Today’s find: Cookie diplomacy

I go this week. 

We go. 

And we do not go alone.

On Tuesday morning, we’ll be bearing the words of Psalm 34 into a maximum security prison, my Kairos teammates and I:

Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
Look to [God] that you may be radiant with joy,
            and your faces may not blush with shame.
When the poor one called out, the LORD heard,
            and from all his distress [God] saved him.

We’ll be bearing these words of consolation. And cookies. 

Lots and lots of home-baked cookies – maybe 350 dozen or so. I don’t know how many precisely, I lost count. But it will be plenty – more cookies than our group of 49 participants and team could possibly eat in the four days we’ll be together inside the prison. (And we’ll distribute the remainder to local food pantries following the retreat.)

Over the past week or so, I had the privilege meeting up with 8 or 9 of the bakers myself – young mothers, wise widows, prayer partners from my parish, even some complete strangers. All had learned of our Kairos cookie appeal through various channels, and all had reported feeling a strong call to respond to the appeal.

It stirred my heart to hear each of them tell the tale. What’s going on here, I wondered? Why would these already-too-busy folks bother with baking cookies for incarcerated men they’ll never meet? 

I wondered, but I also suspected that I already knew at least part of the answer. They’d heard the words of St. Paul proclaimed on Ash Wednesday: “We are ambassadors of Christ, as if God were appealing through us.”

It’s an amazing thing, to see the grace of the Lenten season stir these ordinary folks into action. They feel God’s grace, and then God multiplies their efforts, 350-fold, on behalf of dispossessed men they do not know.

And now it’s our turn – my Kairos teammates and I – to practice a little “cookie diplomacy.” Broken and sinful though we are, God is stirring up something in us as well … as St. Paul observes in today’s second reading:

And all this is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and given us the ministry of reconciliation; namely, God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

Pray, dear friends, that we do this work well in the coming days. And let us all be amazed to see (and proclaim) how God continues to reconcile the world, every dark and dingy corner of it, to himself in Christ.

Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.

IHS