Very early on the morning of August 19, I saw a comment asking how I was doing with the Rosary, and the thought that immediately came to mind was, "Someone like me praying the Rosary is like Zacchaeus climbing the sycamore tree." As you will recall, Zacchaeus, the chief publican (meaning a collaborator with the Romans and thus a great "sinner"), was too short to see Jesus in the crowd, so he climbed a sycamore fig tree to get a better view. Jesus saw him, and said, "Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for to day I must abide at thy house" (Luke 19:1-10).
I think the sync fairies have been trying to get me to make this connection for a while. An August 9 comment by Debbie mentioned the sycamore tree and that it had biblical significance, but my first thought was not of Zacchaeus but of Amos the Prophet:
Also Amaziah said unto Amos, "O thou seer, go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there: But prophesy not again any more at Bethel: for it is the king's chapel, and it is the king's court."
Then answered Amos, and said to Amaziah, "I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son; but I was an herdman, and a gatherer of sycomore fruit: And the Lord took me as I followed the flock, and the Lord said unto me, 'Go, prophesy unto my people Israel'" (Amos 7:12-15).
I like the idea that Amos, the first of the Prophets in the narrow sense of that word, began his career as a gatherer of sycamore figs. My own motto, of course, is "The highway is for gamblers / Better use your sense / Take what you have gathered / From coincidence."
The day before Debbie's comment, I had written "A few days ago I had the thought that a tree could be the equivalent of the Green Door, but I can no longer retrace the train of thought that led me there." (My own Green Door had led me to a fruiting banyan, a close relative of the sycamore fig.)
This morning, the connection became apparent. One of the meanings of the Green Door is the door at which Christ knocks: "if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me" (Rev. 3:20). When Christ knocks, you can hear that he's out there, but you can't see him because the door stands between you. So you open the door, and he comes into your house. Zacchaeus, too, could hear Jesus but could no see him, so he remedied the situation by climbing the sycamore tree -- equivalent to opening the door -- and this action, too, resulted in Jesus' coming into his house and dining with him.
I think of praying the Rosary as a sort of hineni, symbolically equivalent to opening the door, climbing the sycamore tree, or saying, "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth."
3 comments:
Thank you for this.
Zacchaeus' name is thought to mean "pure, innocent," so it's an interesting juxtaposition with his sinful job.
The concept of hineni "Here am I" and its location-related naive sense reminds me of an odd message I got a few weeks ago. We saw a photo of my family when I was a boy visiting Four Corners, the unique point in the US where four states share a vertex. The states are arranged this way on the map:
Utah Colorado
Arizona New Mexico
We pulled up Google Maps to look at the location as it appears today and zoomed way in. Google Maps had some sort of label glitch and the state names looked like this:
TA LORA
IZO MEX
A little further south along the AZ-NM state line, another Arizona label read "ZO" but was rotated 90 clockwise so it looked like a very wide N over a wide O:
N
O
I did a little bit of playing with these odd letter arrangements.
Talora:
1. a line of fishing rods made by Shimano.
2. an Italian adverb meaning "sometimes" or "at times"
Izomex:
1. a Czech contractor specializing in waterproofing things like building foundations and road and highway bridges.
2. a Polish cattle breeder with a facebook page last updated in Nov 2019.
Taizo:
1. a Japanese masculine given name, possibly meaning "third son"
2. a Greek verb meaning "to feed"
Loramex:
1. a username used on Steam, Pinterest, etc.
2. a store in Mérida, Mexico
3. an Indian trademark related to pharmaceuticals
Tamex:
1. the Taiwan Mesoscale Experiment, a field project between the US and the ROC during May and June 1987
2. brand name for at least one medication, an alpha blocker called tamsulosin used to treat symptoms of benign prostatic hyperplasia
Izolora:
1. Latvian for "insulator"
I'm just throwing these out there to see what doors it might lead to.
Some of those have the feel of the slang used by some Chileans I knew about 20 years ago -- they would use chafamex the way a Mexican would use chafa ("shoddy, crappy"), and they would also add -x to the end of random words, like Chilex for their country or six for sí, etc. (I can't find many references to this on the Internet, so I suppose it was an ephemeral thing.) Loramex in particular sounds like it should be some sort of vulgar South American slang (lora means "whore" in Argentina), though apparently it's respectable enough in Mexico to be the name of a store!
After perusing your Fourth Gospel blog on Saturday, parts of the church sermon I attended on Sunday stuck in mind. The sermon discussed Jesus's names as Isaiah 9:6-7 listed. The Fourth Gospel was brought up considerably more than it had been in a while, and while I don't recall the contexts now, Isaiah 6:1-8 and verse 34 of both John 3 and Matthew 10 were cited. Zacchaeus came up at some point, too -- lo and behold, I saw this post not long after the sermon was over.
I think for the house metaphor to work properly in my case, there need be two doors -- but I'm content with a single multidimensional one (grins). Jesus had to knock for me to be open to belief again. Later, finding the door open, I eventually came across him on the other side.
On the origin of your motto, I'm not overly familiar with Bob Dylan, but that's a curious song. I have no motto as such, but do keep a loose soundtrack in mind of past and future. This favourite has never been more relevant!
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