Brother Odd

walls and said, "She was your mother, wasn't she?"
        Not even that question drew a reaction from him. Painstakingly, he restored her to life with the power of the pencil.

CHAPTER 22
        
        AT THE NORTHWEST CORNER OF THE SECOND floor, Sister Miriam was on duty at the nurses' station.
        If Sister Miriam grips her lower lip with two fingers and pulls it down to reveal the pink inner surface, you will see a tattoo in blue ink, Deo gratias, which is Latin for "Thanks be to God."
        This is not a statement of commitment required of nuns. If it were, the world would probably have even fewer nuns than it does now.
        Long before she ever considered the life of the convent, Sister Miriam had been a social worker in Los Angeles, an employee of the federal government. She worked with teenage girls from disadvantaged families, striving to rescue them from gang life and other horrors.
        Most of this I know from Sister Angela, the mother superior, because Sister Miriam not only doesn't toot her own horn-she does not have a horn to toot.
        As a challenge to a girl named Jalissa, an intelligent fourteen-year-old who had great promise but who had been on the gang path and about to acquire a gang tattoo, Miriam had said, Girl, what do I have to do to make you think how you're trading a full life for a withered one? I talk sense to you, but it doesn't matter. I cry for you, you're amused. Do I have to bleed for you to get your attention?
        She then offered a deal: If Jalissa would promise, for thirty days, to stay away from friends who were in a gang or who hung out with a gang, and if she would not get a gang tattoo the following day as she intended, Miriam would take her at her word and would have her own inner lip tattooed with what she called "a symbol of my gang."
        An audience of twelve at-risk girls, including Jalissa, gathered to watch, wince, and squirm as the tattooist performed his needlework.
        Miriam refused topical anesthetics. She had chosen the tender tissue of the inner lip because the cringe factor would impress the girls. She bled. Tears flowed, but she made not one sound of pain.
        That level of commitment and the inventive ways she expressed it made Miriam an effective counselor. These years later, Jalissa has two college degrees and is an executive in the hotel industry.
        Miriam rescued many other girls from lives of crime, squalor, and depravity. You might expect that one day she would become the subject of a movie with Halle Berry in the title role.
        Instead, a parent complained about the spiritual element that was part of Miriam's counseling strategy. As a government employee, she was sued by an organization of activist attorneys on the grounds of separation of church and state. They wanted her to cut spiritual references from her counseling, and they insisted that Deo gratias be either obscured with another tattoo or expunged. They believed that in the privacy of counseling sessions, she would peel down her lip and corrupt untold numbers of young girls.
        You might think this case would be laughed out of court, but you would be as wrong as you were about the Halle Berry movie. The court sided with the activists.
        Ordinarily, government employees are not easily canned. Their unions will fight ferociously to save the job of an alcoholic clerk who shows up at work only three days a week and then spends a third of his workday in a toilet stall, tippling from a flask or vomiting.
        Miriam was an embarrassment to her union and received only token support. Eventually she accepted a modest severance package.
        For a few years thereafter, she held less satisfying jobs before she heard the call to the life she now leads.
        Standing behind the counter at the nurses' station, reviewing inventory sheets, she looked up as I approached and said, "Well, here comes young Mr. Thomas in his usual clouds of mystery."
        Unlike Sister Angela, Abbot Bernard, and Brother Knuckles, she had not been told of my special gift. My universal key and privileges intrigued her, however, and she seemed to intuit something of my true nature.
        "I'm afraid you mistake my perpetual state of bafflement for an air of mystery, Sister Miriam."
        If they ever did make a movie about her, the producers would hew closer to the truth if they cast Queen Latifah instead of Halle Berry. Sister Miriam has