Resurrecting Chicago

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!

Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness!

Fifteen years ago I began this site by naming it: “Resurrecting Chicago.”  Since then, this blog has become the posting ground for all kinds of essays and reflections but I hope I haven’t made you lose sight of the urgency of its name.  I am a Resurrectionist and along with my brother Resurrectionists, I try to bring the light of hope to my little part of the Kingdom of God, centered around Chicago. 

In a few weeks, the members of my religious community, the USA province of the Congregation of the Resurrection, will gather in Darien, Il  just outside of Chicago  to renew our sense of brotherhood and to take stock of our mission. 

We will begin with prayer, followed by our provincial superior who reads us the state of the province report. It includes how we are doing these days, who has died, which apostolates we are leaving, where we go next and what the rest of the CRs in the world are doing. But, maybe the most important event won’t be this address but the gathering  itself of the religious community which was originally named “The Brothers of the Resurrection.”

What attracted me originally to the Resurrection community was the enthusiasm and the happiness that I saw among the men who formed the Resurrection community that taught me at Weber High School in Chicago. 

Living in that spirit makes for a hopeful outlook, no matter what the present conditions are.  That sense of hope, and a kind of easy joy still motivate us  who serve the Church in the spirit of the Resurrected Christ.

Our take on the Gospel?  We teach two principles: First: That Jesus asks us to die to our own selves and rise a new person in Him. That means carrying our cross daily and letting the light of the resurrection shine in our lives. Second: we minister to build and raise up the Kingdom of God in whatever ministry we are blessed to serve. We call it “resurrecting society.”

We are asking you who are reading this to pray for us. Beg the Lord to give us direction, healing for those who need it and courage to live out our vows. Yes, we are diminished.  We have fewer members and many are old but, we are still here.  Still ministering.  Still resurrecting!

We place our loved-ones’ remains in graves, but things used by them often stay with us for a while and become mementoes.  Those relics are not buried.  We then say something like: “This is all I have left, now.”

When mom died her favorite earrings were kept and worn by my sisters.   Dad’s hammer (which he loved to call “the persuader”) still hangs there above his tool bench.

I remember two other relics of my family members.  Each of them comes with a story.

Often, on a winter evening of my Chicago childhood, my mother would say: “Go out into the shed and get some oil (kerosene) and don’t spill any!” Mom would ensure that we had heat all night and didn’t run out of fuel before morning.  So she sent me out to the shed most evenings. I was six or seven years old and big for my age.

The weathered, gray, shed stood there in the shadows.  As I unlocked it and opened the door, the heavy, oily smell of that shed added to the uneasy feeling that I always felt out there. Then, I would flick on the light switch and a small bulb would dispel some of the darkness.

Most nights I could just make out the stuff that dad just couldn’t throw away. Among the paint cans, various pieces of wood, an old car battery and jars of assorted screws and bolts, there were mementoes. Reminders. Relics. Some of those things stored away in the shed reminded me of  family members.  I thought about them often as the ten-gallon oil can slowly filled.

One of these things was a creamy white body cast, a plaster mold of a torso, my father’s torso.  Some years before, dad had fallen off a roof at work and fractured his spine in several places. At the hospital, wet-plaster infused bandages were applied over his chest and abdomen.  As the casting dried, it began to shrink. Dad couldn’t breathe.  Somehow he was able to phone my mother from his hospital room.  Mom called the nurse on dad’s floor and the medical people cut off the front of the abdominal part so that he could breathe.

He wore that cast for at least a year until a doctor instructed a tech to saw through the sides.  They gave the cast to dad. For the rest of his life, my father struggled to ensure his breathing was OK. He loved fresh air and hated neckties.

The doctors at the hospital told him that he would never work again.  Not work? Tell that to a young man with a wife and three little kids at home. No more a roofer, dad became a carpenter, building new homes and remodeling others. Maybe, he kept the body cast as a reminder of how his determination squelched the prediction of the doctors.

That soiled, white, plaster cast dangled there on a hook driven in just behind and above the oil drum, the hard ghost of a man’s form. I wondered as only a child can wonder as the kerosene poured into the can.

On the same wall, next to the body-cast, hung a deep-brown leather apparatus with long straps. It had been used to restrain my brother, Leroy, who was one year older than me. During the birthing process, he had been deprived of oxygen for some time. Although you wouldn’t know it to look a him, he had brain damage.   He walked and ran like other children, but he wasn’t right. He was epileptic, mute and did not engage well.

He loved to run. I knew he was going to make an attempt when we were outside and he’d begin to smile. At every opportunity. after he learned to walk, he’d try to get away and begin running. He was uncontrollable and fast.

My father crafted the harness from shoe-store leather. Leroy had to wear the restraints when we would be outside at a park or walking to the store. The straps were leashes that dad would hold to keep Leroy under control when we went to visit family or went to the park. He had been raised on a southern Illinois farm.  His experience with farm horses and their harnesses had given him the idea. The harness fit around Leroy’s chest like a bodice.

My father and mother are buried next to each other in the same cemetery where Leroy is interred. The body cast and harness are long gone, thrown out in some move. I no longer can touch the hard cast of dad’s form nor feel the soft leather of Leroy’s harness.

The relics of my dad and my brother remain a matter of the heart, now. I miss my brother and father deeply and long to embrace them in eternal life where there will be no restraints, only wholeness forever.

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OMG. I was sitting at my computer this morning answering emails when the doorbell rang.  It takes me a couple of minutes to get to the front door and when I got there the bell-ringer had left, but I see two men on the front walk discussing something.  One man, nattily dressed in a grey suit and maroon tie, probably fifty years old, was jotting something into a pocket notebook. The other guy was a lot younger, casually dressed with khaki pants and an off-white conservative short-sleeved shirt and he was pointing at something behind his older friend.. Turned out they were discussing what street to try next. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses on their weekly hunt.

I hoped they might see me at the window of my enclosed porch and return because I have a standard response to the Witnesses. After they introduce themselves, I talk over them and begin rambling loudly that I’ve been saved since 1967. I talk and gesture dramatically faster than they about my religious experiences. I’m warm and smiling.  I’m also lying but maybe a day or two in purgatory might be worth it. They are typically unprepared for this welcome and usually hand me a tract and quickly leave.

Years ago when I lived in a small town in Missouri — the buckle of the bible belt– I found stuffed under my front door a JW pamphlet describing the story of a Catholic priest who fled to the Witnesses.  The last page encouraged me as a priest to leave the Catholic Church, too. It really made me feel good about the Witnesses.

These so-called witnesses are scavengers, targeting the poorest and most vulnerable.  They try to coax Christians to leave their own churches and join the Witnesses. Then they mesmerize their novice candidates. They develop the fear that once you join and then try to leave, you will literally go to hell.

Jehovah is their rendition of the tetragrammaton YHWH, the sacred personal name of God, which was and still is never pronounced out loud in Jewish services. Lord (Adonai) is substituted. In writing and print, ancient Hebrew did not supply vowels.  If vowels are used as superscripts above the NAME  it means: Here, the reader will say “Lord.”

At the time of Jesus, the chief priest on Yom Kippur while hidden away behind the curtain in the Holy of Holies would voice the sacred name.  No one else did, ever.

I think Jehovah’s Witnesses is a cruel, malnourished religion.  The daughter of a women I know was ejected rom the Witnesses because she got married to a non-believer. Her mother matter-of-factly informed me that the entire group of JW families –including her own– were committed to shunning the daughter for the rest of her life.  I can’t imagine a more anti-Christian behavior.

Showing that we bear the cross of Jesus in our own lives is the best example to the world of a witness for Jesus. Living His message must be our witness to the world. Anything else is perjury.

What inaugurates Spring for me is seeing fishermen at the river. In winter, the Illinois’ River’s edge is empty of fishermen and of kids skipping stones across the flowing surface of the Illinois. When the weather warms and the days begin to lengthen, the fishermen appear.

Around here, they are all men for some reason.  They fish. I guess that the women garden and trim around their flower plots at home. It is men that fish, at least here along the Illinois River, and today the full sun is making the ripples of the river shimmer like they were throwing off glittering diamonds.

On this north side of the river, I see six fishermen seated on aluminum lawn chairs, each with two or thee fishing rods poking out toward chosen spots in the river.  The fishermen rest, staring at the water.  They are positioned, backs to me, one every 150 – 200 feet, all gazing with lazy alert at the stuff that floats past them on the endless river.

It is quiet: no kids, no spouses and no fish either. Occasionally, one of the men reaches for a cup holder, lifts a Styrofoam cup and takes a sip of coffee (at least I think it’s coffee). A single white gull glides silently above them against the blue sky.

The fisherman are static and remind me of starlings that descend on telephone wires and position themselves a standard 12″ apart so that the birds look like black notes on a musical scale. The fishermen here are half-notes playing out their silent tune on the river bank, a middle “C” chord played on the staff of life.

“Any Luck? I say to the sturdy old African-American fisherman who passes by my picnic table where I come to sit and read. He’s done for the day and headed to the small parking lot behind me.

“No, not today, not even a nibble,” he says.  Smiling from underneath his well-used tan cap, he left dangling the hope of better luck tomorrow. It’s about 3 PM and he’s ready to go home but the other five are still at their positions.

Something about this scene is calming.  The surface of the Illinois River is still sparkling like a Van Gough painting.   The river current is slowly passing to the southwest moving toward the Mississippi River carrying away tree branches, floating mallards, and debris of all kinds.  About once every two hours a tug boat advances slowly toward the granaries just outside of town. I recognize the creamy white tiny upper deck of the “Anabelle Lee,” one of the smaller tugs, on it’s way up-river for another load of grain.

I don’t fish anymore.  It’s too much of a bother to scrape the scales off and gut fish, assuming I’d catch anything. No, I just wait for a friend to stop by my house with fresh crappie cleaned and ready for the frying pan.

 I’m at the picnic bench, a stone’s throw from the anglers. People wander by and visit.  An old Marine comes over to talk.  He likes the park but doesn’t enjoy fishing, except for a receptive ear. He has a pocketful of stories about his combat time during the Vietnam War and he’s eager to tell you about a few of them –in detail.

He’s a chunky six-footer, bent over slightly, with a white goatee and knee replacements — and stories of resurrection. Divorced after many years. He says he was wounded five times, once in the head. 

“The docs told me I’d need to carry O2 with me and that I wouldn’t be able to breathe without some help.  I fooled ’em. No oxygen tank.  I’m still here.”  

He tells non-stop stories about neighborhood fights when he was a kid and how he didn’t want to fight but guys thought he was always looking for a fight.  “I wasn’t –but they wouldn’t leave me alone.” He’s standing between me and the river, leaning forward and on his feet for the whole time. Eventually, he moves on but I know he is a seeker. He is fishing for something important to him.

The fishermen are static, sitting in their chairs — not moving– facing the river.  Some artist should capture this. Nobody smokes, no loud  music, either and no one moves much.  They look like sculpted statues posted along the river. They seem mesmerized by it.

I wonder what they are thinking about.  It must be important because they spend so much time at it. I’m reminded of –believe it or not — a Babylonian proverb: “God does not deduct from man’s allotted days on earth, the time he spends fishing.”