Reviewed by Eileen Quinn Knight, Ph.D. Profiles in Catholicism
Looking at the characteristic of Michael Zedek’s experience and writing: he is a practiced and practicing noticer. Without even being didactic about this, he shows that he wants you to be a noticer, both of his work and, after reading it, of countless easy-to-be-overlooked, but truly revealing, features of what surrounds in or informs us. In this book the important issue is to notice that which may be hidden or ignored and to express hope that readers will be motivated to improve their own “noticing” quotient and capability. The concept of noticing, which this dictionary defines as “becoming aware if…something or someone’ is ceaseless, a constant if life even when one is dreaming. It can be so taken for granted that its potential for enhancing life can easily be overlooked. But it deserves notice.
Noticing and finding ways to communicate mysteries in what he saw and heard and felt in also the vocation of Rabbi Zedek. The reader could look that assignment up in any seminary manuals for future rabbis. One notices, it is intended also to be part of the vocation of those who make up the rabbi’s congregation or of others in the culture, who became aware of his vocation and achievement. Notice: without even sounding polemical or didactic, Rabbi Zedek could not be more focused, clear or grounded as when he plinks down a sentence like this about his intention: “I hope this book reminds us that we need not wait for the exceptional moments in order to realize how remarkable this world and our lives are even if we cannot hold them close enough.”
Always aware of the lives of the reader, the rabbi shows that he knows that few of us can live dramatically at the mountain. “No, there are full diapers and traffic delays, distractions and disappointments galore. Amy number of mundane, routine matters fill our days……every event points to an ultimate reality, as you’d likely expect a religious person to insist, behind everything is the One, the infinite, or to use the traditional Western word, God.” Zedek elaborates and clarifies the matter by quoting my fellow Nebraskan Willa Cather: ”Miracles…seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.” Rabbi Zedek, our light-hearted and never overbearing sage, bids in Chapter 2, “Let’s talk, which he does and we listen and then also are ready more than before to talk about mysteries in and about ordinary life. This is what Martin Marty, Professor Emeritus, from the University of Chicago who influenced the faculty of St. Xavier University summarized the beauty of Rabbi Zadek’s work. In the appendix Rabbi offers additional literary sources that refer to the miracles around and in us for individual reflection as we travel on our pathways toward the sacred. At the end of each chapter there are questions of reflection about the work of the chapter. This is a book to assist in one’s spiritual life in regard to prayer. A great gift for all.