Writings
Fred Craddock writes:
When I was a kid, I went to church with my mother. The minister of our little church would speak to my mother. “How’re you, Miz Craddock?” he would ask. And the five of us kids would go along like little ducks after our mother. “How’re you, Sonny? How’re you, Honey? How’re you, Sonny? How’re you, Honey?”
Sometime late Thursday afternoon, when the church was teeming with kids rehearsing with various choirs, the bubbling water feature in the narthex was knocked to the floor, disassembling its component parts and flooding the narthex carpet. What surprised all of us was that it was not the roughhousing of middle school boys which did the deed, but a bit of over-zealous leaning by some grade school girls.
If you watch commercial television at all, you are well on your way to believing that everything that currently ails the world can be cured by better cell phone reception. Day after day we see vignettes of businesses in trouble, families in trouble, marriages in trouble, when suddenly this guy shows up with a cell phone and says: “Here, try this.” Immediately, things improve. People improve. Differences disappear. Faces smile.
Let’s start with a question. When a Roman Catholic priest is ordained, what is the first thing he does? He celebrates mass, that’s what he does. And it is a really big deal….his first mass, I mean. He announces the date, names the place and sends out invitations. Friends come. Family comes. Colleagues from the seminary (and from the hierarchy) come. It’s the culmination of one long journey and the beginning of another. So people want to be there.
