I’ve been part of The Catholic Company’s Review Program long enough to know what the envelopes look like in my mailbox.
So, on Friday, when I saw that familiar white envelope waiting for me, I was pretty excited. I was supposed to be getting the brand-new Our Lady of Guadalupe: Mother of the Civilization of Love, by Carl Anderson and Eduardo Chavez. And oh! was I excited about that!
But, instead of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the envelope contained…the July Magnificat.
I looked at the packing slip.
Sure enough, it said Our Lady of Guadalupe, review copy.
But there in my hand was the July Magnificat. No Guadalupe in sight.
I couldn’t help but feel like maybe this package was a little bit intentional.
Oh, not by the folks at The Catholic Company. By Someone Else.
I used to subscribe to Magnificat. I used to enjoy it and rave about it and really benefit from it.
And then I bought The Christian Prayer Book, which is the lay version of the Liturgy of the Hours. No need to subscribe to Magnificat when I had one volume for the whole year.
Or so I thought.
Then I received the July issue, and I flipped through it.
My heart leaped a little. There were the articles, there were the short prayers, there was the daily saint. Oh, how I had missed Magnificat.
That’s nothing against the other prayer options. It’s just a reunion of old friends, of a sort. And my prayer time, for the rest of this month, will be delightful enough for me to start saving my money to start another subscription, I think…
The image is the July 2009 cover. Did I mention that every month there’s a different beautiful painting on the cover? They’re lovely enough to warrant saving them (if you can keep them away from a certain four-year-old who tends to collect interesting things in her desk…).
