In my local Jiffy Lube waiting room the other day, I felt my irritability index rising as the infomercials and reality-TV shows blared in the background … a futile attempt at drowning out the sound of hydraulic lifts and impact wrenches pulsing from the garage. The coffee was suboptimal, and everyone around me was buried in their phones.
Then everything changed.
Prominently displayed on the table in front of me was the latest issue of the Arlington Catholic Herald. Seeing the familiar logo, font and my bishop’s photo from a recent event, I backed away from my little precipice of it’s-all-about-my-schedule irritation, reached for the issue, and opened right up to a column by Elizabeth Foss. (My muscle memory, trained by decades of familiarity with the Herald, affords me a rare superpower: I can turn to any section or page I want, usually in the first attempt.)
This wasn’t even the first time the Herald had transformed a moment for me at Jiffy Lube. A guy who works there routinely brings in his copy, and his manager is fine with it.
This unknown brother in Christ, and a fellow Herald fan, brought to mind other quiet but powerful ad extra — outward-facing, to the world — evangelization efforts. One friend always brings her print issue on flights, using it to spark conversations about faith. Others buy a gift subscription, giving their loved one — often away from the faith or of no faith at all — regular access to stories that can touch their heart.
Someday in eternal life, please God, we will meet many souls whose journey in faith was spurred on by a phrase, story, column, or image they happened upon in the Herald.
But countless ad intra — inward-facing, deepening our ongoing conversion as missionary disciples — evangelizing moments also point to the Herald as their proximate cause. In the 11 years I served as a columnist for the Herald — where I focused on marriage, family life and evangelization, often through the prism of commutes, cleaning the gutters and other mundane moments — I recall dozens of interactions with readers who told me how something resonated (or not so much).
I knew one of my pieces had hit home not from a view-count on the Herald website or through social media likes and shares, but when someone would approach me and pull a folded copy of a particular column out of their Magnificat, missal, or journal. Once, a young father of five told me how he cut out a column I wrote, titled “Sundays at 9 p.m.,” and put it on his fridge to remind himself of the husband and dad he aspired to be. That piece included this lead-in (to which I also still aspire, many years after writing it):
“At about 9 p.m. on a recent, stressful Sunday evening, which came on the heels of a stressful weekend, which came on the heels of a stressful week, I turned to my wife and asked, ‘How am I doing at being emotionally available to you and practically responsive to the needs of our home?’
If only. In fact, on that Sunday evening, I was nowhere near asking that question.
But if I had, I arguably would have been on the cusp of posing a powerful question with implications far beyond a worn-out Sunday evening … “
The young dad’s “fridge moment” points to the Herald’s genius, its indelible gift to our diocese over these 50 years: with the Holy Spirit, the Herald team has co-created an inviting space — on the printed page and through its digital presence — for powerful questions and conversations about truth, beauty, and goodness, and for transformative ad intra and ad extra “turnings” or moments of conversion.
“Cor ad cor loquitur” (Hearts speaks to heart), St. John Henry Newman reminded us. I am by no means alone in having a front-row seat to this heart-to-heart dialogue with Herald readers, who often, in turn, share personally about their moments with the Lord. Countless clergy, columnists, student contributors, interns, photographers, editors, staff, and Herald writers over the years have been blessed to experience similar moments.
Perhaps my Jiffy Lube waiting room moment is a parable: we’re all trying to follow the Lord and hear his quiet voice in times that seem noisy, distracting, suboptimal and anxiety-inducing.
But look up. Look around you.
Thank God: someone brought the Herald.
Johnson and his wife, Ever, are cofounders of trinityhousecommunity.org.
Why Jesus uses parables