Patricia was ten years old. She lived in a suburban neighborhood where
there were only a few children her age, including Morgan, an
eleven–year–old boy who was nice but only for a very limited amount of
time. Summer was generally a very boring period in her life. There were
just so many hours a day that you could listen to rock tapes. So she
decided to create a treasure hunt.
How could a ten–year–old girl create a treasure hunt? You ask that
question only because you don't know Patricia. You have to understand,
first of all, that right at the corner of her street there was a bus stop
to which many, many people came early in the morning to get on a bus,
which took them to the train, which took them to the city and their jobs.
They were all well dressed—even on casual Friday—and carried expensive
leather briefcases and serious and worried frowns. Then at the end of the
day, they came back looking frazzled and wilted and with heavier
briefcases and heavier frowns. None of them ever looked up.
So the first day of her treasure hunt, when it was very hot and no one
was on the street, Patricia sneaked out of her house with a large supply
of red chalk. Looking carefully up and down the street, to make sure the
police wouldn’t see and arrest her for defacing public property, she
scrawled in large red block letters right at the bus stop,
TREASURE NEAR! > > > > >
Then at strategic intervals along the street, she scrawled other notes:
THIS WAY TO THE TREASURE! > >
YOU’RE GETTING CLOSER! > > >
DON’T QUIT NOW! > > > > >
YOU ALMOST HAVE IT! > > > >
LOOK IN THE TREE! > > > > > >
GO FOR IT! > > > > > >
Then Patricia found a very bright penny in her large collection of
almost a thousand pennies and slipped it into an old notch in the bark of
a beautiful oak tree in front of her house. To give her treasure hunters a
last bit of reassurance, she wrote on the tree trunk:
TREASURE HERE!
Well, at first no one paid any attention to Patricia’s signs and the
arrows that went with them. You see, while they never looked up when they
walked down the street to the bus because their eyes were always downcast,
they never paid any attention to what was on the sidewalk. Then the second
day it rained and wiped out all her carefully drawn signs. “This time”,
she said to herself, “I’ll do it right!” So she replaced all her signs,
and this time, she did them in psychedelic colors.
Sure enough, that night some people began to notice the signs. Most of
them ignored the promise of treasure, but a young woman with an especially
heavy briefcase looked at the first sign and her already heavy frown got
heavier. Then she saw the second sign and laughed at it, not altogether
pleasantly. The third sign caught her attention. Then, when she came to
the sign that said, “Go for it!” she looked both ways to make sure no one
was watching her. Then, with a crafty expression, she crept up on the
tree, took out the penny, and grinned happily. She put the penny back into
the tree for the next customer and strode away with the grin still on her
face.
“Not bad for the first one,” Patricia chortled to herself.
The next person was an older man whose walk suggested that all the joy
had gone out of his life. He looked like he would hardly be able to make
it home each evening, so weary, so discouraged, so beaten, did he seem. He
imitated the woman's approach, even to looking in both directions so that
no one would think him stupid. He laughed and laughed and laughed when he
took the penny out of the tree. He kept the penny and put a quarter in its
place.
Patricia wasn’t sure that she approved of that. The whole point was the
penny. So she found her second–most shiny penny and replaced the quarter.
She dropped the quarter in a special place on her dresser. She’d put this
extra treasure in the collection in church on Sunday.
Well, so it went. More and more people found the treasure. It made them
all much happier. By the end of the week, Patricia had three dollars and
fifty cents to put in the collection on Sunday. She thought about
deducting money to pay for the pennies she had lost, but that would have
been like totally yucky, wouldn’t it, when you had almost a thousand
pennies?
Patricia the Penny Planter decided that this summer was not so boring
after all. Then late one day, a prim and proper young man, the most prim
and proper young man Patricia had ever seen in her long experience of
life, saw the sign at the bus stop and began to follow the other signs.
Patricia, who naturally watched all this from the window in her
air–conditioned bedroom, could hardly believe it. There must be hope for
all the prim and proper young men in the world. He got all the way to the
edge of the sidewalk opposite the tree, looked again in both directions,
and then turned away and walked briskly down the street.
“Oh, drat!” Patricia the Penny Planter said, using her strongest
language.
That night, just before she was going to bed and when the lights in her
room were off, Patricia the Penny Planter looked out her bedroom window.
There in the gloomy darkness, illuminated only by a dim street lamp, was
the prim and proper young man, now in a T–shirt and cutoffs. He left the
sidewalk and very cautiously approached the tree.
Patricia could not contain herself. She threw open the window and
shouted at the top of her voice — which was pretty loud to tell the truth
— “Go for it!”
The young man looked up, startled and frightened. Where was this voice
in the dark coming from? He turned and ran away as fast as his expensive
running shoes could carry him.
Patricia closed the window. She was laughing. “I’ll get him yet,” she
told herself. “He's hooked. I'll get him yet.”
Now my friends, the question you will want to ask yourself is how the
kingdom of Heaven is like Patricia the Penny Planter's treasure hunt....
The following parable is attributed to John Shea and was quoted by Andrew
Greeley in several of his novels. While it is longer than the other
chapters, it is well worth including here. Enjoy and learn!