Six years ago, I was at a Fourth of July party when a woman I know handed me a photocopied sheet. “I’m asking everyone to pray this novena for my fiancé’s brother, who is struggling with mental illness,” she said. “You say the prayer nine days in a row.”
Just when I thought I’d outgrown mentors, a friend introduced me to David Stang. His enthusiasm for his favorite subject, his sister Dorothy, is contagious.
Few human activities are more basic than walking, and few more taken for granted. You need to watch an infant to be reminded that walking is a hard-won achievement. Learning to walk is one of the main projects of our first year of life. Somehow it dawns on us at a very early age that getting around on two legs might be better than crawling. Once this miracle is achieved and the parental applause dies down, it’s something we do daily, minus ovations, until accident or illness or old age stops us.
Read more scholars on today's signs of the times.
The church as family is the place where all members give to each other and nourish together the gift of life.
Editors’ note: Sounding Board is one person’s take on a many-sided subject and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of U.S. Catholic, its editors, or the Claretians.
Read more scholars on today's signs of the times.
Principle:
Before the obligatory “Ave Maria” and a crazy aunt leading “YMCA” at the reception, guests at a Catholic wedding witness “a covenant by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life and which is ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses and the procreation of children.” But this was not always the case. For more than a thousand years of church history, this idea of marriage faced plenty of healthy competition.
Jesus has his normally crowded itinerary this month. In our Sunday readings he'll be lecturing his disciples on why they don't need more faith--they just need faith. Then he'll be chased by 10 lepers crying out for a miracle. After dispatching them whole, if not unanimously grateful, he'll teach a lesson or two about the importance of prayer. Then that needy tax collector Zacchaeus, dangling from a tree, will catch his attention.
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