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Among the lay ministers profiled in The Lutheran are a registered nurse who hopes to work as a nursing home chaplain, a lawyer who serves at a South Bronx shelter for homeless men, and a computer store employee who handles administration for her parish. Another lay trainee, Peter Rupp, is preparing for full-time church work when he retires. Rupp notes that his theological training has already deepened his spirituality. "I've become much more aware of God's working in my life," he says. He tells of a day when he "felt more and more uneasy" at his desk. "I finally got up and started walking around the plant. Three people needed to talk over some personal or health issues."

An injection of spiritual sensitivity and compassion into the everyday worlds of work and family life could have an impact far beyond church institutions. Mary F. Rousseau, writing in The New Oxford Review (June 1995), sees that as the main reason to talk about a "millennium of the laity." Rousseau takes many of her cues from Pope John Paul II's 1991 statement titled The Lay Members of Christ's Faithful People, and her essay includes more explication of the pope's "Thomistic personalism" than the average reader, Catholic or not, is prepared to handle. Many will also find her traditional sexual morality off-putting. But Rousseau does illuminate in stirring terms the spiritual significance, and transforming potential, of our ordinary, everyday lives.

Calling for a "sanctification of the laity," Rousseau writes that the unique vocation of the Christian laity is to bring "self-giving love" into "the realm of 'worldly' life." It begins with love between marriage partners and enters society via the love parents give to their children. She points out that many of her students are cynical about love and altruism because they have seen no evidence in their young lives that love is real and dependable. If love is only an abstraction, she notes, then one is left with an ethic of "self-seeking" instead of "self-giving."

On the other hand, Rousseau writes, "a single act of love for anyone -- a grocery clerk, a newsboy, a customer -- radiates outward like ripples of a stone tossed into a pond... The ripples of love could gradually turn this global village of ours into a civilization of love."

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