Starting point

Mary, the mother of toddlers, called the church one Friday morning. Her sister-in-law couldn't watch the kids, she said. Could the rest of the catechumenate planning team come to her house for our weekly meeting instead? I was beginning to wonder what kind of crazy place I had landed in, while everyone else gathered up our planning materials without so much as a pause, and all five of us piled into a car and drove 20 minutes out to the century-old farm house where Mary lived, to have our meeting at her kitchen table.

I was doing a yearlong internship in rural ministry, and had already concluded--among other things--that these people knew nothing about using time wisely. They seemed mired in way too much chat and camaraderie, unable to get down to the real business of ministry.

When we got to Mary's home, I was assailed by peaches. Lush southern Michigan peaches ready to burst open and drool goodness onto the trees in the front yard. Mary's home too was filled with the scent of their happy cooking, wrapped in pastry and oozing with hot syrup, and the sweet smell of coffee perking in a little tin pot. Soon we sat down to peach pie hot out of the oven and fresh coffee, prepared by Mary as a consolation prize for us having to come to her instead of the other way around.

Mary had no formal training in ministry, but she had a Ph.D. in making people feel special. Mary could bake a pie that would bring tears to your eyes, and leave you sad for days, recalling church functions carelessly catered with stale, store-bought sugar cookies and bad coffee in disposal foam cups.

That pie was an epiphany for me. I realized what it must have been for Jesus and his friends to sit down and have a hot, home-cooked, soul-satisfying meal that last evening before Jesus layed out before them, one final time, a eucharistic meal, and their own ministerial assignments.

[Karen O'Brien writes from Florida.]

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