CHAPTER 1
Addressing Zacchaeus


It was early morning and fresh snow lay in the streets of Prague. Everything was fairly fresh in those days--the mid-1990s. A few years earlier, the Communist regime had fallen in the course of the "Velvet Revolution," along with its monopoly of political and police power, and for the first time in decades genuine parliamentary democracy was restored. The church and the university once more enjoyed freedom. That turn of events wrought enormous changes in my life: during the 1970s, I had been secretly ordained abroad at a time of religious repression at home that had already lasted decades. Not even my mother, with whom I lived, was allowed to know I was a priest. For eleven years, I performed my priestly duties clandestinely in an "underground church." Now I was able to function openly, freely, as a priest, without any risk of repression, in the newly created university parish in the heart of Old Prague. After years during which I had to give lectures on philosophy solely as part of clandestine courses in private homes organized by the "flying university," could only publish in samizdat, I was able to return to the university, write for the newspapers, and publish books.
But on that particular winter morning I was headed, not for the church or the university, but for the parliament building. Among the novelties of those days was the custom, established a few years earlier, of inviting a member of the clergy to the parliament once a year, just before Christmas, to deliver a brief meditation to the assembled members of parliament and senators prior to the last sitting before the Christmas vacation.
Yes, everything was still fairly fresh and...