Not long after officially becoming Catholic, I was asked to become a lector at our parish in Bethesda, Maryland. This is a lay person who assists in celebrating Mass, by making the opening and closing announcements, doing the readings and sometimes leading The Prayer of the Faithful. Since I've been involved with all kinds of public speaking going back to my youth, it is within my comfort zone.
It has been more than a decade now that I jumped in as a lector. I'm resuming those duties after taking a break last year, while I was National Press Club president. The interlude has given me an opportunity to reflect broadly.
Going through the complicated process known as RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) under the guidance of a wonderful mentor, Brother Malachy Broderick, and in the years since, my journey of faith has taken many interesting turns. Not the least of which was having the opportunity to learn under this gifted teacher.
Fast forward to the first Mass where I was about to speak. I was in the sacristy with the presiding priest, his name was Father Mark, taking some quiet moments before we were about to start. I commented that it was my first. Given the complicated choreography of the Mass, I was just worried that I might get something wrong. After all, I wasn't a so-called "cradle Catholic" so a lot of this was still new to me. I'll never forget he just looked at me, paused and with full confidence said "God will get you through it". Nothing more was said at that point by either of us. Everything went as it should. Fitting that a basic lesson of faith was so helpful to me at that point and over the years.
Since that time, there have been any number of experiences when that advice served me well. It might have been a high-profile event when I was anxious how it would turn out. Another might have been while trying to figure out how to piece together all the components of a news story. Time and time again, Father Mark's voice has resonated in my head with his line of reassurance. Turns out he was right.
For a journalist or the writer, the corollary is the supposedly dreaded "blank page". That has a variety of permutations in multimedia, a text story, a video package, a radio report, or wrap, as we like to say. There is tension at the beginning of the creative process because we don't yet know how it ends, or how we should conclude it until we get there.
Life is like that. It takes the passage of years to understand how certain patterns that do emerge. Maybe it is just our way of making sense of the otherwise seemingly random turn of events that come our way.
Our rational side sometimes presses us to want to know how things resolve themselves before that resolution is apparent. We see it in young people who want to think they know how their lives are all laid out for them in advance. But as the line goes attributed to the late John Lennon "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
And that's a good thing. Imagine how insufferable life would be if we knew the story beforehand. No mystery, no joy, and yes, no pain.
So, the next time I'm getting the least bit anxious about how things are going to turn out, I can be comforted by the fact that Father Mark knew the answer.
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