Resurrecting Chicago

The Seven Stars of the Big Dipper. (Wikipedia,)

When I was about fifteen years old, I was on a long night-time car ride from Chicago to the Northern Wisconsin town of Eau Claire.  There was very little traffic at that time of night. My uncle was driving  and other than our headlight beams, it was pitch dark and after  a couple of hours our conversation drifted to silence.

Soon I was slouched up front dozing. It had been a long day. After a while, I  opened my eyes and there it was. I didn’t have to move my head. Looking through the windshield, I saw a grouping of stars that I’d heard about  but never seen.  When I saw the formation, I knew immediately what it was: “The Big Dipper!”

I grew up in Chicago where even on clear nights, just a few stars were visible. The ambient light of the big city washes out the clarity of the night sky. Now, unmistakably hung there in the Wisconsin sky was a wonder, a surprise design left for me to discover.

I didn’t impose it. The Big Dipper spread out before me like a gift or grace from God.  It was just a wonder there for me to to recognize.  Sure, I know the Creator did not manage the arrangement of these particular stars so that I could discern a water scoop. “The Big Dipper” is one name for a pattern we think we see in the night sky. Other cultures, the Greeks, for example, call it “The Seven Oxen.”

Ever since that night the magnificence of the stars stays with me. It was years later in the Missouri Ozarks that I lay down in an open field on a clear night and saw the Milky Way for the first time, the myriad of stars sprinkled from one end of the sky to the other. Wonder and surprise flooded my heart, again. And, I wondered how people could say that there is no God.

A farmworker. (US Agriculture Dept. public domain)

When I served in rural Michigan in the middle years of my priesthood, I rented a quaint, white farm-house next to a field of blueberry bushes. Each year from mid-summer until late August, those cultivated bushes yielded their sweet harvest,  Some mornings, I’d pick a handful of berries from the closest bush, drop them into my bowl of Cheerios and add some milk.  I can testify that the tangy sweetness of those purple berries added a zest to my morning wake-up routine.

Because I belong to a religious community, the Congregation of the Resurrection, I was trained in social ministry. We are priests and brothers who teach in schools, do various kinds of social work and organize missionary apostolates.  My apostolate included working in medicine along with the ministry of priesthood. That’s why I was in Michigan attending to patients in a federal rural health clinic.  During the week I treated patients with physical ailments and on Sundays I celebrated the Eucharist for the farmworkers in their own chapel and fellowship complex.

Before  I served in Michigan, I never paid much attention to farm workers. Though many times and in many places, I’d noticed them working in the fields but, I’m embarrassed to say, I had looked right through them. I saw them but didn’t pay them any mind. To middle class folks like me, the poor are those you read about not those you know.

It was a different story when I watched from my kitchen window as the men and women in long sleeved shirts and jeans with reed baskets hung over their necks picked blueberries, collected them and carried them to a truck parked in the middle of the field. They were bent over nimbly snatching the blueberries from the bushes on days so hot and humid that all A.C.s were running full blast in homes in our small town.

One morning I looked outside and the workers were all gone, and  their camp abandoned because the “LA MIGRA” (ICE) had been called (by whom?) and had arrested some of them as illegal immigrants.   The rest had fled. The blueberries languished in the field.

Soon after  I began this ministry, I got into an argument at a public meeting because I told the locals that their youth (white and middle class) would not pick the berries because it was backbreaking work and hot in those fields.  One farmer was furious with me because he didn’t want to hear me say that about local young people.  Nevertheless, I think he knew that I was right. 

But, I’m not going to criticize those farmers, I’m going to talk about my own prejudices.

Many times, I saw workers bent over in the fields, snipping “pickles” (cucumbers) from vines or, on ladders collecting apples and gathering all the other fruits and vegetables that we have available in our supermarkets.  I saw them but looked through them as if they did not exist, I guess, because they were not important to me. Besides, they were Mexicans, spoke Spanish and were not going to stay longer than they were needed for the harvest.

The Gospel is very real. At the clinic, I  treated these workers for skin infections, especially “la hierba” (poison ivy), various orthopedic injuries and gastric issues, among many illnesses.. I learned that migrant workers  lived together under cramped conditions in camps, There were families with children, sure. However, many were single men, young men who slept on the floor with seven or eight others in trailers. The work day was from sun-up to sundown. Average wage was about $13 an hour.  After paying for their food and housing, they’d send what was left to their families in Mexico.

Jesus urged us to sell what we have, give it to the poor and then follow Him. In the beatitudes he said the poor would be blessed with the kingdom of heaven some day. I think differently now about migrant workers and the other people who have to scramble for the basics of life. I can’t look through them anymore because I know Jesus is looking right at me now to do the right thing.

As for the racial stain on my own soul, I hang my head as I remember this scripture: “The foreigners among you must be treated as your native born.  Love them as yourself for you were foreigners in Egypt.  I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:34)

Angels (Alexas Photos)

At the corner of State and Madison in the heart of Chicago’s downtown, on a one-way street, two lanes of  cars were paused and ready to go as the pedestrian light turned from green to cautionary yellow. The crowd that was surging across the street in front of the cars held back when the light turned yellow.  But, thinking that I could make it, I started to cross anyway.  Heck, I was young and thought: “I can beat these cars!” 

In the instant that I made an intention movement to go for it, an arm from the left flung itself across my chest like a stop gate at a railroad crossing.  It was the guy next to me. In the next second the light turned green and the cars roared forward across the pedestrian white lines where I would have been, had that guy not stopped me. 

I quickly turned to look at him. “Nice suit,” I thought. He looked disgustedly at me and growled: “DUH YA WANNA BE A STATISTIC?!” The tone was pure Chicagoese.

Ah, I love Chicago.  Where could you hear such a succinct way of getting across a point?  The point being: I was just about to fling myself in front of two lanes of cars with drivers anxious to score a first out of the pack, a dicey decision that could have cost m my life.

 I never saw that guy again and I can’t remember what he looked like except that he had on a brown business suit and was probably on his way home after a long day at the office. The guy knew immediately that I was unfamiliar with the fundamentals of crossing a busy street in downtown Chicago so he stuck his arm out and issued those memorable words.

I think he was an angel. I know that he didn’t look like one but, what do angels look like?  Divine intervention swooped down, a life changing moment occurred, and I’m still alive fifty years later. I don’t think it was a coincidence. No, I don’t know what angels look like but that Chicagoan acted like one. He touched me and called out an immanent danger.

I think God often sends an angel in the form of a human who is there at a defining moment in life. Think of a time when your life was in jeopardy and someone pulled you out of the way.  You were about ready to make an awfully bad decision and someone intervened. It could have been just a human rescuer or, just maybe, it was your guardian angel or an anonymous angelic messanger.

Remember the scene in the film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when James Stewart’s character jumps off a bridge and a pudgy old man pulls him out of the water? They end up in a bar where the unlikely rescuer identifies himself as an angel on a mission “to get my wings.” Stewart looks directly at the smiling old gent and says sadly: “Angel…? You look like the kind of angel I’d get!”

I wonder if my guardian angel sometimes wears a brown business suit? By the way, have you thought about what your guardian angel looks like? Or, any angel, for that matter.

The following scripture verse reminds me that God has angelic options: “For He will give His angels charge over you, to keep you in all your ways.”  (Psalm 91:11) 

Our galaxy, The Milky Way. (Image by StockDrop)

Recently someone asked me about the passage in Second Corinthians where St. Paul refers to a “third heaven.” (II Cor. 12:4). It got me thinking: What in the world does “third heaven” mean? (Pun intended.)

Somewhere in my theological training we must have talked about a “third heaven,” but, I confess that I don’t remember the explanation. I’ve had to spend some time, searching out the ways we talk about heaven.

Here’s what I’ve come up with:

The first heaven is what I see when I look up during daylight.  It’s partly cloudy as I look up at this morning’s sky. The clouds are gray wispy streaks across a light blue background. But I know that there is more to it than that. Look up, according to legend and you may see angels sitting on a cloud or two. The bible says that the heavens declare the glory of God.

The second heaven is what I see at night when I look up.   It’s the Milky Way, and beyond our galaxy, outer space. But, it’s also the moon on a clear night. It’s wonder for astronomers and the realm of fate for astrologers.

The third heaven is the place that I know is “up there” but beyond the heaven of day, and the heaven of night.  The third heaven is the domain of God.  When we pray and have an extraordinary experience like Paul had, that’s the third heaven. No, you can’t see the third heaven by looking up.  You have to look inside your own universe, the awareness within you that can conceive of the divine.  

So, the third heaven is the place — whether in the body or out of the body– you are taken up into God’s presence. It is the place that our Lord refers to when he tells the thief at His right: “This day you will be with Me in paradise.”

The third heaven is not beyond the second, it’s within. It is the realm of divine truth, and hope and love. It is the new heavens and the new earth. “Eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into anyone’s heart, the things God has prepared for those who love Him”.( I Cor 2:9)  Looking up doesn’t help as St. Paul makes clear.  He didn’t know where he was or how he was seeing, But, he was taken up to the third heaven and had a real experience of being with God.

The Third Heaven, then, is not way out there beyond the cosmos. If you want to discover the third heaven, look deep beyond the darkness within for Christ’s light shining there. Find it and just maybe He’ll invite you in for the experience of a lifetime.

I’m sitting on my enclosed porch praying Morning Prayer of the Church while it’s still dark outside. It’s winter and soon the eastern sky’s early pink glow will alert the local birds to remind me to feed them.

A male sparrow watches me in the morning.

Lord, I am thanking you for another day with all its possibilities.  Most of the time, when I sit out here, I’m hoping you’ll surprise me sometime during the day with an unexpected phone call or a visitor.  If this turns out to be one those days when I have fatigue most of the day, I’ll try to adapt, though the full hamper of laundry stares at me. I nudge myself back to the recitation of the psalms of the day. back to realizing that You are present.

Soon the neighborhood begins to light up, and the local house sparrows come and sit on the railings which lead up the ramp to my outside porch.  Snow and cold out there this A.M. The birds are here every morning and line up, hopping around, chirping away until I grab the bird seed and spread the grains out on at the tiny platform that I’ve installed at the juncture of the outside porch railing and ramp.  It holds a cup of seeds.

I can’t use a feeder station because the fat gray squirrel who lives in the maple tree in front of my house is watching.  So, I simply scatter a cup of seeds on the platform and railing and watch as house sparrows descend and peck away. In an hour the seeds have vanished, and the squirrel gets nothing.

Cartoonists who in one panel get their idea across have always intrigued me.  OK.  I’ll try to describe what I mean.  Picture a one-gallon fishbowl.  The bowl is three-quarters full and in the center two large goldfish are facing one another.  The deep-orange one on the right is answering the agnostic and equally colorful brother on the left.  He says: “If there’s no God, who feeds us each morning?”

I fantasize that kind of conversation going on among my feathered friends this morning.  Maybe they believe the same as the goldfish on the right. I remember Our Lord Jesus, speaking of the value of human life, when He says “Look at the birds of the air.  They neither sow nor reap but your Father feeds them. Not one sparrow falls to the earth and dies without your Father knowing it. You are of worth more than many sparrows (Mt 10:31).

It has taken me a long time to like sparrows.  They are ubiquitous. (I have longed for the opportunity to use that word.) and monotonous in their presence. The darn things are not native to America.  Over a century ago, someone let them go in New York City’s Central Park and now they are everywhere, (There was another opportunity for ubiquitous) including on my front porch.

The sun is still rising but it’s already lighting up our lives, mine and the sparrows. Right now, the sparrows on the railing outside catch sight of me and renew their chirping and hopping.  I better get out there and offer seeds to break their fast of a long winter’s night. They, too, seem to believe there is a God.

Teilhard de Chardin, 1947. Wikipedia, public domain.

I hesitate to write about getting old because I feel if I do, I might lose some of my readers. I prefer to be non-numerable or ageless. Still, there are advantages to being older because there is more leisure time to focus on what it all means. 

Teillard de Chardin was a Jesuit philosopher, paleontologist and spiritual writer.  In his old age he came-up with a reflection that I recall now and then.  You’ll find it in his book the Divine Milieu:

“When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more when they touch my mind); when the ill which is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old; and above all, at that last moment when I feel I’m losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me; in all those dark moments, O Lord, grant that I may understand that it is You (provided only my faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within yourself.”  (Teilhard de Chardin, S. J., from his book: The Divine Milieu.)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a priest who was also a research paleontologist.  He wrote in French, a softer more nuanced language than English. As a pre-Vatican II Church figure, he who often used scientific imagery to explain phenomena, a practice which did not please Church authorities, Chardin did not fit into the theological climate of the pre-Vatican church.   He was accused of muddling theological and philosophical concepts with a vocabulary more proper to poetry.  His writings were popular just before the Vatican Council and were considered dangerous and too liberal.  The Vatican issued a montium — a warning– that believers should avoid his books.  He was finally removed from his teaching positions and his license to teach theology was revoked. 

Father Chardin, a Jesuit, accepted this rebuke and retired to a quiet life with his brother Jesuits in New York City. He was a man obedient to Church authorities and humbly accepted his removal from academic roles without renouncing his opinions.  His books were best sellers.  He lived out his life in study and prayer, often walking in New York’s Central Park and sitting on a park bench talking with children. 

There is something unique about this Jesuit’s wondrous view of the universe and of humanity’s part in its renewal.  He famously referred to Our Lord as the “Omega Point” or the final Word in the Father’s ultimate plan.  Only then will all things, the cosmos itself, be revealed in all its glory through Jesus Christ.

Ahem…just a moment! Please excuse me… I’m looking for my cane…. I’d like some time to wonder about all this.

I think I’ll take a walk in the park… would you like to come along?

Hello!  It‘s been nearly four months since I posted anything on this site and I need to tell you why.  I’ve had a bout of sepsis from which I am still healing. I found out that it takes a long time to recover normal body rhythms and to feel strong again after this kind of sickness.

Sepsis occurs when an infection, even a simple skin infection like mine, causes an immune reaction which is so massive that it attacks healthy tissue and causes widespread inflammation. Generalized weakness, profound fatigue and pain (approaching a scale of ten) make the entire process feel like you are breaking down.

I didn’t have enough energy to post anything and that bothered me because I like to write. I swear I didn’t have one sharp idea during the past four months that I could write about. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have had the energy to sit at a computer and tap the keys.  I discussed this with Our Lord and discovered a deeper meaning to “Thy will be done.”

So, I did a lot of sitting on my front porch in the morning light. Couldn’t get to the church for Mass. Instead, I sat praying on my porch most mornings and watched people walk their dogs. I did a lot of waving at the people who drove past me and waved from their cars and pickups. I even developed a kind-of porch ministry to individuals who’d see me sitting there and come up my ramp to talk.

I had a lot more time to pray and felt grateful for the opportunity.  I prayed here and there but formal prayer was tedious to sustain –all part of my recovery from sepsis.  I was satisfied, though, to snatch the small graces which surrounded my time out there on the porch.

I’m glad to be back and hope that the Lord thinks that I should have a few more years. They also serve who sit on the front porch and embrace graceful moments. 

“Never trust a Catholic!” My Lutheran minister friend eyed me from across the room and slung that imperative toward me as we sat with three other pastors in our weekly get-together in Panama City, Florida, where I happened to be the local Catholic vicar.

Over several years, he and I had become close friends but, his mother’s warning and a few other anti-Catholic attitudes occasionally slipped out. ” For example, he always referred to the members of my Church as Roman Catholics, with an accent on the “Roman,” which I took as a papal slur. Sometimes, he roughly called us “RC.s”

I was raised with my own prejudices against Lutherans. As a child, my best friends were Lutherans and we often played together in the lot next to St. Timothy’s Lutheran Church just down the street.  I remember squatting down once to look through the basement window of St. Timothy’s trying to see if I could catch a glimpse of the golden calf that Sister had told us that  non-Catholics worshipped.  Never saw it.

Turns out that my best friends over the years have been Lutheran ministers.   We hold so much in common. The Lutheran worship service has the greeting, confession, scripture readings, sermon and sometimes the communion service just like Catholics do. We also share pastoral troubles like the latest blow-ups during pastoral board meetings.

I thank God that wherever I have been stationed, especially in small towns, the Lutheran minister and I would become friends. “John” still calls me from time to time. He belongs to a  more liberal Lutheran church –the one that developed out of the St. Louis, Missouri division from the Missouri Synod. You couldn’t find a more genial guy than John.  Bright, involved with his church and always willing to listen to my stories, he’s been a fine pastor wherever he has served. Then, there is “Al,” a Missouri Synod pastor now retired.  Al and his wife have been great examples of practical Christianity and over the years fostered a dozen children, and raised them in a loving family. He and his wife have been friends of mine  for over fifty years. LastIy, can’t forget “Gene,” another Lutheran pastor was the most fiery of them all.  He died a few years ago. I miss his strong devotion to his Lutheran community and his warm acceptance of me as a co-servant of the Lord.

No, I didn’t convert any of them to the Catholic Church nor did they get me to convert to the Lutheran Church. What we did do for each other was to let the old prejudices melt away and gracefully, I think, serve the flocks assigned to us.

Resurrectionists who work in other parts of the U.S. must be getting tired of hearing about CRs serving the Catholic Church in and around the city of Chicago.

“What am I chopped liver?  I’m a CR and I minister in California!”

“Chicago? I’m a Resurrectionist and live and work in a small town close to St. Louis, Missouri. I’m tired of hearing about Chicago!”

No, Chicago isn’t California and it isn’t St. Louis, and definitely isn’t New York. I can remember how I felt a few years ago on the first day of a brief visit to that eastern Mecca.

As I came out of the subway in Manhattan, I saw people rushing straight ahead as if each of them were late for a doctor’s appointment.  They all appeared set in his/her way– and you better get out of it!   New York — intimidating, awesome, and cold-hearted, at least to this Midwesterner. That city needs the warmth and love that we Resurrectionists could bring if we only had more members.

L.A., on a recent brief visit, seemed more casual than New York but Angelinos could use some of the breeze of the Windy City. Smog and grit were everywhere in L.A. It looked to me like a great place to preach new life in Christ as we Resurrectionists love to do.

 I look at Chicago as St. Paul  looked at Corinth or Ephesus.  Chicago is a state of mind beyond being a geographical point in the middle of the U.S.   It’s a symbol of a town with a hometown fling and its own windy ways and we Resurrectionists have made an impact there. 

Wherever a Resurrectionist is stationed, that place is “The Church.”  There is no sense of thinking about a locale somewhere else.  For all intents and purposes, the Church is your own backyard, your own neighborhood.

We Resurrectionists minster to individuals and help them get up from their ordinariness and live a new life in Christ.  We become part of the local neighborhood community. As far as I’m concerned, my neighborhood is one of those fields that are ready for the harvesting that Jesus speaks about: “The fields are white for the harvest.” (John 4:32)

Please pray for us– we Resurrectionists who work in the U.S– as we come together during the last week of July, 2025, to renew our lives in Christ and plan how to bring the kingdom of God into the places where we live and minister –and they all ain’t in Chicago!