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In Catholic school, Zacchaeus was presented to me as a biblical hero, someone to emulate. I remember a religion class where I colored mimeographed pictures of him sitting in his sycamore tree. What would I do to see Jesus? the coloring page prompted me to wonder. Zacchaeus muscled his way to the top of a tree, and Jesus was so delighted with this effort he invited himself over for dinner.

I often read the first stanza of the poem “Bible Study” by Tony Hoagland as a prayer: “Who would have imagined that I would have to go / a million miles away from the place where I was born / to find people who would love me? / And that I would go that distance and that I would find those people?”

My husband and I were born and bred in the Upper Midwest. When our son moved to Atlanta, we got our first exposure to that part of the South. One of the first places we visited was the Martin Luther King Jr. Center. We toured the old Sweet Auburn neighborhood and the house where King grew up. We checked out the exhibits about the civil rights movement and heard stories about the lives of King and his family.