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

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

Stillllll Waiting.

Stilllll Waiting.

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.

John Milton, Sonnet 19

Waiting…Waiting…Waiting…Waiting….  Waiting in line, waiting at a light, waiting for a call, or a letter, or word from a friend in trouble.  Waiting for the coffee to brew, waiting for the toast to pop up, or for a pain pill to kick in.  All of these random thoughts, these examples have come to my mind as experience of the helplessness of waiting share one blessing.  Something’s gonna happen, eventually.  We’ll get to the front of the line, the light will