April 19, 2023
The innkeeper’s joy
By Liz Duffy ’23
The first story I heard about St. Dominic tells of him remaining awake all night, speaking with the keeper of the inn he was visiting while traveling through Spain. Upon conversing with the man, St. Dominic learned that the innkeeper had stopped practicing the faith. By the end of that night, the innkeeper was convinced of the truth of the Gospel and had resolved to return to it. When I imagine how this night must have unfolded, I cannot help but wonder what St. Dominic’s disposition toward this man must have been. I imagine him engaging the innkeeper with profound patience, kindness, understanding, and charity. I envision the two men sharing a pitcher of beer on the first floor of the inn, discussing questions that everyone asks, at one time or another: Who am I? What was I made for? What is happiness, and how do I attain it? I imagine, with the sun rising over the horizon, St. Dominic embracing the innkeeper with brotherly love, as the innkeeper cries with the particular joy that comes when one encounters true charity.
The mental image I have of this encounter is the result of a personal experience not unlike the innkeeper’s. Before I arrived at Providence College, I was a staunch agnostic, firmly resistant to the Catholic faith. During my first theology class, a class I only enrolled in because it would eventually be required, I found myself asking question upon question. Knowing that the Dominican friars would be good resources for the answers, I began to meet with them regularly to have conversations about the faith. Their answers were always delivered with patience and kindness and demonstrated a respect for me and the questions I was asking. Their dispositions reopened my mind, softened my heart, inspired me to pursue theology, and prepared me to receive the gift of faith that God had been trying to give to me all along.
Like the innkeeper and many of my friends at PC, I was given the greatest gift I could receive because of the determination of St. Dominic: the gift of the truth communicated in love. It is the truth that shapes the minds and hearts of the students at Providence, an institution which exists only because St. Dominic committed himself to helping others know the deep, pervasive, and transformative joy that comes from rejoicing in the truth. I am deeply grateful to the friars I have come to know, who never once failed to guide me with the same patience, charity, and humility with which St. Dominic presumably treated the innkeeper. In a time when, for many, the truth has become seemingly slippery and elusive, reduced to relativized conclusions drawn from personal experiences, it is essential that PC continues to commit itself to sharing the truth with its students. The temptation to falter is strong, and the cultural resistance to the truth of the dignity of human life, and to the providence of God, is powerful. But imagine what good we stand to preserve if veritas continues to be our motto, not only in name, but in action: that particular joy of the innkeeper that so many students have the opportunity to experience, and the promise of an everlasting happiness that surpasses anything we can imagine.
Liz Duffy ’23, from East Greenwich, Rhode Island, majored in theology and humanities. She received a Father Philip A. Smith Fellowship for Service and Study Abroad to spend the summer of 2022 in Geneva with Dominicans for Justice and Peace, a delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Council. She is the daughter of Robert Duffy ’82 and Sharon Stetkiewicz Duffy ’82, and the sister of Meaghan Duffy Orrall ’11 and John Duffy ’20.
