Resurrecting Chicago

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 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, in a winter 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 had ended up in the shed 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 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 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.  My brother, Leroy, 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. 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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