5/12/2015 – Tuesday of the 6th week of Easter – Acts 16:22-34

      Paul and his companions did not have an easy time preaching the Good News of Jesus in their travels throughout the ancient world. Paul and Silas were stripped, beaten with rods, and thrown into prison.  Rather than being angry and frustrated with their situation, they lift it up to the Lord, singing hymns and praying for the other prisoners to hear.  It tickled me when I heard how Paul and the others remained in the prison after a great earthquake came and provided a means for them to escape. I thought about the prisoners whom I have ministered to in the federal and state prisons in Yazoo City and in the Jackson area; they would have burst out of that prison with joy as fast as they could, seeing this means of escape as a golden opportunity and as a gift given to them by God.

       Later this week, on May 15, we mark the anniversary of the death of Peter Maurin.  Maurin immigrated from southern France to the US in 1909.  He devised his own method of Catholic social philosophy, supporting himself with menial jobs along the way.  However, he struggled to find away to apply these teachings to real life situations.  His life changed in 1932 when he met a Catholic covert named Dorothy Day.  Maurin and Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement in New York City, an Catholic lay organization that combined corporal works of mercy with a hospitable welcome to the poor founded on the radical Gospel message that Jesus preached.  Day and Maurin envisioned a new kind of society.  They worked to put many of Maurin’s ideas into action until his death from a stroke in 1949.  The Catholic Worker movement still exists today and still tries to embody the vision that Maurin and Day first had. 

        Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day – Paul and Silas and their companions in the Early – we have such great examples of Christian who came before us and who lived out the values of the Gospel.   In our own way, may we hear God calling out to us to bring his Good News to the world and to live out our faith.