The homily today looked at the power of touch from Christ’s healing of Peter’s mother-in-law chronicled in Mark 1:29-39.
The power of touch is not only physical but can come from the closeness of experience, especially potent experience—shared between one human being and another; and this fertile field is at the heart of the Lampstand Foundation’s work: the belief that only a reformed criminal can reform a criminal.
The experience of being part of the criminal and carceral world is such a deeply singular experience resulting from and encompassing the causing of great harm to innocent human beings by the criminal; that it is only through the deep knowledge of a transformed criminal—converted to the Catholic faith, accepting that for the rest of his life he must work to atone for the harm be has caused to the innocent—that an authentic touch can occur within the often hardened soul of even the penitential criminal.
Lampstand Foundation website, http://www.lampstandfoundation.org/
"The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity. Nobody is so competent as the sinner in matters of Christianity. Nobody, except the saint." Charles Peguy (1873-1914)
About
- David H. Lukenbill
- I am a California native, married, we have one daughter and live close to the American River with two cats and all the wild critters we can feed. I am a management consultant to nonprofit organizations and have an Associates of Arts degree in Administration of Justice from Sacramento City College, a Bachelor of Science degree in Organizational Behavior from the University of San Francisco and a Master of Public Administration degree, also from the University of San Francisco.