His name I knew: Alphonsus Rodriguez… Four decades a doorman. No resplendent garb, only a simple black robe. No authority, only service. Open the college door cordially to visitors, find faculty or students wanted in the parlors, deliver messages, run errands, give alms to the needy, comfort troubled youngsters.

Terribly humdrum routine? Four decades in a rut? Apparently not. His secret? It comes from his own lips, his own pen. Each time the bell rang, Alphonsus looked at the door and imagined. Imagined what? Imagined that the bell ringer was God – God asking entrance. On the way he would repeat again and again, “I’m coming, Lord.” No respecter of persons, save the person of the Lord. Whoever came to the door – the high and mighty or the lowly and powerless, the bold and the beautiful or the humble and the unremarkable – each visitor met, and enjoyed, the smile Alphonsus kept for God. For in each who came to the door Alphonsus saw the same God, heard only one voice, “Here I am knocking at the door.” This was God’s turf – and he knew it.

Little wonder that students rang his bell time and again. Some confused, for counsel; some depressed, for courage; some desperate, for prayers. Do you need a concrete example? When Alphosus was 72, an adolescent came to the college in Majorca. He was afire for God, wanted above all else to serve, but was puzzled: How serve? How best give of himself? Where? He rang Alphosus’ bell; the two become fast friends; they met time and again on the college grounds, talked about prayer, about holiness. At Alphonsus’ urging, the student volunteered for the missions in South America. In fulfillment of a vow to be “slave forever to the Ethiopians,” he labored for life in Cartagena, Colombia…

- Love is a Flame of the Lord, Homilies of Walter Burghardt, SJ, Paulist Press, 1995.