On tradition, ritual and the smaller moments of life – End of the Day for May 4, 2014

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Joseph celebrated his Confirmation into the Catholic Church today, a culmination of his religious education. Now, I am not the most religious person on the planet and neither am I a member of the Catholic Church, but I was still impressed with the ritual and pomp of the ceremony.

Jcw confirmation

Joseph Claude Francis Welch, Bishop Wilkerson and Liam Cadegan

There are certainly moments in your life when a little pomp and circumstance is called for, but it also had me thinking about the other side of the equation today. As humans we tend to focus on these large dramatic moments in our lives at the cost, I believe, of noticing and remembering the smaller, perhaps more important occurrences in our lives. I am sure you have small moments in your life that made a dramatic impact on you – -that one smile from a special someone you will always remember, that scene of snow falling on a Winter night, the scene that caught your eye as you walked through town.

Today, I experienced a bit of both the large and small. The occasion itself was big, but as Joseph sat with his godfather Liam, I was struck by the way that fate brings people together in small ways, not large. I met Liam in my freshman dorm at college in 1982, along with his wife-to-be, Jaime and my wife-to-be Rosanne. (SMILE) From such a small coincidence of sharing a dorm all those years ago, I saw him sitting here today, with my SON (!?!?) at his Confirmation. There are so many things in that sentence that I could have never predicted it blows my mind. If we hadn’t started talking in the dorm lounge that one evening in Fall 1982 all this could have never come to pass.

So, I would remind you look for the small, special moments in your life, as well as the larger, more dramatic ones. Both carry an amazing impact, but I have come to believe that it can be the smallest moments that have the biggest impact. It is up to us to pay attention, though.

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