On tears and 'answered prayers'

I ran across a quote from the 16th century attributed to St. Teresa of Avila. It seemed to apply to some news stories over the past week, a type of story that appears fairly regularly but can get lost in the chaos of the sensational.

The quote is this: "There are more tears over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers." Here are three stories. See if you can find in them the relevance that I do.

I start with another quote, this one from the Los Angeles Police Department, described in a wire story Wednesday. After an L.A. cop made a one-minute video of a homeless woman singing a Puccini aria alone in a subway tunnel, the department tweeted: "4 million people call LA home. 4 million stories. 4 million voices ... sometimes you just have to stop and listen to one, to hear something beautiful."

The video went viral. The homeless woman, a Russian immigrant and classical violinist, became a sudden media celebrity, then retreated from all the attention. Her story is still playing out, but that LA police tweet still haunts - "sometimes you just have to stop and listen to one, to hear something beautiful."

Then there was this report Sunday, a "Suburban Heroes" tale written by our Mick Zawislak: Round Lake Beach police Officer Ken Lupi risked his life and acted decisively when he responded to an accident call in July to find a vehicle on fire and a driver trapped inside. Lupi managed to extinguish the fire and enable the driver to be rescued, and when the department recognized his heroism, he shrugged that he just thought that's what he is paid to do. He added this comment: "Whenever I show up to an accident, whether it's minor or severe, I treat it like, 'What if my family were in that car? What am I going to do to help them?' Because ultimately the goal is to help people."

Are your eyes welling as mine were? Try one more.

On Friday, our Cops & Crime columnists Charles Keeshan and Susan Sarkauskas described a relationship between Palatine police Sgt. Art Delgadillo and Alexa Mang, a 2-year-old girl with numerous health issues, including a deformity in her legs that makes walking difficult. Delgadillo saw her struggling in therapy as he drove past her house one day. He stopped, as the L.A. Police Department might say, to listen to one voice. Alexa responded immediately, and over time, a deep bond formed between the two. What's at its root and, for that matter, Delgadillo's reputation for compassionate service?

"Love," the officer said. "People sense it when other people truly care about them. You can be in any bad situation and a little love can heal. We don't have enough of that."

No, we don't. We have lots of horrific accidents in which a person kills an unarmed neighbor in his own home mistakenly thinking he's an intruder in hers, of shrill political acrimony over phone calls and whistleblowers, of storms and floods and fires and disasters of all sorts. I don't necessarily mean it to be religious, but in St. Teresa's context, I think of these as "unanswered prayers," things we wish did not happen. They produce an unending stream of anxiety and tears. Yet, even so, that stream doesn't compare to the tears - in value if not in volume - produced by "answered prayers," the things that, because they did happen, let us "hear something beautiful."

jslusher@dailyherald.com