By Terry Polakovic
I am lucky because I live in a house that has a great front porch. I have spent hours on that porch sharing stories with family and friends. It was the inspiration for this blog. However, I quickly realized that it wasn’t much fun sitting out there by myself. I needed a little help from my friends.
So, over the next several days and weeks, you will start to meet them, and I am sure you will come to love them just as I have. Many of these men and women helped to found the ENDOW program, and all of them have made it what it is today ~ a fast growing, educational program for women based on the teachings of the Catholic Church. I can honestly say that it has been a grand adventure for all of us and it is our greatest hope that a few people have benefitted along the way.
Now a little bit about friendship…taken from ENDOW’s Discover Your Dignity: A Woman's Journey through Life, Part II study guide:
“…True friendship is one of mutual love and goodwill. Communication is an essential component. True friends want to share the most important things in their lives; they want to do the same kinds of things and do them together. They want their lives to coincide in a very real way. As Aristotle put it, they must “eat salt together.” This kind of friendship means helping each other grow in virtue and communicating to each other that we are lovable. It means taking the time to really know one another for who we are and looking beyond each other’s shortcomings to what we can ultimately become. Essentially, true friends help us to see ourselves as we truly are and they give us an insight into how God loves us…”
Perhaps more than ever, today we need to sit on the front porch with our friends. Both the porch and our friends remind us that we are human. We need to be reminded. Never before in history has our humanity been so severely tested. In a world that has lost its affinity for closeness, we need to remember that we were made for relationship. Frances Weaver, the author of The Girls With the Grandmother Faces and a friend of mine from years gone by once wrote, “The fabric of American life began to disintegrate with the disappearance of the front porch…When we moved to the patio in the backyard, then to the TV in the house, we lost important human contacts.” She was right. Let’s do our best to recapture them.
So, over the next several days and weeks, you will start to meet them, and I am sure you will come to love them just as I have. Many of these men and women helped to found the ENDOW program, and all of them have made it what it is today ~ a fast growing, educational program for women based on the teachings of the Catholic Church. I can honestly say that it has been a grand adventure for all of us and it is our greatest hope that a few people have benefitted along the way.
Now a little bit about friendship…taken from ENDOW’s Discover Your Dignity: A Woman's Journey through Life, Part II study guide:“…True friendship is one of mutual love and goodwill. Communication is an essential component. True friends want to share the most important things in their lives; they want to do the same kinds of things and do them together. They want their lives to coincide in a very real way. As Aristotle put it, they must “eat salt together.” This kind of friendship means helping each other grow in virtue and communicating to each other that we are lovable. It means taking the time to really know one another for who we are and looking beyond each other’s shortcomings to what we can ultimately become. Essentially, true friends help us to see ourselves as we truly are and they give us an insight into how God loves us…”
Perhaps more than ever, today we need to sit on the front porch with our friends. Both the porch and our friends remind us that we are human. We need to be reminded. Never before in history has our humanity been so severely tested. In a world that has lost its affinity for closeness, we need to remember that we were made for relationship. Frances Weaver, the author of The Girls With the Grandmother Faces and a friend of mine from years gone by once wrote, “The fabric of American life began to disintegrate with the disappearance of the front porch…When we moved to the patio in the backyard, then to the TV in the house, we lost important human contacts.” She was right. Let’s do our best to recapture them.
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