CatholicInside

The Places We Can Reach

2011-11-12T09:28:00.000-08:00

For the past several days, it's been impossible to get online or go out in public without hearing about Joe Paterno. People are upset that abuse went unaddressed for so long; some are sad, some are sickened, some are outraged. Some urge one another not to rush to judgment and examine records and transcripts trying to decide with whom the true fault lies

I can't help thinking that it's all a waste of time and energy.

There are people within the system who need to analyze that information to figure out how things went so horribly wrong and make sure it never happens again. I'm not one of them. Probably, you're not either. And while people like us are investing so much energy and outrage and emotion in something that happened long ago and far away, real people are sitting right next to us with real, present needs.

Twenty years ago or so, when I was still in school, a middle-aged woman told me that the world was too big and too full of problems for her to fix, and that all she could do was light her little corner of it and hope that some of that light and warmth spilled out and shone on someone else.

I, of course, still believed that I could save the world; it's what I was going to school for. I thought she was rationalizing, that what she offered was simply an excuse to live her comfortable life and not worry about those outside "her little corner". And, as an adult, I've certainly seen people make that sort of rationalization. But now that I'm middle-aged myself and have both made a run at saving the world and narrowed my focus to raise a family, I think I understand better what she meant.

I think she meant to say that we can't undo the damage someone far away might have done to a child years ago, however much we might like to. But we can make a difference in the lives of those around us, and they can make a difference in their own circles, and in that way our light and warmth can spread far and wide. And that, surely, serves a greater purpose than joining the tens of thousands of voices on the Internet arguing about how much culpability Joe Paterno might have and who should have been fired along with him or in his place. That, surely, serves a greater purpose than sinking into depression at the ugliness in the world that sometimes seems too big to combat--or even contemplate.

Maybe the best thing we can do, every day, is simply to love the people we can reach--or reach further for people to love.

The Essentials of Everyday Christian Life - Revisited

2009-02-27T01:48:00.000-08:00

This morning, I had breakfast with a friend whose most important role in my life has been to show me the truth about myself. I'd been trying to explain to him, or perhaps to myself, why it seemed to me that I couldn't really maintain my spiritual life and live in the world at the same time. To illustrate my point, I mentioned Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil.

To grossly oversimplify for anyone who has neither read the book nor seen the movie, the main character is a woman married to a doctor, but having an affair with another man. Her husband is not enough for her; she has different values and aspirations. Her husband, after learning of the affair, takes her on a mission trip to a remote, disease-ridden part of China. It's intended as a kind of punishment, but becomes instead her redemption. She begins, ever so slowly, to open herself to the people, to find joy in service, to love those she would once have considered far below her station.

But could this sustain? I suggested not. My friend pointed out that in fiction, it did just that, but I persisted. Was that credible? Did he believe she'd have gone back to London and eschewed the society she once aspired to? Would we have found her playing the piano in an orphanage there?

He conceded that it did seem a bit contrived.

Well, there. That was exactly my point, and the problem with the world we live in today. There are too many distractions; life moves too fast. When life is stripped back to the basics, when we're in rural China in the days before modern medicine or sifting through the rubble in Manhattan, our cores emerge - we are closer to the people we were meant to be and happier being those people. But it does not sustain in everyday, modern, fast-paced, trivial times.

It was, I thought, an important revelation. It was clear in my mind what I needed, although not how to achieve it. Isolation, a different community--somehow to find a world more basic, where I could remember who I was meant to be. Wasn't that, really, what we all needed?

"It sounds to me," my friend said, "like you're saying that you would be better if only God would make it easier for you."

That wasn't, certainly, what I'd meant to say. I'd meant something very different, something about there being a world in which it was natural to be our best selves, and how we don't live in that world every day. Not, of course, that I'd believed it to be beyond our control: it seemed to me that we could always choose to opt out of the world we live in and choose the better one--the one we always hear isn't "realistic" in modern times.

What I hadn't believed was that it was possible to take that step without moving to the mountains or joining a convent or going to work with orphans in China. That it was possible to stay right where we are, to work at our same jobs and live in our same houses and maybe even fly to DisneyWorld and still make the simple choice to live in that better world where it's more natural to be our best selves. We are, after all, called to be "in" the world but not "of" it. And that must mean that we don't need a cleaner, more elemental place to let our better selves out.

That brought me almost full circle. Once again, I knew "what", but the "how" escaped me. The first half of this post sat for nearly a week while I alternately thought about how to end it and waited for inspiration. And then, yesterday, a strange thing happened. What looks like an answer came back to me in the most ironic form: My own words, written nearly two years ago and long forgotten.

For one of my other blogs, I sift through the search strings that bring people to all of my sites, and yesterday, I found this one: "list of things a Christian should do every day". Apparently, I'm the #4 result for that phrase, and it leads to a post called "The Essentials of Everyday Christian Life". Interestingly, despite that placement, I've never had a hit on that term or a closely related term before; I haven't seen or thought of this post since shortly after I wrote it.

So, in the end, I was reminded of several important things--not just the contents of this post, but the fact that on some level, we already know the answers. And, more importantly, that God is always willing to point us back to them when we lose our way, if only we're willing to listen.

Abortion in the National Political Arena - a Response to Eric Scheidler

2009-01-04T10:35:00.000-08:00

I recently ran across a post on Eric Scheidler’s blog about abortion in the national political arena. Although Scheidler wrote his post back in September and it was specifically geared toward the election in November, the issues raised are more pervasive and more long-range than the 2008 election—especially since the outcome says would have put the issue to bed didn’t occur.

I want to be clear up front that I am not writing this post to pick apart Scheidler’s analysis. I disagree with his conclusion, but I’m responding in hopes of furthering the dialogue and thought process, for two very positive reasons.

The first is that, as Scheidler points out in his post, we’re all on the same side. Regardless of your feelings on the associated legal and political issues, if you’re reading this blog then I’m reasonably confident that you’d prefer to see more pregnancies end with happy babies well cared for in loving arms and fewer in abortion. The second is that Scheidler’s argument is the first rational one I’ve ever seen for basing your Presidential vote on the abortion issue.

In short—though I strongly encourage you to read the original post—Scheidler argued that electing John McCain would finally take the abortion issue off the table in national politics and move the battle to the states, where abortion laws are actually enacted, and allow the national focus to shift to other pressing issues. I’m all for getting the issue off the national table and back to the states, for a variety of reasons. The first is purely practical...aside from the role that U.S. Supreme Court appointments have played over the past few decades, the President has very little to do with abortion issues; that’s governed by state legislation, within the parameters set by the U.S. Supreme Court and (in some cases) their own state constitutions and state supreme courts.

That means the abortion issue weighs too heavily in national elections for two reasons. The first is that it simply isn’t the arena in which the true battle will be fought. The second, often overlooked, is that the President is in fact charged with a wide variety of important duties that have nothing to do with abortion. When abortion issues become the deciding factor in Presidential voting, the issues the President will actually confront on a daily basis take a backseat—which means we may or may not be choosing the right person to handle the actual job at hand.

I would also like to see abortion move out of the national arena because I have an attachment to the U.S. Constitution as written and the system of government it created, and that system of government very explicitly reserved such issues to the states; abortion isn’t a matter of federal law, but efforts from both “sides” have pushed it in that direction—and that’s simply not the system our forefathers created.

I believe, though, that Scheidler’s contention that electing a President who would appoint the right Supreme Court Justice to overturn Roe v. Wade would take the issue off the national agenda is overly optimistic. A comment to his post raised the issue of federal legislation, but I share Scheidler’s view on the relative triviality of that concern. Mine is much simpler and, I think, much more soundly supported by history: For decades, it hasn’t made much sense to make abortion the primary issue in national elections, and yet, there it’s been. Some people—a large number of people—have been basing their votes on this issue for decades. Organizations like Scheidler’s have been encouraging them to do so. And in 35 years, nothing significant has changed at the national level. Roe v. Wade is right where it was 9 Presidential elections ago. That’s 9 Presidential votes cast with an eye toward a single issue that hasn’t moved in either direction (at the national level) during that time. That history makes me highly skeptical that having the issue “resolved” by a change in the Supreme Court’s interpretation of abortion rights would change much in terms of how people choose their candidates. I think, at the risk of offending some voters, that the whole state/federal issue and exactly what falls within the purview of which sector of government and why escapes many very zealous voters. Once you throw into the mix a history of huge blocks of voters focusing on this issue despite the minor involvement of the federal government, the emotion involved, and the complexity of the issue, I don’t think that overturning Roe v. Wade would cause a significant shift in voter focus.

And, of course, there’s an inherent “for us” in Scheidler’s argument. He writes as if the issue would be off the table once Roe v. Wade was overturned, but of course there are millions of voters who feel passionately about preserving Roe v. Wade—would they consider the issue “settled” at the national level and move the battleground to the states? Of course, to some degree they would be forced to do so, because legislation would presumably be developing rapidly at the state level. But it’s much easier to fight one battle than 51, and we have to assume that the primary concern of the pro-choice movement at that stage would be reinstatement of a federal Constitutional interpretation that limited states’ ability to restrict abortion rights. And that puts abortion and appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court right back at the top of the national agenda.

I don’t have an answer. I agree with Scheidler that having babies born alive and healthy is a paramount goal. I agree with the folks he calls “liberal Catholics” that outlawing abortion isn’t enough and may be entirely the wrong way to go about that—our religion requires us to do much more than ensure that people are born alive and then abandon them to their own devices. I agree that the focus on abortion law in the national political arena has a detrimental effect on election results and national policy at a much broader level, but I don’t think that shifting which side is currently prevailing will take that issue off the table. I hope to hear more discussion on this issue from both “sides”.

On the Eve of the Election

2008-11-03T17:38:00.001-08:00

Long ago, I wrote about the challenge of voting our faith in today's society.

I've thought long and hard about this post today, because this isn't a political blog, and because I know that what I have to say here will not be popular with some of my regular readers. But God calls us to speak the truth in all things, even when it's unpopular, so speak I will--and you can take it or leave it as your own prayerful reflection deems appropriate. But consider that if you're in doubt, you might have landed here for a reason. One of the reasons I'm writing this post is that I've gotten a huge amount of search traffic over the past couple of days on terms like "vote your faith" and "voting your faith 2008". It's obviously an issue weighing heavy on our minds.

There are, of course, issues and arguments on both sides of the fence. As I pointed out in my earlier post, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama, sets forth views that are entirely in line with Catholic teaching. Many Catholic voters are focused, and have been focused for many years, on the issue of abortion. That's unfortunate, since aside from appointing Supreme Court Justices, the President has almost nothing to do with the issue of abortion--it's a matter of state law. And, of course, the Supreme Court rulings on abortion issues haven't changed significantly since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, despite several changes in administrations. That's 35 years of wasted votes.

And sometimes even that goes wrong. George W. Bush somehow managed to garner support as a "pro-life" President despite signing the most egregious futile care statute ever enacted in the United States. I'm pretty sure that Andrea Clark's family didn't view President Bush as "pro-life".

Because the issue of abortion is so stark, it sometimes overshadows other issues that are just as important to our society. Issues like how we think of and treat other human beings, how we discharge our responsibility to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and whether we put value in loving one another or in profit and prestige. Maybe we overlook these things because they're not so dramatic and obvious and in-your-face as issues like abortion...or maybe we overlook them because they're uncomfortable.

Why are we worried, for instance, about tax increases? Doesn't the Bible tell us to give Caesar what is Caesar's, and not to store up our treasures on earth? The Bible tells us, also, to feed the hungry, to tend to the sick, but we want to do it our way. So many good Christians respond to this point with a mental (or actual) foot stomp, a "yes, we're called to do that, but AS WE CHOOSE--the government shouldn't be making the decision for us."

Perhaps. But what are we holding on to? Control? Possessions? The ability to judge who among us is worthy of help? Is any of those things a valid attachment? And isn't the root issue bigger than that, anyway? Isn't the root issue about the kind of society we want to live in, about whether we want a leader who believes his mission is to tend to all sheep or to maintain and intensify a system that has us competing against one another for success--for our very survival--rather than viewing our fellow man as something precious regardless of his station in life?

I'm in favor of life, and life means much more than outlawing abortion. It means and end to capital punishment (as the Catechism teaches), an end to unjust wars, an end to statutes that allow doctors to decide it's not worth caring for someone anymore, an end to people dying of curable diseases because they can't afford medical care, an end to women thinking abortion is their only option because they lack emotional support and medical resources and a means to feed their children, an end to a legal structure that makes it profitable for major corporations to injure and even kill consumers and so very much more. It means painting a world where the phrase "not my problem" is recognized for the nonsense that it is.

Lets take a step toward creating that world tomorrow.

Gentle Power

2008-06-07T12:44:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make.

I've always found Mary a bit intimidating.

Crazy, I know, but there's something about her being the only human who ever lived without sin that's always made me feel like she couldn't possibly help but frown on the rest of us. I've always marveled at those who were able to call on her for comfort, because it seemed to me that her glow of purity couldn't possibly function as anything but a glaring spotlight on how flawed the rest of us were.

My mind, I must confess, still rather sees it that way. But recently I had an encounter that reminded me that the highest knowledge doesn't come from my mind.

Back in May, the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe visited my midwestern church. The story of Juan Diego has always been a favorite of mine, and if I have thought vaguely of traveling to Mexico to see his miraculous cloak. If that's possible, it won't be for many years, so I was delighted to learn that the image was coming to me. I couldn't wait to see it, but I must admit that I was entirely unprepared for the actual experience of it.

Her gentleness was undeniable; I puzzled over how I might ever have seen her as aloof and intimidating. Her words to Juan Diego--"am I not your mother?"--suddenly rang true in a way that they never had before. I could have sat at her feet forever and simply absorbed the peace and gentleness that she radiated, and I know that I was not alone in that. Nearly everyone in the church was moved to tears at one time or another, or continuously.

It's really impossible for me to describe the way that the power of her gentle, loving spirit washed over everyone in her presence--it's certainly nothing I was prepared for in viewing an image, and I have delayed making this post for weeks in hopes that words would come to me that would allow me to share something of what I saw and felt in that church that day, but they have not come. I can only say that I cannot even begin to imagine the experience of someone like Juan Diego, or Bernadette, to feel the full force of her presence--it is on one hand difficult to imagine surviving such intensity and in another quite easy to understand how their lives were so completely transformed.

Perhaps, in the end, it is just as well that the experience defies description. It is one everyone should experience firsthand.

The Value of Punishment

2008-05-10T12:13:00.001-07:00

I wrote this post nearly a year ago and never posted it. I started out to say "I don't know why" at the end of that sentence, but I don't think that would be entirely accurate. I think that I never posted it because it was uncomfortable, because it was too personal, because it's something none of us like to think too much about as it applies to our own lives. It's fine in the theoretical, as we talk about raising children or reform in our criminal justice systems--two things that I, as a parent, former criminal defense lawyer, and legal writer think about a lot--but not so much when it comes closer to home. I ran across it again today and decided that I thought what I'd written was true, and important, even if it wasn't entirely comfortable...so here it is.

I had to be punished yesterday. In one sense, I think that self-imposed punishment is the least valuable. It requires discipline, certainly, and a deep level of acceptance, but it is still in some sense chosen, still within our control. Receiving punishment from some just authority—whether we want it or not, whether we agree with it or not—is beautifully humbling. Or it can be, if it is well conceived and well received.

Unfortunately, both of those conditions seem to be sadly lacking in society today. In our criminal justice system, punishment is imposed seemingly at random; some sentences seem outrageous in their lenience and others in their severity. Most sentences have nothing directly to do with the crime in question. It doesn’t seem to be intended to inspire reform, and where it is the inspiration seems to be expected to come from fear of future punishment, from having “learned your lesson” about what happens if you behave like that. True reform, as we well know, requires a change of heart, not simply an aversion to punishment.

And, in fact, the aversion to punishment itself can undermine its effectiveness. When punishment is accepted—and I mean accepted internally, not simply conceded to—it can open the door to wonderful growth in obedience and humility. Unfortunately, the flipside—and the much more common scenario today—is that resistance to punishment (though it might not be escaped) builds a fortress of pride and an illusion of being “in control of our own lives.” The “they can’t do that to me” attitude has become so instinctive that it is nearly impossible for the value of punishment to penetrate the rejection of obedience and humility.

One summer morning several years ago, I was lying on my bed reading with my daughter when the power went out. I got up and checked the breaker box and looked out the window to see whether the neighbors had power, and then, with a bit of a sinking feeling in my stomach, I went to check the front table where we kept the outgoing mail.

You see, I’d just returned from Las Vegas, and before I’d left I’d written out the utility check and put it in an envelope on the table where we put the outgoing mail…but I hadn’t actually mentioned to my husband that it was there and needed to be mailed.

At one time in my life I would have been angry: angry with my husband for not sending out any mail during the whole time I was gone, and angry with the utility company, because the bill couldn’t be more than ten days late and this seemed a bit hasty. I was just back from this long trip, and I was tired. We only had one car, and my husband had taken it to work. That meant a trek uptown—about a mile and a half—on foot, and it was in the nineties.

But I made a conscious decision that morning. I didn’t get angry. I took responsibility for not having either mailed the bill myself or explicitly pointed it out to my husband, and I recognized that three mile round-trip walk in muggy 90+ weather as the price I had to pay for that carelessness. My daughter, then five, wasn’t responsible, so when she began to complain of being hot and tired on the walk, I put her on my back and carried her. She shouldn’t have to suffer for my mistakes, after all, and if carrying her made the whole thing a little harder on me, so be it. Maybe next time I wouldn’t get so caught up in the excitement of my travel plans that I overlooked the obligations of everyday life.

By the time I arrived at the utility office, I was glad that we didn’t have a second car. It was clear to me that if this had been a minor inconvenience cleared up in five minutes in my air conditioned car, I wouldn’t really have taken time to give any thought to the way I’d just assumed someone else would take care of the details while I floated in the lazy river at the MGM Grand.

Although I was already in my thirties that day, it was the first time I’d thought to be grateful for consequences, to really open myself up to fully experiencing them instead of letting resentment interfere or trying to find ways to mitigate them.

There seems to be a “never give in” attitude in our society that makes it a point of pride to stand your ground even when you’re clearly wrong. “They can’t do that to me” extends so far that when it turns out that they can—when one finds himself in jail, for example, or without his driver’s license—“not letting it get to you” seems not only to be the norm, but viewed as somehow heroic.

I say, let it get to you. If you’re in jail for something you did, suffer. Don’t live inside your mind so that you can be “free” even behind bars—live behind bars and acknowledge your restrictions and the reasons for them every minute of every day. If you’ve lost your driver’s license, don’t drive. Accept the inconvenience of having to leave earlier and walk and take buses as part of the punishment you know you deserve, and give up places you don’t really need to go so that you don’t make someone else pay the price for your crime by requiring taxi service. And above all, be grateful. Realize you’ve been given an important opportunity to grow in virtues, to learn your place in the world and in God’s plan.

C.S. Lewis said once that every man we encounter will one day be a creature of such beauty that we should be tempted, if we saw it today, to worship it, or of such horror that we’ve never seen the like even in our nightmares. He pointed out that in every encounter, we help our fellow man along one path or the other. But there is perhaps no man-made circumstance in which that is so true as in punishment. It is never ignored, it is never without affect: it strengthens humility and obedience or it strengthens pride and rebellion.

Advice? Insights? Anyone?

2008-04-16T19:47:00.000-07:00

This evening, my daughter told me over dinner that she was worried about one of her friends. She's in middle school, so of course a lot of frightening possibilities sprang to mind at once, both about the kids and their families. She has a friend in foster care. She has a friend who is the victim of a "shared custody" arrangement that has her moving back and forth between her parents' homes every other day. She has a friend whose mother was recently deported. So I was prepared for the worst.

But not for what she said.

Her friend, she told me, wears a cross tucked inside her shirt, because her mother has forbidden her to have anything to do with "church stuff". Her mother found and threw away her Bible, and won't let her go to church with friends because she doesn't want her "learning about that religion crap".

I had no idea what to say.

I told her that we would pray for her friend and her mother, and that she should remind her friend that the most important thing was her relationship with God and that no one but her would know if she talked to God. And I felt two firmly held ethical beliefs crashing into one another hard enough to leave shattered glass on the ground around me. I'd be outraged if I felt like some other adult was feeding my daughter ideas that were contrary to our religion at her age. But the idea of a 12-year-old child trying to be a Christian alone and hide it from her parents is pretty painful, too.

I have no idea what the right thing to do might be, or even if doing anything (other than praying) is right. Any thoughts, experiences, prayers, insights, etc. will be greatly appreciated.

Hijacking Jesus

2008-03-06T12:57:00.000-08:00

I was always bothered, when I was working in the city, by the people on the street who held up pictures of Christ while they begged, who wrote Bible verses on their signs. It seemed exploitative to me; I was less likely to give them money than to those who simply claimed a need. Jesus, I said once to a co-worker, is not a marketing device.

What I meant, of course, was that I thought that Jesus SHOULDN'T be a marketing device. That's all I could mean, really, because there is no denying that in today's society, Christ is a marketing device every day, all around us. What began as something sincere in the days when we knew the members of our parishes has become the frequent tool of the unscrupulous. I'm not just talking about the credit repair people advertising on Relevant Radio, giving the impression that they're just there to help. I'm not just talking about people advertising on the back of the church bulletin and offering a 10% discount to parish members simply because it's a cheap way to draw in business. I'm talking about something much more sinister, and much more pervasive--something a single example should clearly put into perspective.

Google "Christian payday loans". No really. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Yes, there are more than 8,000 results.

I must admit that even cynic that I am, even with the experience I've had in researching and writing consumer protection information about payday loans and payday lenders, I held out a moment of hope. I just had to. I thought that maybe, just maybe, Christian payday loans were a moral alternative to the payday lenders who command fees equivalent to 400% interest or more in storefront offices and over the Internet.

So I clicked on a few links. I read some information. I filled out a few forms. And I learned that Christian payday loans are different from regular payday lenders are different from other payday lenders in one way: they write "Christian" on their websites and marketing literature.

What is Christian about charging 400% interest to working people in such dire straits that they can't afford to wait for their next paychecks to arrive? And what, exactly, is Christian about using the word "Christian" to sell something without letting Christian principles alter your business practices in any way? Jesus as a marketing device is bad enough, but Jesus as a marketing device for deceptive and destructive practices is more than we should tolerate.

Recently, in the name of Christianity, we've seen protesters disrupting the funerals of fallen soldiers and slain college students. Now, we see businesses that exist only as a means of taking advantage of the working poor selling their virtually unbreakable cycle of debt with Christ's name. This list could go on, and I'm sure that you don't need me to spell it all out. We see it all around us every day. But what are we going to do about it? How are we going to reclaim Christ's name and insist that it stand only for the principles HE taught and works truly done in his name?

"My Soul Has Adjusted"

2008-02-18T22:39:00.000-08:00

A colleague mentioned to me recently that he doesn't sleep much—never more than a few hours at a stretch. "That can't be healthy," I said, and he told me that his body had adjusted.

That happens. The human body is a remarkable thing; it's made to function one way, with a certain amount of sleep, within a certain temperature range, with a certain kind of fuel. And yet, if those things aren't available, it adapts. And we recognize that adaptation—we know that our bodies were meant to have nutritious food and a minimum amount of rest and all that, and that if they aren't getting it and they're still functioning, something fundamental has shifted in order to accommodate that, to keep operating as best it can in the absence of optimal conditions.

For better or worse, the human soul seems to work pretty much the same way. The dangerous difference is that we’re not so quick to recognize it. When the soul doesn’t get what it needs to thrive, when it doesn’t get the fuel it was meant to run on or the environment it was created to thrive in, it adjusts as well. It finds a way to get by in less than optimal circumstances, without the food and water and fresh air that it needs to be all that it was meant to be.

But just like the body, it has to change to do so. Just like the body, it doesn’t work as well without the conditions it was created for, doesn’t grow to its full strength, doesn’t become exactly what it was meant to be…what it could have been if only the sunlight hadn’t been obscured or the water hadn’t been polluted or any of a hundred other possible contaminations or missing pieces. And I think that for the most part, we don’t notice. It’s not so easy to see our souls shriveling as it is our bodies, not as easy to detect that something isn’t working quite right. Our souls adjust.

And unless we recognize that that’s what’s happening and find them the right food, the right sunlight, enough fresh air, they shrink into something very different from what they were designed to be.

But finding the right food and re-adjusting to it isn’t always easy. It seems, perhaps, that if it’s what we were made for, if it’s what was made for us, then it should fit, should feel right, should be as natural as breathing. And without those adjustments, that might well be true. But breathing fresh air is painful if we’ve become accustomed to a different atmosphere, and vegetables are hard to digest after a steady diet of processed foods. It stands to reason that if we’ve been feeding our souls a lot of junk and they’ve adapted, the good stuff isn’t going to go down easily—that’s going to take another round of adjustment.

The Spirit of Martyrdom

2008-02-03T20:53:00.001-08:00

Recently, I read Father David Knight's book, His Way. I've probably mentioned before how interesting and insightful I found Father Knight's Confession Can Change Your Life, and I'd been meaning for a long time to read more of his books. One of the things Knight talks about in His Way is the spirit of martyrdom in the modern world. Those of us who have always lived in the west have rather lost our sense of what that means. After all, we're rarely called upon to sacrifice our lives for our faith, and no one ever shows up and confiscates our land because we won't abdicate loyalty to Christ. It creates the impression that martyrdom is a concept of days gone by.

Really, though, Father Knight points out that it simply tends to manifest itself far less dramatically in our culture today. The point, he says, is that those early Christians knew that they risked everything every day simply by being Christian. They didn't remove themselves from everday life or avoid building homes and families and owning property and working at their trades--they simply did it all with the knowledge that the day might come when they had to choose, and that when that day came, they would choose Christ.

In some small way, we all face those decisions every day. We all live out that spirit when we decide to pass up on a profitable venture because it's not consistent with Christian values or to skip a social event because we can't condone the atmosphere or any of a hundred other things that we might not consciously connect to martyrdom--might not even consciously connect to our faith.

The whole idea that martyrdom was a necessary condition of any Christian life, but that it didn't mean quite what we associated it with from history and the idea that it wasn't about giving things up so much as a continual state of willingness to give them up if that's what Christianity required resonated with me. The apparent conflict between the focus on the value of relationships and the admonishment against attachments always created some dissonance for me, and this gave me a new perspective to consider.

But I must admit that even as I read those words and gained those insights, I was thinking that even the kind of choices Father Knight described didn't come up so often in modern life. Specifically, he pointed out that any friendship that wasn't founded in Christ was at risk, could always turn if you chose to stick to your principles and be true to Christ. And I didn't really get it. After all, I have many friends who disagree with me about many things. I think that most of us do.

But God has a way of clarifying these things for us, and just a few short days after I'd read those words and questioned their validity, a group of people I'd been associating with in an online forum took the surprising step of pulling away from the main forums and forming their own discussion group for the express purpose of limiting religious discussion.

The controversy that led up to their decision was, indeed, unpleasant, and on one level it might even have been understandable. But the options proposed frankly shocked me: come join our new group and agree to "leave God out of it" or don't come and talk to us at all. This wasn't, understand, and anti-religious or anti-Christian group. It was a group of people who was sick of listening to people proselytize and debate and squabble and so chose to create a safe haven where all discussion would be free from mention of God, positive or negative.

But is it really possible, if you're attempting to live a Christian life, if you're making decisions and analyzing situations in light of Biblical imperatives, to "leave God out of the discussion"? I determined that it was not, and off they drifted. But the controversy didn't end there. The backlash from the previous discussions continued to grow until there was more backlash than there was discussion. And the knee-jerk negative reaction to anything remotely related to religion became so extreme that I found that there were people I hardly dared respond to, because I was repeatedly faced with the choice of triggering that reaction, answering less than honestly so as not to reveal that God was part of my analysis, or simply not responding at all.

Of course, we all encounter people it's best to simply ignore, people best kept at a distance. But in this case, the people I found myself most reluctant to be honest with were the people I'd found most interesting, the people I'd believed to be most open-minded and capable of rational discussion that considered all viewpoints.

I don't fault the people involved; I can see how every new step along the path developed, and how each decision along the way seemed like a reasonable one in the moment, and how different the issue looks from "the other side". But it came as a startling revelation to me that I'd one day suddenly be asked by rational, thinking people to choose between talking to them and acknowledging the role that God plays in my life--and it gave a concrete context to what I'd been thinking just the week before "couldn't happen here".

Just Wanted to Share a Thought on Peace

2008-02-02T13:10:00.001-08:00

I ran across this story on another blog today, and while the idea it illustrates shouldn't be news to us, it's a good reminder, and well told, so I thought I'd share: The King's Prize

Grace is Like Sugar

2008-01-26T22:34:00.000-08:00

In my fledgling days of Christianity - and during dark days later and probably some still to come - the idea that God would grant one the grace to weather trials, to do the right thing when it was hard, to make sacrifices wasn't especially comforting. It didn't, frankly, sound like that much of a gift that I'd have the strength to do stuff I hated and give up stuff I liked.

And sometimes it's like that. If you absolutely have to take some awful-tasting medicine, sugar can make it possible to swallow it. Not pleasant, certainly, and probably still something you'd rather avoid, but possible. That's the picture of grace I always had when I read those words words about grace enabling you to do the right thing, as if it would give you the ability to stomach things - lots and lots of things - that you'd rather avoid.

But I'd forgotten about grapefruit. Or at least, I'd forgotten that there's a lot more grapefruit in the world than there is horrible tasting medicine, and that it comes into our lives much more regularly and naturally.

Grapefruit is sour. I actually happen to like grapefruit plain, but many people do not. It's too tart, too bitter, too acidic. Add a little sugar, though, and it's delicious. Not just something you can stomach, but something really good. Sugar doesn't mask the taste of grapefruit or cover it with something different and better or mitigate it so that you can take a deep breath and force yourself to swallow. No, it draws out the best of the natural flavor of the grapefruit, mingles with it, enhances it.

Without a pinch of sugar, it would be very easy to pass on grapefruit altogether, to decide on the first taste that it was a bit too tart and never really experience the texture and the hint of sweetness and the hundred and one health benefits. But with a little sugar, it's suddenly inviting. Not something to be stomached but something you might otherwise never have enjoyed. Something you might develop a taste for even without the sugar, once you've come to know it better.

It seems to me now that it's a little that way with grace, too. Sometimes there's awful medicine to be taken and it only takes the edge off enough that it's possible to swallow. But more often there are potentially delicious fruits, and grace draws out the flavor for us in something we might otherwise never have appreciated, gives us eyes to see the appeal in something masked by our worldly views, or sets up a stepladder to a place we didn't know enough to reach for.

Reclaiming Christmas - It's the Wrong Goal

2007-12-19T20:59:00.000-08:00

'Tis the season when Christians everywhere start forum threads and write articles and take surveys and talk over pumpkin-spiced coffee about how we can get the focus out of the department stores and back on Christ's birth.

We hear the same questions again and again: How can we keep our hearts in the right place, rise above the commercialism, and make sure that our children understand that the true meaning and importance of Christmas isn't how many gifts Santa brings?

I think it's the wrong question. In fact, I think it's so thoroughly, completely, RESOUNDINGLY the wrong question that so long as we keep asking it, we'll never find an answer.

The answer isn't in finding a way to take back Christmas. It isn't in refocusing our views of that day, or the season as a whole, on Christ. It's in living that--and teaching our children to live that--every day. If God is at the center of your family's life on a day-to-day basis, God will be at the center of your Christmas season. If He's not, then no amount of dramatic proclamations about what Christmas should be is going to change that--not in the short-term or the long-term.

Just as what your children (and you, and I) put into and get out of church depends upon the relationships we maintain with God and his son during the week, what we put into and get out of the Christmas season depends on the place God holds in our lives the rest of the year. Christmas isn't a time to change gears and suddenly pay more attention to God because it's the time we celebrate Christ's birthday--it's the time to commemorate the birth of someone who is already special and significant in our lives.

While the commercialism of Christmas may be something of a distraction, it's hard to imagine a child who lives every day with an awareness of God and a connection to Christ suddenly losing sight of those things because there are gifts on the horizon. It's equally hard to imagine one who hears (and thinks) about God only for 45 minutes on Sunday morning being truly prepared for Christmas just because we made loud noises about what the season is "really all about".

The issue isn't what Christmas is really all about, or what Easter is really all about, or Sunday is really all about...it's about what LIFE is really all about. If we get that right--if we even strive to get that right--our hearts and minds will be in the right place when the momentous occasions arise.

Silver or Gold I Do Not Have...

2007-11-30T00:05:00.000-08:00

My office held a Toys for Tots drive this week, and the response was overwhelming. All of those people who might have had the best of intentions but let time slip away, as so often happens, were saved from themselves by one young man in the office who took up a collection for Transformers--he even let the donor choose the particular Transformer he wanted to give, and then traveled to a number of stores in adjoining towns to make sure that all "orders" were filled. In the end, our company of just over 100 people ended up with a waist-high box brimming with toys.

Personally, I have a bit of silver and gold this year. After a dozen years of freelancing, I took a full-time job two years ago and regular, predictable income has been good to us. My 11-year-old daughter and I went out to buy a toy, but we ended up buying a few. We needed some pink things to balance out all those Transformers. She'd been sick and had just gone back to school that day, and I was worried about having her out running around, but she was enthusiastic about shopping. In fact, she insisted on carrying the gifts, saying, "I can take that" as I picked up each new item. I protested that I could carry some of them, but she insisted and so I let her take them, giving it no more thought until this evening, when I started to tell my mother about the success of the drive.

"Mommy bought a few toys," my daughter told her. My mother asked what I'd gotten and my daughter described the toys. And then she said, "I didn't have any money, but I carried them."

Catholic Carnival # 147

2007-11-27T05:55:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'll be honest: I've been working since 6:30 this morning and I haven't had a chance to follow a single link in the latest carnival yet, so I can't make any recommendations. I thought I'd go ahead and get the link up there, though, in case you have more time on your hands than I do...it's a very busy week, so maybe you can let ME know about those can't-miss posts in this round!

Catholic Carnival 147

The Map that God Made

2007-11-24T14:49:00.000-08:00

My search traffic intrigues me--so much so that I've started a separate blog just to answer the questions I find in my stats. One of the big questions in my mind is always what people were looking for when they typed in those words, and whether or not they found it on my blog.

On this blog, a large percentage of my search traffic comes from questions about Catholic marriage and divorce, and although I have a post called "Catholic Divorce" and another one called "The Truth about Catholic Marriage", I always suspect that those visitors don't find what they're looking for. The language in those search strings always seems to suggest that they're looking for a loophole. Somehow, for instance, I don't think the person searching for "when can Catholics get divorced" is really looking for guidance.

Far be it from me to sound critical. I'd be lying if I said that I'd never flipped open the Catechism in hopes of finding justification or permission for the choice I already wanted to make (and you wouldn't believe me anyway, would you?). But I think that when we do that, we're missing the point, that we've already skipped over an important step. After all, didn't God lay down the law for our benefit? And if so, then isn't "Are you going to let me do what I want to do?" the wrong question? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to consult God first, to find out what He thinks is going to work, than to figure out what we want, get poised on the edge of action, and then check to see whether or not it's okay? Wouldn't it make more sense, in short, to look at the directions before we got lost?

If we accept that God created us and knows us and wants what's best for us and knows what it is, then that means more than accepting that, however much we might not like it, we have to let go of some of our own goals--it means formulating those goals with the guidance we've been provided in mind. On the surface, it might sound like one of those "easier said than done" things, but in practice, I suspect that it would be easier than the way most of us live now, because we wouldn't get so far down those paths that are ultimately cut off.

It seems to me--and I certainly don't pretend to know another person's heart based on what he's typed into a search engine, so maybe I'm projecting my own weaknesses--that most of us tend to look on God's laws as lines at the boundaries of our lives: so long as we don't cross them, we can do whatever we want in that wide open field inside the lines. And maybe to some degree that's true, but I begin to suspect that we're cheating ourselves when we think that way, that God is offering us a detailed, brightly colored topographical map that shows us where all the good stuff is and how to get there--not just the most direct route, but how to find the peaceful valleys and the cool streams even when we've wandered off into the brambles and dark woods--and we can't get our focus off the one big danger sign at the edge of the cliff long enough to see it. Our eyes turn toward that heavy black line and we think, "As long as I don't go over there, I should be okay." And maybe we will. But shouldn't we be going for something a little more than "okay"?

So the Truth Is...I'm Martha

2007-11-24T10:58:00.000-08:00

This week, I started reading Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World, but it's tough going for me. The thing is, I think Martha was right.

One of my greatest blessings as a Christian has been clarity. In part, that's the gift of being Catholic--we're not left with much ambiguity. In part, I think, it's just a particular blessing I have: there are some things in life that just aren't gray, and the ones that are clearly spelled out in the Bible or the Catechism are clearly among them.

Perhaps that's why I'm so perplexed about what to do with this Mary/Martha thing. See, in my mind Martha is the kind of woman we should all aspire to be and Mary is a hanger-on who can only exist because people like Martha are doing the real work, and I'm not going to be swayed from that view...even by a little thing like the fact that Jesus himself said Mary had it right.
So there we have it. Am I wrong? Well, obviously.

One of those incontrovertible facts of which I just spoke is that when I disagree with GOD, I'm wrong. He's omniscient and I'm not. He created the world and I didn't. He gets to make the rules and I don't. It's a no-brainer. He's right.

But I still can't get my mind around it.

I can't help but notice that even though Jesus said that Mary had chosen what was better, He didn't say, "Martha, you sit down too. We don't need to eat. We don't need a place to sleep. Let's all just sit here and bask in one another's presence."

Of course, Jesus could have done that and then summoned food for all if He'd chosen, but the rest of us can't. And since He didn't make that choice, Martha couldn't, either. She could either "choose what was better" like Mary and let her guests starve or she could go right on doing what was "worse" and give them nourishment and clean bedding and all that. And Jesus, it seems, even while he was praising Mary, let Martha go right on slaving away. And there's no indication that He and his followers didn't happily partake of the food she prepared.

I don't know the answer. It seems to me that without the Marthas of the world we'd all be dead, and I can't conceive of the Lord wanting us to turn a blind eye to the sick and hungry in the street as we rush by to go and sit undisturbed at his feet. Maybe I'll find some clarity and reconciliation in this book--or maybe my frustration will continue to grow. I'm sure I'll be writing more about it. I hope anyone who has insights about this will share them here.

North of Hope

2007-11-17T09:53:00.000-08:00

It's been a busy couple of weeks and I haven't done much posting on any of my blogs, but I did manage to finish a good book during my commute. A couple of months ago, I posted about People of the Book and the Loyola Classics series I'd discovered there.

The first book I ordered was Jon Hassler's North of Hope, and I'm afraid it's derailed me. I planned to work my way through the Classics list, but that's going to have to wait until I've worked my way through Hassler's other novels.

I'm a lover of books and the written word in a way that transcends subject matter, and in this case it's just a bonus that Hassler's primary characters--or some of them--are Catholics making the hard decisions of life in the context of their faith. It's a novel as much about human nature and growth and the small steps that turn out to be huge crossroads as it is about faith, and I think that if you like books that reveal human truths in little ways on every page, you'll enjoy this one even if you're not Catholic.

Voting Your Faith - Is it Possible in 2008?

2007-11-08T21:29:00.001-08:00

A political discussion group on Blog Catalog has a great carnival going on all this month, looking for posts on "The Biggest Obstacle to Electing the Right President". I'm departing in a couple of ways--first, because I don't usually talk politics on this blog, and second because the issue I want to talk about isn't the universal answer to the question. It's only an answer that applies to people who are concerned with voting their faith, and who happen to be of the Christian faith.

"Vote your faith" has, unfortunately, become a sound bite like so many other political soundbites, full of emotion and imperative but without a lot of substantive meaning. It's easy to get swept away in the rhetoric, and to sincerely believe that one highly-publicized issue or another is decisive, but the truth is that like everything else in politics--like everything else in LIFE--voting your faith is rarely that simple. And it's become increasingly complicated as the world itself has become increasingly complicated and the issues to be determined by our elected officials have become increasingly varied and often technical.

In 2000 and 2004, many Christians supported President Bush because they were "pro-life" and Bush's opponents were in favor of keeping abortion legal. However, those same people overlooked the fact that President Bush, as Governor of Texas, had signed a futile care bill into law--a bill that allowed hospitals to withhold critical care from patients even over the objections of the patients themselves and/or their families. That, it seems to me, puts the Christian who wants to vote his faith in a bit of a bind: neither candidate respects the sanctity of human life in the way that most Christian religions--and certainly Catholicism--would require. I've often heard it said (in sound bites, of course, and on bumper stickers) that you can't be Catholic and support a candidate who doesn't oppose abortion. And yet, it seems equally clear to me that you can't be Catholic and support a candidate who advocates giving medical professionals the power to legally decide that some lives are not worth preserving.

The issues don't end there, either. As Catholics, we have very clear doctrine on what constitutes a just war...and on when war is absolutely unacceptable. And we're meant to support the concept of marriage as a God-given bond between one man and one woman for life.

But doesn't it always seem that the political candidates who oppose abortion also oppose protections that would keep large pharmaceutical companies from determining that it's acceptable to kill a certain number of people in the interests of profits? Doesn't it seem that those who oppose gay marriage are also fairly liberal about how they'll use military force? This list, I think, could go on indefinitely.

A woman in a Catholic discussion group once said (condescendingly) that it was a question of PRIORITIZING. She meant that abortion was the number one concern and we could overlook these other issues so long as the candidate had that one right. But I don't remember seeing anything about a question of priorities in my Bible. I can't find a place in the Catechism where it says it's perfectly acceptable (let alone righteous) to encourage one evil if it allows you to combat another. And it seems to me that the complexity and diversity of the issues at hand and the mixed bag of positions each candidate carries make it impossible to vote in good faith for any of them, if voting your Catholic faith is the goal.

Believe? What Does "Believe" Really Mean, Anyway?

2007-11-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

Her expression turned suspicious. "You believe in angels?"
"I do, Marcella. Don't you?"
She squinted, trying to see the invisible. "What's Rome saying these days?"
"About angels?"
She nodded.
"Same as always."
She shrugged. "Then I suppose I do." She scooped out a saucepanful of birdseed. "But it's one thing to believe in angels and another thing to actually see one. That's what separates Christians from loonies."

That conversation takes place in the excellent novel North of Hope by Jon Hassler. It reveals a lot about the character, but I think it reveals just as much about a lot of us. It's easy to believe in things like angels and miracles in the abstract, but have you ever heard a story of angelic intervention or a miraculous occurrence that you believed? I'm not talking about the ones in the Bible or that we read in histories of saints who have been dead for hundreds of years. I'm talking about stories related by people who were there, passed down through families--do you believe that angels appear to people you know (or might know), that miracles can happen on your block?

My aunt had scarlet fever as a young child, in the 1940s. Medicine, of course, was much more limited in those days, and the doctor had come and gone and said there was nothing to be done for her. My grandfather was a Chicago cop, working security at the airport, when a Cardinal happened to arrive on a flight. He broke away from his entourage, walked straight up to my grandfather, and said, "You have someone sick at home." My grandfather told him about my aunt, and the Cardinal gave him a medallion and told him to take it home and put it on her. He did. She recovered. And she carried that medallion every day of her life until she lost it to a mugger in her forties.

The funny thing is, it's the most religious people I know who don't believe that story--or rather, who believe the factual telling of it but are quite certain that her recovery was a coincidence. And maybe it was. Doctors have certainly been known to be wrong. There wasn't any flash of lightning or instantaneous healing or anything clear and dramatic to point to. Except, of course, that the Cardinal approached my grandfather, having no rational way of knowing the situation.

I strongly suspect that at one time, nearly every Catholic family had stories like that. When my mother was a child, there was a statue in her local parish that bled on Good Friday. Far beyond there being little DOUBT in any of the parishioners' minds, there was little intrigue, either. My mother, having grown up and attended mass in that parish, doesn't recall ever having seen it. When I point out that people travel across the country to see tortillas in the shape of the Blessed Virgin and such and inquire as to why she mightn't have thought it worth making the trip across the neighborhood to check this out, she's at a loss to provide the context to understand it. Everyone knew about it...and everyone took it in stride.

It seems our perspective has changed dramatically, but it's changed in two very different directions. Some of us are so desperate for a sign of the supernatural, for some "direct contact", for something tangible, that we'll make a pilgrimage to see a grilled cheese sandwich. And others are so jaded that we'll consider any possible alternative explanation for something that looks like a miracle. But what ever happened to those who quietly believed that angels and miracles were a part of life, a part they were grateful for but that didn't belong on the 10:00 news?

What about you? Do you believe in angels? And if you said yes, do you believe there's one in the room with you right now?

Catholic Carnival # 139

2007-10-03T19:49:00.002-07:00

Catholic Carnival # 139 went up yesterday, and although I haven't yet had the opportunity to follow all the links, I'm pleasantly surprised anew at how many different, interesting and thoughtful Catholic blogs are out there.

Take a moment to check it out if you're in the market for a wide variety of Catholic thoughts and perspectives. And while you're at it, check out Catholic Carnival # 138, too, since I neglected to point it out last week.

In Whose Name?

2007-10-01T19:40:00.000-07:00

In the final volume of the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan assures a Calormene that, although he has believed himself to be a follower of the evil Tash all his life, whatever good he has done has truly been done in Aslan's name.

His message is that wherever the unfortunate man has believed his loyalties to be, loyalty itself is not possible in the name of evil. The message echoes that of the church in explaining that, while the only path to salvation is through Christ, not all men have the opportunity to fully understand what lights their paths. Nonetheless, to follow the unknown light may be enough to lead them home.

There is another, darker message inherent in these words, though. For just as it is not possible to do good in the name of Tash (or of Satan), it is not possible to do evil in the name of God. And so, if the man who in ignorance does good though he knows not that it is God's path he follows may be saved, what of the man who does evil though he persuades himself that it is in the name of God?

Just as surely as one cannot love in the name of evil, he cannot hate in the name of good. Where, then, does that leave the Christian whose righteousness has hardened into pride, whose hatred of the sin has hardened into hatred of the sinner? What of the poor man who offers darkness up to God?

Great Resource for Catholic Readers and Writers

2007-09-30T12:18:00.001-07:00

A bit of a departure today, but I wanted to take a moment to point out a blog I recently discovered that, of course, captured my heart by being both Catholic and book-focused. People of the Book is a blog authored by Jim Manney of Loyola Press.

I've barely scratched the surface of this blog and my reading list is already growing faster than I can place orders. Among other things, Manney's blog introduced me to the Loyola Classics series, which surely has something for everyone with a taste for Catholic literature.

If you're looking for something to read, check out People of the Book--but make sure you have a little time to spare before you click that link.

Every Little Thing We Do

2007-09-29T15:24:00.000-07:00

I didn't link to another blog from my writing blog today. In fact, I didn't write the post that I'd been planning to write that had been triggered by the other blog. The post was about writers' block, and it was a good one. More to the point for me, it tied directly in with one of the most popular posts I've ever written, Writing is Easy.

Like most of my writing, the post I was going to write began unfurling in my mind, unbidden. But then I gave a moment's thought to the blog I was going to link to. It's primary purpose (self-confessed) is to put people down. Not all people, just those the author considers intellectually inferior.

I think there was a time when I would have thought, "Well, I'm just linking to this one post, and there's nothing wrong with this post." There was a time when I would have thought that someone who wouldn't link to a blog post about writing because it happened to reside on a blog about how stupid people are was going a little far, was being a little too judgmental, perhaps. I would, I expect, have rolled my eyes at the idea. It wouldn't be like endorsing her ideas, right?

Well, in a sense it wouldn't. I could even say that I didn't agree with the rest of the content of the blog or...whatever. Disclaim away: I'm a lawyer, after all. But I'm a lot more conscious these days of the way that every little action has effects we never see. It's easy enough to think, "It's not like I'm getting thousands of visitors a day", and that's true. It's entirely likely that only a handful of people would follow that link on my blog. That one link would only boost that blog's Technorati authority by one, and that one backlink from my blog (which has no page rank) would certainly have no effect on Google ranking.

So what's the harm?

The simple answer is that I don't know, but that I've come to realize that "I don't know" and "there is none" are not identical statements. Maybe just one person clicking that link would think the abuse was clever and slide a little further from compassion. Maybe one person would send the link to someone else, who would love it and post it in a group or forum where a dozen or a hundred others might click it. And, of course, maybe none of those things would happen. But comparing the upside (I felt like writing a blog post that would have tied in) with the downside (any possible appearance of endorsement or accidental boost to a blog that exists to advance a philosophy as inconsistent with Christian principles as any I've ever seen), it seemed pretty clear which way the scales tipped.

I've written before, on another blog, about the way the little decisions we make in everyday life effect the people around us. I guess this is just one more example, one more arena, in which I'm realizing we have to think through the ramifications of things that might not appear, at first glance, to have any.

Email Parables

2007-09-27T20:30:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, I ran across a post entitled "Another Inspiring Story" on a Catholic blog that was new to me.

My first thought was (as it usually is when I receive stories like this in email forwards or run across them on the web), "I wonder if that's true?" Of course, I suspected that it was not; the simple fact is that the vast majority of these stories circulating online turn out not to be, or at least to be heavily evolved from their original form. It was a touching story, but wasn't it likely that someone had just made it up?

I was somewhat startled to realize that it didn't matter in the least. There was truth in the story, whether or not the story was true. This particular group of boys might not have shown this particular kindness to this particular child, but so what? People do show one another such kindnesses from time to time (probably far too infrequently), and when they do, it makes a very significant difference to everyone involved.

The story touched my heart (and if you know me in real life, you know that I don't have a sentimental cell in my body), and it brought something to the front of my consciousness that should be there more often: a kind of tenderness for human beings in their capacity for tenderness. It reminded me that relatively small sacrifices can become relatively large gifts, and that sometimes it's the youngest and most innocent among us who are most likely to keep that in sight.

And that, I suspect, is exactly what it was meant to do. Does it matter whether it was a real-life example or simply a parable intended to illustrate a greater truth? I think that it does not. I got the message.

Deus et Caritas

2007-09-21T17:56:00.000-07:00

When Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical came out, many were surprised. This man the press had been calling "God's rottweiler" seemingly setting the tone for his pontificate with...love? But that perceived conflict overlooks something essential in the nature of faith. It is true that as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger developed a reputation as a doctrinal hardliner, but what is a doctrinal hardliner except one who believes completely?

If God is Love, then doesn't it make perfect sense for all of us to be "doctrinal hardliners", to embrace without reservation all of the teachings inspired by the Holy Spirit? Indeed, it seems that only one who truly and fully believed that God is Love could fully and truly advocate abandoning all stubbornness, all pride, all personal desire in favor of doing it God's way.

Perfect faith is hard to come by; it's hard to trust enough to sincerely say, "Not my will, but Yours." It's hard to hear God's will, sometimes, over the clashing din of society, practical demands and our own desires. That's where a "doctrinal hardliner" like the former Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, comes in handy: he helps maintain clarity. And clarity about God's will is critical, because God knows what He's doing. It seems unlikely that anyone with a sincere belief in God doubts that He knows what He's doing.

More often, the problem seems to arise when God's interests and ours conflict. The "rules" are tough; two equally dangerous responses emerge. The first is an outright rejection, a decision to go one's own way. The second, subtler, equally corrosive, is the rejection of the idea that God could disagree with us.

Few people who truly believe in God are willing to simply say, "No, I know you're there and I know the teachings you've sent, but I'm opting to ignore them. " Instead, our tendency is toward incredulity that God might have said those things, might have set up those limitations. The rejection of Christ's and the church's teachings is often prefaced by the phrase, "I think God wants us to be happy." The implicit statement is that God wouldn't have said no to something *I* think would make me happy.

And, of course, that entirely misses the point. It presumes a level of knowledge and understanding that we do not have. It makes, however unconsciously, the prideful statement, "God wouldn't require anything *I* don't agree with!"

But God knows more than we do. He designed us to work in a certain way, and he knows what it is. He has the big picture, whereas we're looking at only an infinitismal slice--no, grain--of infinity.

In the end, "God is Love" and "doctrinal hardliner" are not only logical companions but necessary ones. If we believe that God is Love and we believe He knows what He's doing, then nothing makes sense except to do exactly what He says in faith that it's the right thing for us--even if the reasons won't fit in our brains.

Catholic Carnival

2007-09-13T22:36:00.000-07:00

For several weeks, I've been meaning to participate in this Catholic blog carnival. I love the fact that the carnival exists and has been consistent for, if the numbering is accurate, more than two years. I never seem to have a post that feels appropriate, though, so I haven't actually taken the leap and submitted. I finally decided this evening that whether or not I was ever going to get around to participating, it was high time I shared the link. The carnival moves around, but if you visit the most recent collection of posts, you'll find instructions for submitting or subscribing. I've found some great Catholic blogs this way that I would probably never have stumbled upon otherwise, and there's quite a range, so I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Catholic Carnival 136

The Stations of the Cross: Veronica Wipes Jesus' Face (# 6)

2007-09-13T20:48:00.000-07:00

Wednesday evening I was sitting alone in the silent narthex of the closed church, waiting for my daughter to finish choir practice. Choir practice is only 45 minutes long and it's a 20 minute drive from home, so I wait for her, and I'm glad it works out that way, because it gives me an opportunity to take some quiet time that I'm inclined to neglect among the everyday details of work and parenting.

The Stations of the Cross on the walls are large and sculpted from white marble with small wooden crosses, and as I sat looking at the 6th station, I wrote this on the back of an outdated flyer:

Scripture tells us nothing about Veronica. It is only Tradition that tells us she existed at all, and the details are few. We do not even know whether Veronica was her name. Some have suggested that she was really Salome, some that she was Mary, sister of Martha, others that she was simply an unknown woman along the path whose identity is lost to us forever.

Still, this moment, blurred as it may be by two thousand years of repetition and translation, may be one of the most real for us as Catholics living in the modern world.

Veronica reached out a hand in love, in friendship, in compassion and support. It's that simple, and that bears some thought. She wiped Christ's face, and we talk about it still, 2000 years later.

Modern Christians are rarely asked to die for their faith. Many of the most significant stories in Christian history may seem inaccessible, their applications to everyday life abstract and uncertain. Simon of Cyrene helped to carry Christ's cross, and we have to figure out what that means in our lives, how we emulate that in a world of day jobs and trips to the grocery store. We have to draw analogies and listen hard to God and even then, we're often uncertain as to whether or not we have it right.

But Veronica reached out and wiped the face of someone who was suffering. No translation required--we all know how to do that. And if it might seem more significant that she did it for Jesus, then we've apparently forgotten the words of our Lord in Matthew 25:40...

And the king will say to them in reply, 'Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.'

If it seems more significant that she did it in such circumstances, under such pressure...well, yes it is. And doesn't that make it all the harder to understand how we might neglect to do the same thing in the relatively safe environments we encounter every day?

Banking on that "Outside of Time" Thing...

2007-08-20T19:56:00.000-07:00

This evening, my train was delayed by a pedestrian fatality. In the year and a half that I've been commuting to work, this is perhaps the fourth time I've been on a train that was delayed because someone was killed on the tracks. It's happened often enough, that is, that I'm not quite sure whether this is the fourth or the fifth.

Once, last summer, I was actually on a train that killed a man. Although I was fortunate enough not to actually see anything, it was a horrific experience. Word quickly spread through the train that it had been a suicide.

After a few initial moments of dismay, I took out my rosary and began to pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet. Jesus told St. Faustina "When they say this chaplet in the presence of the dying, I will stand between my Father and the dying person, not as the Just Judge but as the Merciful Savior", and I couldn't imagine many people who would need a merciful savior more than a guy who had just jumped in front of a moving train.

I'm not honestly sure how many times I went through the Chaplet--we sat there on that train for a long time, and then we sat on the grass next to the railroad tracks for a long time. But in the back of my mind, doubt was nagging. "Dying" and "dead", after all, are two very different things. I was pretty sure that death by train was instantaneous, and so I'd come along several minutes too late to comply with the strict letter of the promise. I worried about the possibility that there was nothing to be done for a guy who'd already been dead for eight or ten minutes when I'd thought to start praying.

I still don't know the answer to that, but the idea that it was too late by ten minutes seemed inconsistent with the whole idea of mercy, and when I tried to sort that out it occurred to me that this whole "time" thing is strictly an earthbound concept. God, not bound by time, had already known about this prayer eight or ten minutes earlier when the crucial moment came.

Am I rationalizing? I don't know. In fact, uncertainty on that very point has had this post sitting in "drafts" for a week. It's entirely possible that I'm simply looking for a way to say, "It's never too late", a way to believe that all prayers do some good, even if we don't always get the answer we're looking for...even if we don't get all the formalities quite right. Maybe that's rationalizing. Or maybe it's Hope.

Hypocrisy or Human Weakness?

2007-08-19T15:01:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I read a lengthy post about high-profile evangelists. I don't recall exactly where I read it, but it doesn't matter, because it said the same thing as a hundred other posts and editorials we've all read: since a handful of evangelists have been proven to engage in exactly the behaviors they warn against, we must conclude at once that:

1. They're hypocrites who just want to ruin people's sex lives;
2. Since they're hypocrites, all evangelists are hypocrites; and
3. Since all evangelists are hypocrites, all Christians are hypocrites who just want to ruin your sex life, and should be either disregarded or burned at the stake depending upon how much they're annoying you personally.

Now, I'm no big fan of high-profile evangelists, and I'm quite certain that some of them are hypocrites. That's nothing new. Men who maintain only a passing acquaintance with God have been making a pretty penny preaching the gospel since long before television--they traveled from town to town and set up on streetcorners to collect your money instead of creating a P.O. Box and using the airwaves to ask you to mail it in.

That didn't, of course, mean there were no real preachers. It didn't mean that there was anything wrong with the values they preached. It only meant that those particular men were dishonest. Happens in every field. Obviously, we can't draw conclusions about every Christian, or even every minister, in the world based on those high-profile cases.

But maybe that doesn't go far enough. Maybe we need to dig a little deeper. Maybe the real question we need to be asking is whether it makes a man a hypocrite to speak out against something he's done himself.

I suspect that if it were that simple, there would be no one left to speak out.

Remember the woman who was going to be stoned? Jesus said, "let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone", and everyone went home. EVERYONE. Who is without sin?

Jesus. The Blessed Virgin. And...

um...

well...

Right then.

No one on earth has been qualified to preach the gospel for two thousand years. Least of all Peter, the apostle to whom Jesus entrusted the keys to the kingdom--he betrayed Christ directly, claimed not to know him!

If you read this blog regularly, you know this has recently been a serious issue for me personally. Back in June, I started to get some really wonderful feedback from readers, and frankly, it terrified me. You see, total strangers were accusing me of things like "wisdom" and "walking close to God" and I, living with myself every day, knew how very far from either of those things I often fell.

Some time away, some prayer, some input from good people helped me to realize that it wasn't about me at all, that the truth remained the truth whether it came from my keyboard or anyone else's.

Such is the case, I think, with most evangelists. If a man goes on television and says that adultery is a grave sin and then cheats on his wife, it doesn't mean that adultery wasn't a grave sin after all. It means he committed a grave sin, all the graver because he clearly knew how serious it was.

Now, there may be evangelists who preach against adultery and laugh while they sneak around with other women that very night. They, perhaps, are the hypocrites of whom those editorials speak. But their actions don't make adultery a good thing, don't change the basic truth they communicated. And there may be evangelists who preach against adultery and then commit it themselves, and tearfully and sincerely ask God for the strength to walk away and get back on the right path. They are, perhaps, not hypocrites at all but ordinary sinners like the rest of us who apply the same standards to themselves but then fall short. But, again, the actions of the speaker don't affect the truth of the words.

If we had to wait to hear the truth of God's commandments from someone who lived them perfectly, we would have to wait for Christ's return.

The Stations of the Cross - Simon of Cyrene Helps Jesus Carry the Cross (#5)

2007-08-17T22:23:00.001-07:00

Scripture tells us little about Simon of Cyrene and his role in carrying the cross. Matthew, Mark and Luke each address Simon's involvement in a single sentence, while John's account has Christ carrying the cross himself.

Despite the brevity of the reference, the first three gospels are consistent; each names Simon of Cyrene, and each indicates that Simon's service was not voluntary. Matthew and Mark use the phrase "pressed into service", while Luke says, "made him carry the cross".

Simon didn't volunteer to help Christ. That bears thinking about. Not because it tells us anything negative about Simon, specifically. The streets were lined with people who didn't volunteer to help Jesus--Simon was no different or worse than any of the others. But he wasn't necessarily better, either. He was just the man the soldiers chose to "press into service".

But then what happened?

We don't know, of course. The gospels are universally silent on any action or reaction of Simon beyond carrying the cross when he was so ordered. But we can imagine, can we not? Would it be possible to walk behind Jesus, carrying his cross, and not be changed by it, even if you'd been "pressed into service"?

In that regard, Simon of Cyrene was perhaps not so different from you and me. Aren't we often "pressed into service" when we really would prefer not to take up the cross, when we really wouldn't ever have volunteered for that burden. Sometimes those crosses are thrust upon us, but at other times they're pressed upon us more subtly, more gently, in ways that might allow us to decline. Sometimes the ways we're "pressed into service" are more nudges than true presses; sometimes we have the option of setting down the cross and walking away.

That, perhaps, is the moment to think about Simon. Not because of the choice he made--we do not know whether he had any choice at all--but because we know, if we allow ourselves to know, that Simon could not have walked behind Christ carrying his cross and not been changed by it. And neither can we.

Christian Marriage and Domestic Violence

2007-08-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

I had a great opportunity this week to participate in a blog carnival encouraging Christian women to speak out on domestic violence. It's an issue near to my heart, since a large part of my legal practice was devoted to pro bono representation of victim's of domestic violence.

April Gilford at Life as a Christian Woman had the great idea to invite women from different perspectives to speak out on the issue as it affects Christian women, and my post in her collection of thoughts on domestic violence in Christian marriage is joined by essays from a United Methodist Clergywoman, a former victim of domestic violence, and others.

April has also arranged a unique interchange with Jocelyn Anderson, author of Woman Submit! Christians and Domestic Violence. That's coming up on August 28.

My thanks to April for shining some light on this tough issue.

"Catholic Divorce"

2007-08-13T19:48:00.000-07:00

Being Catholic means being challenged a lot and, as I mentioned in my earlier post, continually confronted by misconceptions about the church.

One of the most common, and most hotly protested, misconceptions about the church is that an annulment is nothing more than a church-sanctioned divorce.

Here are the circumstances under which the church can terminate a valid marriage:

Yep, that's right. A valid marital union lasts until death. Period.

In fact, even the word "annulment" is misleading, because marriages aren't annulled. They are declared null, and while that might sound like a matter of semantics, it's really a critical distinction. A declaration of nullity is a declaration that a marriage was defective from the start. A marriage can't start out valid and later be annulled, either by the church or through the actions of either spouse.

Does the church grant declarations of nullity too easily? Perhaps. That's another analysis for another day. I believe, though, that there's another reason for the proliferation of declarations of nullity in the United States: Americans get married too lightly.

its' not a surprise that, in looking back, the church so often finds that a couple has not validly bestowed upon one another the sacrament of marriage. Even practicing Catholics who marry within the church often consider pre-cana nothing more than a hurdle and those somewhat less devout often marry outside the church to avoid the limtations of time and place. People get married in Las Vegas after a 24-hour acquaintance and in their own hometowns to get our of their parents' houses or to get health insurance or because they're already pregnant so they might as well.

Is it any wonder, then, that teh church so often finds that couples lacked the understanding and intent to form the most serious and enduring of all earthly bonds?

While divorce and remarriage as a pastoral issue certainly presents a challenge to the church, the fact is that tribunals favorably disposed toward declaration of nullity have a lot to work with in an environment where true marriage as God intended it is increasingly rare.

It seems, though, that the church may be caught in a vicious circle. A declaration of nullity may be warranted where the couple--or either spouse--lacked the understanding and intention to form the lifelong, self-giving bond that God intended marriage to be. But if the vast majority of divorced couples receive declarations of nullity, however valid, then how can the church hope to restore an understanding of the sacredness and permanance of marriage?

I have no answers. But I'm pretty sure that it's time we moved the discussion away from whether or not the church should be granting so many declarations of nullity and toward how she can start creating marriages that are impervious to them.

Till We Have Faces

2007-08-13T04:20:00.000-07:00

I thought that I'd long since read all of C.S. Lewis's fiction, but periodically I check the library or bookstore shelves in the vague hope that something new will have magically appeared. Of course, I could attack this much more efficiently and certainly by simply looking at a full list of his publications, but I opt for the browsing approach instead, and once in a while it works.

A couple of months ago, Till We Have Faces magically appeared. To be honest, it looked vaguely familiar, and I'm harboring a suspicion that I looked at it long ago and didn't choose it because I'm not a big fan of myths. The book bills itself as, and is commonly reviewed as, a retelling of the myth of Cupid & Psyche.

But one of the reasons myths haven'te ever really inspired me is that I've read them only in the kind of condensed form that you see in high school mythology class--or perhaps, that's the way they've been handed down. Lewis takes a whole book to tell the story, complete with character development. Still, the telling takes the familiar form of narrator passing along a tale--though with a little twist. The narrator is one of the main characters, and the story her effort at vindication, her charge against the gods.

Like all of Lewis's fiction, the tale is rich with Christian allegory, perhaps somewhat closer to the surface than usual in this story populated by gods and worshippers and rebellious humans.

If you've ever been a fan of Lewis and haven't read this book, I strongly recommend it. If you've never been a fan of Lewis, read it anyway.

The Thing about Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough…

2007-08-12T16:23:00.000-07:00

...is that it’s not cookies.

Cookie dough tastes good, and sometimes it’s hard to wait around for the cookies. So we sample while we’re baking and the cookie dough is good, even if it isn’t what we set out after when we started baking. So maybe we eat a little more.

Of course, if you eat enough cookie dough, you start to feel a little queasy, and you don’t enjoy the cookies quite the way you were hoping to. And there’s always a small chance that you’ll get salmonella from the raw eggs in the cookie dough, though you don’t actually know anyone it’s ever happened to and the threat seems sort of remote.

But even if you moderate, just take a taste or two of cookie dough, and it doesn’t contain any odd bacteria…it’s not a cookie. There’s a process for turning it into a cookie, and there’s no shortcut: it’s not going to be a cookie until all of the ingredients are added and thoroughly mixed and it’s based at the right temperature for the right amount of time. Wanting it to be a cookie doesn’t make it so.

Life is full of things like cookie dough, of times when we want to jump the gun, to cut a little corner, to get what we want a little sooner…and in doing so turn the object of our desire into something slightly—but critically—different. Sometimes those things are morally neutral and don’t make a big difference in our lives.

You complain that your pizza is taking too long, so the guy behind the counter reaches in and grabs it before it reaches the end of the conveyor. The crust is the wrong consistency, and you’re a bit disappointed, but life goes on with no real harm done. You’re so eager to share your favorite childhood movie with your son that you try it when he’s too young and he doesn’t much care for it—and probably won’t ever be able to see it quite the way you’d hoped. Or you want to finish painting that room today, so you start on the accent coat before the base is ready and create a smeary mess.

There is, of course, nothing in life so like cookie dough as sex. The sexual union created by God is the perfectly baked chocolate chip cookie, but there’s a virtual smorgasbord of other possibilities: cookie dough, plain chocolate chips, butter and sugar. It’s the cookie dough, though, that’s the most dangerous, because it contains all the right ingredients and yet, without proper baking, it just isn’t a cookie.

That’s why sex outside of marriage is the most pointless, the most futile, the most potentially damaging, precisely for those who think they have the best reasons for it. Casual pick-up-in-a-bar-and-don’t-learn-my-name sex isn’t cookie dough. We could argue all day about whether it’s a candy bar or rat poison, but no one would mistake it for a cookie, and no one goes into it looking for a cookie.

It’s the people who think, “It’s okay because…” who are really cheating themselves. Because the people who say, “But I really love him and I don’t ever want to be with anyone else” are looking for a cookie. They’re looking for the true and total sexual union that God created, not just sex. And they may have all the ingredients: the love, the commitment, and the good intentions are like flour and sugar and eggs. But God is the baker, and neither love nor desire turns the dough into a cookie; only marriage does that.

Help, I've Lost my a la Carte Menu!

2007-08-07T22:28:00.000-07:00

I lost my a la carte menu in a restaurant.

I came by my cafeteria Catholicism honestly--I'd grown up in a household that was nominally Catholic without ever attending mass. Ever. My mother didn't say much about God or religion, but the one clear message I got as a child was that the Catholic church was the "one true church where God was", but that it was also "wrong about a lot".

In retrospect, it's quite clear that those two things can't simultaneously be true, but what did I know? I grew up thinking I was Catholic because I'd been baptized Catholic and my mother said we were Catholic, and since attending mass wasn't one of the menu items I chose, I was in no danger of having my misinformation challenged.

It wasn't just mass that I eschewed. Confession wasn't for me, either--and when the time came I had no qualms about marrying a divorced man with a non-denominational minister presiding.

Eventually, the truth intruded in a number of ways, from different directions and through different people--I think it's usually that way. But I remember quite clearly the moment when I realized that I couldn't pick and choose, and what a shock that revelation came as.

I was sitting in a restaurant with a group of friends from work--one of those look-alike chains with a bar in the center--and someone commented on the fact that my ears weren't pierced. I said, "If God wanted me to have holes in my ears, I'd have been born with them."

And one of my co-workers--a seriously Christian man for whom I had tremendous respect--said sarcastically, "I didn't know you were such a woman of faith."

Now, I'd meant what I said in the sense that I'd always thought it was wrong to mutilate the bodies we were given, no matter how slightly, for decorative purposes. But in fact I hadn't given much direct thought to God in that analysis. It was more or less a way of saying, "If I'd been meant to have holes in my ears..." Still, his words rankled, and I said, "In some ways I am."

He responded instantly, "The ones that suit you?"

I was angry, but I only said, "No, the ones that make sense to me."

The subject changed, the night went on...but a couple of hours later when I was alone in my car, it suddenly hit me: it's the same thing.

It was almost as if I'd heard the words spoken aloud--not in any supernatural sense, but simply because the phrase occurred to me just that way, not as a nebulous idea taking shape or something slowly beginning to dawn, but precisely in those words. "It's the same thing."

Frankly, I wasn't all that happy about this discovery. I'd always depended entirely on my reason, and suddenly I was faced with the possibility--the strong likelihood--that there were things that didn't make sense to me and were nonetheless true. And, of course, that's true. God knows things we can't ever hope to understand, and recognizing that when I disagreed with God it meant I had it wrong was a big step. But I made another discovery as well. A lot of those things that hadn't made sense to me were really things that I'd never examined very closely. Once I took the time to understand the church teaching and the scriptural basis, more often than not it turned out to make a whole lot of sense--sense I'd never have seen when I was starting from a different mindset.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church - You Should Check it Out!

2007-08-03T18:42:00.000-07:00

Once a friend told me that if I had a "YaYa Sister" name (whatever that is), it would be "Sister who always states the obvious". I'm about to do it again.

If you're Catholic, you really should consider reading the Catechism.

If you're not Catholic, and you think there are a lot of teachings of the Catholic church that you take issue with, you should consider reading the Catechism.

We have such a great blessing, as Catholics, in that every single one of the essential core teachings of our faith has been laid out for us in one place. We can get misinformation about church teachings from our friends, from catechists, even from priests--but we can't get misinformation about church teachings from the Catechism.

It seems that every week I hear Catholics, or people who were raised Catholic and have since left the church, voice objections to church teachings that...well...don't exist.

This post was prompted by the last of several allusions to the way that the church teaches people to live in constant fear of hell because "you can't be sure". I'm not sure whether this is a misunderstanding of the warning against the sin of presumption or a misunderstanding of the statement that we can't be sure another person is in heaven or hell because we never truly know the state of another's soul or the extent of God's mercy, but I do know this--the Catechism of the Catholic Church does not say "it's a crapshoot whether you get to heaven or not...just live in fear."

I've also heard objections to the "church teaching" that no one but Catholics can go to heaven, and even (I swear) to the "church teaching" that you go to hell if you leave your Christmas tree up after January 12.

And all of this, of course, without even touching on the outrageous misunderstandings of the church's teachings on human sexuality.

It's all right there. Just read it. The Vatican has the entire Catechism available online at http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM, but I'd recommend buying the book--it's over 800 pages long, and it's easy to lose context when jumping to a paragraph online. You can search the online copy, but I'd recommend reading it straight through. That context thing again. And, of course, there might be some surprises--it's not so good when we're surprised to learn things about the faith we profess to follow, but it's better than not learning them.

If Only We Knew What God Wanted...

2007-07-21T21:08:00.000-07:00

A character in one of Walker Percy's novels says something to the effect that if God told her to do nothing for the rest of her life but stand on a streetcorner and greet people, she'd do it and be the happiest person on earth. I don't know which novel it was in; to be honest, I didn't read it. I read the quote I just paraphrased in The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, and it stuck fast in my brain.

It stuck, initially, because it rang so true. Because that kind of clarity did, in fact, seem like the most desirable thing in the world, and it seemed a shame that God didn't just hand out slips with our missions on them or check in every once in a while to give us a review and create some action steps with us.

It stuck, later, because I realized that the truth it revealed wasn't about our desires but about our blindness--quite possibly willful blindness. It's an easy thing to say, and it feels true, that we want to know exactly what God expects of us and then we'll get right on it. The thing is, God DID tell us exactly what he wanted us to do, and we haven't exactly set straight to work.

We're all looking, it seems, for some big dramatic answer. We want God to come down and tell us that he wants us to go and work with orphans in the Congo or save the whales or raise money for the homeless. We want him to tell us whether we should be getting married, what kind of job we should be accepting...but that's OUR thinking. That's not really about wanting to know what God wants so much as it is about wanting God to have opinions about the things that are important to US.

When you really stop and think about it, there's no mystery.

If the question "What does God want me to do?" requires a grand answer, an answer that spans all areas of your life and years or more, then it's pretty nebulous. But if the question really is, "What does God want me to do?" the answers are very clear. Jesus walked around and talked about them for three years. God passed them down through Moses.

I think there is a kind of perception that those answers are too general, too vague somehow. They're not personalized, and that means that we don't necessarily hear them as answers to "What does God want ME to do?"

But in nearly every moment, in nearly every situation, in nearly every small choice, the answer is clear.

We say, we want to believe, that if we knew what God wanted us to do, we'd do it immediately and joyfully.

So let me ask you a few questions:

Does God want you to be loving and forgiving to everyone you encounter, regardless of how they treat you?
Does God want you to tell the truth?
Does God want you to keep your word?
Does God want you to pray?
Does God want you to go to mass and receive him in the eucharist?

The list could go on and on, but I think the point is clear. In any given moment, if instead of asking God for a life plan, we ask only about the next step--and I don't mean a move across the country or a new job or a marriage proposal--the answer is almost always clear. Those questions generally aren't the sweeping ones that WE want answers to, but they're the ones God thought important enough to spell out clearly for us.

Day to day life is absolutely filled with clarity when you start to think smaller.

Does God want me to get up and go to mass?
Does God want me to buy a new game system with this money or give it to someone truly in need?
Does God want me to quickly grab the last cupcake, or give it to my sister?
Does God want me to stop off for coffee and a doughnut even though I'm running a little late, or get to work on time?
Does God want me to own up to my mistake and try to fix it, or to try to cover it up?
Does God want me to turn around and tell this cashier that she gave me back too much change?

Of course, that's not exactly the kind of clarity we want. It's not the kind of clarity we want because it doesn't answer our "big questions", and it's not the kind of clarity we want because the answers aren't quite what we had in mind. Somehow, an instruction from God to sell all our possessions and go work in a convent in a remote South American village is a kind of clarity we can live with, because even though it involves sacrifice it's so clearly IMPORTANT. This little stuff doesn't really clear anything up--there's just another question in the next moment, and then another one the moment after that. But that's okay. Life is made up of those one-after-another moments, and those little right decisions, those small moments of conscious clarity, add up to a lot.

They add up to changes in us that we might not even see occurring--making the next right decision and then the next and then the next turns us into people with different standards and greater self-awareness. They make us more receptive to God's whispers, so that maybe those big answers will start to come into focus. But even if they don't, it will be okay in the end. Because the most important thing that string of next right decisions adds up to is a lifetime of right decisions. And we already know that's exactly what God wants us to do.

Communion as....Communion

2007-07-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been in a crisis, or witness to a crisis, and watched a community physically pull together? It happened on September 11, of course, and during Hurricane Katrina. It happens in more isolated disasters, like when Baby Jessica fell down the well nearly two decades ago and when miners are trapped underground and critical minutes are ticking by. There’s a sensation, then, of people stepping into a unit somehow. As each one steps forward to do his part, or to offer support, or simply quietly sheds a tear in solidarity and concern, it seems that the mass of separate people somehow become one.

Unfortunately, the sensation, the perception, never seems to last long. Our petty disputes and distances resurface nearly as soon as the crisis has passed. The separation isn’t nearly so visible as the coming together was, but it is just as complete and decisive, and at some point we look up and find ourselves strangers again, despite whatever it was that we experienced together. But in the moment there is an almost tangible melding that must be something like a pale version of the communion of saints, of the unity we’ll all one day share and so, it seems, should aspire to even now.

I must admit that this concept is a bit uncomfortable for me. Although I often hear priests say and I read from the most credible of fathers of the church and saints that the greatest human desires are for unity, to be loved, not to be alone, I am not especially in touch with those desires. If in fact they are written on every human heart, they are buried quite deep within mine. I seek to write, to think, to contemplate, to analyze so instinctively that often human interaction strikes me as a somewhat unnatural interruption of that process.

Yet there are moments in which I can see that my usual perception is off, that there is something bigger and deeper, something that I perhaps set myself apart from even as I—because I—seek to understand it and give it words.

In the unlikely event that someone might have been sizing me up for marriage, I disqualified myself at mass this Sunday—at least, if that person has read Patricia Wrona’s excellent book The Exclamation: The Wise Choice of a Spouse for Catholic Marriage. You see, one of the things Wrona tells us to be on the lookout for is those supposedly devout Catholics who are looking around at other people and such during mass instead of engaging fully. I think she raises a valid point. But this Sunday I happened to be at the very front of the communion line, and that meant that I’d returned to my place while the vast majority of my neighbors were still waiting in line.

Usually I keep my head bowed during that time, absorbed in prayer, but this time I decided to watch people receive the Eucharist. It was a conscious decision, not only to watch them but to watch them in a particular way, to absorb the significance of the moment when they stepped forward in the same way we absorb the significance of the person stepping forward to offer a helping hand or a word of comfort or a handful of change in a crisis. After all, what do we ever do in life that is more significant than receiving Christ in the Eucharist? What do we ever do that should so unite us?

And so I looked at each person as he stepped forward as if he were stepping forward to support a victim, as if he were volunteering for a rescue mission that was dear to my heart, as if he were reaching to life a corner of something heavy that we all carried together. Maybe something like a cross.

And I found that those people looked different. They were beautiful, all of them, in their different ways. Their hearts were visible, or many of them were. But I knew that in reality, the difference was not in the people around me; it was in my eyes.

Accidental Christianity

2007-07-12T06:26:00.000-07:00

Ray Bradbury was an atheist. E.M. Forster railed against Christianity. Why, then, are the universal truth conveyed in some of these men's greatest works so reminiscent of those illustrated by Christian writers, and even set forth in non-fiction by the fathers of the Church, the saints, and even the Bible itself?

There are those, of course, who will argue that this very fact proves that these values and principles come from somewhere other than God, are somehow ingrained in man despite culture and religion. There are those who will suggest that Christianity merely codified those same virtues that are common to men everywhere.

Yet when Forster's anti-heroine is redeemed in death, because she has at last embraced her humanity and man's relationship to man, does she not fulfill the commandment of Christ that we love one another as ourselves, and see the whole world transformed in that moment? The machine may have been intended to represent religion, yet the very falseness of the religion it represents lies in its violation of the core teachings of Christianity and in the distancing of human beings from one another.

And when Bradbury's fireman discovers the necessity of silence, sees how the constant noise and activity has kept him (and all the world) from the truth, does he not make the same discovery that has touched the hearts and changed the lives of generations of monks and contemplative nuns?

The list could go on, of these great voices in literature, men whose insights into humanity and human relationships and, above all, the harms we do to ourselves in the name of progress--men who professed no belief but preached the accidental gospel with their warnings. The list could go on, and there must be a reason, a foundatino, for this crucial point of intersection between what should be--what profess to be--entirely conflicting belief systems. And many would argue that the common ground is found outside of religion, outside of sect, outside of specific teachings, in some fundamental aspect of humanity.

I would agree.

Christ told us these teachings, these commandments, would be written on our hearts, and so they seem to be. Written so clearly and so deep that even those who do not recognize them are moved by them, that even those who do not see their source are inspired by them. Fear, culture, education, negative experience, the influence of an early teacher or family member--any of these things (and many others) can drive a man to "believe" or "not believe" in Christianity. And yet, it seems that those who look inside, who listen to the silence and attempt to draw meaning out of it and convey that meaning to us--those like Forster and Bradbury--find the truth within themselves even when they cannot see clearly from whence it comes.

Shouldn't the Fear of Hell be Kind of Superfluous?

2007-07-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

This evening as I was walking from my office in downtown Chicago to the train station, I heard a man shouting on the streetcorner. I heard only a snatch of what he was shouting as I passed:

"...you are headed straight to hell! You cannot be a homosexual and go to heaven! You cannot be a dyke and go to heaven!"

It reminded me of a blog post I read just yesterday, wherein the author suggested that we needed to get the threat of hell back in the foreground of our speech and consciousness. And that reminded me of a conversation I'd had with a non-Catholic friend, who had suggested that we Catholics used hellfire and eternal damnation to terrorize our children.

The truth is, I don't think much about hell. It isn't because I don't believe in hell, or because I think God didn't really mean it when He told us what He expected of us. It's because the whole issue of hell is so very, very secondary.

It's kind of like this: Every day, I don't steal stuff. All manner of bad things could happen--even in the earthly context--if I stole stuff...but those consequences never enter my mind. I have other, bigger reasons for not stealing stuff (it's wrong; it damages trust; it hurts others; it sets a bad example). Those issues are determinative for me. Any one of them is enough to make it immediately self-evident that stealing is not the way to go. So is it important that I have a solid understanding of the punishment for stealing fixed firmly in my mind? I think not; it's just not going to affect my mental state. Are some people deterred from stealing by the possibility of jail time? I expect that they are, just like some people are deterred from cheating on their spouses by fear of getting caught and embroiled in a messy and expensive divorce. But that seems to me a weak and inferior reason when compared with loyalty and fidelity to one's spouse and one's promises.

Christ told us that the greatest commandment was to love God with all our hearts, minds and souls. Isn't that love reason enough to do his bidding? If we change our behaviors to please and accommodate our friends and family on earth, don't we owe and aren't we naturally inclined to give at least that same consideration to God? And isn't it a much greater gift that is given freely out of love than grudgingly out of fear of punishment?

I don't mean to suggest that hell isn't a real danger, but rather that it should in some sense be the least of our worries. I simply cannot see a true Christian saying, "Oh, well, I WAS going to blatantly violate God's commandments and offend God and separate myself from him and reject the gifts of Jesus and tear the body of Christ...but if I'm risking HELL, that's a whole different story--I'd better get my act together!"

The Vatican's Rules of the Road

2007-06-30T14:12:00.000-07:00

I saw a lot of tongue-in-cheek reporting last week about the Vatican's "Ten Commandments for Drivers", and it is a little amusing at first glance that the Vatican has decided to give us driving lessons. At least, until we stop and think for a moment about why--both why the Pontifical Counsel for the Care of Migrants and Itinerant People felt the need to tell us how to drive, and why we found it amusing.

The problem, of course, is that we don't know how to act on the road. Virtually every one of us, every day, cuts some corner. Drives a little too fast, cuts someone off in traffic, runs through a light that's changing from yellow to red because we don't have the patience to sit still for 90 seconds and wait for our next opportunity, and react in anger when other drivers do the same. Sometimes uncontrolled anger. We treat each other discourteously, make each other late, press each other to go faster, insult each other (out loud or internally), and once in a while we pull over alongside the road and shoot each other. Probably it's high time someone reminded us that those "obstacles" in the other cars around us are actually other human beings, who are just as worthy of being treated with kindness and respect in their cars as they are on the sidewalk--even if they're bad drivers.

And if that's not enough to give us pause, why does it amuse us so that that admonishment comes from the Vatican? I can't speak for everyone, but it seems to me that it's because we have a sense that driving doesn't really have anything to do with the church. I think that sense is the reason for all of the bad behavior described above, and I think it's also indicative of a much more widespread problem.

Are there parts of our lives that have nothing to do with God? Are there places in the world (our cars, for instance) where God's laws don't apply and we're not the same people with the same purpose?

Consciously, I think most of us would say no, but unconsciously, how many of us forget God in the details--maybe so much so that when we hear that the Vatican has something to say about the way we act in traffic, it seems as entertaining (and even outrageous) as our hairdressers issuing a declaration on proper car maintenance or a cooking school putting out the authoritative guide to drywalling. Driving, somehow, falls into a separate compartment.

But, of course, when we stop and think about it, we know that God's laws apply everywhere, that there aren't virtue-free zones in our cars or anywhere else on earth, and that the way we treat our fellow human beings is something that God and his son care quite a bit about, whether we happen to be on foot, on a train, on a plane, swimming in the ocean, or driving.

Every moment in life is a choice. C.S. Lewis said that every person we encounter will one day be either glorious or hideous, and that every interaction we have with another human being helps him to move closer to becoming one or the other. How many of us drive in a way that's more likely to move our fellow motorists toward glory? How many of us are even thinking, as we're stuck in traffic or standing in a long line or annoyed by the mix-up in our utility bills and the long hold time, that there's a human being on the other end of every one of those situations who has his or her own concerns and frustrations and triggers and strengths and weaknesses? Every moment, every interaction, impacts the person we're interacting with. But it impacts us as well. It seems unlikely, for instance, that the person unable to sit through a 90 second red light is going to go home and have infinite patience while his child takes four minutes to tie one shoe. It seems unlikely that the woman who screams at the person who inadvertantly cuts her off in traffic will go into the office and respond with patience and useful instruction to the subordinate who's mucked up half a day's work.

Like anything else in life, driving is practice. If we practice virtues--patience and charity--we build those muscles for another, greater battle. And if we practice instead selfishness, irritability, impatience, we'll hone those as well. And if we think, sitting in traffic, that "this part of our life" has nothing to do with God, then we've missed the point entirely.

Radio Silence

2007-06-24T18:55:00.001-07:00

If anyone is still reading, it probably hasn't escaped your attention that I haven't posted in about a week, and that gaps were appearing during the previous week. Here's what happened:

A little over a month ago, I installed a stat counter on this blog. About the same time, I received a free "sponsored listing" on a great blog directory, and listed this blog in a couple of Catholic directories.

Much to my surprise, my stat counter told me that I had readers from several different countries. Some of those countries were places in which Catholicism is frowned upon, and it was a bit overwhelming to me that people who weren't free to practice their faith as they wished might be reading my blog as a little slice of Catholic life.

At the same time, I started to get some email feedback on the blog. It was so lovely and encouraging that, frankly, it scared me to death. A handful of wonderful people called me things like "insightful" and "blessed with a gift", and...well...I pretty much stopped posting. Because, you see, I'm just a single mother in Chicago struggling to support my kid and raise her honestly and get as close to God's plan as I can with all the missteps I've already made. I don't know anything you don't.

I am a writer by natural persuasion and by profession, and I can't think of a more valuable place to use that gift than in talking about God's love and his gifts and how we can live those things more completely on earth, but I'm no authority in my own right and I wouldn't dare to presume that God speaks through me. I offer him my transcription services and the talents he gave me if He chooses to use them, but that's a big "if".

So I'm going back to writing, but with a sort of disclaimer: I only hope that my thoughts and insights and revelations might sometimes inspire others in their own insights and prayers, might appears in the right place at the right time to remind someone of what he already knew or encourage someone to dig a little deeper. The only absolute truth I have is what comes from the Bible and the Catechism--my own wisdom is newborn and frail.

Assumptions are the Opposite of Love

2007-06-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

At mass this morning, I watched a woman pull a bottle of hand sanitizer out of her purse and immediately begin scrubbing after the sign of peace. I was stunned. So stunned that I pointed her out to my daughter (way to set an example, mom: engage in detraction right in the middle of mass and invite your child to participate!)

Of course, I recognized immediately that my reaction was at least as inappropriate as her action and started feeding myself excuses for her. It might have been better simply to accept that it wasn't really my place to make judgments about her hand-washing habits anyway, but instead I started thinking up good reasons she might have: maybe she had some kind of medical condition that made germs especially dangerous for her; maybe she had obsessive compulsive disorder or some kind of anxiety problem. If something like were the case, then she'd deserve compassion, not judgment, right? (Did I forget, just for a minute, that EVERYONE deserves compassion and not judgment? Maybe I did. Just for a minute.)

God has a lovely way of setting us straight when we're feeling self-righteous, though. "Coincidentally", this morning's gospel was about the woman who washed Christ's feet with her tears and how Jesus used the moment to teach a lesson to the Pharisee who thought she was unworthy. And then, the lady with the hand sanitizer got up and went to serve.

So while I was judging her hand-washing as some kind of anti-body-of-Christ gesture and then trying to excuse her by imagining that maybe she had some kind of physical or mental illness that explained her bad behavior, she was being considerate of all the people to whom she was about to dispense communion.

It was an excellent moment of revelation, because it reached far beyond that one woman in that one circumstance. How often do we witness a moment of an interaction, or one action by another person on the street or on a bus (or at mass) and think that it tells us something important about them? Certainly love requires us to turn those negative reactions into something positive and compassionate--for instance, whenever I am in a store or some other place and see a woman overreacting to small infractions by her young children, yanking them and shouting at them, I pray for peace for her and that she'll be able to find joy in her children. But doesn't love also require that we see people as they are, or at least try? That we react to their authentic selves?

Of course, that's not always possible in a fleeting contact; we don't often get to know the person who happens to be standing in front of us in line at the grocery store. But maybe it's a start simply to remind ourselves that she's a whole person and we don't know her. None of us would want to be judged by one of our momentary lapses--and we all have them. Even less would we want to be judged harshly because someone misunderstood the intent of a kind gesture, like washing our hands before we served communion.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

2007-06-14T21:46:00.000-07:00

This isn't the kind of thing I usually post here, but a question on a discussion forum this evening asked about "must read" books, and in responding to that question I realized that I would be remiss if I didn't mention Paul Elie's incredible book in this space. The book is three years old, and it may well be that most Catholics with an interest in literature and/or biography have already read it, but news of it didn't reach me when it was published.

I found a hardcover copy of the book on a used book shelf in the back of a small town video store about two years ago, and I'd never heard of it. In fact, I'd never read any of the writings of Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, or Thomas Merton--something I was inspired to remedy immediately upon completing Elie's unique, interwoven biography of the four noted Catholic writers.

I supposed that someone with Catholic literary tastes had recently passed on, or had made a mass donation, because I found Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy (another marvelous find)in the same store at the same time.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage was a long book, large and heavy, but I nonetheless carried it back and forth to work with me so that I could read it on the train (and sometimes at lunch), read it in the bathtub, and even balanced it on the edge of the sink so that I could keep reading while I brushed my teeth. I stayed up too late reading...every night.

Even so, it took me weeks to read. I read and read like crazy and the number of pages remaining didn't seem to diminish at all. That was fine with me. I got a little nervous as I neared the end, uncertain what I'd do when it was over. I loaned it to a friend, and his experience was the opposite. He simply set everything else aside and read it cover to cover in a matter of days.

For anyone interested in the way committed Catholics with real-life problems live their faith in the modern world, this book is a must-read. For anyone who (like me) has barely scratched the surface of American Catholic literature, this book will have you snatching a few minutes away from reading to search out the works of the authors it chronicles.

The Stations of the Cross - Jesus Meets the Women (# 8)

2007-06-12T08:28:00.000-07:00

Jesus tells the weeping women to cry for themselves and their children, not for him, and often we hear comment on the depths of his compassion, that even in such suffering and so near to death, he turned his concerns to them.

I think, though, that there is another message in Christ's words to the women, and one we cannot afford to overlook: whatever harm we do to the interests of God and his son, we harm ourselves far more. Our sins may anger God, may sadden Christ, but they do not diminish the Holy Trinity or its members.

Humanity has committed every imaginable sin against God, including attempting to kill him, killing his earthly incarnation, and still he remains perfect. But those who commit the sins, those who stand by in silence as others commit them, are badly damaged.

It is important to remember that our own sins harm others and harm the body of Christ, but harm us most of all, because they transform us--little by little or in one dramatic moment--from the people we were intended to be.

It is perhaps equally important to remember this when others sin against us. Whatever harm others do to us intentionally, the harm to them is much greater. We may be wounded emotionally, physically or financially, but whether our souls are wounded depends upon our reactions, not the actions of others. The man who deals us a painful blos may well be dealing himself a mortal one and so, like Christ, we do well to turn our attention away from our own victimization and toward the much more serious threat to the victimizer, who can only wound our bodies but threatens his own soul.

Toxic Soil Bears Bad Fruit, However Sweet it Might Look

2007-06-10T22:52:00.000-07:00

When I was a teenager, the general public was just discovering that unseen toxins in the soil could poison our food. Love Canal came as a shock to most of us, and television specials and newspapers across the country dug into the fact that toxic leakage—or intentional pollution—trickled underneath innocent looking gardens and created poison fruits and vegetables.

A quarter of a century later, that’s no longer news to us, and yet it seems that most of us haven’t quite caught on to the spiritual equivalent. Nearly every day I hear someone who honestly strives to be a good person justifying some evil by the good that will theoretically come out of it. Sometimes it’s something as simple as a lie intended to protect another person, sometimes it’s much bigger: an adulterous relationship that “is so spiritual” or something we can’t quite bring ourselves to call theft from a corporation that “will hardly miss it” to benefit someone more in need.

Maybe these are rationalizations and maybe they’re honest beliefs; I suspect that there is a little of both. But regardless, they’re wrong, for the same reason that we couldn’t eat the fruit that grew at Love Canal, no matter how bright and juicy it looked: you can’t grow good fruit in poisoned soil. The issue of whether the “end justifies the means” is one that’s much debated, but it’s a moot point, really, because good ends don’t come from poisoned beginnings, no matter how we might expect things to work out.

Flushing the toxins out of the soil and creating clean earth in which to grow good fruit can be a painful process, and sometimes it seems like there isn’t much left when the poison has been flushed away. It’s easy to imagine that the ground is going to be barren when it’s cleansed, that we aren’t going to bear any fruit at all when we’ve cut off passions and relationships and even habits that seem so vital. But God surprises us. Taking that leap of faith to say, “I know you know better than I, so I’m going to surrender to your will even though it seems like there’s nothing on the other side” isn’t easy, but the truth is that there always is something on the other side, usually something that we couldn’t have imagined.

A lot of Christians say they have faith in God, but seem to mean something that isn’t quite what faith in God seems to me to imply. It seems, rather, that many people have been misled into having faith that God is going to give them what they want, when true faith would have them believing that whatever God wanted was better than anything they could have thought to desire on their own.

It’s not easy to have that faith, when our own desires and experiences and attachments can be so very overpowering, can seem so fundamental to our lives and goals that we can’t imagine happiness without them. But we don’t have to imagine it. We only have to believe that God knows what he’s doing, and that our inability to imagine something in no way means that it doesn’t exist. Then, we can begin to clear the ground for fruit that looks and tastes as sweet, but doesn’t poison us.

The Stations of the Cross – Jesus is Condemned to Die

2007-06-09T12:46:00.000-07:00

Pontius Pilate has in some vague way gone down in history as a force of evil. The truth, I think, is much more sinister, much more dangerous, and a much more serious warning for all of us. I believe it was Edmund Burke who said, “All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.” Was Pontius Pilate a bad guy who wanted to kill Christ? According to all four of the gospels, he was not. He was simply a man unwilling to take responsibility.

It’s easy, two thousand years later, to look at the black and white outcome and revile the man who sentenced Christ to death…easy not only because his action was so egregious, but because we can say in good faith, “I would NEVER do a thing like that!” It’s a little more uncomfortable to examine what Pilate actually did, and to ask ourselves not only whether we COULD do a thing like that, but whether or not we have done such things, even do them in small ways every day without allowing ourselves to recognize them.

Matthew and Mark both relate that Pilate asked the crowds, “What crime has he committed?” It would seem that he sought to discourage their call for Christ’s crucifixion, but without confrontation. Luke and John go further, telling us that Pilate stated directly that he’d found Jesus guilty of no capital crime.

He found him guilty of no capital crime, and then he handed him over for crucifixion. Yes, our moral outrage is easy to find and well-founded. But why did he do it? Every account seems to indicate that he merely conceded. Whether it was to appease the crowds or to avoid displeasing Caesar, Pilate did what he knew was wrong—what he’d publicly stated was wrong—to avoid crossing someone else.

In Pilate’s case, he acted. In Pilate’s case, the outcome was so dramatic that it couldn’t be ignored. But what a very fine line it is between that dramatic action and our own smaller actions, even our simple failures to act.

How many times in everyday life do we “go along” because we’re too self-conscious to speak up, or too concerned about the consequences to ourselves if we do the right thing? How often do we tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter, that the small lie we go along with isn’t really hurting anyone, that the hurtful comment we don’t object to has already been made and there’s no benefit in drawing ire to ourselves? Worse, how often do those small evils pass us by without notice, without even a twinge that says, “I shouldn’t have been a part of that”?

Just like Pontius Pilate, we all make conscious choices, and we make them a hundred or a thousand times a day. Our choices, just like Pontius Pilate’s, impact the people around us, often in unforeseen ways. And just like Pontius Pilate, we cannot evade responsibility; even those choices designed to relieve us of responsibility bear fruit—for good or evil—that remains in our gardens. Washing our hands after failing to do good doesn’t change that reality.

Sometimes the Sign of Peace is all a Person Needs

2007-06-01T07:07:00.000-07:00

At mass this morning I encountered a young man I'd never met before. It happened, I think, because I arrived a little late and sat in the far back of the church. At early morning weekday masses, the sign of peace is always a little sparse--there usually aren't more than one or two people in each pew, and it's mostly smiling and nodding since no one can actually reach each other. That's always been fine with me. That part of mass always made me a little uncomfortable because it seems so contrived. At one of the churches I attend regularly, they often begin mass by saying, "There are no strangers in Christ--please stand and greet your neighbors." I always think that it's a nice sentiment, but that in fact there are strangers seated all around me...and it's clear from the formality of the execution that many others feel the same way. Like so many other things in our world, it's a great idea that falls short in practice.

This morning was no different at first, but a couple of minutes into the exchange of the sign of peace, a young man approached the woman in front of me. From the way that he walked and talked, I suspect that he had a mild mental impairment. I watched as he offered the sign of peace to the woman in front of me with an earnest smile, and then headed my way. I could feel myself smiling broadly and spontaneously as I took his hand, and then he moved on down the row...and then to the next row. He didn't stop until the Priest started to speak again, and then he hurried back to his seat, having shared the sign of peace with everyone in the last three or four rows of the church (which is four sections wide).

Frankly, despite all of my reservations about the sign of peace and the idea that we can make strangers neighbors simply by shaking their hands and all of that, he purely delighted me with his sincerity and openness.

I'm a task-oriented person, and so I immediately began, unconsciously, to think about whether I might be able to do something for him. He appeared to be alone--did he need a ride? Maybe...

Well, the fact was, he was doing just fine. In fact, he was a step ahead of the rest of us, since he was the only one who had taken the initiative to reach out sincerely to everyone he could physically get to in the time allotted. But that's the way I operate: set goals, check things off the list. The Bible itself says that it's no good to tell a man to eat well and stay warm if we aren't going to offer him a coat and a good meal.

And yet...

Doesn't it also tell us that charitable acts without love are meaningless?

I quickly realized there wasn't a thing in the world I could do to brighten the day of that young man in the church. He was sitting in church with an open heart, connecting in love with everyone around him. He didn't need anything from me. Nothing, that is, except a sincere, open smile as I took his hand.

The Truth about Catholic Marriage

2007-05-28T22:56:00.001-07:00

Lest allegations of hypocrisy distract from the point here, let me say right up front that I didn’t have a Catholic marriage. Like so many “modern” Catholics, I thought I knew better and married outside the Church. Ultimately, my marriage failed for all the reasons any Priest (or good Catholic in general) could have told me that it would had I been willing to listen. I do not, therefore, speak from experience.

Nonetheless, I know the tenets of the Catholic faith and I know many good Catholic couples, and I know the foundations of Christianity as a whole, and so it troubles me deeply when (as this evening) I run across in a work of fiction or film this stereotypical picture of the miserable Catholic couple who hate each other’s guts but are “too Catholic” to get divorced.

See, that sentence is whatever the sentence-long version of an oxymoron is. You can’t be “too Catholic to get divorced even though you hate your spouse” because if you’re all that Catholic, you don’t hate your spouse. If both partners—as usually seems to be the case in these fictional representations—are devout Catholics, then they know that their faith requires them to do a lot more than stay married. It requires them to pray for each other and together, to put one another’s good ahead of their own even when they’re not feeling “in love” and that doesn’t come naturally anymore. Of course, people are human. They lapse. They fail. They throw the rules out the window. But the view from outside the Church seems to be that the Catholic church requires people to stay together even if they’re miserable, and the truth is something much more and less burdensome: the Church requires married couples to endeavor not to BE miserable, to extend love to one another whether or not it comes naturally, whether or not it seems to be warranted, and to keep themselves open to the grace that will allow them to do so.

Even in secular circles there is often a debate about whether children are better off coming from a “broken home” or having parents who “stay together and are fighting all the time”. Even during those days when I thought I knew better than the Church, it seemed to me that was a disingenuous choice. Adults, after all, could simply opt NOT to be “fighting all the time”. If both people truly had the best interests of the children at heart, they could just act like adults, put the children’s needs first, and refrain from screaming at each other, slamming doors, and petty refusal to speak to one another at the dinner table.

Is it always going to be easy? No. Is there a “breaking point”? Perhaps. That’s another discussion for another day. But those couples (real or fictional) who are “too Catholic” to get divorced but live in a state of constant hostility, putting walls up against one another and tearing one another down, have missed the point—and paint a misleading picture for the rest of the world. They’ve condemned themselves to the worst of both worlds, focusing on the “letter of the law” and ignoring the spirit. They live unhappily in order to appease the Church and God, but live in a way that defies what Christ himself called the second greatest commandment: love one another.

Sadly, many outside the Church (who have no reason to know better) have seen these misguided souls suffering and latched on to an image of Catholics as doomed by the Church to chafe against the bonds of bad marriages. The simple truth is that if both partners were truly living as good Catholics, the marriage wouldn’t be painful. It might not be the passionate love of youth, and it might be sprinkled with hardships, but two good people living together with a shared devotion to God, to their children, and to one another’s good will not make one another miserable—and anyone who is “too Catholic” to get divorced should be all of those things.

The Essentials of Everyday Christian Life

2007-05-26T08:42:00.000-07:00

It’s all too easy to get caught up in the busy-ness of everyday life and forget the true essentials, or let them get pushed into “their place”, forgetting that their place is at the foundation of our lives. But if we build our lives around our jobs and our social interactions and the details like laundry and shopping and fit our souls in where we can find room for them, we truly are building houses on sand…and pretty close to the water’s edge, as well. I’m as guilty of that as anyone (perhaps more), so this morning I decided to make a list of the true essentials, the things I believe absolutely must be a part of every single day if we’re to live healthy, fulfilling lives:

PRAYER: If we believe that our relationships with God are the most important thing in life, the foundation of what we were created for, then it seems self-evident that talking to him should be a priority. And yet, how often do prayers slip through the cracks or rush through “saying the words” without really engaging? At my best, I spent an hour every morning in receptive prayer, prayed the Divine Mercy Chaplet in the afternoon, and prayed a 20-decade rosary every night. It took about two and a half hours all together, which a lot of people—even good Christian people—have told me is “just too much”. But it kept the focus in the right place.

SERVICE AND CHARITY: We tend, I think, to think of service and charity in terms of the bigger things, the planned things: running a youth group, volunteering at the food pantry, becoming catechists. And all of those things are important acts of service, but they’re not the only ones. Every day is full of opportunities for service—things as small as waiting and holding the elevator for a stranger who is walking in the door, offering to go and pick up lunch for a colleague on a deadline who can’t get away from her desk, making what your son wants for dinner even though it isn’t what you want at all. It is, I think, those acts of service that determine who we are, that make us into people who automatically respond to the needs of others (large and small) and make the larger and more time-consuming acts of charity a natural next step.

ATTENTION TO DUTY: Duty is an unpopular word in today’s society—it tends to bring to mind a tight-lipped older woman who looks disapprovingly at her “neighbors” but helps them anyway because she “knows her duty”. We all know she’s missing the point, since her first duty in that context is to LOVE her neighbors. But duty is a fact of life. We all have obligations. If we have children, it’s our duty to feed and nurture and instruct them, to keep a roof over their heads and maintain an environment in which they can grow and learn. If we have jobs, it’s our duty to do the work we’re paid for, do it well, and do it on time. If we’re members of groups or organizations or simply communities, we have a duty to do our share to keep things running smoothly, and we create duty when we make a commitment.

EXAMINATION OF CONSCIENCE: Sin is a slippery slope. Whether they’re sins of commission or sins of omission, it’s easy to get used to them and to stop perceiving them as sins. We all have blind spots, things we do on a regular basis that we don’t even realize are wrong unless we’re fortunate enough to have a friend true enough to point them out to us. That’s why it’s important to be explicit, to do it on a very regular basis, and to use someone else’s list. There are a lot of good examination of conscience guides out there, and it’s absolutely critical to get one of them and use it. Why? Because the sins that are the most deeply embedded in us, the ones we’re the least likely to root out, are the ones we can’t, or don’t, or won’t recognize as sins. Our subjective examination of conscience is based on our standards, or at least on our own perceptions of God’s standards. To make a true and ruthless examination, we need an objective measure.

CONTRITION: Making an examination of conscience is an important start, but it seems that a lot of people stop there, and that’s not enough. It’s easy to say in a vague sense, “Yeah, I probably didn’t do as well as I could have today,” and it’s good to acknowledge that, but it’s of no use in doing better tomorrow. If, on the other hand, you say, “I wasn’t very kind to that co-worker I don’t like today, and I’m sorry. Give me the grace to be more patient and loving toward her tomorrow,” two very beneficial things happen. One is that you get grace to help you be more patient and loving tomorrow. But on a practical level, you also get a clarity that doesn’t let you off the hook. It’s much harder to go in to work the next day and be automatically snappish with your co-worker—as soon as you hear your own tone of voice, you’re likely to be reminded that you made a commitment to try harder. Sometimes consciousness is all it takes, but even for those sins that are harder to root out, making a frank examination of where you fell short every day makes it much more difficult to slide unwittingly into those actions.

PENANCE: Penance is an integral part of contrition. In our everyday relationships with people, it’s common—almost automatic—practice to say, “I’ll make it up to you” if we let someone down. Whether we do something extra in service to them, send them a card, go back and correct whatever it was that we left undone, we know instinctively that just saying we’re sorry (even if we mean it) isn’t enough. We have to show that we’re sorry. So why should it be any different when we’ve let down God and the whole body of Christ?

Saints and Sinners...or is it all the same?

2007-05-22T19:34:00.000-07:00

Maybe every Catholic has moments of hovering on the edge of sin. I like to think--or perhaps I fear--that that's not the case. I read the lives of the saints and it seems as if it was very easy for them. That sounds outrageous, perhaps, since they were often tortured and horribly killed, but they seem to have had such clarity, and it wasn't just a mental clarity.

It's easy to know what's right. It's easy to weigh some personal desire against the will of God, against the entire system that God set up for the good of all his people in this life and the next and see that whatever it is that's tempting you loses. Mentally, that's easy to do.

The trouble is, sometimes that doesn't make you want it any less. That's where it seems to me that the saints had it easier, that those who have attained that level of grace today have it easier--because if the stories that have been passed down through these hundreds of years are to be believed, then they didn't care about anything but God's will.

In some sense, we should all be able to say that; in some sense, if we're making a serious effort at being good Catholics, good Christians, then "God's will is all that matters" has to be our bottom line. But what, exactly, does "all that matters" mean? Does it mean, as the saints seemed to convey, that everything else so pales in comparison that you just couldn't care less about it? Or does it mean only that you make the conscious effort to throw everything in the scales, and when you do God always wins?

I don't know the answer. I don't know whether when the saints said that they didn't care about anything but God's will, they truly didn't desire anything else or they were just able to make the decision to set everything else aside. But I begin to suspect--and it's another of those revelations that shouldn't be a revelation, I think--that the latter leads to the former.

There was a moment not long ago when I was standing on one of those fences. It was a Saturday morning, and I was thinking about whether or not I was in a state of grace, whether I should be receiving communion on Sunday, and if not whether I was properly disposed to make a good confession that afternoon. I thought I hadn't chosen my direction yet. I thought I might not be ready to commit to turning away. But the question I asked myself turned out to be in itself an answer I'd never expected.

You see, the question I asked myself was about whether I'd be able to bring myself around in time to make a good confession and receive communion. And as soon as I "heard" myself ask that question, I literally laughed out loud with relief. I'd already decided, and I hadn't even known it! Unconsciously, the question I'd formed had been not "if" but "when". It appeared that the answer had been clear in my heart even while I was still wrestling with it in my head. From there, the path smoothed out instantly before me. After all, if I knew what my ultimate choice would be, if I knew that I was going to choose in favor of God at the end of the road, then why not simply choose now?

C. S. Lewis at Fatima

2007-05-19T09:33:00.000-07:00

March 4, 2006

To my knowledge, C.S. Lewis never visited Fatima, but last week his Mere Christianity had an abrupt collision—in my brain—with the words of Our Lady at Fatima.

After showing the children hell, Mary told them that most people went to hell because of sins of the flesh. In one way, that made sense to me: unlike many of our other sins, sexual sins require a kind of willful disregard, a conscious decision to substitute our will for God’s. Yet, in another way, it was always a sticking point for me: in a world full of murder, physical abuse, satanic worship, con games that rob the elderly of their very means of survival, and cruelties many of us cannot even imagine, most people are in hell because of sins of the flesh?

In the stairwell at work it occurred to me abruptly that “because of” and “for” were not synonymous, that perhaps—although I can’t authoritatively interpret—Our Lady meant something a little more complex than, “Commit sins of the flesh and you’ll be cast into hell.” Maybe she meant that sins of the flesh would lead us to hell.
Whether or not that’s the message that Mary intended to convey at Fatima, there’s an elemental truth to it. Sins of the flesh foster self-indulgence and selfishness—characteristics that lead surely to sins against charity and quite possibly to dishonesty and deception. The more self-indulgent we are, the more other people and their needs appear as obstacles to our own desires rather than opportunities to extend love.

Sins of the flesh also help us along the dangerous road to redefining love. Love, as Jesus and his followers used the word, had nothing to do with heart-racing excitement, nothing to do with sexual attraction, nothing to do even with enjoying another’s company. It’s desiring another’s best good, pure and simple.
Sins of the flesh invite us to desire our own gratification above another’s best good. They invite us to buy into the redefinition of love as something that happens of its own accord and that we recognize by our subjective reactions to another. Worst, they invite us to use this newly defined love as justification for nearly anything. Lying is okay if it helps the object of our love—after all, our intentions are pure when we act out of love, right? Sex outside of marriage is okay if we’re “in love.” Never mind that the Bible says nothing about being “in love,” that “in marriage” is crystal clear throughout. Never mind that “in love” has nothing to do with the love that Jesus and his apostles advocate and God commands. It’s okay if we’re “in love.” And how very convenient that is for us, since we’ve virtually redefined love to mean “overpowering attraction.” We used to worry over gray area, but no more. All sins of the flesh are “okay” if we really want them, because that must mean we’re “in love.”

Unless, of course, they are those sins of the flesh that we commit alone. No worries. Those “aren’t hurting anyone.” That whole fuss about obedience is re-cast: we must obey the important rules, of course, but does God really care so much about sex? The logical answer is yes, he must; otherwise, the Bible wouldn’t go on about it so. The answer our logic arrives at is often different: it’s a small issue compared with war and murder and child molesting. But that answer isn’t really about the relative seriousness of sins. It’s about substituting our judgment for God’s, about throwing out obedience in favor of a value system that makes sense to us—and leaves a bit of room for self-indulgence, as well.

So already those sins of the flesh, not even acknowledged as such, have led us a step away from charity, a step closer to redefining love in earthly terms, and virtually tossed obedience out the window altogether. It’s quite a bit easier to see how all that might lead us to hell.

And that’s before Lewis ever speaks his piece. Lewis suggests in Mere Christianity that heaven and hell might be the same “place,” that the difference might lie in the reactions of certain types of creatures to the same set of circumstances. Heaven, as he (and many other Christian writers) describes it, is a mass of interconnectedness with one another and with God, a true “body of Christ” bringing with it an intimacy like none we could imagine on earth. Throughout our lives, Lewis suggests, we become either more and more heavenly creatures, loving and open to God and our fellow man in a way that will embrace that intimacy as the fulfillment of our lives, or more hellish creatures, centering inward in a way that abhors that intimacy and self-giving and suffers greatly for it.

Sins of the flesh, paradoxically, are among the greatest obstacles to intimacy. When we enter into a connection that should be intimate, but litter it with reservations and qualifications—when we say, however unconsciously, “I’ll open myself to you in this way and this, but not these others,” it isn’t the opening that impacts our souls but the reservations, the holding something back for ourselves. We create something that passes for intimacy while keeping the deepest parts of ourselves protected—the very parts that will one day be ripped wide open, for better or worse.
Perhaps Lewis’s vision of heaven and hell is accurate and perhaps it is not. Perhaps Our Lady meant something more complex and less direct than her words implied when she said that most people were in hell because of sins of the flesh, and perhaps she did not. Regardless, given what we know of heaven and hell, it’s quite clear in which direction we’re led when charity, obedience, and true love and intimacy fall to self-indulgence.

Dying, He Destroyed Our Death

2007-05-19T09:22:00.000-07:00

Praying the Divine Mercy Chaplet this evening, I had a vision of an angry older woman. I often see people who are near death during this prayer, whether they are real or composites or simply embodiments my mind uses to make the intention concrete I do not know. But suddenly this evening I saw a connection that I had not before, a connection probably obvious to most but that had escaped me until this moment.

I thought of the crown of thorns, of the humiliations of the officers who spat on Christ and placed a reed in his hand, and even of the humiliation of hanging on display on the cross, knowing what it really meant but sharing that information with no one, having crowds think him powerless and conquered, and for the first time I saw this not only as an act of atonement for us, but an act of empowerment. Not the kind of empowerment that comes from the desire to emulate Christ, the mission to model one’s life on his or share in his suffering, but something much more direct, something easier.

He rendered it all powerless, not just death but virtually every threat that could be visited on man. He made it unimportant, nothing to fear. Might we be humiliated before men, ridiculed, thought little of? Well, perhaps. But the person most clearly deserving of respect and dignity in the entire history of the world was subject to ridicule and humiliation at least as severe, so what can it really mean about us, to us?

We hear over and again, “dying he destroyed our death”, and perhaps we need to examine that line more closely. He destroyed our death in the sense that he gave us the opportunity to share in the resurrection, but he also destroyed the fear of death—or at least, any real reason to fear death. In the same sense, he destroyed physical suffering and humiliation, because he rendered them powerless.

Perhaps the message that isn’t enough conveyed—or that I wasn’t ready to hear—is not that Christianity requires us to pick up our crosses, or even, as I’ve often heard “enables” us to do so, but that it turns crosses into something entirely other than what those who would have them as weapons intend them to be, into something that in the truest sense of the word can’t hurt us, no matter how much they hurt us.

That’s why the old lady I saw, real or not, didn’t need to hold on to her anger anymore (whether she knew it or not). It’s why one who has been wrongly accused or mistreated can let it slip by in silence, not just because of an imperative and an ability to rise above it that comes from Christianity but because it truly doesn’t matter. Christ was wrongly accused and mistreated, so what shame can there be in it?

So much of a man’s self-protectiveness comes, I think, from pride. But if Christ remained Christ when all pride had been stripped away from him and he’d been beaten, humiliated, and killed in the public square, then what can the rest of us stand to lose by those same experiences?

Nothing of value, I think. And that’s more than an exhortation or an obligation or a theoretical stance—it’s a reason to live without fear.

On the Rosary--Carrying the Cross and Beyond

2007-05-19T09:11:00.000-07:00

Friday, April 28, 2006

Always before I've focused on one mystery at a time, but today it occurred to me that the Carrying of the Cross and the Crucifixion can't really be separated. We hear again and again, "take up your cross and follow me" without really thinking about the fact that when we pick up the cross we're following Christ to crucifixion, to a still-greater sacrifice, but most of all, to a good. We hear so often "your cross to bear" fro those who exhort us to accept trials and suffering in patience, but lose sight, it seems, of the fact that we bear a cross to a place and for a purpose, and then even the crucifixion itself is not that purpose. Rather, its purpose is the fruit that it bears. Christ bore his cross and made his sacrifice and willingly died on it that we might achieve salvation. Just so, every time we are asked to carry a heavy cross, we carry it in preparation for some sacrifice. And that sacrifice itself must occur that we might complete some act of service, so that God can work through us, so that others might be moved to conversion; sometimes, perhaps, it is simply that we be enabled to carry a heavier cross to a grater sacrifice on the road to serving God's will. But always there is an end of the road down which we carry that cross, just as Christ's road ended at Golgotha. And the carrying of that cross is never merely a burden, but a task to be accomplished in furtherance of God's service.

Surely the man who carries heavy rocks in the hot sun all day to build a house suffers less than the one who simply carries them from one place to another and then back again, seeing that his work offers nothing of value. And yet, even that man, could he but see it, is walking a road bearing those rocks as his cross. It may be a road to greater patience or humility, to obedience, even to physical conditioning that will enable him to better serve God. Whatever cross we carry, we carry it that we might be enabled to climb onto it, when the time is right, to make the lasting sacrifice that will accomplish God's will.

Talking to God on the 7:42

2007-05-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

Monday, February 27, 2006

I was thinking today about the ways that we can incorporate God and prayer into the busy reality of professional life, and it occurred to me that this isn't an area where one person can likely give another any practical advice. For instance, I often pray the rosary on the morning commuter train, but I suspect that piece of information isn't especially useful to anyone. I suspect that, because I think this is an area where there are only two schools of thought--that either seems perfectly natural to you (in which case you don't need me to suggest it), or it makes you cringe (in which case it will do me no good to suggest it).

I'm on the train for nearly two hours each day, which provides a lot of opportunity, not just to pray the rosary but to read and to write. Some of my rosary meditations have been written on the train, and leading up to lent I've been reading The Sacred Passion.

It's an interesting experience for me, praying and reading the Bible and church bulletins and such in that venue, because I think I know how people react. I think I know that because not so very long ago, I know how I would have reacted. I'd have been the person I steered very clear of. And my view on that hasn't necessarily changed so much. I've witnessed a lot of hatred from people who were the most visible Christians I knew, and if I saw someone reading The Word Among Us on the train (as I was this evening), I'd try not to sit too close. I'd learned from experience that I'd be met by some kind of smug superiority, some kind of near-hostility. I see that still.

At first, it made me self-conscious about being Christian in public, but of course that's exactly what we're called upon to do. So I tried the one thing that always works (once I've tried everything else and found that it didn't work and so at long last remembered that only one thing really works) and listened to God. Sometimes that requires a lot of prayer and meditation, but not this time. This time, it only required remembering a quote from St. Francis of Assisi: Preach the gospel always; if necessary, use words.

It always troubled me, even when I was an a la carte Catholic, that those attitudes gave Christians such a bad name, that they were such bad ADVERTISING for being Christian. And maybe that sounds like a funny way to put it, but it's the way I think. When I go out into the world with a crucifix around my neck and I take my rosary beads out on the train, when my co-workers know that I'm going to mass on my lunch hour, then everything I do--for better or worse--is an advertisement for Christianity. It's my job to make it a good one, to make sure that I don't ever convey that attitude of superiority, to make sure that I'm willing to pop those beads back into my purse and get up to offer someone my seat, to smile sincerely at every person who looks my way, not just because it's the right way to treat my fellow man, but because the last thing I'd ever want would be to be the person who made a stranger feel like Christianity wasn't a good and welcoming place to come home to.

Giving Things Up "For Lent"

2007-05-19T09:08:00.000-07:00

February 24, 2006

A child asked me a few days ago how long lent lasted. Her meaning was clear--for how long do I have to make this sacrifice? It was a fair question, and one I certainly remember from childhood, from a time when lenten sacrifices were something we accepted but looked forward to getting over with, as well.

I'm a grown-up now, though, and hopefully have a deeper understanding of what penance and sacrifice is all about. Readings about lent continually make the point that in making the sacrifices we do, in fasting and giving up various entertainments and distractions, we draw closer to God. We make room in our lives for more time for prayer, for more focus on God's will for us, for giving more of our time and our treasure to those in need.

With that in mind, that whole "off the hook" approach to the end of lent doesn't look quite so appealing. It's hard to say, "Whew--lent is almost over! Any day now, I'll be able to get further away from God again! And hey...all this pesky charity stuff will be over with and I'll be able to get the focus back on me."

Lent, as we all know, is a time of conversion. Parameters on that time help us to focus, help to inspire us, help to pull our attention from busy lives that might otherwise lead us to keep planning to start praying more "as soon as things slow down." Lent as an established season is, aside from the particular reasons for the timing, a great way to command our attention NOW instead of leaving us to our vague plans for the future.

But it seems to me that if the conversion of lent is really to mean something, if the conversion is real and true, then it must endure beyond. It doesn't seem possible that we can undergo conversion for forty days and then set it aside to go back to our favorite television programs when the sun rises on Easter morning. If we're really observing lent, really investing in it, really seeking and achieving greater conversion, then shouldn't we be hoping not to "go back to normal" when it's over? Shouldn't our real goal be to internalize the tendency to sacrifice, the focus on God, the freedom from distractions, to the point that we continue it forever?

Right or wrong--and I think we all know that it's wrong--life does intervene. We all drift at times, all find ourselves so caught up in the details of getting by in the world that we're not growing in spirit. But if each lent we set that time aside, we accept the focus of the season and shed the distractions that keep us from continual conversion, we can take another step. And if we don't lose that ground--if we nurture the spiritual fruit that we reaped during lent throughout the year rather than happily lapsing back into old habits when it's over--then when lent rolls around next year we'll be starting from higher ground, ready to take conversion to the next step.

I've already said here that my goal is 100 hours of prayer during lent. One of the things I'll be praying for is that when it's over, I don't find myself thinking, "Well, that's over. Good that I don't have to pray quite so much anymore and I can get on about my life."

Email from God

2007-05-19T09:05:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Yesterday, I stopped in to talk to a priest in a parish near my office, and he suggested rather strongly that confession might be in order. It wasn’t so much that I had anything pressing to confess, but that he wanted me to take communion. I told a friend about the experience that evening, and she suggested that there was a reason that wasn’t immediately obvious to me. I resisted the idea—I’d know, after all, since it was me. Right? RIGHT?

I didn’t give it much more thought until this evening when I opened my email. I have these daily “Grace Lines” that appear in my email, but on this particular day, I’d received four of them. They had four separate dates, but they all arrived together and they were all quotations and reflections about—you guessed it—the eucharist.

I happened to be on the phone with the same friend. “I just got four emails with four separate dates on them all at the same time, and they’re all about communion.”

She laughed. I wasn’t quite so amused. I was thinking something more along the lines of, “Okay, okay! I HEARD you!”

“He’s God,” she said. “And He’s sending you little emails.”

Well.

When you put it that way, it’s a little funny. I tried to picture God sitting at a computer, sending me email, but I failed because…well…He’s God, and I have no concept of what he might look like. “So God has a computer?” I asked.

She thought yes. I thought he was commandeering other people’s computers—the people, for instance, who should have sent me these spiritual reflections one at a time throughout last week. In truth, it’s probably nowhere near that mechanical, but I have a human brain and it required that email to pass through a mechanical process to reach me.

“My question,” she went on, “is does He send spam?”

I laughed, but in that immediately guilty way that glances upward for lightning. “Would it be spam?” I asked.

And she said, “See?”

And I did. I saw that God can use anyone and anything. Of course (yet again), I knew that in concept—and I certainly knew it when that priest steered our conversation in a direction that I hadn’t intended and didn’t necessarily welcome with open arms. I even knew it, in a sense, when I got that cluster of emails all talking about the same thing. What I didn’t realize, I think, was that the really significant fact isn’t that God can use anything, but that God does use everything. Everything.

I’m not surprised when He talks to me through a priest. I’m a little surprised when He sends me email. But when a conversation with a priest and a conversation with a friend and a reference on the radio that takes me back nearly a year and then four separate emails dating back ten days all say the same thing to me, over the same couple of days…well. I think at one time, I would have felt bombarded, like messages were coming at me from all directions, like every time I turned away from one, whether intentionally or not, another appeared in my new path.

Suddenly, it looks a lot more cohesive than that to me. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem like I’m getting messages from God everywhere I turn, but like I’m getting ONE message from God everywhere I turn. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem like He’s sending one message and then, if that doesn’t take, sending another, and so on. Instead, it seems like He’s created one comprehensive message around me, and it’s in everything. It’s consistent. It’s all one piece. And it’s only coming from one direction.

On the Rosary--The Agony in the Garden

2007-05-19T09:03:00.002-07:00

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

“Not my will, but yours, be done.”

Many of us pay lip service to that idea, and some of us even mean it in a general sense, but few of us are called upon to make that surrender with complete knowledge as Christ was. Most of us are never asked to choose God’s will over our own knowing that God’s will leads to torture and death.

Would we make that choice? Most of us want to believe that we would. Many of us, perhaps, would. Because in a sense it is easier, isn’t it, to die once and dramatically for our faith, that to die in pieces every day, to go on living in that death?

Men live much of their lives this way. A man will run into a burning building to save a stranger’s child who will not turn off the television to show an interest in his own. But we cannot be heroes to God, we can only be right or wrong. And the rights and wrongs we choose every day surely show who we are--and whether or not we have truly surrendered to God’s will—more completely than one act in a moment of crisis.

For me, that moment in the garden is one of the two most significant moments in the Bible—the moment in which Christ says, “I want what you want…no matter what it is.” It is also the one that demands the most of us, surely the most difficult aspect of being a Christian. We must learn to want what goes against our desires, to want what we fear, to want to lose what we treasure. But it is also the very essence of Christianity, surrendering all to God, even your will. It is at the very heart of a fruitful relationship with God that we learn to experience everything that God wills as good, no matter how painful it might be, simply because God wills it. We learn to be grateful for whatever God sends our way, because He knows what He’s doing, and we know that whether we like it or not, whether we understand it or not, what he sends us is right.

There is a certain kind of peace that grows from that surrender. It doesn’t mean that pain becomes painless or that suffering ceases to be suffering. But when we truly kneel and say, “Not my will, but yours, be done,” as Jesus did, when we truly internalize that surrender and accept and embrace whatever God sends our way, there comes a sense of knowing our place.

Kneeling at length can create an ache in our knees and a stiffness in our backs, yet it brings its own kind of comfort, a naturalness in being in right position to God, as we were intended to be. So this internal surrender puts our souls in right position to God, and is the only thing that allows us to live exactly where we belong, exactly as we were intended.

My Time is Not My Own

2007-05-19T09:03:00.001-07:00

Monday, February 20, 2006
CatholicActs

We tend to think about life--or at least I always have--as divided into "work time" and "my own time." Sure, the lines are a little blurry here and there; I may take a phone call about work at home, and I might answer an email or two from a friend while I'm at work. In general, though, I've always thought of my scheduled work hours as time I owed to someone else and the rest of the hours as...not. My own time.

Imagine my surprise when I awoke at 4:45 this morning to the realization that my day--work time, "my time," even the sleep time I was inexplicably missing at that moment, belonged to God. Of course, I should have known that. I'm sure that I did know it, and that if you'd asked me at any time, I would have said exactly that. I knew it, but I didn't understand it. Suddenly, at 4:45 a.m., I understood. I didn't want to be awake--I'd been asleep for less than five hours--but of course "I want" was flying right out the window with the whole "my time" concept. I lay in bed with my eyes drifting open and closed, thinking about how much freedom and flexibility I had in my days, and how often that meant that I didn't make the best use of "my" time. With my comforter tucked up around my neck, I invited God to change that and then I busted myself and dragged myself out of bed to kneel on the cold wood floor and do it right.

I asked God to take away that freedom, and to restructure my days to suit His purposes. I thanked Him for waking me with that revelation, and for prodding me out of bed and onto my knees.

And so I began the day a little differently. I'd like to sleep a little longer, but that's not my time I'm using up there. It's pretty cold out today--do I want to go to mass at lunch, or stay at my desk and eat a good lunch and answer some email? Well, it's not my time, so the real question is, "What would GOD like me to do with that time that belongs to Him?" I went to church.

That repetition, throughout the day, "My time is not my own," changed everything. It chafed a little, to be honest. It felt restrictive enough to make me squirm. But not enough so that I could disregard it. That new mantra put a yoke on me, one that should have been there all along. It changed everything from how efficiently I worked to what I did on the train on my way home.

And I think it has the potential to change even more. Because it's occurred to me that the impatience I sometimes feel at being interrupted, the reluctance to do what someone else wants me to do when I had other plans, stem from that idea that "my" time is being intruded upon. If it wasn't my time in the first place, it can't be taken from me. If all I'm busy with in any given moment is whatever God wants from me in that moment, then it's impossible to be interrupted. Whatever arises will only be the next thing he's asked of me, a continuation, in that sense, of what I was already doing.

This requires more thought--more analysis, perhaps, of what things in my life God would and would not like me to do with His time. In the meantime, I'll decide in the moment. It seems, though, that every decision must come down to that reminder, "My time is not my own," and that question, "What would God most like for me to do with His time?"

I don't expect this to be as easy as it seemed in the first moment, but it is, if not easy, certainly CLEAR. And it's only the beginning, because there's this thought nibbling around the outsides of my mind right now about who really owns my MONEY, too.

Almsgiving Made Easy

2007-05-19T09:01:00.000-07:00

CatholicActs
February 19, 2006

I learned this week that churches still have poor boxes in the back--at least, some of them do. That's probably something I should have known all along, but I always thought they were sort of an historic relic. In church, they pass the collection basket, and then if there are special concerns, they pass another one. There are even opportunities to sign up for direct withdrawals for your weekly contribution, and to support the seminarians in your parish, and...well, there are plenty of opportunities to make donations, and plenty of mechanisms to do so. And so I'd always assumed that the poor box had rather fallen by the wayside.

Recently, though, I came into some money that I didn't want to keep. Well, that's not entirely true. I like money, and there never seems to be enough of it to go around, but recently I received some money that I didn't feel entitled to keep, profit from something I should never have done. I left it sitting on my desk while I contemplated what to do with it, and the very next Sunday as my we were walking out of church--a different church from the one we usually attend--I happened to spot a golden slot in the back wall of the church labeled "poor box."

The connection didn't immediately spring to mind, but I was intrigued that this church still had such a thing, and mentioned it a few days later to a friend, who was equally surprised. Still, I thought it was unique to this particular church.

The following Friday, though, I went to St. Peter's in the Loop at lunchtime, and made a point to check. Sure enough, they had a golden slot in the back wall, too. I dropped that money in the slot, made an act of contrition, and went back to work, but the presence of that poor box stayed in my mind. We could probably all stand to do a bit more almsgiving than we do, and often that's just a matter of staying conscious of opportunities or seeking them out.

We all put our money in the collection basket. We probably make contributions when fundraisers call on us, and when we pass the Salvation Army bellringers outside the shops at Christmas, and when we clean out our closets and have the choice between charity and the garbage bin. We put cans of food out for the letter carriers' food drive every year, but most of us don't pack them up during other months and drive them to the food pantry.

We're called to go further, and often--at least for me--the failure to do so stems more from the way that time flies and the world makes demands than from unwillingness. And so I was delighted to be presented with this simple, sparkling hole in the wall of the church. A place I'll pass every time I go to mass, a golden opportunity waiting to be taken advantage of.

The money I save during lent will go into that box, but I hope it won't end there. It's wholly anonymous, no accolades, no tax deductions--the perfect opportunity to offer true Christian charity every week--or every day.

On the Rosary--The Visitation

2007-05-19T08:57:00.000-07:00

Sunday, February 12, 2006

The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is ripe with lessons, and from an historical and theological standpoint perhaps the consecration of John the Baptist, Elizabeth’s recognition of the blessed nature of Mary’s child, even the of Elizabeth’s conception in old age are more significant, but it is always Mary’s humility that stands out for me. We are told that Mary served her cousin during the last months of her pregnancy.

How many of us, in Mary’s place, would have undertaken an arduous journey to serve a pregnant relative? She was pregnant, too! And with a child given to her as a mission directly from God. How easy it would have been for her to say, “I have to take care of myself and my child.” How easy—even justified—to say, “I am performing the most important work in the history of the world—others should be attending to me.”

But she trusted in God that she could set out on this difficult journey without risk to the child she carried. She trusted and she didn’t let it go to her head.

How often do we think that we’re too important, that our time is too valuable, to attend to the little needs of others?? How often do we think that we would do more, that we would stop to help, even that we would take the time to listen and encourage, if only we weren’t rushing off to attend to some important business? Mary’s important business was to carry and nurture the Savior of the world, but she made time to sweep Elizabeth’s kitchen. She didn’t confuse the importance of the job she’d been graced with and her own importance. Just as importantly, she didn’t underestimate the importance of those who were called to serve in less dramatic ways.

The Lord calls us to serve our fellow human beings—period. There’s no exemption granted for those who have more important things to do, and there’s no worthiness test for those in need.

Mary knew that being chosen by God to give birth to his son was an honor, not an achievement. She knew that, far from being granted a special status that excused her from serving her fellow man, she had to honor the grace she’d been granted with her very life.

Perhaps, with the best of intentions, it may sometimes seem that direct service isn’t the most useful thing we can do, that writing a check and going back to work will accomplish more. And in purely material terms that may be true, but God calls us to give of ourselves.

It isn’t only the material effect but the human connection, the grace, the humility, the active engagement in the body of Christ, that love demands of us. This scripture wouldn’t carry the same weight if it told us that Mary had hired a maid to attend to Elizabeth. She traveled to her side and remained for three months.

If the mother of God finds such service appropriate to her, then surely none of the rest of us can think ourselves above it.

On the Rosary--the Annunciation

2007-05-19T08:44:00.000-07:00

Sunday, June 05, 2005

Each mystery of the Rosary has, for me, a particular point or two that stands out and resonates, that seems to dominate my meditations. Each one, of course, contains a wealth of lessons and insights. The first thing that strikes me about the Annunciation is the fact that the Angel waited for Mary's consent. From birth--before birth--God had prepared her to play this role. She'd been born free from original sin specifically because she was destined to be the mother of God, and yet, when the moment came, nothing was demanded of her. God didn't send down the Angel to say "This is how it's going to be." He waited for her assent.

This has to be the ultimate example of free will. And, of course, the real lesson for all of us is in Mary's reaction. This revelation certainly didn't comport with the life plan she'd had only a moment before. Her entire world--any future she might have anticipated--altered and shifted before her eyes. And she said, "Behold the handmaiden of the Lord." Wow. She's just a teenager, she's had the shock of a lifetime when an Angel appears to her, she's told that her entire life is going to be completely different from the one she planned and anticipated, and she says, "Be it done unto me."

That's something we could all reflect on when unexpected changes occur in our lives. In comparison, It's kind of hard to justify how hard we try to reject those relatively small changes God visits on us. They arrive every day, unexpected job changes, the necessity of a move, an unexpected child, an emergency bill that means cancelling a vacation, the need to move an ailing elderly relative in with us...and often we lament and complain and sink our fingernails into the past and hold on for dear life.

But aren't we all handmaidens of the Lord? Wouldn't we all like to believe that, if the Angel appeared to us, we would be as gracious, as certain, as unwavering? Would any of us say, to that Angel's message, "No, please tell God I'd rather not follow his plan."? Would any of us say, "No, I see what God wants, but I have a better way."? Maybe we wouldn't say those things because we know that God knows best, and maybe we wouldn't say them simply because we wouldn't have the nerve, because direct defiance of God is more than most people would dare.

Whatever the reason, though, the vast majority of us would not say, "No." And yet, don't we try to do just that every day? Don't we say "No" every time we substitute our own judgment for rules that have clearly been spelled out for us? Don't we say "No" every time we kick and scream and fight the changes that God sends into our lives? Don't we even say "No," in a way, when we choose to struggle rather than to pray for guidance? Perhaps we all need to think about that more explicitly, to realize the next time that we engage in those struggles and resistances that what we're really saying is, "No, I can't be your handmaiden today, Lord--I'd rather follow my own plan."