By my guess, the gentleman is right around my age. Watching him walk - he avoids curbs and sharp turns, I appreciate his arthritis and day-to-day aches and pains. Yet, what is most fascinating is to watch what he does in those three-hundred or so feet from his car to the Wellness Center.

When I was ordained, in the “good ole days” when priests sat in the confessional from 3:00 to 5:00 on Saturday afternoons, a standard item on the shopping list was “I lost patience with my husband/children/brother/sister (fill in the number of times).”

Sometimes, perhaps too often, Americans – even those of us struggling to stay ahead of bills and hoping to avoid a major medical problem - forget just how fortunate we are and in the forgetting we miss wonder.

Most priests and deacons have at least one bookshelf dedicated to ritual books. Not copies of Sacred Scripture. The “how to” books of everything from baptisms to burials, confessions to marriages and Sacrament of the Sick.

Perhaps for Julian of Norwich, surviving the 1348-1350 Black Death and the Peasants Revolt (1381), not to mention the beginnings of the persecution of break-away Catholics in England, it was possible to declare “all manner of things shall be well.”