Being faithful isn’t about the grand gestures or the extraordinary. It is really about the smallest everyday moments in life. Getting children to day care. Making sure an older parent gets to the doctor. Not getting annoyed at a tiresome co-worker. Making a meal with love. Doing laundry again.
And again.
Our lives are not something that will happen to us, but a collection of the moments we live each day. Being intentional about each of those moments is what it means to be faithful.
I think of today’s Memorial to Joachim and Anne, the parents of Mary. Their lives were not big or dramatic, yet they shaped Mary with their constant faithfulness to God in everyday life. Joachim and Anne, like most of the population, were peasants, yet carried a heavy burden of taxes to the brutal Roman empire and to Herod the Great. But they would have taught Mary how to gather firewood each day, wash clothes and dishes and take the jars to the well to be refilled. Again.
Yet in that hard life, Anne and Joachim were faithful. They prayed and went to the synagogue together where they would have listened to the scripture. And they taught Mary what it means to be faithful. To say Yes to a life of lugging water, gathering firewood and washing clothes. There was no glamour about it, but she learned that God was always with her. She learned to rely on God’s support. She was prepared to say Yes.
In today’s gospel, Jesus uses an image every peasant would have understood: the seed has to fall on rich soil in order to thrive. There are thorns, rocky grounds and many distractions in our lives. But being faithful every day is not something glamorous. It is simply the daily living of our relationships with God, our families and those around us.
Sometimes we wait for our “Real” life to start. For the big break to come, the family pain to end or the fun lives we see in the media to come to us. We don’t always see that we are in our Real lives now, standing ankle deep in the rich soil. Our small and loving care for others, our tending to those in pain in our lives and authentic service in our daily life – that is the faithfulness that Joachim and Anne taught Mary. That is what she and Joseph taught Jesus.
And that is what Jesus teaches us.
Maureen McCann Waldron
The most important part of my life is my family – Jim my husband of 47 years and our two children. Our daughter Katy, a banker here in Omaha, and her husband John, have three wonderful children: Charlotte, Daniel and Elizabeth Grace. Our son Jack and his wife, Ellie, have added to our joy with their sons, Peter and Joseph.
I think family life is an incredible way to find God, even in (or maybe I should say, especially in) the most frustrating or mundane moments.
I am a native of the East Coast after graduating in 1971 from Archbishop John Carroll High School in suburban Philadelphia. I graduated from Creighton University in 1975 with a degree in Journalism and spent most of the next 20 years in corporate public relations in Omaha. I returned to Creighton in the 1990s and completed a master’s degree in Christian Spirituality in 1998.
As our children were growing up, my favorite times were always family dinners at home when the four of us would talk about our days. But now that our kids are gone from home, my husband and I have rediscovered how nice it is to have a quiet dinner together. I also have a special place in my heart for family vacations when the kids were little and four of us were away from home together. It’s a joy to be with my growing family.
Writing a Daily Reflection is always a graced moment, because only with God’s help could I ever write one. I know my own life is hectic, disjointed and imperfect and I know most of us have lives like that. I usually write from that point of view and I always seem to find some sentence, some word in the readings that speaks right to me, in all of my imperfection. I hope that whatever I write is in some way supportive of others.
It’s an incredibly humbling experience to hear from someone who was touched by something I wrote. Whether the note is from someone across campus or across the world, it makes me realize how connected we are all in our longing to grow closer to God.
