Rodriguez and Maundy Thursday
From the conclusion
Rodriguez stayed. He didn’t run from Detroit’s rot, its danger, its slow-motion collapse. He walked those streets, finding something worth loving in that post-industrial armpit. It reminds me of Mother Teresa, wading through Calcutta’s filth, embracing the kind of suffering that’d send the rest of us screaming for a hot shower and a gated suburb.
The average person can learn to accept that he’ll have neither fame nor fortune (though many of us resent it). It’s a sort of detachment, or at least resignation, that comes with age. But to shrug off comfort, health, and safety? That’s a rarer breed of detached madness.
And then here we are, staring down Holy Thursday, the cusp of the Triduum, when we’re forced to reckon with the ultimate act of detachment: God himself, stripped bare, broken, and bleeding for a world that barely noticed. Rodriguez, in his own small way, seemed to have walked a shadow of that path.
Read the beginning
Eric Scheske
