(1) The highlight had to be seeing the car with the license plate GZUS N ME. First, one recognizes that good old American individualism is still very prevalent in the heartland and given a Christian baptism. Second, the culture here is not as secular as the west coast. The reports of Christendom's demise are highly exaggerated. Of course, as in any Christendom, the church has been highly colonialized by culture. But one senses the difference between the "left coast" and here. It is an interesting issue: is complete secularity (an act of the human imagination) better for the witness of the church than a colonialized Christendom situation? At least in a secular situation, we can know who our enemies are to love them. The passive-aggressive attacks on the church within a Christianized liberal nation-state are so much more subtle. Yet blatant secularity is so hostile and dismissive of the church's witness and intellectual heritage.

(2) Road construction of the highways continues on the highways between Chicago and Northwest Indiana. I swear that these same highways where undergoing construction over 20 years ago when I would travel occasionally to Chicago from Notre Dame, and 16 years ago when I pastored and made hospital calls in Chicago from my small steel town parish. It is like penal reform -- constantly on-going, never done. I'm not sure the significance of this, except that the Northwest Indiana area has undergone economic hard times with the evaporation of the steel industry, and became an area where minorities became a majority throughout this time.

(3) We traveled within about 5 miles of my first pastoral assignment, the town we lived in when Carl, my long-suffering, neglected son, was born. I had a little wave of nostalgia, remembering the profundity of the experience -- Mr. Flanagan dying of the brain tumor, the transient couple with children with ring-worm, Otis Peach's sudden death by heart attack; Dirk's struggle with social security disability and Carol's struggle with Dirk; the woman whose husband held the gun to her head and threatened to kill her; the woman whose ex-husband raped her, and then sued her for custody of the child who resulted from the encounter while refusing child support. The long hours of work, traveling to Notre Dame and St. Mary's to teach, finish the dissertation. Baptizing Sean.

The church there is no more. I was a "church-growth god," moving from 13 in attendance to 43 in a space of a year. But after we moved on, eventually the church was not able to sustain its witness. The pastor who followed me is still a friend, and though young at the time, did a good job -- better than the congregation knew. But eventually a pastor came with weird teaching and poor administration and pastoral care. The church, always fragile, imploded. I've lost track of the people in the intensity of subsequent life, except for the cards from Mary Flanagan, a saint if ever there was one.