Evaristo Mapruanga SJ, a Jesuit brother from Zimbabwe, had never seen snow.  So when he came in 1989 to my program in Texas for his final Jesuit training, I found this out and The Cheerful Charlie Jesuit Annual Hiking Corps (at that time me and Donald Gelpi SJ, R.I.P.) felt we could correct that.

Evaristo had a lot to learn during the year.  He’d never finished secondary education, so with his superior’s OK, he came to  Austin early and completed a high school GED. He did it so successfully that after his year in Austin (and the summer I’m telling about), he was enrolled in Loyola University New Orleans for an Associate Business Degree.  Everyone there was happy that he did and they came to the universal opinion that Evaristo was one of God’s chosen ones.

For him, though, the highlight of his years here was 1990 and the mountain we climbed.  We packed up in July at the foot of one of the Sierras in Northern California. Gelpi and I had the topological maps keeping us on the trails and we climbed the first couple of days to a cooler altitude. Then we packed up and headed to the pass. When we got there, it was packed with snow.

Evaristo dropped his pack with a happy grunt, his black face glistening with an elated smile, and immediately lay down on his back and created  a “snow angel.”  That must be a human instinct, making a snow angel, since no one had instructed him. 

It was also providential. After he had finished his two added years at Loyola, he went back to Zimbabwe to manage three rustic clinics. He did fine traveling to and fro for several years, but then he developed a persistent chest pain. No one at any of the three clinics could tell it was not a heart problem and by the time he got into the capital, Harare, it was too late to stem the eruption of the internal thoracic artery in his chest and he bled to death internally.  

They told me and I really grieved because I loved the man. His family insisted over my protests that I have the Loyola ring the Jesuits there had got him. I have it now, the only thing of the man I would touch again on this earth.  

But Evaristo is in heaven with his Snow Angel, and I’ll be there with Evaristo and my Snow Angel before too long, please God. This is how our lives go, and it does illustrate how, as far as Purgatory goes, we’re in it.