his, kissed one of the thousand images of Mary, hugged one of the statues of Mary tenderly, and limped out into the night. It was only 3 am. Ken and Mark looked at each other in surprise. They had been praying late into the night with Mike and were about to sleep, but had not expected Hezario to head out into the cold night like this. They shrugged, and continued their Rosaries.
Hezario limped out towards the eastern part of the city. He walked along one of the smaller streets of the city, and although there were no streetlights to show him the way, he walked quickly.
Mike and his wounded gang continued along their way, when suddenly Mike saw the outline of another man walking towards them. He was limping just like him.
"Who's Michael?" A strong powerful voice rang out in the darkness. "Come forward."
Mike could now see the limping, tall, pale man in the moonlight, and looked at him in wonder. No one had ever spoken to him except his mum when he was a child. "Who are you?" Mike suddenly asked angry and irritated.
"Who I am does not matter, Michael. What matters is who you will be." The pale man stared at Mike for a few moments with such great intensity that Mike had to look down to the ground.
"Follow me," Hezario ordered, and he turned and headed back, without checking if Mike was following his footsteps.
Mike stared at him and saw his outline disappear into the darkness, but did not follow. The gangmembers looked at each other with surprise. "Wonder who that weird man was, " one man said. The other guys cracked jokes and sniggered and laughed at the strange man. "Do you want us to go hit him for you?" one guy asked Mike.
Mike was silent.
After a few moments, almost desperately and frenziedly, Mike began to limp after Hezario, hoping that he wouldn't lose sight of the man. Soon, the gangmembers had lost sight of both Hezario and Mike as they limped in through the night - out of the darkness and into light.
*
Hezario gestured to Mike to enter the house, and motioned to him to sit on the fourth chair. Ken and Mark stared at Mike, wondering what was going on in his mind. Mike looked at all the holy pictures of Mary around him, and all of a sudden began to sob like a child, and he went on crying for hours.
*
One day, Hezario spoke to the other three young men. "We have to move into the heart of the city, buy a large building, and make it our Monastery. The Monastery of the Blessed Virgin Mary."
Everyone agreed, because that was what they had wanted from day on - a place to pray and be united totally with God, a place impossibly located in the midst of the busy and hectic pace of the city.
They soon got a place, and became cloistered monks in the Monastery, under the guidance of the Church. Their timetable included sleep, prayer, hard work, total silence, and then two hours for talking amongst each other as a community. They did not go out to buy food but always stayed in the Monastery. There was a chapel on the other side of the Monastery, attached to it, and people who came to pray would donate food to them. If they did not receive food, they went without food.Abbot Hezario assured them that God would provide, and God always did.
They spent hours in prayer, praying for those in the city and those who prayed in the Chapel. Every single prayer that rose in the chapel was answered at lightening speed, or those who came to pray were assured through prayer that they did not need what they had prayed for. The Chapel began to be crowded with people from the city. People everywhere heard of the Monastery in the middle of the city and thronged to it. The monks did hard work - after their daily Mass and prayers they either wrote or made altar bread or manufactured pious articles to be sold. They would leave whatever they made in the Chapel cupboard, and someone or the other would take it.
But after a few years one or two of the monks began to be relaxed. They started eating greedily, entertaining worldly thoughts, became proud and began to harbour grudges in their hearts. All at once the prayers in the chapel began to be much less effective. People stopped donating food, saying that the cost of groceries were too much. The Abbot called a meeting and soon understood the problem and urged the community to fall deeper in love with God. They resolved the issues, and the monks began to pray and live with love again, but with great fervour and joy. In no time the Chapel became a place of mighty prayer again.
The other drug dealers came to hear of this place and were both afraid and enraged. One of the gangs came to destroy the Monastery, but as soon as one of the violent thugs entered the cloistered Monastery, he became breathless with the beauty of the divine presence. He saw the monks before him looking at him kindly, but there was the presence of another Person which was so divine and beautiful that he realised how sinful he was and reformed himself. He became one of the monks, the fifth one.
The other gangs were shocked and enraged at this, and on a planned date, they all together surrounded the building to destroy it.
The monks continued their prayers and duties, unworried. Hezario was writing a journal of the Monastery: "I am totally unafraid of the hundreds of men with weapons around us. This place has been consecrated as a Monastery of Mary and will remain so forever till the end of time. As I sit here writing, the latest and fifth monk is praying on his knees fervently for God to bless the men who surround us. None of us are even praying for ourselves, as we belong to Mary and She will take care of us. I am worried about one thing though. One gang is actually trying to get into the Monastery through the roof, and they are not aware that because of financial difficulties we were not able to build a stronger roof. The roof could fall down at any moment and they could fall 15 meters to the ground. But Father Ken is ready for them with bandages and medicinal herbs. Father Mark is making some good hot soup for them. Father Michael is pretending to be busy and trying not to show it, but I can see very easily that he is bursting with excitement at the possibility of being a martyr for Jesus. But there is one other thing I am terribly worried of. My dear friends who are trying to destroy us think we are unarmed and that we have no one to protect us. But as I have always sensed for the last twenty years of this Monastery's existence, the Blessed Virgin Mary has always been walking alongside us, invisible but powerful. They do not know that She is our Mother and that we are Her children and that She doesn't like her children being hurt. My only hope is that my Mother, the Virgin Mary, will appear to them as they approach this Monastery and thus they will fall in love with Her and with God and think more sensibly about life."
At this moment Hezario stopped writing, as the first man fell through the roof. He sighed, whispered a quick prayer, put away his writing material, and joined the other Fathers as they bandaged him, applied medicine to him, and gave him some very nice tasty vegetable soup.
"Evil will never prevail against the Church my friends. The Fortress in the middle of the wild forest will always be a Fortress," Father Hezario said to the other Fathers, who smiled back at him. They began to say the Rosary as they healed and fed their enemies, who were totally taken aback by the beauty of God's love that was flooding the atmosphere of the Monastery.
