Hearth & Altar

Jesus tells a short parable about a servant who comes in from the fields and is expected to serve his master's meal first, before eating his own. Nobody thanks him extra for doing what he was supposed to do. Doing your job well, Jesus is saying, isn't a bonus. It's the baseline.

Today the Church remembers Leo the Great, a pope who once rode out, essentially alone, to meet Attila the Hun - one of the most feared warlords in history - as Attila's army approached Rome in the year 452. With nothing but his own words, Leo persuaded Attila to turn back. It's one of history's genuinely remarkable, well-documented moments, and Leo never seemed to treat it as anything more than doing what needed doing.

Titus's first reading gives the quieter version of that same courage: be sound in faith, in love, in endurance. Not flashy. Sound. Most of what a family does well never gets applauded, and tonight's a fair night to notice that doing the ordinary, unglamorous thing well is itself the point.

Titus specifically addresses older and younger members of a household differently - older men and women modeling steadiness, younger ones learning self-control - which is a fair reminder that faith formation in a family isn't one-size-fits-all. What soundness looks like for a parent and what it looks like for a child are related, but they're not identical, and both matter.

• For courage in hard conversations, through the example of Leo the Great, we pray to the Lord.
• For our family, to do our ordinary work well without needing applause for it, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who serve quietly and go unthanked, we pray to the Lord.
• For all in our Book of Names, we pray to the Lord.

Tell the story of Leo the Great meeting Attila the Hun at supper tonight. Then ask each person: what's one hard conversation you've been avoiding? Nobody has to answer out loud if they'd rather not, but everyone should actually think about it.

Leo the Great's meeting with Attila in 452, near the Mincio River outside Mantua, is well documented and genuinely remarkable - a churchman with no army talking back an invasion through words alone. It's a great story for kids who like history, and it's also a real, historical instance of courage that didn't involve any weapon at all.

If your family lands on a real hard conversation tonight, it doesn't need to be resolved on the spot. Naming it honestly is often the hardest and most important part. Follow up on it later in the week if it feels right.

The servant parable pairs oddly but well with Leo's story: neither the servant nor the pope did anything for credit. They both simply did the next necessary thing.