Finally

The www.homelesscatholic.com website is officially live. We left beta two days ago. Been told it takes 48 hours for the site to be live for those who’ll be checking the site from just about anywhere in the states. Hmm. Something deeply philosophical about that.

Still working out the updates portion of the site. We’re adding at least one new reflection a week. Haven’t heard back from the publisher on the wisdom in making individual chapters of the book available for download. Will find out soon, I suppose.

As we welcome new folks to the site, I’d like to say hello. We just added another page in the “Stuff of God” process of pages for what we Homeless Catholics face. The latest page is “Fathering Faith.” Fathering, of course, refers to the way that Jesus told us to pray - Our Father. It’s the encompassing word of parenting, which means father and mother for us lay folks. 

An intriguing reality for parenting, though not politically correct, is that both father and mother together model the fathering of God. We desire both. Notice I didn’t say “need” both. We actually do need both, but I didn’t say it. I said desire because our hearts want the firmness of mother and father, the gentleness of father and mother, and so on. We yearn for our parents to be like God so that we will know more about who God is.

And, we yearn to parent, like God. Not all of us get to be parents, but there are so many ways that yearning gets extended. When life forces us into parenting, the painful/joyful realities change us. When life asks us to join others in parenting, if we don’t have our own children, we go through a similar agreement with God to experience the pains and joys. In both cases, though, God will come through. God will let us know what parenting is.

If there is a larger topic than parenting, I don’t know what it could be. Without the road map of faith, parenting seems so random. The road map of faith is already random. What must it be without faith!