Tattoos On the Heart by Gregory EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Gregory Boyle
- Publish date: 22 February 2011
- Language: English
- Genre: Christian Self-Help
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Pages: 240
- Price: Free
- ISBN: 987-1439153154
God, I Guess
God can get tiny, if we’re not careful. I’m certain we all have
an image of God that becomes the touchstone, the controlling
principle, to which we return when we stray.
My touchstone image of God comes by way of my friend
and spiritual director, Bill Cain, S.J. Years ago he took a break
from his own ministry to care for his father as he died of
cancer. His father had become a frail man, dependent on Bill
to do everything for him. Though he was physically not what
he had been, and the disease was wasting him away, his mind
remained alert and lively.
In the role reversal common to adult
children who care for their dying parents, Bill would put his
father to bed and then read him to sleep, exactly as his father
had done for him in childhood. Bill would read from some
novel, and his father would lie there, staring at his son,
smiling. Bill was exhausted from the day’s care and work and
would plead with his dad, “Look, here’s the idea. I read to you,
you fall asleep.” Bill’s father would impishly apologize and
dutifully close his eyes. But this wouldn’t last long. Soon
enough, Bill’s father would pop one eye open and smile at his
son. Bill would catch him and whine, “Now, come on.”
The
father would, again, oblige, until he couldn’t anymore, and the
other eye would open to catch a glimpse of his son. This went
on and on, and after his father’s death, Bill knew that this
evening ritual was really a story of a father who just couldn’t
take his eyes off his kid. How much more so God? Anthony
De Mello writes, “Behold the One beholding you, and
smiling.”
God would seem to be too occupied in being unable to take
Her eyes off of us to spend any time raising an eyebrow in
disapproval. What’s true of Jesus is true for us, and so this
voice breaks through the clouds and comes straight at us. “You
are my Beloved, in whom I am wonderfully pleased.” There is
not much “tiny” in that.
* * *
In 1990 the television news program 60 Minutes came to
Dolores Mission Church. One of its producers had read a
Sunday Los Angeles Times Magazine article about my work
with gang members in the housing projects. Mike Wallace,
also seeing the piece, wanted to do a report. I was assured that
I’d be getting “Good Mike.” These were the days when the
running joke was “you know you’re going to have a bad day
when Mike Wallace and a 60 Minutes film crew show up at
your office.”
Wallace arrived at the poorest parish in Los Angeles in the
stretchest of white limousines, stepped out of the car, wearing
a flak jacket, covered with pockets, prepared, I suppose, for a
journey into the jungle.
For all his initial insensitivity, toward the end of the visit, in
a moment unrecorded, Wallace did say to me, “Can I admit
something? I came here expecting monsters. But that’s not
what I found.”
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