Dear God,
In Luke’s gospel (Luke 10:1-10), Zacchaeus, a chief tax collector and a wealthy man, wants to see Jesus. But he’s short, and there’s a crowd around Jesus, like usual. So he climbs a sycamore tree to get a better view.
The story goes on to say Jesus saw him in the tree, and told him to get down, because, just like Donkey in the 2001 flick, “Shrek,” our Lord had a plan, which involved staying up all night, swapping manly stories with Zacchaeus, and in the morning, making waffles.
But I want to stick to this whole climbing-the-sycamore-tree thing, because I think it’s significant. I think you are trying to tell us humans, God, how important a proper perspective is.

Zacchaeus was a sinner, yes. He was the CHIEF tax collector, which is like being the primary shareholder of PayFirst CareLast. But he’s the only one who had the right view.
He, alone, could see the entire elephant, like in the Buddhist Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant:

A number of disciples went to the Buddha and said, “Sir, there are living here in Savatthi many wandering hermits and scholars who indulge in constant dispute, some saying that the world is infinite and eternal and others that it is finite and not eternal, some saying that the soul dies with the body and others that it lives on forever, and so forth. What, Sir, would you say concerning them?”
The Buddha answered, “Once upon a time there was a certain raja who called to his servant and said, ‘Come, good fellow, go and gather together in one place all the men of Savatthi who were born blind… and show them an elephant.’ ‘Very good, sire,’ replied the servant, and he did as he was told. He said to the blind men assembled there, ‘Here is an elephant,’ and to one man he presented the head of the elephant, to another its ears, to another a tusk, to another the trunk, the foot, back, tail, and tuft of the tail, saying to each one that that was the elephant.
“When the blind men had felt the elephant, the raja went to each of them and said to each, ‘Well, blind man, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?’
“Thereupon the men who were presented with the head answered, ‘Sire, an elephant is like a pot.’ And the men who had observed the ear replied, ‘An elephant is like a winnowing basket.’ Those who had been presented with a tusk said it was a ploughshare. Those who knew only the trunk said it was a plough; others said the body was a grainery; the foot, a pillar; the back, a mortar; the tail, a pestle, the tuft of the tail, a brush.
“Then they began to quarrel, shouting, ‘Yes it is!’ ‘No, it is not!’ ‘An elephant is not that!’ ‘Yes, it’s like that!’ and so on, till they came to blows over the matter.
“Brethren, the raja was delighted with the scene.
“Just so are these preachers and scholars holding various views blind and unseeing…. In their ignorance they are by nature quarrelsome, wrangling, and disputatious, each maintaining reality is thus and thus.”
Then the Exalted One rendered this meaning by uttering this verse of uplift,
O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim
?For preacher and monk the honored name!
?For, quarreling, each to his view they cling.
?Such folk see only one side of a thing.

Sometimes I think of life as one of those 3D posters that can simultaneously frustrate and fascinate you. Because for the first 368 times you stare at it, all you see is random dots. But then one day, as you gaze at it cross-eyed because you’ve just spent two straight hours on the computer reading Beyond Blue, you unexpectedly see a yellow-footed Antechinus (whatever that is) and then a duck-billed platypus, and then an Australian king parrot, a laughing kookaburra, and a flock of Ulysses butterflies. By the time you have finished your tuna sandwich and are on to the four packs of Kit-Kats you packed for lunch, you can spot the entire Australian rainforest, and you can’t believe you never saw it before.
My depression has done that for me—given me vision. It’s my sycamore tree, God, but you already knew that.
Although I feel I gave you my life back when I was 18, when I uttered something like Mary’s fiat—”Okay, God, I cry uncle. You take over,” the Great Depression of 2005 and 2006 left me with a perspective, kind of invisible grace, that you only give to three groups of people: those who desperately want to die, those who are dying, and those taking care of people who are dying.
You offer to these people–and also to the folks battling debilitating illnesses–a sneak peak of mortality, so that every breath taken in a symptom-free world seems nothing short of miraculous, and those things previously taken for granted—a Kindergarten class of vampires and Darth Vaders praying the “Hail Mary” on Halloween, and the imaginative world of a four-year-old who is both a fairy-princess and a beautiful mermaid in the bathtub—are now received as gifts. A sense of our mortality, that is what’s at the top of the sycamore tree—so that on those days you don’t want die, you’ve got one hell of a view, and can catch all the action, and perceive the hidden mystery and beauty in life, that is often concealed to the public.
In “A Short Guide to a Happy Life,” novelist Anna Quindlen writes about the year her mother died of ovarian cancer, when Anna was nineteen and her mother forty. “This is what I learned from that experience,” she writes, “that knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.”
She writes about the climb up that sycamore tree, about the view from the ground versus the perspective from the tree:

Maybe you have come to feel the way I have. And you’ve come to feel that way for a very difficult or demanding reason. One day you were walking around worrying about whether you had anything to wear to a party and reminding yourself to buy Kitty Litter or toilet paper. And then you were in the shower lathering up, or you were lying on a doctor’s table, or the phone rang. And your world suddenly divided, as my world did many years ago. It divided into “before” and “after.” . . . “Before” and “after” for me was not just before my mother’s illness and after her death. It was the dividing line between seeing the world in black and white, and in Technicolor. The lights came on, for the darkest possible reason.

Catholic author and priest, Ronald Rolheiser, describes the passage into new vision—the climb up the sycamore tree–as “purgatory on earth.” For him, the “before” and “after” happened in the summer he was fourteen:

My inner world collapsed. It began with the suicide of a neighbor. A young man whose health and body I envied went out one night and hung himself. Then another young man from our small farming community was killed in an industrial accident, and the summer ended with a classmate, a close friend, dying in a horse-back riding accident. I served as an altar-server at each of their funerals. My outside world stayed the same, but inside, not unlike the young man whose story I just shared, things were dark, spinning, scary. I was in a free-fall . . . But, as all that pain, disillusionment, and loss of self-confidence was seeping into my life, something else was seeping in too, a deeper faith, a deeper vision of things, an acceptance of my vulnerability and mortality, and a sense of my vocation. I’m a priest today because of that summer. It remains still the most painful, insecure, depressed period of my life. But it remains too the time of deepest growth. Purgatory on earth, I had it when I was fourteen.

I’m still not going to thank you, God, for my illness. I’m not that evolved or spiritual. But I’m keenly aware that most of the good stuff in my personality—sensitivity, gratitude, generosity, and compassion—those things you would term as “virtues” come from my perspective atop the sycamore tree, where I sit with some goody 3D glasses, looking out over a crowd around Jesus, an elephant being felt up by four blind men, and an Australian rainforest that’s quite spectacular. Maybe, having danced on the edge of death for so long, I understand better what Helen Keller meant when she wrote, “The greatest tragedy in life is people with sight but no vision.”