For someone who went through a fairly detached childhood, she is remarkably concerned with relationships between people, with making contacts, with guiding the elderly, the sick and the dying. She also hangs out with a group of toddlers and preschoolers on a weekly basis.
And by ‘detached youth’ I mean: Lucia Simao (50) grew up as the child of two Dutch Indos, who left their Indonesian homeland in 1952, also for their own safety, and left for Amsterdam. The future spouses turned out to be on the same boat, the Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, but they only discovered this in the Netherlands, when they found each other and got married and had children.
Lucia casually talks about family life, as if it were a detail that everyone will recognize: that she was never allowed to address her father directly, but that she always turned to her mother with the words: ‘Mama, can you ask papa if …’ Fill it in. Father spoke indirectly through his wife’s voice, like an oracle, both in Dordrecht and in Krimpen aan den IJssel, where the Simaos eventually settled.
I think it’s an incredible story: it was the 70s and 80s in the Netherlands. But Lucia simply states: “I grew up in anger, because my father was angry, an anger that he in turn inherited from his father, who was forced to work as a KNIL soldier on the Burmese railway.”
I see Lucia Simao almost every week, often without speaking to her: in church, during mass, she follows a string of toddlers and preschoolers to the altar, where the youngest ones put a candle – “bring light”. as Lucia describes it. The children can say themselves to whom they dedicate the candle.
Shortly before that, Lucia told them something about God and about Christ, during the so-called children’s ministry: the procession that enters the church halfway through the liturgy arouses slight emotion. It’s a brief moment, and they’re gone again, disappearing into the adjacent rectory.
I have now also made an appointment there: in the rectory of the Nicholas Basilica in Amsterdam, where Lucia has recently found work as an administrator, for a small financial compensation. And where she now has her own office at her disposal, to be able to work in peace, she has two children at home. As a volunteer she visits, also for the church, the sick and people who for whatever reason are unable to attend the Eucharistic celebration themselves. She is the (unpaid) coordinator of the visiting group, as it is called, delivers the Holy Communion consecrated by the priest, talks to people at home, reads the Gospel, sometimes prays with them when they ask.
All in all, she puts in about ten hours of volunteer work a week in these church affairs. And oh yes, she also runs a funeral company, because she specializes in bereavement counseling.
Rough estimate: working weeks of 80 to 90 hours.
Not Catholic
And to think that until her fortieth birthday Lucia Simao was convinced that she might need a god, but she certainly didn’t need a church. And she certainly wouldn’t become a Catholic, because she knew about her father: ‘There they pray to Mary. And that’s not good.’
Again the enigmatic father, with whom she only spoke about his Indonesian past ten years ago. “The man walked up the deck to the boat, but had no idea where he was going. Yes, to the Netherlands. But that he would initially end up there with a family who immediately announced after his tiring long journey: ‘Just too late, no more food, because the potatoes have already been counted’, he had never experienced anything like this.” After that there were boarding houses for him and after that a marriage, a house of his own and children.
Until the age of six, she and her parents attended the New Apostolic Church, an orthodox Protestant denomination that was founded in the 19th century. But then and there something must have happened, Lucia doesn’t know, but overnight nobody went to church anymore. End – and as so often: no further explanation.
She didn’t feel very connected to others in the city anyway. For a long time she did not consciously know that she was a ‘brown girl’, certainly looking back on the white majority on the street and at school at that time. Later she heard from a school friend that she could not be invited to a birthday party ‘because my mother doesn’t want brown people in the house’.
Now Lucia leads a procession of children, many of whom are colored, brown, mixed, black. The girl who was not allowed to participate is now the leader, the one who teaches.
The term religion comes from the Latin ‘religare’, according to the Church Father Augustine, which means as much as ‘to bind, to bind together’. I present it to Lucia, she nods, but as I say it, I know that she is the doer, who also gets to work without any philosophical or theological explanations.
An insignificant incident occurs during our conversation: we are in the large rectory kitchen, Lucia has fetched cake, she serves it on a plate and I drop a piece on the carpet. Before I can even get to my legs, she has paper to hand, a cloth, gives me a new piece, a new knife. “You are very clean,” I say. She: “But it’s not my own kitchen either, I’m a guest here.”
Helping other people, being of service, doing good: that is not simply seen as quality these days, especially not when women devote themselves to it. I ask about the position of the Indos in the Netherlands, who for a long time especially did not want to cause any nuisance. Lucia adds: “That so-called silent integration of us: everything had to remain indoors and you were polite to the white Dutchman.”
Exuberant singing
Even without a church there was the conviction that she was carried, and that by God. She went to secondary school, she rose to become an executive secretary, and later on she enrolled in the cooking school. She asked people she met if they could tell her about their faith or the church they attended. “Apparently I was very busy with that, but most of them became very uncomfortable with my questions. Until a friend’s parents said, “Come with us.” That became the Crossroads church in Amstelveen, an international community with activist and evangelical features. Lucia: “It wasn’t a church building, it looked more like a school or a sports hall and I found that immediately reassuring. And the first thing I heard was music, an exuberant singing. Now I had sung in pop bands as a teenager, so that was coming home.” She also became active at Crossroads immediately.
In the meantime she had met someone through the cooking school: she liked it when he went to the meetings with her. He did, a courtesy call, because he was not caught. This man was busy orienting himself towards Catholicism, and he hadn’t learned that from home either. Then she had to go with him, he thought, to the Nicholas Basilica in Amsterdam. She reluctantly went.
“But I sat there, and was immediately touched by the words of Jim Schilder, the chaplain who then presided. It was like he told me everything personally. There was a man, a father figure who spoke to me constantly.”
The second time she attended mass, a bum sat next to her on the couch. Again she felt connected to the place, and to the stranger next to her. “I became a Catholic not long after, on March 26, 2016. Baptism was no longer necessary, I received Holy Confirmation.”
But before that, she had already been asked to become the coordinator of the small children in this Catholic Church. “And it had to be, because I can’t just sit there and pray and kneel, I have things to do, I have to be with others.” Meanwhile, Lucia Simao is intertwined with the Catholic Church, which brings her peace. That is also why she is happy with her office in the rectory, in these hectic times, with children at home. “And I now know so many people here, I am attached to this community.”
Suddenly this anecdote comes to her mind: “It’s about my name, and about what I have to do in my life. I see a bum, outside in the square in front of the church, who is rooting in a trash can. At that moment I am just eating a sandwich, and I address the man: does he perhaps want a piece? He looks up in surprise and then says in really posh Dutch: ‘But madam, how awful aerdigh yours.’ His name is Hans, he says he just came from Rome, and as soon as he hears my name he exclaims: ‘Lucia, that is light born at dawn.’”
She summarizes: “It is my job from my angry youth to bring the light to the people.”