Written by Father Michael
What a Easter week! Easter Monday I was driving home from a family dinner north of Indianapolis and decided to get of I-65 and travel US 52 & 41 to my doctor’s appointment in Munster. The route now is through the alternate energy wind farms of Indiana. I guess giant windmills will be savior of the small farmer and big ones too; they have a guarantee cash crop produced from Hoosier wind. Indiana is now one of the largest producers of wind power electricity in the US. Little did I know that a few hours later I would also rely on alternate energy.
I arrived at my appointment and as I got out of my car my heart started to flutter and not for the reasons that starts most of your hearts aflutter. Actually I was relieved because now my cardiologists would see what I have tried to describe to him. His nurse started an EKG before I even saw him. He entered the room as deadpan as ever and simply stated “Michael, I am sending you to the ER”. I looked at him and said: “You’re joking, aren’t you?”
He started me on Coumadin , but the next day my heart rate dipped down and as much as I tried to convince him that I have the heart of an Olympian athlete he did not buy it and recommended a pacemaker. So now I rely on an alternate energy supply.
Kindly my sister brought me something to read for stay in the hospital: Mitch Albom, The Five People You Will Meet in Heaven. Thanks, sis, but I wasn’t planning on going there, just yet. (It’s a good book.) I was and am far from going to heaven, I hope, but hospital stays do make you reflective. So the phone call from my daughter did have us planning my funeral, seriously and jokingly.
The five people in the book were people that changed the character, Eddie’s, life in some way or rather Eddie changed their life in someway and he did not realize it. In between reading the book I thought of the events in my life. How things happen that changed me. In 1960 I got acceptance letters the same day from my father’s Knox College in Galesburg, IL and Notre Dame. Knox’s tuition is $100 more the ND, it’s 155 miles away and no direct transportation, Notre Dame is cheaper and just down the road from Hammond on the South Shore, so off to ND. My dad took a job with USAID in Indonesia, so I spent a year on Java, traveling to Sumatra and Bali and around the world. I ran into the mother of a friend from grade and high school who told me her daughter was in St. Louis. I wrote to fix her up with a ND grad living there. He showed up at her door with his fiancée. I continued to write and we met in Montreal at EXPO 67 and married nine months later. We raised (isn’t that always “raising”) two beautiful children and lived the “ideal family” life but then after 27 years it crashed and died. My world ended. But we have to die to reborn. From death comes life and I started over and took chances I never thought I would. When a priest I knew offered me a job as a hospital chaplain in an oncology ward I said: “You are joking, aren’t you?” Then he said why don’t you become a deacon and God intervened and said silently why don’t you become a priest. So at 63 I was ordained and at 68 got batteries to keep me going. Chapters can be written on each event and more events will come. Happy days, sad days. Easter is the crowning of hope that we have a God that loves us and patiently waits for us to return home. Alleluia!