Last month found Dad and I in Vicksburg, Mississippi on a Sunday.

“Suppose there is a Catholic Church here?”  Dad asked.

There was one.  The Gospel that Sunday was John’s and featured the Apostle Andrew.  Only in this Gospel do we find Andrew as a disciple of John the Baptist and the first to follow Christ.  John tells us Andrew recognizes Jesus as the Messiah and seeks out his brother, Simon Peter, to come follow Him as well.

“This morning we get one of the few mentionings of Andrew which takes place in the New Testament.  The New Testament only references Andrew a dozen times, and half those times it goes on to mention that he was the brother of Simon Peter.  It is as though Andrew’s name doesn’t carry any weight unless his famous brother is thrown in.

You see folks the Apostle Andrew was just like you and I:  He was an ordinary man.  He never makes a great speech that gets recorded.  There is no mention of some great act Andrew performs.  He simply recognizes Christ and follows Him, and brothers and sisters that is all that is asked of us.

The other three which join after him, his brother, James, and John, all get called on by Christ to be present in some of His finest and most trying hours.  Time and time again Andrew, the first, is left out.  Do we ever hear about Andrew being bitter about this, of his throwing a temper tantrum, or being jealous with the others?  No.  We don’t.  What is remarkable about this ordinary man is how easy Andrew makes it look, but Christ knows how hard it was for Andrew, and Christ loves him for it.

You and I know how hard it is to be ordinary too.  You and I know how hard it is to follow Christ.  You and I know how hard it is to be Catholic in the state of Mississippi.”

The priest’s name was Malcom O’Leary, though I wouldn’t have guessed him for an Irishman. He had walked up the aisle humbly, with graying hair, a bowed head, and a decided limp hardly concealed by his vestments.  His homily, only partly caught here, was as skillfully worded as any I had ever heard and was delivered to a parish no larger than one which might exist in a small, rural Iowa town.

Ninety percent of this congregation was black, and some of them, along with some of Mississippi’s whites, were part of an expanse of poverty like I had never seen in this country before.  I wouldn’t have faulted Fr. O’Leary for saying how hard it was to be poor in Mississippi, nor would I have faulted him for saying how hard it may have been to be black.  He had said neither of those things, however.  Instead he talked about how hard it was to be Catholic.

Perhaps if it hasn’t been hard for us to be Catholic, or whatever faith it is we choose, we haven’t been doing it right.  Maybe the same applies for being ordinary.  It is the Gospel of John that uses the ambiguous phrase “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”  This unnamed disciple is almost always in the company of Simon Peter.  He’s in his company so much, it wouldn’t be a stretch to think they might be related.

The traditional interpretation is that the disciple whom Jesus loved was John.  If we lay tradition aside, and sometimes it is the best thing to do, perhaps Christ saw in an ordinary man, whose name was hardly worth mentioning, exactly what Fr. Malcom O’Leary saw.  Perhaps in embracing the difficulty of the ordinary, Andrew was anything but.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIQ1NHa0g6A

hack noun 1. a writer producing dull, unoriginal work.  2. a dry, unproductive cough

It was the end of a long, cold February day in Iowa City, and I had the pleasure of being in the company of an attractive woman.  The fact that she was a talker made her more so.  There was nothing more I wanted than for her to keep right on talking.  It was hardly the first time I had felt that way.  Winter is the loneliest of times.

“Do you weld?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Are you a welder?” she asked.  “My Dad was a welder.  He had lung trouble.  They finally found out it was because of the fumes.  Do you weld?”

“No.  I’m not a welder.”

“Well, I really hope they find out what is going on with you.  Hopefully this scan will help them do that.”

I imagined we had been moving through that scan like cattle, and the fact that she could hold such a thought for me, a stranger at the end of the day, I found remarkable.  It was no surprise that she would wonder if I was like her Dad.  By now I was used to wondering whether she wanted me to be.

I had never seen anyone wear black scrubs before, and why the gal with the CT scan was wearing them was beyond me.  If she looked like an angel, then it was the Angel of Death.  Surely there were more cheerful colors, for surely there were those getting much worse news than I.

I had lived the previous two years thinking my persistent cough was the omen of something inheritable and, until a few months ago, largely untreatable.  (You might think me a hypochondriac, but I never have been before and am too old to go around picking up new habits now.)  An hour prior to the scan, I had found out it didn’t have anything to do with an inheritance at all.  It might just be heartburn or a calcified lymph node causing a tickle.  This should have been good news, but in some strange way I felt unaffected by it.

Now I even felt disappointed.  Her concern was unwarranted.  Still, she didn’t know that, so I didn’t tell her.

To get to the precautionary CT scan, I had made my way through a series of waiting rooms.  Most in them were older.  One was younger.  For some moving from waiting room to waiting room is like living; for some it is like dying.  While we tend to think the two are different, perhaps the only differences are immediacy and how you want to look at it.

“Your shirt has metal snaps; it will have to come off.”

It did and in the process revealed the extra 15-20 pounds it was probably doing a poor job of hiding anyway.

“I will have you lay right here on this table.  Don’t worry about your boots; they’re fine.  Now if you would just place both your hands above your head…perfect.  All right, the table is going to move through the scan and you will hear a voice telling you how to breathe, until then just breathe normally.”

For the first time in my life, looking at my pale, white belly and my lanky arms devoid of tone, I felt old.  It passed, though.  I then closed my eyes and prayed that they find the harpoon that got me.

When it was over, I snapped the shirt, donned the long black coat, and stood up in the boots which allowed me to reclaim as many of the trappings of youth my receding hairline would allow.  On the way home I stopped in West Des Moines and filled a prescription for an antacid and an inhaler.  I paid the man and handed half of my reclaimed trappings back.