She tapped my shoulder on the way out of the sanctuary, the woman who had been sitting behind me at my parish’s early-morning Pentecost Mass.
“You’re the one who knows about women saints, right?” she asked. I nodded.
“I came to hear you Thursday night, but I got there late,” she said in an apologetic tone. “It was 8:20, and you’d already started speaking. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
I told her she should have come in anyway, and that maybe the woman I was talking about right then was the one she needed to hear about. Really, it wouldn’t have been any trouble at all, I said.
“I guess I’ll just need to buy your books,” she said, smiling. I asked her name; she told me. We shook hands.
Then, outside, she caught up with her daughter, who looked to be in her late teens or early twenties. She told me they’ve been members of the parish a long time, but don’t do anything important. “We just help with the doughnuts,” she said, almost apologetically again.
I told her how much doughnuts time had meant to me at another parish when I was coming back to Catholicism, how much easier that time was to talk with people I didn’t know.
My ministry, writing and speaking on women saints, may seem more “important” than others. But it’s truly not. Doing whatever He calls us to do pleases God. And I daresay, helping with doughnuts has brought more souls to the Kingdom than my new friend realizes.
