Angela Center

Integrating: spirituality, psychology, social responsibility and the arts

What's New

Reflection for the 3rd Sunday after Easter 2005

Calendar

Psychotherapy /      Counseling Services

Conference Facilities

Registration

Contact our Staff

News

AC Press

HOME

This essay, a reprint from 1998, is intended to show how in your own life in your own way you, too, may have experienced Christ on the road to Emmaus.

Last Tuesday, as a participant at a conference at Angela Center, I was present at an early morning meditation service. The day weighed heavily upon me because it happened to be the anniversary of my son's death in April five years ago at the age of twenty-three. He was very much on my mind.

To stimulate thought and prayer a passage was read from John Shea's Hour of the Unexpected. It was about the Emmaus episode in Luke's Gospel. You know the story: how two disillusioned disciples were dragging their feet along the road to Emmaus when a stranger fell in step with them and something about him began to revive their imaginations, turn their hearts on fire. Or as Shea puts it: "And now a sudden stranger falls upon their loss with excited words about surprises hidden at the heart of death . . . and that every scream is redeemed for it echoes in the ear of God." The reading ends with the disciples recognizing the stranger for who he was -- the arsonist of the heart.

And I began to think - that pretty much describes Philip: a stranger who fell in step with me relatively late in my life. Stranger indeed! because at some point in his childhood I actually concluded: Philip got off on the wrong planet; he was never destined to fit into what we call middle class normality. I saw him born and the look on his face even then seemed to say, "What stop is this? What am I doing here?" The first year of his life was a silent one. He'd hang there in his jumper, only his eyes active, taking in everyone. You could almost hear his little brain wondering, "Who are all these funny looking people?" Once he entered day care and thereafter through elementary and middle school within a day of enrollment he found whoever was the marginal kid and became his advocate. By the time he was thirteen he had found another marginal population - at the edge of Golden Gate Park and in the Haight district.

That marked the end of my hope of maintaining a family facade of middle class coziness and respectability. I went through all the phases, the whole roller-coaster ride: panic, sanctions, pleading, programs, dawn trips across country in quest of him. But Philip remained reluctant to join my prudent, safe world and I resigned myself to letting go and letting God (as they say) - and oddly enough, we mellowed out very quickly and became ever closer right up until his heart gave out one night and I received that call we all dread to receive - a call that binds me to several other parents in our parish at a level too profound for words.

While thus musing upon Shea's words, I wondered what did I learn from this brief excursion along my own road to Emmaus with a boy and young man who will always be a messiah (an anointed one) to me? I learned a lot about homeless people and addicts, young and old. I learned a lot about Phil's contemporary friends with whom he shared flats and hotels in the Haight and Mission - about their fear to enlist in what they saw as an often ruthlessly competitive secular world. I learned a lot about how many of them die young. I learned to identify with them. And I learned to stop pretending, to overthrow the tyranny of our always having to appear an "ideal and self-sufficient family", to deny, to conceal our vulnerability.

And there's that other thing John Shea said of Christ that's so true of you, Phil. Insofar as I never loved in the way or to the degree I have since you fell in step with me, you may indeed be called the arsonist of my heart.

-- Geoff Wood