OUR IGNATIAN RETREAT PART 4

Our January 2012 meeting opened with Father Beaudois asking me for my reply to his Who am I? question posed the month before.

Naively, I thought I had a good answer. In fact, I had gone to the bother of typing it out.

“I’m a husband, a father, a grandparent and so on,” I began.

“I also define myself by my activities such as golfer, card player and blogger or by my skills such as tutor or painter”(as in College Pro, not Michelangelo).

Father Don's eyes twinkled like a returning Jeopardy champion as he listened. I continued in the same vein until he interrupted with,

“Mike, Mike, Mike…that’s all very good. The wrong answer but very good.”

For a moment, I thought he was going to pull out his flash cards as he liked to do on occasion in his Chem class almost fifty years ago.

Mike..What colour is this?
Red, Father.
That’s good. What colour is this?
Amber.
I'd call it orange but amber is OK.
What colour is this Mike?
Green.
That’s great. At least I know you’ll make a good truck driver someday.
(Sixties kids weren’t bubbled- wrapped).

“Mike, you’re going to like the answer because it’s got some math in it.
You’re actually a rimless zero. You’re nothing in this big cosmos, just a speck of dust really.”

Now I was the one who wanted to hold up a card; a red ejection card would be good.

“You’re a rimless zero. You have existence only in God,” he continued.

For someone like me who is just recovering from cancer, who already felt marginalized by his condition, I felt his answer was just as inappropriate as his colour card questions. I had been at zero fo six months and was just beginning to walk to the right on life’s number line.

“Reflect on it. It’s the first step to real understanding,” Father added without giving any further explanation.

His assertion both challenged and annoyed me and as the days went by, I did a lot of thinking about it.

Maybe you will too. Are you just rimless a zero?