Brother Vince Wilmes did not recognize the voice on the phone, but he remembered Cliff when he said his name. Fifteen years before Cliff played left field on Brother Vince’s Little League team—statistically a losing season. Of course, for Brother Vince every season tallied more losses than wins. He chose the kids of less ability or awkward coordination because he wanted to give everyone a chance to play.

Cliff-from-left-field called that day because, in his late 20s, he found himself in trouble with the law. A broken family life left him few allies. So, he contacted the one person who always accepted him and asked for prayers.

Brother Vince, a senior Glenmarian with a shock of silver hair, walks with a cane and writes his memoirs. The names and details from the more than a half century of relationships sometimes grow fuzzy in his memory, but a dominant theme comes through: To help people find God, he stood in relationship with the least glamorous and most challenged along the way.

Brother Vince arrived at Glenmary’s farmhouse headquarters two weeks before his 25th birthday in December 1940. The society—consisting at that time of Glenmary’s founder Father William Howard Bishop, Father Raphael Sourd and three deacons—welcomed him as the first Glenmary brother. For the next 60 years, Brother Vince befriended down-and-outers and kids who played clumsy baseball in the missions of Georgia, Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky.

"My contact with each person was a genuine gift," he reflects. "I kept meeting people with issues and needs that God wanted dealt with."

To encourage a fellow shackled by drink, Brother Vince helped him weave grapevine baskets to earn some income. Then, he toted the baskets around in his car selling over a hundred of them at regional gatherings or to friends.

His room at Glenmary headquarters in Cincinnati acts as museum and stockroom for paintings and craft items of people young and old who squeeze through life with only a couple bucks at a time. Each month every penny of his Glenmary brother’s allowance supports friends by purchases, loans and outright gifts.

To raise additional funds Brother Vince scavenger hunts natural materials from the woods to make crosses. More than 60 of his crosses have found their way to Arkansas— mostly to trailers and dwellings of migrant workers with the admonition to read John 12:32—"And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself." Part artist, part poet, he reflects, "People’s gifts and talents are like things that fall from a tree and are lost unless they contact the cross."

A number of his relationships from over the years and over the miles finally contact the cross in prison. Currently Brother Vince writes four friends in jail. He remembers that three of them played Little League with him and wryly adds, "They’re in a different ball game now."

Eunice, whose family Brother Vince helped for over three decades, contacted him from her jail cell. Pregnant at 15 by a man twice her age, she married another fellow a few years later. In the milieu of poverty, her marriage grew desperate until one day Eunice shot her husband. Now she writes Brother Vince as possibly the only man who ever treated her with the respect God shows a daughter. Her letters end, "I love you, Brother Vince."

Slowing down a bit and riding an electric cart between the Glenmary residence and the office where he logs five hours a day in the mail room, Brother Vince constantly thinks about the relationships he has made over the years. "I wonder why there are so many different paths," he muses, "why people aren’t on the path to heaven."

A magnet to boys searching for a healthy role model, Brother Vince in years past opened the rectory and engaged the kids in projects. Working with boys having little or no religious training, he occasionally marched them to church and taught them a prayer. Although his Little Leaguers jumbled the Hail Mary to "pray for us Senators," something must have stuck. Maybe Cliff-from-left-field remembered that experience and, in his trouble, tried to contact God—which he did by calling his former coach.