I Wonder...

It’s Christmas morning, and the Nativity Stable is crowded.  

My friend Dave shared a thought that really threw me.  “If Mary and Joseph were not able to find room at an inn because of all the people traveling to the census, there must have been lots of other people in that stable, too. In Detroit there are “warming centers” where the street homeless can come in out of the cold.  There are no beds, just rows of folding chairs.  The room smells of sweat as clothes worn for days without access to showers begin to raise the humidity in the bare room.  There is no apparent joy in the room that I picture, in a place that used to be called the “24-hour walk-in center”.  There are dedicated people who staff that room during the day, helping people try to find housing, healthcare, and maybe the odd job.  But at night, it’s just the security staff, whose gift to these lost is not encouragement, but merely alertness and equity.  The chairs are as hard as the life that these lost live, in a city to big and too poor to give them hope.

When Dave reads the Gospel story, I hear that the Shepherds leave and spread the joyful news.  But I’m still stuck in the 24-hour walk-in center, and the smell is in my nostrils, and it is worse than a stable.  What sends the shepherds out with enthusiasm? 

He said that in those times, guys who could not find other work often were hired as shepherds.  These guys might have been day-laborers, the bottom of the manpower barrel.  For the last ten weeks I’ve been working with a crew of homeless guys.  Eleven guys started out at Goodwill Inn, half of them Veterans, just three of them who have remained through the program.  What has made me feel like a failure in working with them is that despite their considerable talent and goodness, I can’t seem to lift their sights higher than mere survival. 

So these three are the ones I see as shepherds in my imagination, and I think “what in this scene succeeded where I have not; what has given them enthusiastic hope?  This morning Kathy and I will go to the morning Mass, what is called “The Shepherds’ Mass”.  The church will not smell like the walk-in center, and none of my three day-laborer companions will be there…not physically.   But I am inhabited by these images, and they will enter the church with me.  

Wonder will enter the church with me this morning.  Not wonder as in wonderful; wonder as in I wonder.  I need to experience whatever those shepherds experienced, so I can leave not in disappointment and despair, but with excitement and joy, eager to spread the story of whatever they saw in that crowded stable. 

Promise…Reality…Legacy

photo courtesy of Washington Post

Mary and Zechariah both learned something that I need to remember.  Patience, people!

Zechariah sees this angel, you know?  

Angel says, “Hey!  Zech!  Elizabeth’s pregnant!” 

Zechariah says, "My old Lizzie, she’s too old!"

Angel says, “God can do it, and God did.  She’s six months pregnant, dog!”

Zech says, “No way!  Can’t be!”

Angel says “Shut Uuuuuuuuuuup!” and old Zechariah, he shut up, all right, ‘cuz he can’t speak.  God thinks “Hmmmm…I gotta let this talker think some on this.

And so Zechariah thinks for three months, reflects on things, goes about his work in silence.  And by the time Elizabeth gives birth to a son three months later, Zech has changed his tune.  He’s changed his thinking, and adjusted his view.  He had opened his mind, and when Elizabeth’s body opened up and produced a son, Zechariah opened his mouth and pronounced his name: John.

Mary sees an angel too, and she says yes, and then her body is closed around the child forming in her, closed for nine months.  These days people get ultrasounds, and post fuzzy images on Facebook.  But then it was just mystery, just trust.  Nine months.  She had said yes to something that would change the world.  Her life changed.  But do you suppose that when the angel disappeared and she was alone again there in the recesses of her parents’ house, that she felt any change?  What about the next week?   I would have had doubts.

These weeks I’ve been working with a group of guys; talented, promising…and homeless.  Like the first homeless person I’d known in Detroit and thought I could “fix” when I saw how good he was, I have found myself suffering disappointment by what I see as a lack of progress.  This morning I came upon an article in the Washington Post about 79 Seat Pleasant Elementary School students.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/local/seat-pleasant-following-the-dreamers/?hpid=z2 The video is a great start; please watch it.  

But the three titles of the three articles are what helped me most. 

The Promise

The Reality

The Legacy

Mary and Zechariah waited, each in their own way, from the promise to the reality.  But just as they suffered the reality, the not-quite-as-I’d-hoped-or-imagined, and just as we do, you and I, all of us are held to discover the legacy only as it unfolds…and keeps unfolding, generation after generation.  Whether homelessness or salvation or family…patience, people!

Celebrate Disillusionment!

image courtesy verticalblue.net

Father Anthony Citro shared that today’s readings (4th Sunday of Advent) regard three main characters all of whom were disillusioned.  David thought he’d build a Temple for God, but God said he had something greater in mind – the House of David bringing forth the Messiah.  Paul of Tarsus thought he’d be a hero of the status quo by persecuting the Christians, but got knocked off his high horse and ended up preaching the salvation of Christ.  And Mary of Nazareth thought she’d be a traditional Jewish woman, practicing virtue in the recesses of her home, and the Angel called her to a true light.

None of them, Father Anthony said, ended up with what they had thought.    They all had to let go of the false light (il-lusion, from lucis, the Latin word for “light”) of their preconceptions in order to move into the bright light of truth, and become their true selves. 

If someone came to me and said that they were disillusioned, my response would be sympathy, and I would be inclined to console them.  But to become disillusioned literally means to be relieved of a false light.

This is the season of light, celebrated in many faiths in the northern hemisphere because the days are shortest now, and darkest, and we long for brighter days.  For Christians, it is looking to a star, and following that star to the Bright Babe, who would grow to learn that being the Chosen One would be…different than he might have expected.  He would follow the true light to the Cross, and then beyond the grave, and knock at the tightly shut door of our hearts, we securing ourselves in the darkness that is our illusion, our false light.

This is a time of illusion being stripped from most of the “developed” world.  We are learning that our prosperity is not what we expected.  Our misconception has led to a miscarriage, and our false dream is stillborn.  Mary conceived, and soon hope will be born…again. 

Shall we abandon our sparkly darkness and step into the light?  I think we’d better hold hands.  It will take our eyes some time to adjust to being able to SEE as we come to discover the joy of our humanity, our true selves, our real brightness, our translucent humanness.

Wait, Watch...or WORK? The Call to Christmas

“Waddya waiting for…Christmas?”  My dad would say that if somebody was in his way in traffic.  That was before “road rage”.  While it didn’t seem to faze the driver in front of him, it certainly linked “Christmas” and “waiting” in my psyche.  And didn’t we, as kids, have a hard time waiting?  But we were stuck with it, and so we learned…to…WAIT.

Maybe that’s why last Sunday I was surprised by the word “Watch” in the Gospel.   I guess my default position is more passive and indifferent, a vestige of my childhood – to wait.  I found the call to watchfulness a perturbing call to a more adult engagement in Advent, and my immaturity surprised me.

But this Second Sunday of Advent calls us further.  It calls us to past waiting and even watching.  It calls us to work.  “Prepare the way”….  Oh, yeah?  How?  Make the high places plane and fill in the low places, so that the son of justice can quickly come. 

We read daily about the growing gap between rich and poor.  The high places are getting higher and the low places lower.  How do we turn it around?  How do we?  Who can we lift up?  How can we bring the cry of the poor to the ears of those living so high that they do not hear?

There are 25 working days 'til Christmas.

O Christ! Christ, Come QUICKLY!

My last post suggested the “watch” as defense against threat.  But Advent is a watch not against conquest, but a watch for liberation.  I find myself needing this reminder on this morning after what is called “Black Friday” and before the First Sunday of Advent.  The shopping madness is called “Black Friday” because, we’re told, lots of stores run the whole year in the red, at a loss, and only turn profitable after the holiday shopping surge.  But I think of it as a reminder of the darkness that we create by shading our eyes from the light. 

This morning, if we care to look, we can find all kinds of stories of the madness of yesterday’s bargain-hunting bedlam.  Despite this binge, the likelihood of a profitable year for merchants and suppliers is in doubt because of the weak economy not only here in the U.S., but in Europe as well.  Today’s financial front pages are full of frightening headlines…just as yesterday’s and last week’s and last month’s were.  The Arab Spring seems to have sowed a lot of seeds on rocky ground.  The Supercommittee turns out not to have been super at all.

Perhaps this is why when I realized that Advent was coming, I realized that my watch for the coming of Hope was urgent.  “Come, Lord Jesus, Come” was not sung sotto voce but emerged as a shout!  “O Christ!  Christ, come QUICKLY!"  I am reading, thanks to one of my friends from Tuesday mornings, Exiles, a Novel by Ron Hansen, about Gerard Manley Hopkins… and the five young German Nuns whose death at sea inspired his greatest poem “Wreck of the Deutschland”.  There on Tuesday morning as we prayed for the coming, yet again, of the Son of God, I found myself calling out as the 28 year-old Sister did, 

Away in the loveable west,	185
On a pastoral forehead of Wales,
I was under a roof here, I was at rest,
And they the prey of the gales;
She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly
Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails	190
Was calling ‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’:
The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best.

Hopkins wrote from his safety in Wales, torn to his heart as he imagined them in the gales.  If not for ourselves in the relative safety from which we access this internet, then for those in the storm, must we not cry out?  And as I reflect on the madness of “Black Friday” and other distractions, I find insight in the way that 78 people (including the five newly-vowed nuns of Hopkins’ poem) died.  The S.S. Deutschland did notsink in the depths of the ocean.  It ran aground in shallow water 15 miles from shore - water too deep to sail in but deep enough to drown.

Perhaps we too are aground, stuck while the world swirls around us.  Or perhaps like Hopkins we are in safety as others drown.  Or perhaps we are just oblivious, wrapped in our safe isolation.

Hockey, Chutzpah, and Holiness

20 years ago my brother Dan went with our mom to try to find the place in Europe where her mom grew up.  They succeeded in finding her town, and shared a story that lives on in me though they are both gone.  And it shines a light on Advent as I reflect on this Sunday’s Advent-opening Gospel.

Rosina Luprich served as a watch nightly – and so did the other women in their town of Deutsch-Proben, midway between Vienna and Krakow, Poland during World War I.  With their men all conscripted in the war, the women patrolled the perimeter of the town with pots and pans through the night.  If enemy soldiers came into sight, they would start banging the pans to wake the mothers of the town, so that they could protect their children.  They walked the wall between safety and threat, and they watched.

The Gospel focuses on the word watch as a verb, calling us to remain alert.  But it also describes the four watches of the Roman system, three-hour divisions of the twelve-hour night, in the words “evening, midnight, cockcrow, or dawn.  The Palestinians, on the other hand, broke the 12 hours into three watches, and theologians liken them to childhood, adulthood, and old age. 

I found myself thinking about a line change in hockey, with five guys heading over the boards onto the bench as their replacement “line” of five come flying off the same bench onto the ice with fresh legs.  They do it so quickly because when the line changes, they are vulnerable, because the other team’s players stay on the ice, and stay in the flow without the chaos of change.

I looked around the room on Tuesday morning, I noticed the two generations of us, and I thought of the ages of man.  Half of us there are moving from child to man and half of us are transitioning from manhood to old age.   The chaos of change is within us, and all around in our society.  We’re called to watch as we are, from our own reality.  Rosina Luprich walked the hills around her town with pot and spoon, because that is who she was and what she had.  I realized as I look around the room that I’m in the chaos of line change in my own life.  I feel too young to me an old man, but too old to be a young man.  Maybe I feel the loss of my productive life as I go flying off the ice onto the bench, watching the fresh legs take the puck.  I wondered whether the young guys similarly feel the loss of the freedom of their recent adolescence, as they are called to the non-stop challenges of raising their own kids.

And I think about Rosina Luprich, who didn’t waste time with such mental games.  She just grabbed her pot and spoon and walked the wall and watched.  It would be ten years later, after my grandfather came back home from the war, that they would pack up their kids and immigrate to a farm near Chicago, a farm where my mother would grow up, where pots and spoons were for cooking, not for standing watch. 

Next: the ages of our lives

Off the Wall Comments

It’s Advent.  And boy, do I need it.

This morning I read a Facebook posting from Dave Koukal, my former colleague at UDM, about a “Homeless-Themed Halloween Party” thrown by a Buffalo, NY law firm that processed foreclosures.  A year ago the firm had encouraged their employees to celebrate Halloween at a homeless-themed party, complete with the staff dressing in costumes that made them look destitute and signs describing the various faux problems their characters had.  The story disgusted me, then saddened me, then angered me, then left me numb. 

It wasn’t until later that I read next Sunday’s Gospel (Matthew 13:33-37) that I realized that Dave’s posting prepared me perfectly for Advent.  Matthew calls us to be watchful and alert.

 

On Tuesday mornings I join a group of guys to look at the coming Sunday’s Gospel.  One of us prepares an explanation of it, and we all have a conversation.  So I took my Halloween homeless party numbed self to the gathering, and one of the guys explained the gatekeeper’s watch.  He had to remain alert at the gate because it was from that location that he could be aware of the dangers outside the town.  I thought of walled cities we have visited while with our son in Europe, and the vista from up on those walls.  Within those walls were the tightly-knit buildings of the town, the shops with their goods, the apartments above them with their bright laundry drying in the safe sun. 

I realized that I’m generally “off the wall”.  I tend to remain down in the safety and warmth of community, letting the wall hide from me the reality of evil.  Call it idealism.  Call it wearing rose –colored glasses.  I think that is why the story of the tastelessness, the collective insensitivity of the staff of that New York foreclosure firm had blind-sided me. 

I’m called, this Advent, not wait, but to watch, to take off my rose-colored glasses and stand where I am aware not only of the warmth and hope and companionship of community, but also of those equally real forces that threaten this.  And I watch for the coming of a God who is much more than a cherubic little baby.  How about you?

Next: the watches, and the ages of our lives.

Good to the Last Drop

Courtesy Gayle Dollinger redbubble.com

I met two people just now as I was weeding and planting in the dawn light turning to sunrise.  One recently stepped down from a very prominent position and said something I admire: “Sometimes it appropriate, even after a good show, to get off the stage”.  I don’t remember his name.  The other just ascended.  His name I remember.  I decided, in their company, that I need to follow their example. 

This is my final posting.  I’ve deeply appreciated the company of you who have read this blog over the past two very good years.  Your companionship has helped my find meaning in my life entering retirement, which I now see as my present calling…and relocating to this new place that Kathy and I now really feel as home.

As I’ve read and written, I have observed that easy search engines give us all a ready access to very good writing.  At times I’ve considered my writing good, but no better than (and often not nearly as good as) much that I have happened easily upon.

So this morning as I mused on God’s wisdom in trusting the presence of the Spirit to continue in secula seculorum the work that the Word Made Flesh began, I decided to follow the truth that I find happy within myself.  I believe I’ve written enough words, read mostly by my old friends from Detroit. 

Ha!  I smile and wonder what Jesus does up there.  I wonder whether He gets up early and pulls weeds and smiles at the flowers, still weighted with the night’s dew bending even more under the weight of the first bee.  I wonder if He takes long walks, and thinks about those with whom he lived such a good life.  I wonder if He wonders about them, but I am certain that He longs.

I am certain, however, that He trusts His Spirit, trusts completely in Her life within all of those about whom He wonders, and who he loves with a love, even at a distance in space and time, undiminished.

If any of you who have read this blog and would, in fact, like some of my particular words from time to time, feel free to e-mail me and I’ll make a list for the future.

But you know that I’m here regardless, and find you as unforgettable as God.  

Toward Pentecost: "Imagine Me Gone."

Next Sunday’s Gospel, John 17:1-11, is all ablur in pronouns. 

Ablur.

Jesus is standing with us, but instead of talking to us...about the Father, he starts talking to the Father…about US.  And we’re left to listen and try to make sense of it. There are, by my quick count, 56 pronouns in the reading, 25% of the words.  It takes some time to figure out who Jesus is referring to. 

Time.  

Perhaps that is the reason for the blur of pronouns; he wants to get us confused, so we listen.  It’s time for him to leave, to leave us, to leave us to our own devices.

Imagine someone who means (or meant) the world to you…leaving.  Everything changes, doesn’t it, at least for awhile?  This is what Jesus is trying to invite us to consider, as we sit around in an untidy, squirming circle, wondering why the heck he is talking to the ceiling.

He's saying "Imagine me gone."

We have nine days from this Thursday to consider this, to join those confused disciples. 

Perhaps you have lost someone who...

An Eternity Together

This Sunday’s Gospel invites us to continue circling the tree in the morning mist, trying to find the bird that is making the music that slows our pulse, softens our step, and pushes back on our preoccupations and worries and fears, as long as we keep listening.  Jesus is talking with his disciples again about being gone, and remaining.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he begins, knowing that this is not a head trip, but a journey of consideration by the softer part of his male companions, the more vulnerable.  He will leave them.  All of us leave each other, don’t we?   We know this is true because we have been left by others, others who have been parents or friends, or God help us, children. 

Jesus is leaving, but he will remain, he says.  And in this is our greatest hope, of never being abandoned, never being alone.  The film “Cherry Blossoms” finds Rudi, losing his wife as we who watch know something that he does not, that he himself is dying.  That we know allows us to see his days of living after his Trudi’s death as his most precious.  And in these days, he circles the tree in the mist of death and listens to the silence, and tells his children “I want to know where Trudi is!”

In life, she attempted to dance him, to bring him to the miracle of the moment, to the intimacy of touch and movement, of being one.  It was not until she was gone that he allowed himself to be surrounded by her, to be drawn in to her, to understand that he and she were indeed one.

Perhaps it is the same with us Christians, we who struggle with the “gone-ness” of Jesus and circle the tree in the silence and mist, trying to recall the song that we have heard sung from time to time, wondering if there ever really was a bird, or if it was just our imagination.  We want to know where God is!

And here He is all along, so inextricably wound in us, in the love that is beyond imagining, but is hinted at by duets in dance and song.  Perhaps that is why it is these duets that can move us to tears?  Perhaps it is the insinuation of voices and arms that are the notes of that birdsong finding our ears through the mist of our hoping.  Yes, it is real.  It is not just my imagination.

Doing Daringly Despite Doubt

How dare we even try?  The world seems so messed up, so far beyond our control, problems so much bigger than us.  Does this ever touch you, this sense of the response that aches to…?

Last night while we were having dinner with our neighbors who just returned from a winter away, a little bird thumped into the dining room window and fluttered, dazed, to the arm of a deck chair.  After a brief chorus of sympathetic “Aww’s” we found ourselves back in conversation.  But from time to time we would glance over, one or the other of us, and check on the little bird’s progress.  When at one point I looked over and it was gone, I shared the good news and we all smiled, relief displacing nagging but deferred sympathy.

In tomorrow’s Gospel,  the Good Shepherd has something to say about Bad Shepherds, remarking about “thieves and robbers”.  My friend Dave shared with us last Tuesday morning that Jesus was following up on some tough words from Ezekiel 34:

Are not shepherds meant to feed a flock?  Yet you have fed on milk, you have dressed yourselves in wool, you have sacrificed the fattest sheep, but failed to feed the flock.

You have failed to make weak sheep strong, or to care for the sick ones, or bandage the injured ones. You have failed to bring back strays or look for the lost.

My flock is astray on every mountain and on every high hill; my flock has been scattered all over the world; no one bothers about them and no one looks for them.”

"For the Lord Yahweh says this: Look, I myself shall take care of my flock and look after it.

Dave’s translation used the words “You pasture yourselves,” and the words thumped into my heart, and since then, I have been looking over from the dinner of my days at the poor and hungry and homeless outside the window of my safe, warm, secure house, the deferred sympathy nagging at me.

I don’t know that any of us at the table last evening would have known what to do with that little bird.  We may have done more harm than good.  And our relief may have been wishful thinking, with half of such birds dying later of brain injuries.  This link explains it, and gives us ideas about avoiding bird strikes.  

But what of the poor and hungry and homeless?  There are so many!  Where’s that manual on how to help them?  

Here we return to the message of Jesus: What now, that I am dead and risen and will soon return to my Father?  What now, indeed?  What do we do?  How do we even enter the world of so many to be fed, so many weak to be made strong, so many sick to care for, so many injured to bandage, so many lost to bring back?  So many!

I’m the way, Jesus says.  Enter through me.  Like Peter, he calls us from our boats of safety across the water to himself.  “Just look at me.”  Like Moses at Meribah, I doubt myself.  How could God possibly get enough out of this rock-self of mine to quench so much thirst!  And Jesus stands at the sheep gate of the sick, injured, lost world and calls me, and calls you, too, I think.  “Just look at me.  Don’t look down.”  And for God’s sake, don’t look away and go back to dinner-as-usual.

Perhaps it was not coincidental that at the table, our neighbor Gary mentioned a video about a runner not hesitating to get up and try the impossible, or we recalled the Derrick Redmond race.  Please watch it and listen to Josh Grogan’s song.

Raising up the fallen may be simply responding as we are called, doing what seems only natural.

Get up.

When is a Door Not a Door?

“How did you get in here,” the heroine screams, clutching her spidering-tense fingers to her mouth, as if to protect herself from the unseen intruder.   

Sunday’s Gospel, John 10: 1-10  begins with Jesus saying “Amen, amen I say to you….”  This is like saying “look at me; I’m going to say something important.”  And what he has to say is that “whoever does not enter a sheepfold through the gate but climbs over elsewhere is a thief and a robber.”  And he goes on to tell us that he is the sheep gate through which we should enter the world.

Do we enter the world through love, or some other way?  If there were signs over the various doors, what would they be?

Members Only

I accept exceptionalism.  I feel comfortable with those who speak as I do, who act conventionally, who conform to the norms I accept.  They are Catholic, perhaps, or White, or Educated, or Male.  And they accept me just as I am: Catholic, Educated, Young, and Male.

Security

I’ll do what will keep me safe.  I’ll hold on to what I have so it will be there for later when I need it.  If I’m sure I have enough I’ll share some of the extra, but I’ll hold on to some of it too, just in case.

Faculty Entrance

I know, you know.  I have an education, and lots of experience.  I should be able to walk right in, and people ought to know that I know.  What do I know?  What they don’t.  I’m special, and need to be treated as, well, above them.

Baggage Pickup

I gotta bring my stuff.  I choose the car that is attractive, that shows whatever it is I need to show others.  I’m frugal, or I’m sensible, or I’ve really arrived, or I’m hot, baby!  Cell phone in my left pocket (smartphone, you know, with all my numbers and my calendar too) keys in my right, wallet in my back pocket, with clout.

(Your Name Here)

This guy is just standing there, holding as sign with your name on it.  He’s looking at you with an expression that is calm, and his mouth betrays a certain mirth, warmer than a smirk, as if he knows you.  I walk over to him, and he says, “Amen, amen I say to you. Come with me.”   You start to follow him, and he says “Leave you stuff here; all you need will be provided.”  

OoHOO!  A...men!

So here we are, facing these five ways in.  How do we choose, really?

Dance of Days

A grain of wheat in nature falls to the ground and roots itself.  I saw a film of this several years ago, before computer videos became so common.  The hairy strand at the top of the seed curled and uncurled with the changing humidity of night and day, curling and uncurling, making a place in the soil to take hold, pulling the seed into the soil and beginning the germination process. 

Of the seven children of the five mothers I mentioned in yesterday’s posting, I knew six.  No, I know six.  With the nights and days of my life, my memory of them plants them in my soul soil, curling and uncurling and finding purchase.  I remember them in their vitality, and their “gone-ness” makes me aware of my “here-ness”.  They give me the gift if presence, of breathing and seeing and smelling and tasting and touching, of longing and striving and slowing down, too, and being still.

They make me aware of my own adult children's here-ness, too, of the gift of their todays. 

When an Arab man becomes the father of a son, his name in changed.  My name, John Daniels, would have become John abu-Christopher 36 years ago.  It would remind me each moment that having become a father my life is forever changed, and my very identity. I think of these five mothers, whose names were not changed in the moment of their children’s passing, but that everything else did, especially at that first terrible moment.

For all of us who grieve, the probing of that tendril, curling and uncurling in our troubled hearts to find a place to grow in us determines and occupies the time of first shock.  My prayer for these five mothers is that as in the process of those grains of wheat in nature, the green shoot that emerges reaches to the light, dancing them in that phototropic gentleness and grace, teaching them the steps, accompanying them in that place that might otherwise seem like abandonment, that life somehow become for them the green dance of days.

Grieving Mothers

Mathilde Roussel Giraudy "lifes of grass"

The pastor’s Mothers’ Day homily was masterful…but in the end, he was just a guy, well-honed logic too dull to cut through the binding cord of loss.

The Opera Turandot was written by Giacomo Puccini – up to the first few lines of the final duet, when the composer died of a heart attack while being treated for throat cancer.  The pastor, a lover of Italian Opera, waxed romantic, inspired by the idea that Puccini’s students completed the work he had begun, allowing it to become one of the world’s greatest and most often-performed operatic works.  In the same way, he said, that God’s saving work is to be completed by the Church, a mother takes God’s miracle of conception and completes it by nurturing it with her own life.

Wow.  I imagined myself shouting “Bravo!” at the end of his homily, as one might do at la Scala in Milan, where Turandot was debuted.  How elegantly he had touched each mother’s heart, ennobling them with the holiness of their charge, to bring God’s work to fruition.  I did not shout.  This was, after all, not an opera hall, but a typically conservative church.  But I did hold on to that glow of appreciation for the composition and delivery of his homily.  Mother completes the unfinished work of God.  Wow.

Then I saw Sarah at the other end of our pew, and tears came to my eyes.  She had lost her son a year ago.  God’s miracle of conception entrusted to her for completion….  I thought of the burden of maternity, of carrying out the work that God has begun in creating a life, and tears flowed

The Eyes of the Heart: Alma Mater

Do you notice how the main characters in these after-Easter appearances of Jesus – the locked room and the road to Emmaus – are guys?  In the U.S., today is Mother’s Day as well as the Third Sunday of Easter.  No doubt.

Earl the Twirl - courtesy UDM Athletics

ALMA MATER
In this morning’s Detroit Free Press is a story   that warms my University of Detroit Mercy heart.  It’s on the Sports Page.  It’s a Mother’s Day story – about a guy.  “Earl the Twirl”, we called him back in U of D’s Calihan Hall, this 6’ 9” basketball transfer who ran with his thumbs up all the time, most noticeably when he was loping across the court after scoring, like he was giving himself a thumbs-up, and maybe us, the cheering throng, too.  We guys saw him as points and rebounds, our hope to get back to the NCAA tournament after the Dick Vitale/Long/Duerod/Tyler years that gave our struggling urban university some time in the spotlight.  His mom saw him as a college student.  And she believed in him.

I think that the reason Jesus kept appearing to guys after that first Easter morning was that

Risen? It Just Ain’t Logical

Caravaggio - "Emmaus"

Puppy or baby – take your pick.  They whimper at night, alone in their place, while you are in the next room.  You peek in, comforting them, “I’m right around the corner.  I’m here.  Don’t be afraid.”  Maybe you reach out and touch them, so they know you’re really there.  And bit by bit, day by day, they begin to understand that out of sight does not mean gone.  They begin to feel better just knowing you’re near.

So Doubt Week is the first week after Easter, and during this second week we begin to enjoy a process of reminding, of Jesus peeking in again and again telling us, “I’m still here” and tucking us in, comforting us, teaching us faith.  On this Third Sunday after Easter, Jesus begins to teach us not in our heads but our hearts.  Two men are walking “conversing and debating”

Meribah – the Field of Dreams

It has been the homeless who have helped me see the Doubting Thomas in me, and it has been they who have shown me the Doubting Moses.  Kathy and I were for decades members of a “prayer group” in Gesu Parish in Detroit.  The prayer that the group did was less and less overt; we simply grew together in the growing edges, the wounded edges exposed to each other in prayer.  Every year Gesu would host a group of homeless neighbors for a week during the winter, part of a rotating shelter program in the city.  I would use my over-committed life at the university as an excuse to avoid volunteering for the program.  But one year when I was working (from a safe academic distance) with the problem of homelessness, the prayer group people let the word out that we would be making sandwiches one day for the homeless to take with them when they got on the bus after breakfast that day, to spend time back in the inner city while the kids were in the school that had been their home the previous night. 

Jesus' “Touch THEM!” that I mentioned in yesterday’s blog came to mind, and I saw keenly my hypocrisy in studying the idea of homelessness but not serving those in front of me.  The experience that I had with my prayer group made a small crack in my heart,

Entering the Wound of the World: Revulsion

Around age 35 I was invited by Jesus to do what Thomas was invited to do, and I can still feel the shame of my response.  Psychologists suggest that most of us are held back in our psychosocial development to a point in life where we suffered trauma or loss.  Most of us, they say, find ways of coping with this retardation, compensating one way or another, some combination of masking, withdrawing, or creating a false strength, like the Phantom of the Opera.  One way or another, they say, to be healed and to grow authentically we need to return to that place of trauma, face it as truth, and integrate it into our lives.

Perhaps the same is true of a hard truth encountered, an insight or knowledge from which we have fled.  We cannot honestly become ourselves unless we are honest about that truth we’ve attempted to evade.  For me one such hard truth was revulsion at touching the wound.  My first “Ignatian” retreat, 8 days in silent prayer and meditation in the style of the Jesuits under the guidance of a Spiritual Director, found me, as in its essential method, experiencing a scene from the Gospels (Luke 8:43ff) in which there was a crowd following Jesus. 

The woman with the hemorrhage was the subject of the story, and her faith that if she could just touch Jesus she would be healed.  “Touch me, Jesus,” I heard her say, and soon in my ears I heard the crowd murmuring the same plea, “Touch me, Jesus; heal me Jesus, Love me Jesus!”  I found myself joining the crowd, murmuring with them, and then I stopped, realizing that I wanted to be his companion, his friend.  I wanted to be someone special, and not just one of the crowd.  In my room alone in prayer, I said the words aloud: “I want to touch you, Jesus, to heal you, to love you.” 

Jesus looked at me (this can happen in this kind of prayer, by grace) and said to me, “Don’t touch me, touch them,” gesturing to the crowd.  I looked at them, and smelled them, and felt revulsion.  “I don’t want to touch them,” I said to Jesus, “I want to touch YOU!”  I cannot recall the look on his face, of the tone of the words, but I remember clearly that he repeated his words.  “Touch THEM.”

I sat and wept.  I wept the tears of a pupil with a paper full of corrections and a poor grade from a teacher I admired, emulated.  I wept in shame at my revulsion.  But in that meditation, I did not touch them.  I let the scene close and ended my session.  I had been given my truth.  I did not want to touch the dirty, needy crowd.  I wanted to hold myself above them.  Shame on me.

So when I experience Thomas’ invitation to put his hand into the wound in Jesus’ side, I feel this revulsion of touching something…what…germy?   This is Jesus, for God’s sake!  But it’s there, that revulsion, even with Jesus.  It’s not doubt, though that’s not resolved, merely overshadowed by revulsion.

Next: the gift of the homeless

Thomas: Reluctance Beyond a Doubt

I felt this cool, pudgy little hand worming its way into mine.  It was a practiced movement, it seems to me now, the fingers pursed into a kind of spongy spear, opening inside my passive palm to make room, making a place for itself inside.  Startled, I turned to see the smiling face of the little girl in the pew in front of me, smiling up at me, smiling the word…PEACE.

While we call Thomas “Doubting” and focus on the same hesitation that kept Moses from entering the promised land (“Go ahead, Moses, hit the rock with your staff and water will come out for your thirsty followers”) the little girl’s hand reminded me that perhaps the greater, though more subtle message of the story of Thomas and the risen Jesus is the reluctance to enter relationship. 

God is a God of relationship.  “Go ahead.  Put your finger into the wound in my hand.  Go ahead.  Put your hand into the wound here in my side. No, no, it’s OK, really.”   And hoping that the revulsion that is literally turning our stomach doesn’t show on our faces, we try to politely say to the God who just four days ago died out of love for us, “No, thank you.”

It was, so perfectly, at the “Kiss of Peace”, the ritual of greeting at the Catholic Mass after we say the Our Father and before we receive Communion.  Before we moved here to Traverse City, we spent 40 years of Sundays in Gesu Church in Detroit, where rather than the usual restrained, polite handshake with those within an arm’s reach, this greeting took several minutes.  We left our pews and walked around hugging, slapping backs, sometimes weeping momentarily in each others’ arms,  sharing some deep loss or great joy.  After years of sharing the same urban reality black and white, young and old, secure and poor, we had come to know each others’ wounds.  Tears come to my eyes as I recall walking all the way across the sea of people one Sunday to embrace Henry Bellaimey, the kind, gentle man who I had watched for those 40 years change from a ramrod straight-backed dark haired smiling business owner to a white haired old man bent to a right angle at the waist, but still with the same broad glad-to-see-ya smile.  One daughter lost to cancer, a wife sick with the same for years at home until her own death, a beloved son moved far away in geography and faith, here was Henry with his other daughter, opening wide the arm not bracing himself on his cane, opening so that I can enter and be embraced within that bent-over body of his, wrapped in his warmth and kindness and history. 

Here in our new parish, the greeting is more restrained, more proper and polite.  We maintain a certain distance.   Kind of like Thomas.  We just don’t want to go deep.  We don’t want to impose. 

Oh, I hope this little girl never loses this innocence, this freedom to enter, to make a soft little spear of herself and to gently find an opening in another’s envelope, into another’s soul. 

Next: entering the wound of the world: a lesson from Thomas and Moses