Imagine you are a high school senior, just looking to find your way through your community service requirements and graduate. You get involved with your parish religious education program, helping teachers prepare students to receive the sacraments. Then one day, the spiritual life of another is thrust into your hands. Another young person, just a couple of years younger than you, has just walked into the school looking for a way through his own personal darkness.
Now imagine you are that second youth. Your mother leads you to the door of the school, just as she led you from your home in Panama to a new home in the United States five years ago. You’ve never been to school — in your world, there are no schools that can penetrate the bubble of Down Syndrome that locks your thoughts and feelings inside. No one really knows what you are capable of learning about life or faith, as even those who care enough to try are held at bay by your 50-word vocabulary.
Miguel Torres, 19, and Juan Rivera, 17, don’t have to imagine such a scenario, they have been the central characters in a challenging and uplifting real-life drama between two young men who under ordinary circumstances could have been classmates, teammates or best friends.
And yet, despite extraordinary circumstances, that’s exactly what they became anyway.
“He’s really smart,” Torres said of Rivera. “He learned things really fast, faster than I thought he would.”
“Miguel is member of our family,” said Rivera’s mother, Raquel.
Speaking through Torres as interpreter, she added, “Juan loves to come to church and he likes Miguel a lot.”
The two found each other when Raquel approached the religious education leaders at Little Rock’s St. Theresa Church with the simple request that Juan be allowed to sit in on his younger sister’s class. But the mother’s plea soon reached one of the teachers, Marianne McElyea, who along with her daughter Natasha Parker, director of religious education at St. Theresa, devised a more ambitious plan.
“Everyone has a right to the sacraments, we just had to teach him on his level,” Parker said. “I knew we had to find a way to teach him, because he deserved to be taught.”
As a longtime educator, McElyea had had experience with special needs students in the past. More pressing problems were Juan’s initial unresponsiveness.
“At first he wouldn’t even look at me,” she said.
Plus neither she nor Parker spoke Spanish fluently. That’s when the final piece came into play.
“I saw Miguel walk by in the hallway and I said ’Miguel, come here. I have a proposition for you,’” McElyea said.
Torres didn’t hesitate to sign on and he never once questioned his decision to help Rivera. Bolstered by McElyea’s lesson plans, assisted by Rivera’s mother and led by his own faith, he somehow knew things would work out in the end. None of that did much to quiet the nerves he had during that first class period, however.
“I was really nervous, I didn’t know how to approach him at first,” Torres said. “After a few classes though, I learned how to communicate with him and from there it got a lot easier.”
Rivera made his first confession and first Communion last year. On the day that happened, some parishioners wept openly, led by Rivera’s mother and teachers.
At the center of everything is the relationship between Rivera and Torres, a bond that is palpable even upon meeting them for the first time. Torres, a soft-spoken young adult who has his eye on college, is the eldest of Miguel and Sanjuana Torres’ four children. The recent Catholic High graduate once considered teaching as a career but will probably pursue a business degree instead.
Now, Torres and Rivera are preparing for confirmation in March.
“Working with Juan has taught me not to be so judgmental about others,” he said. “Appearances are not always what they seem.”