Editor's view

When I heard the tremendous clunk, I knew we were stuck. The heavy metal thud might well have been my stomach the instant I figured out our van had broken an axle. It was Saturday night, and our entire family was sitting in church clothes in a collapsed van 90 miles from home.

After a quick roadside powwow, my husband decided to jog back to the church reception we had just left, hoping that a Toledo friend might still be there. It was a longer run than he anticipated. He arrived to find the last priest turning out the lights. After a full day hosting a special diocesan event, no doubt this priest was ready to crack open a beer and catch a game on TV. He had the 6:00 Mass next morning.

Instead he drove to the site of our breakdown and immediately offered to spend the next three hours driving us to our home and back. We hesitated and then gratefully accepted.

As I sat in the car looking out over darkened corn fields, it occurred to me that this priest’s single act of generosity might count for more than all the vocation talks my kids would ever hear. But that was some time in the future perhaps. Sitting there knee to shoulder in his small sedan I realized that this stranger-priest had given me a more immediate gift: hope. I was moved by his sacrifice. It was a small matter, I suppose, but it was a self-giving that he didn’t need to perform. An act of goodness without any possible payback. We would have appreciated help just getting to a motel.

But he went the extra mile out of the goodness of his heart.

It’s that very generosity of spirit that gives me hope for the church. I had been harboring dark thoughts about priests who’ve let others down, church structures that seem unchristian … and then like the clouds parting and a ray of sun shooting over the gloom came this good deed.

If our church harbors people like this—capable of pure acts of selflessness on small matters—maybe the Spirit is alive and kicking and reminding me of her presence. And that spells hope. Hope was a central theme in the 2004 Convocation. Those who attended were renewed by the sense of hope in the presentations, the discussions, the liturgies and most of all in the energy stirred up by a room full of spirited vocation ministers.

We hope this record of Convocation 2004 captures a little of that spirit that looks toward grace and light. —Carol Schuck Scheiber, Editor