This weekend that same son and I head to New York, to spend time with my mom, and with my 81-year-old dad, a retired surgeon struggling with a puzzling host of health problems, including the waning of memory. I remember clearly my mom and dad visiting St. Peter's University Hospital in New Jersey soon after our son was born with a seizure disorder, how my Harvard-and-Columbia-educated father reassured me as only a father can. I remember standing, bewildered, in the neonatal care unit and my father looking around and telling me my son was in the best possible hands.
For some people, these moments and memories could be an occasion for sadness, a reminder of our fleeting existence, of our mortality, a warning how even the most vital among us eventually wear out. But I only am feeling a profound gratitude for my father and for my son and for the Presence that has enabled me to know them both.
Father Carron, leader of the Communion and Liberation movement, has written: Here begins the drama, because I am called to answer. It is the drama that unfolds between us and the Mystery, through certain facts, certain moments, in which the Mystery imposes itself with this evidence. These are facts that we cannot put in our pocket, which we cannot reduce to antecedent factors.
