A View from the Shoulders

As soon as my kids were old enough to sit, I’d put my hands around their waists and put them onto my shoulders.  I’d put their legs around my neck and circle my forefingers and thumbs around their soft little wrists cupping my hands around theirs, holding on firmly but gently, so they could sit up there safely.  Sometimes I’d exaggerate

Inpetration - Incarnation

Their faces come back to me in my falling asleep and in my waking.  Their eyes are looking into mine, mine into theirs.  We are smiling.  Even as we are looking into each others’ eyes, our peripheral vision is taking in the changes that the faces have undergone in these intervening (good Lord!) 20 years since they were my students.  We had come together in one of the really grand places in Detroit, old diamonds in the new rough.  They had done this kind of thing before, planning a big, dressy party in places we forget about, places that deserve not only to be remembered, but to be enjoyed.  Twenty years ago on this same Belle Isle, the 985 acre island park in the Detroit River, the Marusich Brothers coordinated the annual Beaux Arts Ball, renting generators and

Walking With Myself

I joined myself for a walk yesterday.  We live, Kathy and I, in a new world. A little more than a year ago we left the city in which we lived for forty years to a town 200 miles away. But I wonder, after yesterday, if we ever really moved.
Our little street in Detroit, Warrington Drive, borders Livernois Avenue, a boulevard in the center of which was for decades traveled by streetcars, its rails and wooden ties unearthed just four years ago in a landscaping project. Livernois stretches from Historic Fort Wayne along the Detroit River to the south to Eight Mile road, the city limits on the north, and even wider thoroughfare running east and west between Lake St. Clare on the East and well, eventually Lake Michigan, with thousands of towns and a few cities in between. But in the shadow of the noise of traffic on Livernois, Warrington is more like a village. And that

Why Do We Wait?

“Why are we waiting for the Messiah; why are we waiting for the Mahavir?  Your eyes will suffice to give tired men hope.”  In “New York, I Love You” Mansuhkhbai, a Jain diamond merchant sits with Rifka, a customer bargaining with him for a diamond.  In the process of trying to soften up each other to have the advantage in bargaining, they each disclose a truth at the busy, hazardous intersection of religion and love.  His wife has left him

Gates, Walls, and Chasms: Dives and Lazarus Part III

An irony of the Dives and Lazarus story struck me.  Dives’ Hell was simply an extension of the way he had chosen to live his life: separated.  In life, he trusted the wall to keep Lazarus on the outside, away from himself.   In death, he found himself wanting contact but being sentenced to isolation.  He was so distressed by heat and thirst that he wanted the dirty beggar to dip his scabby finger into water and touch his tongue!  My, how his aversion has melted in the

Gates, Walls, and Chasms: Dives and Lazarus Part II

A simple follow-up to yesterday’s look at Dives and Lazarus.  It seems to me that there are some questions that arise from the story that might serve as lenses through which we can examine our own lives.

What are the walls we put up, or leave up?  What are the structures in our daily routines, in our habits or “order” that enable us to avoid others, not only in our world or community, but in our family?

What are the things that make others repulsive to us?   What do we allow to be “turn-offs” that let us justify the hardship of others or justify not seeing them?

Who do we hold at a distance?   Who do we wall out? 

What are the doorways, the openings through which we could be going, to approach the Lazaruses in our lives, to touch the untouchables?  Where can we cut some newdoors?

Tomorrow – Hell as Chasm, Life as Insect. 

Gates, Walls, and Chasms: Dives and Lazarus Part I

Gates, walls, fences, and in days of old when knights were bold, moats: all meant for the same purpose, to separate.  Distance works, too, or chasms.  Next Sunday’s Gospel  is a classic.  The names of the two main characters are from Latin (Dives means “rich man”) and Hebrew (Lazarus is a form of Eleazar, which means “helped by God”.)  Lazarus is a poor man with sores on his flesh.  Oh, did you find at least a little “ewww” or “yuuuck” involuntarily shudder up at you from inside?  Did you feel a little repulsion at the open sore thing?  So maybe it’s not totally alien for you

Here's Looking at You.

I look down the table at the homeless shelter, at the faces of these people with whom I share Tuesday evenings, and find myself, ironically, at home.  They have allowed me to put them in the tomb with Lazarus (Sartre’s Stare, God’s Gaze from a few days ago) and they have shared with me what fears would keep them from coming out, of coming to life, to a new life, another chance to be alive.  But these women and men are so wounded.  Some suffer a major wound, one so large that healing is slow, and hope for recovery is thin.  Other are so covered with small wounds, each minor by itself but the very accumulation of them saps their energy, weakens them like a fever that keeps us in our beds when we want so badly to get up, get going.

They were trusting, forthcoming, and candid

Sunday Looks

If looks could kill

The look of love

Wipe that look off your face.

He gave me a dirty look.

I see that look in your eyes.

When I grew up, Sundays were different.  Stores were closed – ­all of them, even gas stations.  The reason was that servile work was not allowed on what the Christian world considered the Sabbath.  In Jewish communities, Friday evening would find families dressed in somber clothes walking to temple, walking because sundown was the beginning of the Sabbath, and driving was prohibited because driving was, before cars, hitching up horses and taking the harness and pulling on the reins and the brushing them properly and putting food in their bins and watering them – work that was prohibited on the Sabbath.  Servile work – I recall religion classes at St. Mary’s School, remember trying to figure out what servile work was.  Servile is derived from the Latin, servus, meaning servant or slave.  Servile work was work you didn’t do for pleasure, work that would be done by servants or slaves if you had them.  When I was growing

Sartre’s Stare – God’s Gaze

Lazarus – Come out!  What if Lazarus hesitated, to come back to life?  That’s what I asked my group at the shelter last night.  And what they said showed me once again that we are so much alike, we with homes and they without.

Several years ago, Marion Love did an exercise at Manresa with the twenty or thirty of us who were part of a two-year internship in Ignatian Spirituality – briefly, wishing to “Find God in All Things”, and perhaps to help others do so as well.  She gave us each a flat stone – the kind you might toss spinning into the lake to try to skip it, weightlessly, across the surface of the water, flying again and again until gravity finally wins, but not before delighting us, convincing us that maybe it, for this time, would escape, would simply float into the sky.  Imagine this stone much larger, rolled across your tomb.  You wake up, as Jesus did, finding yourself risen from the dead.  All that is between you and new life is this stone.  All you need to do is touch it and it will roll away, and you will be alive again.

What is Your Net Worth?

I bet you think I’m asking a financial question.  But I’m not, and that’s just the point.

It’s been just over a year since I received a paycheck.  For the previous 40 years, University of Detroit Mercy had validated my service to its students and colleagues with regular checks adequate to support a simple lifestyle.  As long as we were spending less than we received, I felt confident that we’d be fine, and we were.  We raised the kids, sent them through Catholic school, and got them started in college.  As we approached age 62, our earliest opportunity to begin drawing Social Security benefits, we both began to look at the benefits of retirement.  We’d learned that health is not to be taken for granted, and did not want to postpone it any longer than necessary.  We had made conservative investment decisions, and it seemed that we had adequate resources to take the plunge.  I told my boss that

Endless Summer, Endless Vacation, and Retirement

I was ten, I imagine.  I think we had company, but my brother Dan and I had been excused from sitting politely, excused to play outside.  Summer was, more than anything else, playing outside.  And it was staying up beyond the 7:30 bedtime that our parents thought was necessary for us to be able to get up for school alert.  It was the Fourth of July.  We could hear fireworks north of us, and a few seconds after each big boom the dark sky would brighten.  We sat on the north-facing front porch, hoping one of the skyrockets would go up enough for us to see, high over the trees next to the Petropuolos farm and in the back yards of the houses along Scott Street.  Three houses down Pratt Avenue, the Duda kids were sitting on their roof.  They got away with things.  Their parents weren’t strict.  But seeing them gave Dan and me the idea that if we stood on the railing of the porch and held on to the rain gutter, we might be high enough to see something.  No, we didn’t fall, but no, we didn’t see anything either.  I tell the story because even as I ached to see the excitement in the sky that was promised by the sound of it, I ached because the Fourth of July meant that Summer was half over, that we’d be going back to school.  Playing outside and staying up late would soon come to an end.  That ache would remain with me, like ringing in my ears that I could forget or be obsessed by, but it was always there.

When I was thirty, the same aching was true with vacations, but now instead of a three-month summer to anticipate and mourn, we had three weeks.  We would pack up the

Meeting the Prodigal Son on Woodward Avenue...Part II

Woodward Avenue paved over the old Sauk Indian Saginaw Trail for one purpose: to close the distance between Detroit and Pontiac, for moving commerce and eventually cars from one to the other in the shortest time.  It is straight as an arrow as soon as it clears the hills north of 16 mile road, now known as Quarton Road on the west (old Doctor Quarton’s big house is just off Woodward) and Big Beaver to the east, named for a mystery skeleton that temporarily halted a widening and paving project when it was thought to be a small dinosaur.  It turned out to be a big beaver.  Even the mile roads, many renamed now, make it clear that the destination is Detroit, and anything between her and there is an obstacle to be driven past.  And that includes drivers.    

My dad used to call people who drove slowly “Sunday Drivers.”  Another wide avenue in Detroit, Grand Boulevard, was the antithesis of Woodward’s

Meeting the Prodigal Son on Woodward Avenue...Part I

Walking on a narrow trail, we get to see faces of the people we pass.  Walking slows us, and we have a chance to notice their gait, their posture, their way of holding and moving themselves.  When they are ahead of us for some time, don’t we wonder about them, like we wonder about a distant house, its lighted windows calling to us in the night, its inner life a mystery to us? 

My route to work, those last ten years at University of Detroit Mercy, had begun as just such a foot trail from Saginaw Bay to the nearest part of what is now called the Detroit River.  It was members of the Sauk Tribe, pushed south from the St. Lawrence River by other tribes, who walked along it, hunting and trading as they followed the trail over wooded hills, stream-flooded valleys, swampy and riverside flood plains.  In 1701 Antoine Cadillac and other French speaking found that settlement at Detroit River end of that trail a good place to disembark on their quest for settlement and commerce, and that narrow trail with its way of bringing people close to each other would begin to change, as European settlers began to widen it, and to .  By 1805 Thomas Jefferson’s appointed magistrate for the territory, decided to make it 100 feet wide, as a matter of fact, from the river to the town of Pontiac 27 miles to the north.  By the time it was accomplished, it bore his name – Woodward Avenue.  And a century later Henry Ford and leaders from General Motors conspired to pave the old Saginaw Trail with concrete to speed travel between their headquarters and factories in Detroit, Highland Park, and Pontiac. 

Now Woodward Avenue from Downtown Detroit to Downtown Pontiac remains six lanes wide, a center lane in places for left turns, and on long stretches a wide, landscaped median.  While the Saginaw trail brought members of the Sauk Tribe slowly through hill and valley and swamp, Woodward Avenue brings rich and poor of many cultures as quickly as possible

God's Crazy Love Film Festival

The Gospel for Sunday  in many churches is a festival of shorts, little vignettes that feature crazy people.  Luke wrote the screenplay from a story told by Jesus when he was asked by some holy rollers why he hung out with riffraff.  They figured, you see, that he ought to hang out with holy people, being as he was saying he was the Son of God and all.  So he kind of smiles at them, and he starts telling stories, in hopes that they’ll understand why he cares about imperfect people, people with flaws – like us.

First he tells the story of a mad shepherd.  He counts his sheep and realizes that one is missing.  A shepherd in his right mind would keep his eyes open, not to lose any more.   He might consider what price he will get for the 99, maybe fatten them up a bit more and raise the price to cut his losses for the one that got lost in the process. But noooooo, not this guy

Autonomy, Intimacy, and Relationship

Kathy and I have spent the past two pleasantly cool days doing gardening.  Now, in your mind’s eye you might imagine a sweet gray-haired couple side by side in their yard, bending and moving and pulling and tossing in a dance of companionship.  Sorry to disillusion you.  She works on hers, and I work on mine, and each of us comes around from time to time to help the other, to observe and comment or encourage.  And we stop to have lunch together, and stop each other in the afternoon in order to retain enough energy to prepare dinner.  During these days of working like this, I have reflected repeatedly on our dance of autonomy and intimacy, and its difference

Social Security, Providence, and Responsibility

Fr. Jim O’Reilly walked with a major-league gimp.  It seemed to me that for every three-foot stride of forward progress, a bad hip tossed his head back and forth about the same distance.  Despite all of this zigzag movement, his face constantly framed a certain mischievous smile.  He always gave me the impression that he had something on me, like he knew something that I’d rather he didn’t know, that at any moment he’d blurt it out publicly, whatever that truth was.  But this time as he walked past a number of his fellow Jesuits in the dining room at Manresa Jesuit Retreat House, he motioned me over, and then bent close to my ear to share a private comment.  “Don’t ever retire around Jesuits; they’ll give you three jobs!”  In his case, it was true.  He worked - and still works - at Loyola High School, in the adjoining parish, and as a Spiritual Director and mentor for trainees.

We had a visit from a couple of Jesuit friends on Saturday.  As soon as they pulled into the driveway, I realized that they were sacrificing something that I was not.  I’m not speaking of celibacy.

Moral Holiday: Let Go and Let God…?

I remember Kathy’s anguished forehead that first time we went out and left our first child with a babysitter.  I don’t remember what we did, but I do recall that it was not long, despite the babysitter’s comforting and confident manner, before Kathy found a phone and called to check on the baby.  Soon after that we truncated our evening and returned home early.  There was a book around that time entitled Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche.  I could have written a sequel: “Real Moms Don’t Eat Out.”  Man has a lot to learn about ethics from good Moms.  And Kathy’s dilemma is the way I’d like to invite you to look with me at a pair of words that has troubled me since I read them a week ago: “Moral Holiday.”  You can see an earlier post, “Faithful, Free; So What?” and yesterday’s setup for this, “Leisure, Faith, and the Moral Holiday”  to see the string of thought on this.

While Freud built his psychological theories on sexual and parental relationships, a contemporary, William James, looked to relationships with God.  While he questioned (and personally rejected) the existence of God, he observed that people’s thinking and behaving was unquestionably affected by their experiences of God, their

Leisure, Faith, and the Moral Holiday

What justifies indifference in the face of need?  I dunno.  You won’t find answers here.  But maybe we can consider it together.  I’d like to start us on our way by looking at the words.

Leisure – I found it up a narrow stairway that was never really meant for the public.  It always reminded me of the back stairways in the biggest houses in our neighborhood in Detroit, the neighborhood where the live-in servants had quarters

If Freedom Isn’t Free, is Leisure Leisurely?

Back in the 1965 Paul Colwell wrote a song – “Freedom isn’t Free” – that worked in me.  It stuck.  The 60’s brought with them a concept of “Free Love” that began what I’d call “the great confusion”, an idea that spread virally, that we were free to act without consequence, to enjoy without regard for the other, who we assumes would enjoy too, would feel their own pleasure.  Everything was “groovy”, baby.  In 1965, troop levels in Vietnam had increased from 24,000 to 185,000.  Colwell’s song tried to call us back a young generation from the misguided sense of freedom, with little apparent impact.  By 1969 half a million American soldiers, mostly draftees, were slogging in the muddy fields of Southeast Asia, another half million American youth were slogging through the mud of a dairy farm near Bethel, New York.  It was not a war protest, one in the mud here in solidarity with one in the mud there.  It was Woodstock, a music festival where people were high on music, love, and a haze of smoke that was far friendlier than that in the rice paddies

God is My Flight Attendant

“Yo, J – your mother and your brothers want to talk with you.”

“Tell ‘em ‘Later’. I’m busy with you; you’re my mother and my brothers.”

 Sounds troubling, like this “J” is dissin’ his mother.  More troubling – “J” is Jesus, and the exchange comes from Matthew’s Gospel, at the end of Chapter 12.  A good friend, a man that I admire as an example of kindness and passion for humanity, finds this a barrier to following Jesus.  Who the heck would slam the door on his mother because of his “public?”  This week’s Gospel, it’s Luke, another evangelist, who quotes “J”: "If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”  I hear Ronald Reagan saying “Well, there you go again, Jesus

At the Shelter Last Night

They sat all around me at the table last night, these beautiful people who I’ve come to know over the past two months only because they’re homeless.  No, I need to correct that; only because they are in the situation of homelessness. 

One is finding herself, finding her worth, as she loses weight after mustering the courage to leave a physically abusive husband.  She