This is Jim Eder, a remarkable man. Among other things, he was a Chicago school teacher who ran a soup kitchen in his spare time. He sponsored me when I joined the Catholic Church, and he became a mentor, a role model, and my dear friend.
Last week, Jim passed away after suffering a stroke, and today his family and friends came together at St. Lambert’s Parish in Skokie for his funeral. Before the Mass began, I was privileged to deliver this eulogy. If you knew Jim, I hope you find that it captures something of his spirit. If you didn’t know him, maybe it’ll spark your interest, in which case I’d suggest you go help out at Soup Kitchen sometime. It’s still going on, every Tuesday and Friday night. Jim himself won’t be there, of course, but you’ll encounter his legacy in everyone you meet.
Who knows? You might even become part of that legacy yourself. ___________________________
When I landed in Uptown in 1984, I had one goal: To find out about the Catholic Worker. I’d read Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, and I was determined to find out about this movement of people that took the Gospel so seriously. Houses of hospitality and soup kitchens, peacemaking and farming communes, all wrapped up with priests and Mass and saints and Rosaries. The Catholic stuff weirded me out, frankly (I grew up Evangelical), but the Worker stuff appealed to my twenty-something radicalism, so I started hanging around St. Francis House.
It wasn’t long before I discovered the Soup Kitchen up the street at St. Thomas of Canterbury, and that’s where I got to know Jim Eder. “I’m new – what can I do?” I asked him on my first day. “Here,” he said, handing me a mop, “go clean the men’s bathroom.” It was a practical step, concrete, and so welcome – I was part of the team, just like that!
Later, there was always Evening Prayer and pizza and beer. Sometimes music; always story-telling (and the stories never got old, no matter how many times you heard them, due in part, perhaps, to slight alterations of details with each retelling). And then there was the laughter – lots of laughter. The transition from mopping floors, wiping tables, and scrubbing pots to singing and joking and feasting seemed so natural, so…normal!
It was all an eye-opener, a shocker, an epiphany, really. It was my initiation into the Soup Kitchen magic, largely conjured by Jim – how’d he do it? Total strangers from all walks of life coming together to serve a free meal to those in need, but then receiving something else totally unexpected, something so lavish, so extravagant – authentic community.
Dorothy Day wrote that “Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.” That’s a good description of Soup Kitchen, a banquet on many levels – literally for the guests, hundreds of guests, who showed up every Tuesday and Friday, and a banquet for the volunteers as well, with post-Soup feasting and drinking on a regular basis, to be sure, but also a more profound banquet of camaraderie and joy.
And that camaraderie and joy? It was for everyone – everyone, everyone, without exception. Everyone was made to feel welcome and a part of things, integrated into the web of the Soup Kitchen society, just by showing up and pitching in. I experienced it; I know many of you experienced it, too. And it was largely because of Jim Eder. He had an uncanny knack – a gift, a super power, if you will – for reeling in outsiders and giving them purpose, giving them a sense of belonging and place.
What’s more, once you’d been reeled in yourself, you were inspired to do the same for others. You kept your eye out for newbies or those on the fringe, and then brought them into the thick of it all. In essence, you became an extension of Eder’s irrepressible hospitality; which was itself an extension of the hospitality of Christ. Soup Kitchen under Eder’s “temporary” direction – a temporary leadership role that lasted over 40 years – was the embodiment of Peter Maurin’s vision of a world “where it is easier for people to be good.”
Now, let me hasten to add (lest Eder in his otherworldly perch should scowl and scold), that our dear departed friend was no saint. He wasn’t perfect, of course, but he managed his imperfections in a way that I and so, so many others admired and learned from. He wasn’t a saint, but he damn sure wanted to be one, and he worked at it. Every day.
And that’s why I asked him to be my sponsor when I became a Catholic – to be my “godfather,” as I called him. Why wouldn’t I? He was Catholic, through and through; he poured out his life for others through service and sacrifice; he prayed regularly, got to Mass every day, and frequented the confessional. Yet he did it all with good humor, generosity, and just regular humanness. Eder was an ordinary guy with ordinary strengths and weaknesses who, with God’s grace, did extraordinary things – he lived an extraordinary life.
Early on – after meeting him, getting to know him, living with him – I determined to become like him. So, like I said, I asked him to be my sponsor, and, as my sponsor, he not only shepherded me into the Catholic Church, he demonstrated every day what it means to be a Catholic – or, to be precise, he demonstrated every day what it can mean to be a Catholic. That’s what I wanted: To be a Catholic like Eder was a Catholic, and I’ve been working at it ever since.
Although my time in Uptown ended after only a few short years, it was instrumental in shaping my worldview, personality, and character. The Worker, Soup, St. Thomas, the whole Kenmore “do-gooders ghetto” phenomenon was a crucible for so many of us, making us who we are, and Eder was at the center of it all for many of us – me included, obviously.
Even after I left Uptown, Jim and I stayed connected, albeit remotely – going on 30-odd years now. I’d visit him in Chicago; he’d come down to visit us in South Bend; often I’d meet him halfway at an Irish pub in Michigan City. He stood with me at my wedding; he actually became a literal godfather for my son, Crispin; and, for me, he became like a second dad.
Jim challenged me and encouraged me; held me accountable when I was screwing up; counseled me when I was losing my way. We’ve laughed much together, cried together, and bitched about this and that together. It seems like my entire adult life, I’ve been striving to emulate Jim in so many ways – in faith and devotion, in courage and prudence, in friendship and loyalty, and certainly in mirth. You could say we’ve been growing older together intermittently for decades. Only he had a couple decades head start on me, so we both knew that he’d likely be making his exit before me.
Yeah, I knew that, but I still couldn’t believe it when I got the word from Fr. Simon that Jim had suffered a major stroke – that he was unresponsive and unlikely to survive for long. Jim? Jim Eder? Dying? It couldn’t be. What will the world be like without Jim Eder in it? Oh my God, a much poorer world, at the very least, poorer and more melancholy, bereft of a major tributary of charity and good cheer.
Last Saturday, I got up to Evanston to visit Jim in the hospital – to tell him I loved him, to thank him for saving my life, shaping my life, enriching my life. When I got there, I was greeted by Don and Dorsey, Jim’s good, good friends; and there was Paul Shaheen and Alban, good, good friends from an even earlier vintage.
And then there was a fifth person, a young woman I didn’t recognize – Dani, I was told, a relatively recent addition to the Soup Kitchen community. Immediately, I felt a bond with her – and I knew nothing about her other than her first name, that she was a volunteer at Soup, and that she loved Eder enough to visit his deathbed. Then I saw her well up with tears as she got ready to leave, as she bade Jim farewell, as she thanked him profusely for his impact on her life. “Amazing, amazing,” I thought to myself. “Here is a sister, a comrade, a friend – and all because of our common connection with this dying man.”
Amazing, right? Even on his deathbed, he was bringing people together. Today we gather again, once again, because of Jim. We’ll grieve him; we’ll pray for him; we’ll bury him. We’ll commend his soul to God. But we won’t be done with him, for his manner of bringing people together and conjuring community, of eliciting smiles and joviality in the unlikeliest circumstances, of pursuing holiness as if it was the most normal thing in the world – his manner is now our manner.
No matter our state of life, no matter our profession, no matter our age, we can take a cue from Jim and work to create spaces in the world – little corners in the world here and there – “where it is easier for people to be good.” And the world will be all the better for it. And so will we. Thanks, Jim Eder, thanks. Thanks for everything.
__________________________________
“And so we are going to establish a school for the service of the Lord” (Rule of St. Benedict).
“We have been placed on earth to learn to love in the school of Jesus,” writes Fr. Jacques Philippe in Interior Freedom. “Learning to love is extremely simple: it means learning to give freely and receive freely. But this simple lesson also is very hard for us to learn, because of sin.”
In that short paragraph, Philippe sums up my entire Catholic testimony. I’d grown up in faith, but I lost my way in college. I wanted Jesus, the Jesus of the Gospels, but I couldn’t find him. An abstract Jesus of the written Word and interior experience wasn’t enough. I wanted to see him, touch him, know him.
Then I encountered Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. I found the ethos of the Catholic Worker movement compelling in that it was so clearly a school of love just like Philippe describes. Hang around a CW house long enough, and you’ll get better at giving love and receiving love, regardless of your faith perspective. All CW students, if they stay enrolled, progress in love at their personal margins. It’s built into the system.
But it’s hard, very hard, mainly due to sin, as Philippe points out. That’s where grace comes in, of course, and that’s what drove me into the arms of the Catholic Church. I wanted more Jesus, I wanted more loving, both giving and receiving, and I became convinced that the Church and the sacraments and the communion of saints were the means to those ends.
I’m still convinced of that, and I’m still enrolled in the CW school, although as a distance learner now. It’s a lifelong course of study, you see. “Learning to give and receive freely requires a long, laborious process of re-educating our minds,” Philippe writes, “which have been conditioned by thousands of years of struggle for survival.” Daily, daily, daily I have to learn and re-learn the Gospel truth that life isn’t about mere survival or my rights and demands and temporal needs. No, life in Christ is about death to self, as the Lord insists, and an opportunity for new life in him.
Indeed, that new life involves a “process of divinization,” Philippe insists, “whose final goal is to love as God loves.” That sounds crazy, I know, especially given my petty selfishness and stubborn rebellion against heaven, but it’s the goal nonetheless. We’re called to be saints, after all, and saints are merely sinners who passionately desired heaven and never gave up. “This divinization, this becoming God-like, means becoming human in the truest sense!” writes Philippe. “It is a marvelous, liberating evolution.”
And it’s an adventure, the best adventure ever. See you in school! _______________________________
For more information on the Catholic Worker movement, try this link.
“And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need” (Acts 2.44-45).
The call came while I was out Friday night, so I didn’t hear the message until the next morning: Old Eddie had died. His apartment manager hadn’t seen him for a few days and found his body in the flat.
Eddie was the salt of the earth, and one of my heroes.
I met Eddie when he showed up at the Catholic Worker many years ago. He was a down and out veteran with an obscure story, but he didn’t reek of alcohol, nor did he seem like the sort to start a fight, so he got to stay.
Eddie was Polish – a dumb Polack, as he used to say – and so a Catholic, though I don’t think he was practicing his faith at the time. Whether he was or not, he certainly experienced a resurgence of piety after the Worker took him in, and he became very devout almost overnight.
The intellectual side of religion was of no interest to Eddie, so he shied away from the theological sparring that characterized much of our table-talk and porch conversation in those days. Instead, he loved to pray with anyone he could corner – the Divine Office, the Rosary – and he encouraged me in my efforts to get to daily Mass. Plus, Eddie started helping out at the soup kitchen, clearing tables and mopping up afterwards. For him, religion was something you did, not something you thought about.
Once he started receiving disability checks, Eddie got his own place – at the YMCA at first, but later on his own apartment. By then, I’d moved on from Chicago, but Eddie kept up with me, sending me Mass cards for Christmas and Easter, always with a personal note to the effect that he was remembering me in his prayers.
Later still I married, and Eddie’s prayers just multiplied along with my growing family. Every year, without fail, Eddie would send us Mass cards – Christmas, Easter – and every year a personal note.
So, Eddie is dead, but it’s hard to be sad, for I have a pretty good hunch that he had been been given a hero’s welcome on the other side. Like I said, Eddie was the salt of the earth, and I suspect Jesus always makes room for the likes of him.
Still, the news of Eddie’s death got me thinking: Salt of the earth – what does that mean? Usually the term refers to simple folk whose natural goodness is not necessarily matched by gifts of intellect or sagacity, but that seems too patronizing, even vaguely insulting, when applied to people as golden as Eddie and those like him.
Instead, I prefer the image that Pope Francis outlined in his homily the other day: “The Word of God…is alive in the hearts of the simple, of the humble, of the people of God.” In other words, the salt of the earth – the simple, the humble, the people of God – are those in whom the Word of God is energized. Referring to the day’s Gospel, in which the masses protected Jesus from the intellectual Pharisees bent on revenge, the Pope went on:
That simple crowd — that followed Jesus because what He said did their hearts good, warmed their hearts — this people wasn’t wrong. They…listened and sought to be a little bit better.
That’s an apt description of the salt of the earth, an apt description of my friend Eddie. He encountered Jesus, it did his heart good, and he sought to be a little bit better. No spectacular feats, no flashy accomplishments. Just a warmed heart, a bit of sweeping and mopping at the soup kitchen, and a whole lot of prayer. Eddie’s life was quiet and unassuming, but what he added was a richness that was palatable.
In fact, the Pope could’ve been thinking of old Eddie when he specifically referenced salt in another homily about a year ago: “When salt is used well, one does not notice the taste of salt…. What one tastes is the flavor of the food: salt helps improve the flavor of the meal.”
That was Eddie. He humbly and quietly improved life’s flavor for me, my family, and countless others. Rest in peace, old friend. Your subtle seasoning will be missed.
Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
~ Gerard Manley Hopkins
The propped up coffee-table book caught my eye as I was leaving the library. The cover photo of a man raising his gnarled hands in prayer was itself arresting, but what really froze me in my tracks was the title in gold caps: U P T O W N.
I grabbed it, checked it out, and re-entered a world I’d left behind some 30 years ago.
The book, subtitled Portrait of a Chicago Neighborhood in the Mid-1970s, is a collection of black-and-white photographs by Robert Rehak that evokes the raw grittiness of that urban neighborhood with an eerie precision.
Although I arrived in Uptown on Chicago’s north side about a decade after Rehak took his photos, the landscape he depicts and describes was largely the same one I encountered. Uptown was unusual for the wide variety of ethnic and cultural groups represented within its borders. Also, many of the de-institutionalized mentally ill had made their way to Uptown, along with the poor who were pushed out of other neighborhoods experiencing redevelopment. “By the early 1970s, Uptown had the second highest population density in Chicago and high unemployment,” writes Rehak. “It had become skid row.”
A skid row was exactly what I had been looking for.
At the time, I was a wet-behind-the-ears, suburban-raised, angst-ridden and disillusioned Evangelical trying to rediscover Jesus in the inner city. The ‘L’ train deposited me at Wilson and Broadway, and Jesus wasn’t there to greet me – a disappointment, but not really a surprise. What did surprise, however, was the sensory overload that engulfed and enraptured me, and which I came to know intimately after I embraced Uptown as my home.
First, the smells. There was plenty of smoke, because everybody smoked everywhere back then. And the whiff of chili, garlic, and curry, fried meats and broiled cheese, bizarre combinations of spices and foodstuffs representing every manner of international cuisine hanging in the air outside storefront restaurants and street level apartments – not to mention the accompanying tastes!
But the first smell to hit you was the acrid odor of the city itself. You didn’t quite know what to make of it – where it emanated from, what it was – but you’d never forget it. After moving on, years can go by, even decades, and you still expect that sour scent to envelope you when you visit again, and you’re never disappointed.
The smells hit you first, but the sights went right along with them, and you can get a pretty good idea of what the sights were like back then from Rehak’s book: A bleak and crumbling infrastructure, dirt and trash and broken glass, shuttered businesses and empty lots, and people. Lots and lots of people, and every sort imaginable. Black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. Young, old, men, women, and babies. Poor, very poor, and destitute – so I guess not every sort imaginable, because the rich didn’t come around all that often, at least to stay.
Finally, the sounds. There was the rumble and screech of the ‘L,’ of course, and the constant din punctuated by shouts and crashes and laughter at all hours. And the United Nations of faces and ethnic cuisine was naturally accompanied by a Pentecost of spoken word, from Polish to Portuguese, from Eritrean to Hmong.
Nevertheless, English was still the lingua franca, but with a twist that was startling to my untrained ear:An augmented, earthy vocabulary, and, hence, a challenge as I continue to relate this story. Writing requires words, and the words that I’d like to employ in this regard are, shall we say, an acquired taste.
But, I’ll do my best.
After disembarking from the ‘L’ and wandering through the Uptown streets for a bit, I made my way to the St. Francis Catholic Worker on Kenmore Avenue. After climbing the rickety wooden stairs to the expansive front porch, I got up my courage and knocked on the door – again hoping to run into Jesus.
No one answered my knock, so I rang the bell. After a moment, the door was flung open, and a torrent of foul abuse spewed forth. It was a magnificent display, almost like a verbal fireworks finale at an Independence Day picnic. The greeter/verbal artiste’s name was Rosalie, and although we would eventually become pretty good friends, Rosie made it unerringly clear at the time that, in her opinion, I deserved not only death, but damnation as well for making such a racket just to gain entrance to the building.
And that was just the beginning. Jimmy was another Catholic Worker denizen who had a constant mumbling patter that was peppered with spicy phrases and exotic words. And there was old Zeke in the basement, who declared himself God the Father (making the more common claim to be Christ or the Blessed Virgin seem almost trite by comparison), and who accordingly pronounced all manner of colorful denunciations from his smoky corner La-Z-Boy in the St. Francis House basement.
Then there was Love.
Love used foul language the way Matisse used color, mixing and playing and pushing the limits. Plus, Love had a very subtle British accent – whether natural or a pretense was hard to guess – and it only added additional, ironic sophistication to her salty rants.
And here’s the funny thing about Love: She used the same language to express exasperation and kindness, derision and delight. One particular word was her favorite, and by altering her pronunciation and intonation, she could use it in a seemingly endless variety of ways, including the expression of her namesake, love, along with affection and even tenderness. Love was remarkable in that, her speech and unusual behaviors aside, she truly loved her friends, and she helped me begin to really see beyond appearances for the first time in my life.
I went to Uptown to find Jesus,and what do we know of Jesus? “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” St. John tells us. Jesus doesn’t come to us in spirit alone, but in the flesh, to know with our senses, and sometimes it’s not easy to recognize Him.
Dorothy Day alluded to this idea in her essay “Room for Christ” back in 1945:
It would be foolish to pretend that it is easy always to remember this. If everyone were holy and handsome, with “alter Christus” shining in neon lighting from them, it would be easy to see Christ in everyone. But that [is] not Christ’s way for Himself now when He is disguised under every type of humanity that treads the earth.
For those of us who sought God in Uptown, the disguises – and the salty language – were all part of the adventure. Too bad it’s only with hindsight now that we can recognize when He came by then.
That He had come by, however, is not in doubt.
After I leafed through Rehak’s book, I Amazoned a copy to my friend Jim in Chicago. Jim lived in Uptown long before I got there, and he lives there still, so I knew he’d appreciate it.
A week or so later Jim sent a postcard. He had gone through Rehak’s photos and shared them with others – including Paul, a mutual friend from those bygone days. Here’s what Jim wrote:
Thanks for the wonderful treasure of the Uptown picture book. Sure brings back memories and provokes reflection. Paul kept saying, “We were so naive.”
This is primarily a tribute to my friend Tim Roemer. Tim died last year just before Christmas, and I’ve been mulling over his death and life ever since.
It’s high time I got some of that mulling out of my head and into words, especially with the first anniversary of his death approaching. I owe it to him, to his wife, Nancy, and to his kids, Peter and Anna. I owe it because, even though I’ll forever be in Tim’s debt, that’s no excuse to skip payments. Consider this a belated first installment.
A friend like Tim doesn’t come along very often, and he came along in my life at a crucial moment. He was fiercely loyal, embarrassingly generous, and extraordinarily self-effacing. Tim could also be infuriating at times (neglecting to pick up his wedding cake until an hour before his wedding comes to mind), and fantastically stubborn—just like the rest of us. In his case, however, it seemed like those were very small flaws compared to his many gifts and grand magnanimity.
Also, Tim was an idealist and a dreamer—a war tax resister, for example, and a regular at the Uptown Catholic Worker—so we found common cause as we stumbled around like a couple urban Don Quixotes, tilting at windmills and laughing at our foibles.
During this same time, I was discovering the Church, and, in time, embracing it, and my friendship with Tim gave me firsthand insight into what it meant to be a thoroughgoing Catholic. In fact, he was, along with my godfather and others in Uptown, among the first thoroughgoing Christians I’d ever encountered—thoroughgoing in the sense that Tim’s faith wasn’t an attachment or an addendum or just one aspect of his life, but rather it was his life, in a very natural, integrated way. So integrated, in fact, that he didn’t talk about it all the time, nor did he feel a need to draw attention to it. It was simply a given for Tim; it was assumed.
Three stories about Tim neatly summarize that integrated demeanor he modeled for me and which I’ve tried to emulate ever since. The stories all have Sacramental themes, and together they form a kind of catechetical triptych which continues to inform my own faith to this day. Maybe you’ll find them helpful as well. At the very least, if you’re a convert, you’ll appreciate these three Sacramental anecdotes, and why they helped me find my place in the Catholic universe.
First, Confession.
Tim loved to tell about battlefield priests during World War II who would hear Confessions of soldiers prior to major combat actions. “Are you sorry for your sins?” the priests would ask. “No,” would come the honest reply from war-hardened troops accustomed to less than saintly behaviors. Knowing that the troops faced the probability of death, and so anxious to grant them absolution, the priests would then ask, “But are you sorry that you’re not sorry?”
It sounds apocryphal, and maybe it is. Nevertheless, the story illustrates something profoundly true about the Church and her work of mediating the love of Christ to the world—namely, that He’s desperate to give it to us. Unlike the rather rigid formulas that most people associate with Catholicism, the God we encounter in Christ, the one we see in the Scriptures, the one the Church presents to us, is one who will go to any and every length to give us life and love and even Himself.
As Jesus said, God won’t be outdone by human fathers who generally provide good things for their families. Does a dad give his children stones when they ask for bread? Or scorpions when they ask for eggs? No, and usually he is working extra shifts to not only give them food and shelter and clothing, but cake and ice cream as well. Maybe even a trip to Disney World.
Yet human fathers are only a pale reflection of our heavenly Father who wants much more for us than treats and trips. He wants to give us heaven itself, and adoption, and eternity. He’s desperate to do it, and desperate times call for desperate measures. And that’s pretty much what the Gospels are all about.
Second, vocation.
This story hearkens back to the days when Tim and I were both wrestling with our life callings. Like him, I was oblivious to the painfully evident fact that God hadn’t called me to the priesthood. Tim figured it out way before I did—no doubt because, as a cradle Catholic, he was equipped to read the vocational tea leaves more readily. Nevertheless, until he finally relented and embraced his true vocation of marriage and fatherhood (in which both arenas he thrived), Tim had made halting progress in the discernment and seminary application process with the Archdiocese of Chicago.
During one of his interviews, my friend was asked what he thought about the role of women in the Church. Without any hesitation, Tim responded, and it was a simple, direct, vocation-squelching, yet wise classic: “Women’s role in the Church? Same as men: To become saints.” Clearly this wasn’t what the vocation folks in the chancery wanted to hear.
Rather, they wanted some nuanced and politically sensitive ramble about changing cultural attitudes, development of doctrine, and expanding opportunities for women’s participation in the liturgy and church governance. This was in the Cardinal Bernardin heyday, and the archdiocesan middle management was overwhelmingly “progressive.” Orthodoxy had to be gilded with a liberal patina in order to survive such vetting episodes.
None of that for Tim, however. He, like me, saw that the Church needed priests, and he pursued ordination accordingly—out of a sense of love and duty more than a sense of calling. But even if some fancy Jesuitical footwork could’ve enabled Tim to fly below the vocation office’s orthodoxy radar, it was a price too high, and that interview foretold the eventual demise of his priestly quest. That was a good thing, of course, because as Nancy and the kids can attest, his vocation lay elsewhere.
Here, too, Tim became a role model for me, as he took up marriage and fatherhood with the same tenacity and drive that characterized his do-gooder Catholic Worker-ism. “If God has called me to become a saint through marriage and family life,” I can imagine him saying, “well, then, dammit, let’s get on with it!” If he didn’t actually say those words, that’s certainly how he lived, and I took his example to heart.
Finally, the Eucharist.
I lived with Roemer, along with our mutual friend and my godfather, Jim Eder, for a longish portion of my Uptown, Catholic Worker days. All three of us were daily Communicants, although we often went to Mass separately and at different times. Often I would go alone to the 8 am weekday Mass at St. Thomas of Canterbury. When I returned to our flat, I had a pretty good idea of what I could expect.
Eder would already be off to work, having attended the 6:45 am liturgy. Tim would be home, sitting in an easy chair and reading the Tribune amid the clutter and mess of our apartment. Entering our six-flat building and climbing the stairs to the third floor would involve enough noise that Tim would be alerted to my imminent arrival. When I entered our flat, Tim would invariably drop the paper enough to make eye contact with me and utter his favorite question deadpan: “Did He show up?” My answer, always in the affirmative, would be met with a grunt of approval, and the paper shield would be restored.
What might sound like sacrilege or, at best, irreverence always struck me as a preeminent sign of Tim’s secure faith, and I admired his comfortable familiarity with the miracle of the Mass and the wonder of the Church. He was truly at home in that vast Catholic Thing, and I envied him.
In addition, however, Tim’s seemingly flippant question was rooted in a profound insight regarding, first, our own utter dependency on divine grace, and, second, our dire responsibility as well. The humor in Tim’s daily query is that He always “shows up,” no matter what—it’s what He promised us, after all. “And, lo, I will be with you until the end of the age,” He told the Apostles just before the Ascension.
The real question, you see, is whether we show up—or rather, whether I do. He will always be there, no question, ready for whatever problems or difficulties or sufferings I might bring Him, and ready to give Himself totally to us, to feed us with His very self. Will I come to that encounter hungry for Him? Will I come ready with an open heart and a submissive will? Will I come prepared for what He wants to give me and do for me no matter what?
Rest in peace, my friend. Thank you for the Faith lessons you taught me: that God desperately wants to save us, that he desperately wants to sanctify us, and that all we have to do is let Him. Pray for me that, like you, I may show up whenever He does.
I wonder if a man handing another man an extremely sharp, polished, two-edged instrument would hand it over with the air, gestures, and expression of one delivering a bouquet of flowers?
Would not this be madness?
What does one do, then? Convinced of the excellence of the dangerous instrument, one recommends it unreservedly, to be sure, but in such a way that in a certain sense one warns against it.
The call came while I was out Friday night, so I didn’t hear the message until the next morning: Old Eddie had died. His apartment manager hadn’t seen him for a few days and found his body in the flat.
prayer was itself arresting, but what really froze me in my tracks was the title in gold caps: U P T O W N.
utside storefront restaurants and street level apartments – not to mention the accompanying tastes!
No one answered my knock, so I rang the bell. After a moment, the door was flung open, and a torrent of foul abuse spewed forth. It was a magnificent display, almost like a verbal fireworks finale at an Independence Day picnic. The greeter/verbal artiste’s name was Rosalie, and although we would eventually become pretty good friends, Rosie made it unerringly clear at the time that, in her opinion, I deserved not only death, but damnation as well for making such a racket just to gain entrance to the building.
that Tim’s faith wasn’t an attachment or an addendum or just one aspect of his life, but rather it was his life, in a very natural, integrated way. So integrated, in fact, that he didn’t talk about it all the time, nor did he feel a need to draw attention to it. It was simply a given for Tim; it was assumed.
Finally, the Eucharist.
God-Haunted Lunatic 