Editor's Note
The Joy of Lost and Found
A few months ago, on Good Friday, I was privileged to join Msgr. John Williams and some of his St. Joseph parishioners as they prayed the Way of the Cross at an apartment community in South Raleigh. Most of the people who lived there were natives of Mexico, and as our little procession wound from station to station around the property, we acquired a following: a few men and many women, some older but more quite young, with children in arms or strollers.
If you had been there, I think you would have been moved. At the last station, scores came forward to venerate the crucifix, and families formed lines, bringing their Bibles and religious articles, their children and themselves to be blessed. I thought, "With all the talk about 'What would Jesus do?' - perhaps an easier question is 'What did Jesus do?'" He preached, people followed, he blessed them. Just like this!
There was something else. I saw it in the eyes of these people who had journeyed far from home to better their material lives. This ritual - the Via Crucis, the veneration, the preaching and blessing - was spiritual water in the desert, an oasis of the familiar in an alien and relatively secular land.
In one of his books, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser quotes a wonderful Bohemian proverb: "When God wishes to rejoice the heart of a poor man, he makes him lose his donkey and find it again." Good Friday is a somber occasion, but souls were rejoicing that day because something seemingly lost - a spiritual home - was temporarily found.
I felt a similar happiness the first time I read this month's cover story, Angela Flynn's account of her long faith journey to the Catholic Church. She experienced loss - the loss of a birthmother, the stifling of a vocation, the end of a marriage - and rediscovery - loving adoptive parents, recognition of her gifts, caring friends, new love. And rejoicing followed.
Angela came to our church from another tradition. But there are many, many baptized Catholics who have "lost their donkeys" spiritually. The joke is that the second largest religious group in the U.S., after the Catholics, is former Catholics. This month's guest columnist, Sr. Barbara Marie Cady, writes about what we can do to welcome these brothers and sisters home. Returned Catholics, like converts, often learn that a rediscovered faith can be even more meaningful than the original one.
With this issue, NC Catholics pauses for a month. We'll return in September with our special Teenage Issue. Thanks so much for your continuing input and help with story ideas. You can write me at 715 Nazareth Street, Raleigh, NC 27606 or reece@raldioc.org.