Zeke II - The Sequel: Convert or Revert?

The past four days I’ve reflected on the story of a self-seeking guy who has a turnaround.  He has an epiphany – which means an opening, a window through which he sees life differently, a door through which he is drawn, into a place that calls him to change.  We don’t know what made Zeke climb that tree.  We know that Moses and his burning bush, and Paul got knocked off his horse by a voice.  We know from their becoming ongoing characters in Scripture stories that those epiphanies pretty much stuck, that by and large they got turned around and stayed that way.  But Zacchaeus/Zeke is a bit player, steals a scene or two and then is gone.  We don’t know if he stayed changed, or if he reverted to his old self after awhile.

Heart and Home

A good story can fool you; it can take you where courage would not.  A good storyteller knows your heart, and knows how to get in.  But the really good storyteller knows how to take you by the hand and walk you through your own heart.  This story of Zeke in the last two postings is our own story, and the house Jesus is entering is not merely our house, messy as it is, but our own heart. 

As soon as Jesus tells Zacchaeus he is coming over, Z starts to clean up.  He’ll give to the poor half of all he has.  His home and heart are crowded with stuff that he thought would make him happy, perhaps.  He needs to make room for this Rock Star who knows his name, and apparently knows his heart, knows that if there’s to be room for him, Z’s got some cleaning out to do

Guess Who's Dropping In!

In yesterday’s posting, I played with the story of Zacchaeus  and Jesus calling him down from the tree he climbed on to get a better view than his short legs would give him.  I gave him a casual name, Zeke, in the hope of bringing the story into the present, making it easier for us to put ourselves into the story.  I want us to be able to enter the story because it is basic theo-logy, the meaning of God to us.   I called Zacchaeus “Zeke” to make him more like a common person, more like you and me.  Zeke was a “what’s in it for me” kind of guy.  

When I was working in Student Life at University of Detroit Mercy  I was always looking for ways to get us in the media, to let folks see how good we were.  On the Monday of Halloween week one year, I had the brainstorm of calling a local DJ who was a UDM alumnus for help.  On Friday nights, he was “Count Scary,” the ghoulishly costumed host of a horror movie show on local TV.  His character was just kitschy enough to make him popular, especially around Halloween.  I called him and asked him if as an alumnus he would make an appearance

Are You Out Of Your Tree?

Zeke was clever.  No flies on him!  Even if there had been rocket scientists around in 61 BCE when the Romans world conquest included Jerusalem, it would not have taken one – a rocket scientist that is, to see the advantages in joining the conquerors.  The Roman Empire seems to have been able to spread expand so broadly not only through military might, but through their policy of leaving locals in charge.  Local religious customs were allowed to continue, and local government.  The Romans posted soldiers and collected taxes to cover the cost of occupation and send some money back to Mama and the bambini in Roma.  This is where Zeke comes in.

Zeke was clever.  He was always looking for an angle.  He felt like he needed an angle to make up for the fact that he was the shortest of the kids he ran with.  His mother told him he ought to be a lawyer.  And so

Gift of Story; Story of Gift

Did you ever think of how a gift is like an onion?  I see a brightly wrapped box.  Then as I unwrap it, it becomes a sequence of clues, and a challenge not only to discover what it is, but how I should act receiving it.  Will I like it or not?  How will I act if I do not so that the giver is not hurt?  Then it becomes a thing, an object that I can identify, that has a connotation, a name that it is generally called.  It is, for example, a toaster. 

“A toaster", I might exclaim, and before the words reach the nearest wall, it becomes a matter of why-ness.  Why did this person give me a toaster?  I look at the toaster, but it gives me no answer.  So I look at the face of the giver. 

Whose Heartbeat?

Le Pichon’s references (in the previous postings) to the heart being educated by relationship, and the idea of our being born not with full humanity but with full potential of humanity drew me into powerful musing, and a powerful experience.

One of the gifts of a lifetime in relationships with Jesuits was the theological garden of delights of Karl Rahner, S.J.    One of his essential ideas is that humanity perfectly developed is divinity, that since we are formed in the likeness of God, it is Godliness that is our true nature. 

Kathy has been out away for three or four days, returning today from a visit with friends in Detroit.  When she is gone, my sleep changes.  I waken at night and do not fall immediately back to sleep.  And so instead of waking quickly and clearly and early, I find myself stirring slowly, doing what most of call “sleeping in”

Educating the Heart

 Xavier le Pichon (see the previous posting) said it: we are not born all at once with fullness of humanity, but with the capacity for full humanity.  We grow human (the French would interchange the English word “humane”) as we choose to live in relationship.  Educating the heart, he says, is not done by ourselves alone; it is done in relationship.  When the kids were infants and toddlers, we lived in a very simple flat with one small bathroom.  In that bathroom was a window with a type of privacy glass that was designed

The Gift of Fragility

“It is at this instant that I suddenly discovered that my life would never be the same: I could not go back to my lab and continue to live as before. The “Poor” had knocked at my door. I had opened it. He had entered and was now with me forever. Borrowing the words of Isaiah⁴, I had recognized in this child my own flesh and I could not escape any more. I did not know his name and yet he had given me a new name that I had been expecting for years. Within his suffering, my new friend had a mysterious power of presence that had enlightened my own self. In exchange for the small amount of love that I had been manifesting in my own poor way, I had received the gift of the Spirit of God who was dwelling in him. Through this gift I had been confirmed in the depth of my living being, that is of my loving being, who needs presence and who needs at the same time to give himself and to be received fully within a unique relationship.”

Xavier le Pichon: do you know who he is?  Rather than writing today, I encourage you to listen to Krista Tippett’s interview with him, to read his essay “Ecce Homo”.  My words would be a shallow reflection of his.  HERE is a link to the “On Being” web page   Enjoy.

On Wings of Doubtful Prayer

We’re told that the cry of the poor reaches the heavens and does not return until it has done its work.   I think we’re taken there too, when the poor who cry out in prayer is us.

The question of God answering our prayers is perhaps akin to that of asking why a loving God would allow tragedies.  When I read this chapter of Sirach, there is a part of me that wings heavenward, and a part of me that remains here in the mire of doubt. 

I watched a film, simply entitled “Paris” in the opening scene of which a character is told that he has a potentially fatal heart condition.  He wanders

Do We Listen?

Sometimes in my waking, I find that it is words that stir me.  When last year I thought that my life might be radically shortened by the aneurism that now seems benign, I would take these waking words as legacy, as a gem to polish and display for the sake of its beauty, as a gift I was given to leave behind.  I would gratefully and dutifully rise and write.  More often now when I am stirred by waking words I am fooled by their clarity and brilliance to believe that they are unforgettable, that they will return to me

Puck the Dog on Freedom

I sit here wondering why I do this, why I write.  Are there not already words enough to . . . what, to lift the curtain of unknowing, to enkindle a flame of hope, to scrape against the heavy stone of our lives some flint that gives off a spark – of hope, or passion, or dream?

Kathy hasn’t said “hello” very often lately.  She hasn’t seen me returning from being absent-minded, self-centered, somewhere else right here.  For the first year or so, of retirement that is, I confess I wanted to be released; I just wanted to be free to do what I wanted.  I’d worked for 41 years, been married for 40, woken on 3000 Sundays thinking “Mass”.  She would find me arriving several times a day, returning from wherever I had been, right there beside her.  And so several times a day, she’d say “Hello.”

I took Puck for a short walk last night.  He’s a really good dog.  Our daughter and son-in-law trained him

Justice: Let it RAIN!

I confess that I have misunderstood the Bioneers.  I thought that they were dreamers who would not even see a hungry person while rushing to clean up a river.  There’s a lot of land conservancy activity up here, a lot of bird counting and removal of dams to let the fish spawn more naturally.   So I won’t beat myself up for turning my back on the Bioneers in order to give my time to working with homelessness and poverty.  But I’m glad I discovered that they’re into justice, too.  It is Bioneers weekend here, and their promotional information has been everywhere for the past two months.  About a month ago, I bothered to read the elegantly clear and simple motto for the Great Lakes Bioneers 9^th Annual Conference:” Inspiring Action for People and Planet”.  The word “People” jumped out at me

What Do You Stand For?

Standing for something is often fighting against things pushing us down.  But some golden times, it is giving in to something lifting us up.  Moses is standing there, high up where he can see his armies, high there holding his arms up to his God.  As long as he can stand, holding high the staff, the rod that God had turned into a serpent, and then into a staff again, the armies advance.  When he tires and cannot stand like that as God has instructed him, the armies falter.  It is a battle not only against the Amalekites, but against his own exhaustion.  The armies, which had been advancing as Moses stood strong, were now struggling as Moses was weakening.  The day was saved by the support, literally, of his older brother

Did You SEE That Beggar?

I said yesterday that I had been awakened by the word more.  After a Tuesday of prayer first thing in the morning and spending time with my homeless friends at the shelter last thing in the evening, I had wakened to that one word.  And I know why.

Find God in them, we were told, in the ones we couldn’t stand, in the ones who drove us nuts.  Find Christ in them.  It was probably grade school, and it was possibly the nun who was teaching us that was one of those in whom we tried to find God.  What sounds like a call to compassion was more an application of fear in those days when heaven and hell were used far more often than today, when life was a slow but certain progress toward one or the other, and when we were never, except in those moments of blissfully weightless strolls from the confessional, quite comfortable with where we would end up.  

Finding God in them meant “you’d better not ignore me if I show up.”  The Messiah would, you know – show up, I mean.  Jesus said he’d come back.  He also said that at the end of the world there would be a big sorting out.  Wheat would go into the barns and weeds into the fire.  Sheep would go into heaven and goats to hell.  And the bad ones would find out that the beggar they ignored was, you guessed it

Time's a-Wastin'!

"Cows in the Morning" courtesy Michiel1972

It was the morning ritual.  My Aunt Arlene’s dad, Gust Kopack, would sweep into the back porch of the farmhouse after milking the cows, peeling off his striped denim coveralls with their faint sweet smell of fresh milk, the first strap off his shoulder before the screen door thwacked behind him, and he’d hang them all in one motion on the hook next to the door to the house, calling to my Uncle Joe, “Come on, Joe, time’s a-wastin’!”  And off they’d go to fish for the trout we’d have for breakfast.

Time’s a-wastin’.  “Gust” was what

The Wait of Words

I write in the morning, the still dark mornings of autumn, before the time change, when it seems that is the middle of the night and I should be sleeping, but words begin.

At Mass yesterday (does this make it prayer?) I was musing about my writing lately, about how it felt, often, like a pile of words, a too-heavy pile of words added to words.  I thought about poetry, about how it gives the reader not an answer, and not even a question, but an unknowing that calls for time, time to slow down, and perhaps even stop, to listen, like when you thought you heard something and stopped

A Wolf in the Meadow?

New York City, Manhattan Island: so many people, so little that eye contact.  On our little block on Warrington in Detroit, we had thrived on eye contact.  Our faces helped each other feel safe, cared about, known and appreciated.  But here my brother Dan warned me, as we left his nondescript red brick ten-story apartment building in the Garment District, to stop that, greeting people on the sidewalk, saying “good morning.”  I gave him my little brother “Yeah, yeah” smile but he said it again, big brotherishly.  “You don’t do that here.”  Even in the Grand Street Subway station, when people entering the turnstiles faced those exiting the adjacent turnstiles, there was not a glance at each other.  On the subway as we rode up toward Central Park I noticed that people would look at others, but look away when their looking was noticed by their subjects.  There was curiosity, but not communication.  When we

Prayer and Works III: God's Math

In the Kingdom, it’s a whole new ballgame.  Here’s a box score a colleague sent my years ago after a frustrating committee meeting during which I refused to give in to pessimistic assumptions.  He admired my resolute optimism.  To the logical person, this doesn’t add up.  The idealists scored one in the second and one in the eight, and thus have only two runs, thus losing the game.  But my friend Jeff was a minister, and knew God’s math is different.

My name in John, and I’m a workaholic.  I don’t like to stop.  Back in the 50s when I was growing up, the Catholic Mass was in Latin.  The priest, robed in heavy brocade chasuble and lace-hemmed white surplice would say Mass with his back to the congregation, but every once in awhile he would turn, face the people, open his folded hands toward them and say “Oremus”: Let us pray.  There would be

Prayer and Works II

We had a great babysitter when the kids were small, a generous, mature young woman who, through high school and college, was so good and loved us so much that every year or two, she would encourage us to leave not just for an evening, but for a whole weekend, her gift to us.  The kids loved her, and she enjoyed getting out of her own house, one of eight kids there.  One such weekend Kathy and I drove across the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario and took the train to Toronto. 

Neither of us had been on a train for years, and we thought it kind of exotic.  But in actuality, the rail beds were in such disrepair that instead of the train gliding through the little towns on the way, it had to slow down terribly, rocking and rolling over the uneven tracks, to avoid derailment.  On the way back, about a half mile from Windsor’s Walkerville Station, the train did actually come to a grinding halt off the rails, despite having slowed down to less than

Prayer and Works I

When I stop working with the homeless, I forget that the world is wounded in a way that I can help heal.  When I stop reading Scripture, I forget that I am wounded in a way that God can help heal.  I wrote this to a friend, Dave Nichols, who in his retirement continues to serve much as he did in his “working” life as a Baptist Minister, writing and serving.  Every few days I receive from him the latest in his reflections on Scripture.  Often my busyness finds me giving them a cursory look and filing them in my “ought to read” file.  Yesterday by Gods grace I happened to really read what he sent, and it was so good that I dropped him a note of gratitude.  It ended with the statement above, which struck me with their elegance.

Prayer and “works” – the way of a person of faith.  Last month when our nephew died suddenly, one of our daughters blessed us with a fruitful reflection.  She was so struck by the goodness and perseverance of our nephew’s parents, in light of their having lost both of their adult children in two years.  She said that all of our lives ride on two rails, joy and tragedy, and the path of our lives curves to shift our weight onto one or the other, but we are always in contact with both.  We keep from overturning by accepting the support of both rails.  Yesterday my note to Dave seems to have pointed out to me two such rails on which the person of faith moves forward without falling over.  I’ll take this for a ride tomorrow.

Now You're Cookin'

In leisure there is reverie.  Memoires that have been following us, perhaps running on little legs to keep up with us when we are busy, finally can catch up with us.  Sometimes they seem to secretly run ahead of us when we are not looking and stand there, waiting for us to come face to face with them, so they can see the surprise on our faces.  My parents have been doing that these weeks of summer have given way to the hunkering down, the husbanding of homes toward the great and welcoming winter quiet. 

Just now as I was cleaning out yesterday’s ashes from the wood stove and starting today’s fire, my mom came back to me.  I was nursing the new fire along as it struggled to catch from paper to workshop scraps to newly seasoned and split logs.  It makes me think of the nation’s economy, as I

Grounded and Graying...GASP!

Mile after mile I had to fight the urge to just turn my head left and gawk!   I had flown down to Tucson to visit my uncle in the hospital there, and after lifting his spirits I was driving his car southwest to his house for a night’s rest.  I grew up near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, waking each morning to the sound of the jets warming up, and fell asleep watching them line up in the sky to land.  It would be a decade before I would actually fly on one, but my imagination soared for years of my childhood.  These silver birds were a symbol of freedom and adventure for me.  Here in the Arizona desert, their silver was oxidizing to dull gray in sand-locked formations, wing-tip to wing-tip, nose to tail, mile after mile.  An unceremonious chain link fence, gray like their wings, completed the picture of uselessness and decline.  In Detroit I saw miles and

We make the road by walking

It happened again, even with that job, the one I loved so much, the last one.  Kathy and I were driving from our room at Manresa to the campus for an annual dinner, one of these traditions that will likely bring us back down to Detroit from our new home 250 miles north.  As I drove the route down Woodward that I had taken every day for the last ten years at the university, I was surprised to feel it: revulsion.

My first job was washing dishes at the Crestwood Snack Shop, a typical strip mall mom and pop restaurant that was a three mile bike ride from my parents' house in Des Plaines, a suburb of Chicago.  I was 15, but fibbed about my age so I could start working.  For that summer halfway through High School I washed dishes the old fashioned way, in a huge stainless steel double-tub sink, with dish soap that was so caustic that

Frugality and Faith

Slo-Poke.  If you tried to bite it, it would pull your teeth out.  Your only choice was to suck on it.  Well, I suppose you could lick it, but the tongue alone was not enough to really work at that hard caramel, to soften it with (ha!  my mouth just started watering) the saliva that did its job so well,  transforming that hard, sticky candy into sweet syrup that could delight every one of the 10,000 taste buds, not only on the tongue, but under it, and on the insides of the cheeks, and on the lips.    

But the best thing about a Slo-Poke was that it lasted for a long time.  The Sisters of St. Francis of Mary Immaculate had come from downstate, from Joliet, in 1924 to be exact, to teach the children of St. Mary’s School, and they introduced me, I discovered years later

Go Ahead...USE It!

If someone gave you a new car, would you leave it in the garage?  Seems like a waste, doesn’t it? 

Write down the vision clearly upon the tablets,
so that one can read it readily.
For the vision still has its time,
presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint;
if it delays, wait for it,
it will surely come, it will not be late.

I was probably 50 when I began taking evening courses at the University, long after I had received my last degree.  I took them because I realized that soon I’d be retired and not be able to do so.  It seemed like a waste not to use this resource that was free to me as an employee.  When some of the traditionally aged students saw me walk into the classroom and take a seat at a desk just like them, they squirmed and commented to each other that they might have a poorer chance for a good grade with old guys like me there.  But it was one of those students who provided me