Champaign Memories

This Thursday, June 24, we celebrate the birth of John the Baptist. Permit me to roll back my personal calendar to 1968 and share some poignant memories. I was between my junior and senior years at University of Dayton, and involved in The Conference on Inter-American Student Projects. That summer, 11 of us had traveled to the tiny village of Lerdo de Tejada, Mexico, on a missionary trip. We each lived with a local family, and mine was extremely poor; I slept on a narrow cot covered with a mosquito net, we had no indoor plumbing, ants crawled across our plates as we sat on hard wooden benches to eat our tortillas, and pigs and chickens roamed through the kitchen and into the sitting room and out again during the heat of the day. My family and I began to bond after a fashion, but I was terribly homesick and miserable with Montezuma’s revenge. June 24th approached and they began to talk about a party in honor of my birthday – wasn’t I born in March?? – but the Mexican custom was to name the baby for the saint on whose feast s/he was born, and no matter how I objected, I had to have been born on the feast of John the Baptist given my name of Joan! They gathered all of the “gringos” on that day, and filled our tiny house with music, a very lopsided cake, and – how did they get this?? – a bottle of champaign! That was the day that my Mexican family really came into my heart, and it was on that day that I adopted John the Baptist as my patron, and fittingly so. I didn’t know at the time that my life’s work would be in the Church, and that my job would be to get out of the way and point to Jesus. Patrons can be powerful superheroes in our lives, continually encouraging us in the right direction, cheering us on, being constant reminders of how a saint lives, and calling us to that path. If you have not taken seriously the call of your patron, or have forgotten the saint you chose at your confirmation, chose one now! Read My Life With the Saints and get in touch with the power of witness.
[The views expressed in this blog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.]