Writings
Fred Craddock writes:
When I was a kid, I went to church with my mother. The minister of our little church would speak to my mother. “How’re you, Miz Craddock?” he would ask. And the five of us kids would go along like little ducks after our mother. “How’re you, Sonny? How’re you, Honey? How’re you, Sonny? How’re you, Honey?”
After a number of Sundays removed from the vantage point of this pulpit, it’s good to see you. And it’s good to hear you….especially when you sing like you have this morning. To be sure, you always sound decent. But some mornings, you sound positively vibrant. Especially when you know the songs.
Sometime late Thursday afternoon, when the church was teeming with kids rehearsing with various choirs, the bubbling water feature in the narthex was knocked to the floor, disassembling its component parts and flooding the narthex carpet. What surprised all of us was that it was not the roughhousing of middle school boys which did the deed, but a bit of over-zealous leaning by some grade school girls.
Some years ago, I told you the story of Father Gene Monahan and the day he addressed a large gathering of his fellow priests, the better to address the changes that took place in the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. Approaching the platform, he was barefooted. He had on a pair of whitewashed trousers and a T-shirt. That’s all. Peering out at his colleagues, he said:
