Sometimes, God gives you a chance to figure it out

    There is power in words, and as a Catholic journalist, I get to experience that truth and responsibility every day.
    I’m not a plumber or a carpenter or an automobile mechanic. I wish I had those marketable skills because I could have saved a few thousand dollars during a lifetime of plumbing leaks, termite infestation and 10W-30 dripping on my driveway, not to mention the street cred it might have given me in casual conversation.
    Instead, I thumb through the Yellow Pages and let my fingers do the walking – where my brain fears to tread. I know my limitations, and those usually begin with unlatching the tool kit.
    I work in a world of words, and the privileged moment occurs when something I write, seemingly mundane, takes hold of someone in a way I could not have imagined.
    That lesson hit home early in my career at the Clarion Herald. I wrote a short story about a group for the newly widowed, called Bridge to Naim, which meets regularly to help people process and move beyond their grief.
    It was a short story, maybe 300 words. But someone found it buried at the bottom of an inside page, which is evidence of the serendipity associated with a printed newspaper. The widow who read that story probably wasn’t looking for it when she turned the page.
    She stumbled across it.
    And it changed her life.
    That’s what Rosemary Schellhaas, then the coordinator of Bridge to Naim, told me the following week when she called excitedly to report what had happened.
    “After her husband died,” Schellhaas said, “this woman literally had become a prisoner in her own home. She would never go out, not even to church. After she read the story about the group, she decided to take a bus down to Canal Street and buy herself some makeup and a new outfit. And then she decided to come to a meeting.”
    Those stories are the reason the Clarion Herald has existed for a half-century. The mission of every Catholic newspaper is to inform and inspire readers about the ways in which faith can draw someone into the light, and that is an awesome responsibility.
    I always like to say that if you don’t think people read the Clarion Herald, just make a mistake. Then sit back and wait for the phone to ring. It’s a fact of life. We hear about mistakes a lot more than we hear about transformations, but the lesson here is to remain faithful, diligent and humble – and to remain utterly amazed by how an awesome God works in people’s lives.
    We don’t have all the answers. We simply try to explain through words and pictures how real people live out their faith, a mysterious and unique journey, indeed, but always ennobling.
    In a way, we at the Clarion Herald, as did those working in many archdiocesan ministries in the aftermath of Katrina, had the rare privilege of attending our own wake. The clock in August 2005 had struck Dark 30.
    That’s when the kindness of friends and strangers – for us it was particularly those in the Diocese of Baton Rouge – lifted us from the roadside ditch, dressed our wounds and dug into their pockets to pay the innkeeper. Actually, they were the innkeeper.
    When we finally began to draw breath, we published an issue and then drove all over God’s country to deliver newspapers to tiny, wooden churches where displaced New Orleans residents gathered every weekend, grasping at any sign of hope. They grabbed stacks of papers out of our hands before we could even unsnap the plastic bindings.
    Then we published another issue and another. We began publishing weekly instead of biweekly because the news was coming in torrents, and somewhere out in Grosse Tête, there was a Chalmette ex-patriot who needed hope.
    Some people never get the chance to understand their purpose. We were blessed to find it in Katrina.
    We learned that God is a gratuitous lover, and love never fails. What a story.
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at pfinney@clarionherald.org.