The life of faith

I was named for a dead priest, my father’s uncle. Some few years after surviving the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, he got “the call.” (“Vocations follow famine,” an Irish bromide holds. No less the flu?) He went to seminary in Detroit and Denver and was ordained in the middle of the Great Depression...

“God works in strange ways,” my mother would tell us, smiling wisely, passing the spuds, all of us marveling at the ways of things....

Life and time are not random accretions of happenstance. On the contrary, there is a plan for each and every one of us and ours is only to discern our “vocation,” our “calling,” our purpose here. No doubt this is how the life of faith, the search for meaning, the wonder about the way of things first sidles up to the curious mind.

-Thomas Lynch, The Sin-eater: A Breviary