Can you think of anything that actually requires only three minutes for you to accomplish?
Have you noticed that whenever someone requests your presence “for just three minutes,” it usually consumes at least fifteen, if you’re lucky?
We’re all besieged daily by ten thousand demands for our attention, not only in live human relationships, but also from constant electronic typhoons spun by newsmakers, merchants, special-interest websites, scam artists, and well-meaning friends who send three emails when one would suffice.
How do we sort it all out? How can we find God in the midst of the hurricane?
I seldom write book reviews, and this is the first time I have offered one here. But today I want to share with you a compact devotional primer: Three Minutes with God: Reflections and Prayers to Encourage, Inspire, and Motivate by Monsignor Frank Bognanno (Franciscan Media, 2022).
The book cover copy reveals that this book is a compilation of the author’s long-time series of televised 3-minute sound bites, “Thought of the Day” and provides an author’s resume that includes a host of other prestigious credentials: weekly program host for EWTN, chaplain to the Knights of Malta, member of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, spiritual director for the Christ Our Life International Conference.
(Fair disclosure: The author is a long-time friend, and I want to share some stories you won’t find listed among his formal qualifications.)
When I was a mother of two young boys, he blew into my wealthy, elderly, and seriously uptight parish like a pastoral whirlwind. Children were suddenly welcome to act like children in the pews. He regularly confronted the diocesan schools’ scariest principals on behalf of difficult students.
He accompanied pilgrims who were robbed on a train to Rome into dangerous neighborhoods, to help them retrieve—and protect—emergency funds wired to them by their families. Although we called him “The Pink Panther,” in those days he already had a reputation in our diocese as “the Energizer Bunny,” earning the moniker in late August of 1979, when Bishop Maurice Dingman abruptly called him downtown to the Chancery.
The bishop had just learned that Pope John Paul II had decided to include Iowa in his United States tour, in response to a personal letter from a small-town farmer. His Holiness would arrive in just six short weeks.
Father Bognanno was told to make the impossible possible.
“I was 39 years old, and my brain was still developing. I didn’t have enough sense to say, ‘Get somebody, anybody, else,’” he told the Des Moines Register on the 40th Anniversary of the papal visit in 2019.
The precise calibration of 350,000 Midwestern clergy, religious, and laypeople on the fields of Living History Farms in Urbandale, Iowa on October 4, 1979, remains legend to this day. The morning had started out in rain showers, but the sun broke through just as the crowd looked up to see the Holy Father’s helicopter circle down from the clouds. Weather remained clear and bright throughout that historic first—a Pope celebrating mass on Iowa soil.
Monsignor Bognanno is a cancer survivor who hiked to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro to celebrate mass on the peak for his doctors. He’s a son who visited a full day every week for ten years, after senility stole his father’s ability to speak, and cried while celebrating the funeral.
The author of Three Minutes with God has served our Church for fifty-six years. At eighty-three, he’s still the Energizer Bunny, living his own amazing life with God, three minutes at a time. Then three minutes more. He’s culled it all down to the essentials, and what he’s learned can be trusted.
Here’s a short excerpt from Three Minutes with God:
“It is you, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend, with whom I kept pleasant company.” – Psalm 55:13-14
A young married man recently told me that he and his wife were going to take a short vacation without their three children . . . This is a very wise young couple . . . The stronger their bond, the happier and more secure their children feel .
Prayer
Lord, help married couples see how spending quality time together strengthens their bond.
Amen.
(From Bognanno, Monsignor Frank, Three Minutes with God: Reflections and Prayers to Encourage, Inspire, and Motivate, Cincinnati, Ohio: Franciscan Media, 2022, p. 41).
© 2023 Margaret Zacharias
