The Head Librarian Who Never Smiled

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Retired Pastor’s Column

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

October 25, 2026

“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

from Matthew 22:34-40

During high school and college, I worked for five years for the LA Public Library system at the local (Loyola Village, Westchester) branch. It was an amazing job that paid for half my college education at a Jesuit university, no less. It was 15 hours a week. You could come in whenever you wanted and shelve books, man the check out desk, etc., (and even read in a corner if there was nothing to do!) .Great group of people to work with. The head librarian at the time, who has now passed away, was a nice person, but had a very intense scowl on her face … all the time. She literally never smiled. And so in consequence, people were afraid of her a little bit.

As time went on, I made up my mind that (I know this sounds awful), that when I became older like she was, I didn't want to have that kind of face 😠. So every time I saw her, I would smile 😀. She became a reminder to smile. When I was young, I had knocked my front tooth out on a sheet of ice (in Ohio) and didn't get a replacement until about the age of 15. So in consequence, I learned to not smile (kids can be very unkind). I had to relearn how to do that after my smile was corrected, and she helped teach me this.

Fast-forward, I graduated from college, left this job. A monastery came and went, and I was working for American Airlines. I came back to her retirement party, and so did many other people who had worked in this place. She thought I had become a priest and called me “Fr Gary.” She was 12 years too early!

She took me aside and said, "Gary, I have to ask you a question. Why did you like me so much? Because most people don’t. And I never quite could understand why, but you did." I was thinking to myself, "What an extraordinary question! Well, I did like her, but it wasn't anything unusual." I wondered why she asked. I think she actually felt free to ask me this question because she thought I was a priest. What an extraordinary moment! I said, "Yes, I did like you, but why do you ask?"

She said, "It's because every time you saw me, you smiled." Well, of course, I didn't tell her that the reason I was doing that was because I didn't want my face to freeze in the same position that hers was in! It sounds funny to say this, but this little thing I was doing meant a great deal to her. And I went home and thought about this. I already was hoping to become a priest, and I realized then, and I still think about this today, that it's these small acts of kindness, thoughtfulness, intentionality, time we take with someone that makes all the difference. She remembered that.

We may think we love God, but we can't see him. We may go to church and pray and interact with people that we like well, but God will always place people in our lives that are difficult to deal with. They may be bosses or family members. They may be acquaintances that rub us the wrong way at times. They may be people that are deliberately trying to hurt us, on social media or worse, ex-spouses or children that don't speak to us, or whatever the situation. And of course, politics.

Thanksgiving is coming up. What do we do with our differences? God doesn't command us to like everybody. He just tells us to love them, and we do that by being courteous, by trying to be interested in them, by caring about people, especially people that don't look like they deserve to be cared about. It’s what we don’t say as much as what we do.

Jesus is always hiding in disguise behind every face. Some are very disfigured, it is true, and nobody's perfect at this, but Jesus deliberately puts the unwanted, the handicapped, the person that always scowls (like my librarian friend), the person who doesn't like us or is making our life miserable, what do we do with them? Well, we can pray for them. We can at least not be passive-aggressive. We don't have to talk about them to everybody in town about what they've done to us or what we feel about them. These are our tests. This is how we show God we love him. He told us he's going to be in disguise throughout our lives.

The last judgment is based on how we acted toward the sick, the in prison, the hungry, and so on, and it's not limited to that list. We can only know we love God by how we treat our neighbor.

Father Gary