JPII – Mama Needs Coffee

About Me, Catholic Spirituality, Contraception, current events, Evangelization, feast days, JPII, Living Humanae Vitae, NFP

Coffee clicks: Nashville, Instagram bullying, and Communism

October 19, 2018

Heading into a kind of weird weekend for our crew: 2 days off followed by a day and a half of school and then fall break. I don’t remember having fall break as a kid, so I sure hope mine appreciate it.

Dave will be doing the lion’s share of parenting – I’m heading to Nashville on Sunday for a series of talks I’m giving on Humanae Vitae, and I’m thrilled that the first two fall on Monday, October 22nd which is the feast of St. John Paul II. I’m really leaning on his intercession as I prep for my first big speaking events since having babies number 4 and 5, both of whom have been less than cooperative with my prep.

I’ll be at the pastoral outreach center for the diocese of Nashville at 10 am and 7 pm on Monday, and at Belmont University on Tuesday, location and time TBA. Love to see anyone who’s local!

This week was the advent of my favorite hashtag in a long time: #postcardsforMacron highlighted a whole internet full of smart, accomplished women with families of all sizes, many on the largish side, and oh yeah, they happened to have an impressive collection of degrees and academic honors to their names, too.

I had a gross experience on Instagram after commenting on an incredibly inspiring Humans of New York post about the Rwandan genocide. A must read if you haven’t been following. I was praising the pastor who’d smuggled 300 souls to safety by refusing to back down to the roving bands of murderers who kept coming to his door threatening him with a gruesome death. I said I hoped his courage and goodness in the face of complicity and evil could inspire us in our own country to work for a future free from abortion. I got a few death threats and curses for my trouble, and a hundred or so ad hominems last I heard. I’m not stupid enough to keep tabs on comment sections, so I’ll have to trust my IG friends on that one. This piece really resonated with me after this week – I’m not sure I would have agreed otherwise, having largely found Instagram to be the “friendly” social media platform.

I think most Millenials – myself included – would do well to remind ourselves about what Communism really looks like. This story of a Polish hero’s life and death is a good place to start.

Archbishop Chaput has such a gift for communication that is both concise and profound. This is a must read and a great take on the Synod currently underway in Rome.

A third missive from Archbishop Vigano was released this morning.

Have a wonderful weekend, and please say a quick prayer for me on Monday and Tuesday if you think of it!

Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, Evangelization, JPII, Marriage, NFP

NFP survey headed to the USCCB (more or less)

May 30, 2017

Sometimes you just need to crack the door and God kicks it the rest of the way open.

It is my distinct pleasure to tell you, dear readers, that your enthusiastic and heart wrenching and cheering and inspiring and sometimes totally depressing responses (in the neighborhood of 500+ emails, comments, Facebook comments) to last week’s NFP survey are being curated into a helpful guideline for discussion for a panel discussion at the upcoming USCCB’s Convocation of Catholic Leaders on the challenges of living the Catholic vision of sex and marriage.

Which is exactly what we’ve been talking about these past few weeks around these parts.

Catholic author and psychologist Dr. Greg Popcak reached out to me last week asking if he could take a selection of these beautiful, difficult, and numerous responses with him to Orlando where he and his wife Lisa will be leading a panel discussion on the very challenges and scenarios we’ve been delving into in the comments section. Best part is, the convocation will be attended by representatives from every diocese in the United States.

So it was for sure the Holy Spirit who nudged this conversation out into the public square, as it is. I felt a little ridiculous asking “what do you need from the Church?” because, ah, I’m not the Church. But clearly, God had something in mind.

I have so many other ideas for what to do with this tidal wave of interest, with this tremendous wealth of feedback and some of the incredible ideas and suggestions. One thing that really crystallized for me in reading so many of your responses is that in so many areas, my very own parish is already implementing a lot of what is being asked for. And so I need look no further for best practices and implementation strategies than next Sunday. The real question is one of scale, of resources, and of how to light fires that burn brightly in parishes all across the US and the globe.

I want to especially thank the couples whose stories were particularly difficult to tell: the children who have left the faith, the failed marriages, the heartbreaking experiences of being denied by the very Church you are valiantly struggling to love.

I am nobody, just a mom with a blog, but on behalf of every Catholic, please accept my sincere and sorrowful apology that you were not seen. That your family was cast aside. That you went searching for the truth and were given rocks or a snake instead of the bread you desperately needed and deserved.

I’m sorry.

I know it’s nothing coming from me, except that I’m a fellow Christian and I wish I’d have been able to cook you a meal or take your kids for the afternoon or read through an Endow study with you in a small group. I wish that the sexual revolution hadn’t decimated an entire two generations, leaving behind a growing body count of ruined marriages and families and the landscape of utter “go it alone-ness” for so many couples.

We have so much work to do. The past couple weeks as I’ve been reading and responding and conducting interviews with many of you, George Weigel’s words have been ringing in my ears, his sweeping prediction on the importance of the Theology of the Body, and the growing realization that he maybe wasn’t being dramatic enough:“{Theology of the Body} is one of the boldest reconfigurations of Catholic theology in centuries…a kind of theological time bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences, sometime in the third millennium of the church.”

Y’all, he said this in 1999. It’s been close to 20 years, and we’re now ankle deep into the third millennium, and I’m like, “let’s make sometime NOW.”

So stay tuned. We’ve got a lot of work to do. And I thank you for your honesty, your transparency, and your faithfulness.

Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, Evangelization, Homosexuality, JPII, mental health, Parenting, relativism, Theology of the Body

The beauty of gender: our differences aren’t scary, they’re beautiful (and essential)

April 7, 2017

Male and female created he them; and blessed them… – Genesis 5:2

This morning I was strolling a leisurely stroll on the treadmill and enjoying 45 minutes of toddler downtime (thanks, Brandy in kids club) when my eyes drifted to the newsfeed on the bottom of my tv screen where a “breaking news” alert was scrolling.

What constitutes breaking news in 2017? That’s a loaded question. But for this local ABC affiliate station, the answer was “Australia considering banning fairy tales from schools.” I rolled my eyes into my frontal lobe because probably it was offensive to real witches and living fairy godmothers, all that questionable detail Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, etc. go into about their lives and various motivations and ways of being.

But, no.

Apparently, it’s because fairy tales “encourage outdated gender norms” and that children “as young as four” are reportedly manifesting “gender biasing behaviors” in their play and make believe.

(Note: there are real, medical, biological examples of transgendered individuals born with chromosomal abnormalities and ambiguous genitalia. These are real medical conditions from which real people suffer and about which hard decisions and choices have to be made by doctors, parents, and the individuals themselves. What we’re talking about here today, however, is the growing cultural infatuation with what I’ll call “transgenderism by choice,” or the belief that gender is utterly divorced from biological sexual characteristics by desire, not by any design flaw, and that you could possibly have been born with ovaries and a uterus but a brain that “feels” male, and so you choose to discard – whether surgically or behaviorally – the “non-conforming” female part of your identity.

This is a point of real confusion and pain for a lot of people, and the present cultural climate of strangling political correctness makes civil discussion about any kind of gender dysphoria all but impossible. But we must persist for the sake of real human souls. We cannot shrink away from discussing what is fast becoming the defining issue of our age. End disclaimer).

First of all, kids as young as four display “gender biasing behaviors” because children as young as age four do, in fact, have genders.

Fetuses, it turns out, also have genders. Pull up a Youtube video of balloons popping out of giant cardboard boxes and you’ll see this is not a recent discovery. And gender – in parlance common up until just a few short years ago – was basically interchangeable with “sex” – and nobody was going to bat an eye or shred an admission form over it.

Children, like the rest of us, are male or female, and as such, they typically exhibit a few characteristic (but not exclusive) behaviors common to their gender. Boys, for example, as anyone who has ever birthed, raised, or even tangentially known one, are loud and they are intensely physical. Not all boys and not all the time, but overall, there is a certain exuberance that belongs to the male sex that is right and beautiful.

These boys will become men who lend their strong voices to the pursuit of truth and goodness. They will speak up for what is right, and they will take action to defy evil when they see it. Because that is what men are designed to do. Men are action-takers and pursuers of truth by nature. They image God in their strength, both physical and moral. And that is beautiful. (And does not, incidentally, exclude women from being action takers and pursuers of truth.)

So, about those differences. Let’s get into some generalizations here, because there are common features and universal truths that do, in fact, hold water. Not everything that we have collectively amassed over the course of human history needs to be jettisoned just because Mark Zuckerberg has a new global initiative of the month.

Ladies first. Girls are tender. Not all girls and certainly not all the time, but as a general rule, the female sex is superior at feeling and expressing feelings. Emotionally connected and deeply expressive, women possess a relational capacity that is unmatched in men. My daughter can yell down the entire minivan full of warring brothers and silence us all with a shriek of power, but she wears her heart on the outside, feeling the world deeply, and encountering things with her entire being.

This does not make her weak. (And this is not to say that my husband is not tender. That my boys do not feel sorrow for having hurt or disappointed someone, or shed tears of pain.)

Far from it, her depth of feeling and her capacity for emotion render her a force to be reckoned with beyond anything I have yet experienced in my 3 sons. We live in an era which has been captivated by the lie that the heart is somehow disconnected from and inferior to the mind. And that is a lie. The heart is essential. It is where we encounter God in His Holy Spirit, where we give and receive love. The heart is the source of human life, and it is from our hearts that our relationships with one another and with God take their roots. In a culture awash in isolation and alienation, between spouses and families and even within our very selves, it is evident that the price of disregarding and dismissing the heart is deadly high.

And then there are boys. Boys who will grow up to be strong men, and who desperately need to be affirmed in their abilities. They long for the affirmation – especially and essentially from their fathers – that they have what it takes.

A boy who is not mentored into manhood in this way will struggle in his adult life with feelings of unworthiness and shame. A man has to know that he can do it, that he has what it takes, and that there are people – his mom and dad first and foremost – who are cheering him on because they believe he can.

A boy who is denied these opportunities to prove himself is at risk of becoming a man who struggles with his identity and with his understanding of self worth.

For some boys this might look like hunting and fishing trips. Camping and using pocket knives and jumping off of boulders and killing it on the soccer field and generally having the experience of doing the hard thing and coming through the other side with the knowledge that he has what it takes, that he is enough, that he is capable of leading, of providing, of greatness.

This has less to do with being out in the great outdoors, being naturally athletic, or being any particular good shot with a bow and arrow, but it has everything to do with testing himself against some opponent, whether it be the elements, an animal, or even his peers, and discovering for himself that yes, he measures up. He does not fall short.

This does not mean that girls aren’t outdoorsy! I can’t emphasize enough, the stupid stuff we fret over with “gender norming” our kids is so much less about colors and kinds of toys and neutral language and so much more about what is intrinsic to the nature of men and women.

Girls aren’t going to pick up dolls just because they’re silly and pink and soft and isn’t that just adorable how she’s trying to breastfeed her teddy bear? No. I have watched my 3 year old decapitate her brother’s snowman with a lightsaber and then pretend to nurse her stuffed kitty cat, within the span of fifteen minutes. She weeps and rocks her stuffed animals to sleep at night if they’ve had a bad dream. And then she stands on the edge of her bed literally roaring in defiance if anyone should dare trespass and remove one of her beloved “babies” from their positions.

She is not weak because she is drawn to mothering behaviors with her toys, for if she is called to motherhood, it will be the source of her greatest strength and ability. (It’s not for nothing we use the expression of “mama bear” to communicate deep, protective and don’t-you-dare-mess-with-it anger.)

This hysteria over neutral-colored Legos and removing all swords and tutus from toy boxes is missing the forest for the trees. A little boy is standing 12 inches from my elbow right now playing in a pink toy kitchen, stirring soup and preparing steaks to feed the cat. This doesn’t mean his gender is “confused.” It does mean he likes being involved in food prep and his chief enjoyment in the 4’oclock hour is chopping vegetables.

We are foolish when we typecast certain “behaviors” into rigid gender norms and then insist that our children refrain at all cost from manifesting them, should they match up in a way we are currently collectively frowning upon.

What good is there to be gained by discouraging a boy from expressing strength and courage on the playground, whether he is shouting down a bully or rallying his friends to the winning kickball run? And what good is served in correcting a girl who longs to be told that she is beautiful – who in fact has a profound and fundamentally good desire to be affirmed in her beauty on a soul-deep level – that she ought not be concerned with something so trivial or vain?

Conversely, if a boy enjoys cooking and art and a girl is an absolute terror on the lacrosse field, these, too, are good and beautiful manifestations of their particular individual giftedness. This does not indicate a confused or wrongly-assigned gender, but normal and healthy diversity in this thing that we call being human.

Being a mother is intractably a female role; being a hairdresser is not.

While the world frets on about the sexism of fairy tales, about girls dreaming of true love and affirmed beauty, and boys about vanquishing dragons and journeying into uncharted territories, I’ll be sitting here reading Cinderella and the Chronicles of Narnia to all of them, male and female alike. And they will perhaps get different things from the same story. They will perhaps encounter it with their male or female minds and focus on particular aspects which attract or repel them, and that will be fine. That will be good.

Our differences are our strengths, and denying the intricate design of the complementarity between the sexes is to deface the image of the Creator Himself.

(For further reading on the complimentary of the sexes and the essential goodness of gender, I highly recommend reading Dr. Mary Healy’s short, accessible book on JPII’s Theology of the Body, “Men and Women are from Eden.” I also like Dr. Edward Sri’s “Men, Women, and the Mystery of Love” and John and Stasi Eldredge’s books, “Captivating” and “Wild at Heart.” (I’m on a bit of John Eldredge kick myself at the moment, having just finished “Walking with God” and “Waking the Dead” and now about halfway into “Fathered by God.” The last title in particular is great for facilitating a deeper understanding of masculinity.)

Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, Evangelization, Homosexuality, JPII, relativism

Conform or be destroyed {but be not afraid}

December 2, 2016

No matter your political stripe, ethnicity, religion, or sexual proclivities, this one should concern you.

It’s the story of a family. Of a couple who have built an empire together, and whose concepts and innovation have almost single-handedly spurred the revitalization of a local economy and an entire community.

And their kids are pretty cute, too.

I’m talking, of course, about HGTV’s darling it-couple of the moment, Chip and Joanna Gaines, and of their wildly popular show “Fixer Upper” and the Magnolia empire behind it.

Their show, if you are unfamiliar with it, centers around showing prospective home buyers “the worst homes in the best neighborhoods” around Waco, Texas, before deciding on one crumbling property which they renovate and redesign on camera with a dramatic “reveal” at the episode’s end. The show is entertaining because while everything about reality tv is carefully scripted, the real star of their concept is their goofy, sweet, mutually respectful and supremely attractive marriage.

They like each other. They like each other a lot, it would appear, from the viewer’s perspective. And they like their children, and they like the life they’ve built together. There is friendly banter, there is teasing, there are eye rolls and sighs of exasperation, but there is no harsh cynicism. No passive aggression. No threats of divorce of ultimatums about behavior “or else.”

It’s just so refreshing.

The thing is, I think it’s as refreshing as it is because it’s real. I think they really do like each other as much as they play on TV. And it’s a beautiful witness to the joy of marriage.

Which is probably the precise reason they were targeted by a bigoted Buzzfeed writer with an anti-Christian axe to grind and a platform from which, she decided, was hers to lob grenades at unsuspecting victims from. Victims whose only crime, as far as I can decipher, is to hold a differing belief system from hers. And to hold it privately.

So basically tolerance in action.

The story gets a little weirder, though. Because the writer in question didn’t have a personal complaint about the Gainses themselves, but about the church they attend, and specifically about something their pastor preached in a sermon.

It’s pretty crazy what he said, though.

He said that God created men and women. And he quoted this radical text from antiquity called “the Book of Genesis.”

I know. Lock that guy up.

Here’s the thing. We live in a time of supposed plurality of beliefs, but some beliefs are more “free” than others. We give lip service to the concept of diversity, but the only diversity that is truly acceptable is narrowly defined and usually trending on Twitter.

Because the Gaines family attends a church that holds a biblical perspective on marriage (in line with the majority of Evangelical Christianity and the entire Roman Catholic Church, so not exactly a fringe-y minority), they are automatically cast as bigots. Excoriated for not vetting the guests on their show for their sexual behavior. Dragged into a career and life-altering witch hunt because a woman with a microphone can’t stand the idea that not everybody shares her belief system.

The Gaines family are probably hurting right now, but I very much doubt they are surprised. To be a Christian is to be a sign of contradiction in a confused and sometimes darkening world. And none of us are going to get out of it with our reputations or our egos intact. Which is a good thing. It really is!

What the Gaines family could use, however, from their fellow Christians is support. Vocal, enthusiastic support. Write a friendly message on one of their social media accounts (Unrelated: Chip retweeted Papa Francesco earlier this week.)Say a prayer for them. Drop HGTV an email saying how much you enjoy their show, or if you’ve never seen it, tune in for an episode this weekend and enjoy.

Hatred, bullying tactics and public lynchings are as old as the human race. In the era of the internet, the megaphone is bigger and the stakes are higher, perhaps, in terms of public notoriety and the heat being turned up, but in a week or two the news cycle with move on to a new victim, and they’ll be left to pick up the pieces and decide if it’s worth it to them as a family to continue to tell their story publicly.

I hope they do. But I completely understand if they don’t.

The stakes have ever been high to proclaim belief in anything, but particularly to proclaim belief in the One who made all things. Because the moment you stake your claim for Christ, you become an enemy to the world that “will hate you because it first hated Me.” We who dwell in reality, living in the world as it actually is, dwell in a place marred and scarred by actual sin. Sin, which in our time is a bigoted concept in itself (look for that storyline to play out in the not-so-distant future, coming soon to a headline near you) has actual consequences. Like pain. Division. Violence. Loss of friendships and reputation. Suffering.

But sin does not have the final word in this story. Not in the Gaineses story, and not necessarily in the angry Buzzfeed writer’s story, either. Wouldn’t it be a cool footnote in the annals of internet scandal one day to read that all this craziness ended in forgiveness and maybe even a change of heart?

Wilder things have happened.

In the meantime, do not be cowed into silence or surrender by the angry rhetoric or the public fallout being heaped upon this family. They are suffering, but they are suffering for Christ. And He can make something beautiful out of that. To be Christian is to suffer. Not because of a lack of love, but because of an abundance of it. Look to the cross.

And do not be afraid of what the world can do to you or take from you. The world took everything from Christ first, after all. And that ended rather well.

And seriously, pour yourself a peppermint mocha and get your shiplap on this weekend. A good family doing good work could use your support.

“When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.” – JPII, State visit to Netherlands, 1985.

About Me, Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Evangelization, JPII

Who’s your BFS?

September 7, 2016

This past weekend Pope Francis solemnly pronounced what the faithful have known for nearly 20 years now – that Mother Teresa of Calcutta is a saint. I had a front row seat via the various social media newsfeeds to the devotion this little woman inspired in people across all ages and cultures, and it was inspiring to behold. It was also a little disturbing to see that my social media worldview is so myopic that every single “friend” or follower, almost to a fault, was going gaga over little St. T. (Either that or the entire world really was focused on Rome last weekend. Dare to dream.)

But I digress.

Last night I lay in bed, unable to sleep and so fingering my rosary – a gift from our youngest son’s godfather which was touched to the body of Mother Angelica while she lay in state last spring (#Catholicsbecray) and I wondered over the phenomenon of how certain saints inspire such fervent devotion in the faithful, and others kind of fly under the radar for centuries, popping up in a later age only to be discovered as unbelievably important and applicable. I’m thinking here of St Therese, St Faustina, saints like those who’s sanctity was kind of discovered quietly and after their mortal lives had ended, exploding from the halls of eternity into the present with a kind of grace bomb that was exactly what the world and the Church needed at that precise moment.

I was also thinking about how most people seem to have favorite saints, and while there are a few universal rockstars beloved by the entire Church, there are thousands and thousands more who are still – or are now – relatively unknown. And I think it’s awesome. It’s awesome that God gives us saints to befriend and emulate and petition for prayers and heavenly assistance because it’s such a tangible connection between the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant. And it is so like our incarnational God to leave a kind of mentoring channel open between the would-be and the have-been Saints.

I love to hear people’s stories about why they named their kids a certain name, or what the significance of that huge St. Joseph statue in their office is, or why they wear that particular marian medal. It’s fascinating to me how our best friend saints (BFSs if you will) seem to choose us, and not necessarily vice versa.

I heard so many recountings of what Mother Teresa meant to people last week in the lead up to her canonization: how she changed a life with a single encounter, how she’d been a faithful intercessor for a mother for many years, how she’d given a certain piece of advice and redirected the trajectory of a soul.

And I thought, of course, of my own BFS, St. John Paul II, and how much I love him.

How generous the Lord is, to give us such wild variations in personality and life circumstances and historical context. There’s literally a saint for pretty much anything you can think up, and I’d wager there’s a saintly personality that almost anyone on earth can relate to. It calls to mind CS Lewis’ words:

“How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.”

I love JPII for his holy boldness, for his bravery, for his unwavering courage in the face of tyranny, for his propensity to speak truth to power, for his deep love for human love, and for his profound understanding of the mystery of the human person and of the dignity of our sexuality. I think even if he hadn’t played a pivotal role in my own conversion story, I would have come to know and love him. But it’s a hundred times sweeter that he did, and that as I grew to know him better, my heart recognized in his a kindred spirit. Because how like God is that? It’s a bit like discovering the goodness of fit between your spouse’s and your own while you’re dating, to have that moment of encounter and thrill to the realization of “you, too?”

I’m excited for my children to discover their own intercessory champions as they grow and mature in their faith. Even as little boys, my 2 eldest have beautiful devotions to St. Nicholas and St. Anthony, which is funny because we’ve not named anyone after those two great men yet. Our little family has a strong devotion to St. Joseph and to St. Maximilian Kolbe, and of course to JPII, but my biggest boys have saint friends all their own, without any real influence on our part. How crazy is grace?

So who are your BFSs? And if you don’t have one in particular who jumps out to you, have you ever stopped to ask the Lord to reveal one to you? Some years I’ve used Jen Fulwiller’s saint name generator and let a saint “choose” me at random, but my deepest and persisting devotions have been discovered more organically through life circumstances.

Thank God for friends in high places, and for friendships that span time and space. Only a creative God like ours could have come up with such craziness.

St. John Paul II, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Therese, St. Rose of Lima, St. Joseph, St. Maximilian Kolbe, St. Anthony, St. Genevieve, St. Luke, St. David, St. Nathan, St. Francis, St. Nicholas, St. Teresa of Calcutta, and Mother Angelica, and all you holy men and women, pray for us!

Catholics Do What?, Evangelization, JPII, Pope Francis

Why World Youth Day still matters

July 21, 2016

The Pope is on Instagram, and the world is flat. Flatter far than it was back in the 1980s when Pope St. John Paul II first conceived of an international gathering of Catholic youth to come together to meet Christ, along with the Holy Father, for a powerful encounter of truly catholic communion with one another and with the Church.

Spain, Germany, America, Australia…there have been 13 international world youth days to date, and the crowds – multitudes, as John Paul the Great preferred to call them – keep growing.

But why does it matter in 2016? Can’t the average high school junior with a smartphone pull up the Pope’s Twitter feed and see what’s on his mind? Hasn’t Snapchat made the ability to physically gather in person an obsolete relic of the past?

Not so fast.

There is something almost incommunicable about the catholicity of Catholicism if you’ve never experienced the Faith outside of your own culture. And there is something critically important about having a personal encounter with the Faith. Something that no amount of virtual connectivity can ever hope to replicate.

I remember the first time I heard Mass in another language. I was young – too young to remember the specifics – but it was in a California Mission church, and the Mass was in Spanish. While the unfamiliar words washed over me I remember the little jolt of familiarity and joy when the consecration still happened after the Our Father, when hands reached across pews to shake and to hug during the Sign of Peace.

Several years older and several thousand miles away, I heard the Mass in Latin for the first time, in a grand medieval cathedral in Ireland, and I experienced once again that joyful recognition of sameness in the liturgy.

We’re all one. The Church really is universal! I remember marveling, even as a sullen 17 year old who was more interested in the lack of a legal drinking age than in the culture and history of that beautiful country.

I’ve heard other people’s stories about their own “aha, we’re huge” moments: Steubenville conferences, international trips, pilgrimages to Rome. Walking through the doors of St. Peter’s Basilica for the first time, completely overwhelmed by the sheer size of it, and secondarily by the sights and sounds of a hundred other cultures funneling into one grand sanctuary.

And the big one, for young people, is World Youth Day. There is an unspeakable power to seeing the Holy Father in the flesh, the charism of the papacy made incarnate in a joyful overwhelm of familiarity and relationship. He really is our father. And the grace of office is palpable.

Our young people need to be transformed by an encounter with the living Christ. In the worlds of my favorite saint,

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”

This is a living faith. A faith worth fighting for. A faith worth committing to and sacrificing out of love for, in spite of the demands and denials of the world.

And the millennial generation were a source of great hope for JPII. He didn’t see slackers and gamers, a generation destined to live in basements and occupy parental couches. He saw hope. He saw the future of the Church. He saw world-changers and hope-bringers. And above and before all that, he saw future saints.

And now World Youth Day, in it’s 14th iteration, comes home to it’s founder’s roots: Krakow, Poland. From July 26-31.

St. John Paul II could never have imagined how the world would flatten and transform in the 31 years since he first called together 300,000 youthful pilgrims in Rome, but surely he will be watching from his heavenly vantage point as his beloved Poland hosts more than a million young Catholics from around the globe, spilling into the very streets he walked, come to encounter the person of Jesus Christ and His present day vicar on earth, Pope Francis.

So in the lead up to WYD, we pray for protection and for a profound outpouring of the Holy Spirit on these young pilgrims. St. John Paul II, pray for us. Pray for the youth from the nations around this weary world who have been called to Poland, answering a pilgrim’s invitation to experience the universal church in a literal, tangible way. Pray that they would find Jesus whom they seek, who alone can satisfy.”

(And hey Papa, it looks like some of your opening acts are already getting warmed up.)

Catholic Spirituality, Evangelization, Family Life, JPII, motherhood, Parenting, Theology of the Body

Theology of Little Bodies

June 29, 2016

St. John Paul II is my homeboy 4 life. When I have trouble connecting the present moments to eternity, when I wonder how the life after this one could be better/richer/fuller, sometimes it’s the thought of meeting him and falling into his arms for a giant bear hug that reorients me correctly towards heaven.

I’m so grateful, then, to have his intercession from above and his seminal work here on earth, the Theology of the Body (TOB – a series of teachings St. John Paul II gave on human life, love and sexuality – 129 in total – over a 5 year span at the beginning of his pontificate), as a roadmap for this exhausted mother with children who are growing, seeking, asking questions and expecting increasingly complex answers. Even at 4 and 5. Even at 2. (Not so much at 10 months though, but Luke, you know mommy loves you too.)

I don’t have a perfected “method” for beginning to communicate the timeless truths contained in the masterpiece of TOB to people without an advanced theology degree, let alone the ability to write their own names, but happily, that doesn’t seem to matter. Kids are great BS detectors. It’s an innate survival mechanism or something. And they’re equally great truth-receivers. So if you tell them something that is true, they tend to accept it more readily than we world-weary skeptics who wear big boy pants and pay bills do.

The biggest hurdles I have encountered in communicating matters of faith and morals to my children have been my own ego, laziness, and the inertia of daily life.

For example, “Am I doing this right? Is this a great catechetical technique? Can they tell I’m making this up as I go along?” all actually much, much less important than my doing the thing in the first place: having the conversation, answering the hard question honestly, giving a ready and imperfect answer in the moment rather than kicking the can to a more comfortable moment down the road in some nebulous future where I sip placidly on chamomile while discussing Plato’s Republic round the breakfast table.

It’s easy, too, to just lumber along in an unending series of days, lessons, errands, and chores, forgetting that our kids are learning from us as we go along, and that for most parents, the primary transmission of the Faith to the children we’re trying to keep alive will not take place in a lecture setting.

Far from it. There is public nudity and screaming and lots of broken bits of water balloon strewn about the yard while I bark reminders of dignity, modesty, and respecting the neighbors’ point of view. Enhanced (or not) this summer in particular by a critical absence of 5 feet of fence between our yards.

We’ve always tried to speak very honestly about bodies, about the differences between bodies and the dignity we afford to one another and to ourselves, from an early age. They know the proper terms for male and female genitalia. Which I am more or less glad for, but mostly less when checking out at the grocery store. At bath time we remind all butts on deck to treat their siblings with the utmost respect, because God created each of them – body and soul – for a magnificent mission that only they can fulfill. And that they have been created as a gift to the world by a God who loves them, and that their body is part of that gift.

Also, lots and lots of reminders to please put on some underwear.

I’ve heard of a few existing resources for teaching TOB to little people, but haven’t used any of them myself yet. (Here, and here (coming soon) have been suggested to me.)

The basic truths from TOB I’m hoping to communicate them, in whatever way I can hope to achieve while they’re all still south of the age of reason, are these:

Your body is good,

You are your body, just as much as you are your soul, (and you’re in control of that body. So pick up those Legos.)

God has a specific plan for your life, and your body contains the blueprints for it,

God created us, men and women, in His own image, in order to tell us specific things about Himself (in other words: gender is important, intentional, and immutable.)

Anything beyond that gets through to them? I’m counting it as gravy, at least until middle school.

Any great resources out there I’m missing for starting to lay the foundation for Theology of the Body with little ones?

Catholic Spirituality, Evangelization, JPII, motherhood

Support a Prodigal {Stefania Elsmore}

June 21, 2016

I’ve had a few lucky breaks in my career slash stay at home mom life slash ministry, which leads me to believe that much of what we call success in this life depends upon the goodness of other people and being in the right place in the right time, plus a dash of talent and more than a dash of hard work, repeated early and often.

I have the gift of this platform to share words and tell stories, and it’s always my goal to be worthy of the microphone I’ve been given. Which of course I am not. But it’s always good to have goals.

Since I hail from Denver, hotbed of the New Evangelization and home to approximately 220 amazing ministries, I get to attend church with, send my kids to school alongside of, and bump into at Costco some of the most passionate evangelists and talented speakers and musicians of the 21st century. Jason Evert (hi, fellow parishioner) recounted in his book “St. John Paul the Great, His 5 Loves” that my favorite Pole, greeted Denver’s Cardinal Stafford 2 months after World Youth Day 1993 with the exclamation “Ah, Denver! The revolution!” in a not so subtle nod to the role he believed the Mile High city would play in the New Evangelization.

Catholic News Agency, FOCUS, the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, ENDOW, the Augustine Institute, the Servants of Christ Jesus, Christ in the City, St. John Vianney Theological Seminary, and the career launches of Christopher West, Chris Stefanick, Jason Evert, Curtis Martin, Ted Sri, Tim Grey, Mary Beth Bonnaci, and dozens I’m probably forgetting right now would seem to underscore the Holy Father’s point; a revolution indeed.

And now another name that I’ve little doubt belongs on the roster: Stefania Elsmore. A woman with a beautiful voice and a gift for speaking and sharing her heart. And one of only a handful of female Catholic worship leaders who plays, sings and speaks. And she’s from my parish. Lucky us.

Guys, this girl needs to cut an album. And we’re going to help her do it.

I’m putting the button for Stefania’s kickstarter campaign here in this post, and I’m kicking it off with a $10 donation. Because I can give the cost of admission to the pool down the block, and my kids can play in the wading pool for the day instead. If you can share $5, $10, or $100 towards this campaign, I encourage you to do so.

Let’s launch another voice for the New Evangelization, and help Stefania hit her goal of 20k towards a professional studio album that she can share with – and advance her ministry by the sale of – the teens and young adults she loves.

To learn more about Stefania’s music click here.

To fund Stefania’s kickstarter campaign for “Prodigal” click here.

Signed,

another prodigal.

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Evangelization, JPII

Conversation with an exorcist {pt. 1}

January 19, 2016

If you read me even sporadically, you know that I touch on touchier subjects more often than not. It’s not, contrary to what a friend guessed a few weeks ago, that I enjoy conflict. I don’t mind it, but I definitely don’t seek it out intentionally.

Bet you wouldn’t guess that, reading some of what I write here, huh? But it’s true. I’m fairly mild mannered in person. I mean sure, I have a bit of a temper and a bit of a thirst for justice, but I’m not a street fighter or anything. And I don’t generally chat up strangers irl about the stuff I talk about here, not unless we’re connecting on a serious level and I’ve “won the right to be heard,” so to speak.

All that being said, it’s true that I do get into some crazy conversations with people in the comments section from time to time. And it’s mostly fine. I filter out the really insane stuff for my benefit and for yours, but from time to time some crazy slips through.

It’s because we’re talking about real stuff though, and real hearts, and real lives. And people have real reactions to that. Which is good – it’s how we were designed.

But. There are moments when it definitely isn’t pleasant to be moderating comments or fielding emails, and I’ve asked myself more than once why I’m here, why I’m doing this, what the point is. And I say this without an ounce of pretension or bravado, but it’s for Him.

And guess what? He has an enemy.

We have a mutual enemy, as it turns out. And I’ve been doing a little research in the area of spiritual warfare and trying to put some best practices in place, because there is mad resistance to anyone, in whatever capacity they are serving, who is trying to do His will.

So the exorcist. Yes, I had the chance to speak via phone with an actual, practicing exorcist, and he’s about as down to earth and normal as you could imagine, except for the battling demons part of the equation. But we didn’t talk specifically about that. What we did discuss, however, was how best one ought to proceed when exposing oneself to the unknown and to the unfamiliar, particularly on the internet.

He made a very good point when he explained that the internet is a boundary-less place, and that whatever we put out online is accessible to a vast and perhaps unintended audience.

He asked me bluntly “what do you do to prepare before you write, what is your method?” and I very stupidly replied something along the lines of “making sure no kids are currently digging through the trash/playing in the toilet” but what he meant was, what was I doing to spiritually prepare?

And truthfully? Not much.

I mean, I was praying on my own about other stuff most days, but it hadn’t actually occurred to me to ask God what I should be saying, or whether I should be saying it, or to protect me and our family in the writing of it, or to direct it to the intended audience.

Basically I’d been operating as an independent contractor. Which is no bueno, because I am a finite weakling here with limited resources, and I need to be tapping into my Boss’ line of credit before I embark on the big jobs, you know?

Anyway, thanks to father’s very sane and decidedly un-dramatic advice, I’ve been trying to pray more over the things I say and the words I put out into the word, asking that the Lord takes them where He wants them, and begging His protection for my children, our marriage, and our family.

Because you know what? We have a real enemy in Satan. He is a liar and a deceiver, and while it’s oh-so-popular to pretend he doesn’t exist and that he’s an allegory or a fairy tale, he’s not.

He’s a real being, and he hates us.

He hates me and he hates you, and more than anything He hates our God.

So, some practical steps for those of us who live any part of our lives online, which is roughly most of humanity at this point:

– limit your social media usage to what is necessary and life-giving for your state in life. This will look different for everyone, but we all know when we’ve gotten that nauseated how-long-have-I-been-scrolling??? feeling. Stop before you hit that point. It’s a distraction from your real life, and from the work He has for you.

– pray over your pictures/blog posts/tweets before you launch them into the world. Pray that they’ll be directed to the audience God intends for them, and that they’ll be serving His will. Pray especially about sharing images or videos of your kids, that they won’t fall into the wrong hands or be used for evil purposes. Pray about whether to share them, period. I have some regretsies about how visible our kids have been online, but that’s part of growing up as a millennial parent, amiright?

– maintain a personal prayer life. You can’t give what you don’t have.

– Don’t expose yourself – either knowingly or even unintentionally, to anything of the occult. Poison is still poison, even when it’s mixed into orange juice. And even if you didn’t mix it yourself.

One of my favorite images of spiritual combat is telling satan where he belongs – in hell – and saying it with a well-placed Hail Mary or even a whole Rosary. We also make frequent use of holy water, blessed salt, the miraculous medal, and the St. Michael prayer. My kids like to yell “poop on the devil,” which, while less eloquent, is probably pretty effective too.

St. John Paul II told us:

“May prayer strengthen us for the spiritual battle we are told about in the Letter to the Ephesians: ‘Draw strength from the Lord and from His mighty power’ (Ephesians 6:10). The Book of Revelation refers to this same battle, recalling before our eyes the image of St. Michael the Archangel (Revelation 12:7). Pope Leo XIII certainly had a very vivid recollection of this scene when, at the end of the last century, he introduced a special prayer to St. Michael throughout the Church. Although this prayer is no longer recited at the end of Mass, I ask everyone not to forget it and to recite it to obtain help in the battle against forces of darkness and against the spirit of this world.”

And the St. Michael prayer:

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and the snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou oh prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into hell satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.

Catholics Do What?, Contraception, JPII, Pornography, Sex, Theology of the Body

Contraception and the Catholic Church: {part 2} What’s wrong with contraception?

June 16, 2015

Yesterday we began with a little overview of the historical background on the practice of contraception and how for 1,900+ years, Christianity uniformly condemned the practice. Today we’re going to delve into the why behind it: why when the rest of the world has heralded the Pill as a technological innovation on par with electricity and the internal combustion engine (seriously, read some of the UN’s documents on women’s rights) Rome has stubbornly refused to capitulate on the matter.

And it’s not because the Church is anti woman. It is, in fact, because She holds women in such high regard and is so intimately concerned with the dignity of women – and men – that She continues to firmly, gently, uncompromisingly say “no.”

It’s the same reason I say no to my kids when they bolt in parking lots and run blindly into the street after a stray soccer ball. It’s the same motivation that compels me to store poison up high and restrict certain media content from entering our home.

I love them.

I love them enough to say no to them even when they’re really, really sure the thing they want to do is worth doing, and is a good to be pursued.

I don’t want them to get hurt, and if I know better, as the wiser, older, well-formed and properly instructed parent, I say no.

Even when it frustrates them. Even when they tantrum.

Because their ultimate happiness is tied to their wholeness and their health, body and soul, and I won’t permit them to inflict self harm in pursuit of a temporary perceived good when I know the long-term cost is one of destruction and heartache.

So what, exactly, is wrong with contraception?

Contraception is anti life because it opposes the creation of new life physically, by preventing fertilization or by means of preventinve sterilization, but it’s also anti life because many popular forms of contracption are actually abortifacient in nature, meaning they are capable of causing early abortions as a secondary line of defense against pregnancy.

Some examples of this are IUDs, the Depo Provera shot, and certain forms of the Pill, including but not limited to the so called “Morning After” pill.

But even those forms of contraception that aren’t capable of causing abortions – condoms or diaphrams or the good old-fashioned withdrawal method, – they’re still anti-life. They still strip away the procreative aspect from sex, and as we understand as Catholics, sex has two fundamental purposes: it is both procreative and unitive.

And in its perfect design, sex is good. It’s very good. There’s no question about it.

Because sex is fundamentally ordered to bring forth new life – it’s literally how God is writing the story of Salvation History, how He continues to bring new life into the world – it is intended to unite and bond the spouses.

So sex is supposed to feel good. It’s supposed to be wildly delightful and desirable. And it is fundamentally ordered toward the creation of new human life. Not every sexual act will result in new life, nor is every act capable of doing so (read: any biology textbook explaining the human reproductive cycle, paying particular attention to the female body) but God designed sex to bring forth babies. Not every time, but a lot of the time. And the Creator of sex – and of people – is the One who has the ultimate say so.

St. JPII was the master of interpretting – and putting into laymen terms – Christian sexual ethics. His early work “Love and Responsibility,” written when he was still Karol Wojtyla, includes sections on mutual enjoyment and sexual satisfaction between spouses that could make a public school health teacher blush. So forget anything you’ve heard about the Church – or God – being anti-sex.

God created sex, and He created sex in order to continue creating us. Think about that!

It’s the only way He chooses to bring new souls into being. So of course it’s an area of life where we are particularly vulnerable to attacks from the enemy, and to our own concupiscience.

God doesn’t surround us with rules and regulations governing the sexual realm because He’s some kind of cosmic killjoy – it’s because sex is so good and so holy, and because it’s where we participate with Him, directly and intimately, in creating the world anew.

But how do you explain this to someone?

It’s a tough pill to swallow in a culture like ours, so obsessed with the idea of sex but with limited experience with the thing itself.

We’ve got plenty of experience with pornography, with sexually explicit content, with sexual innuendo … but with real sex? With the profound communion of persons, united in the sacramental love of spouses, freely giving and receiving the entirety of the Other?

We aren’t as familiar with that.

Our culture styles itself as sexually free and fulfilled, but to look around is to recognize the price we’re paying for this apparent freedom, as individiuals and as a larger community.

Sex, “freed” from the bonds of marriage and the responsibility of parenthood, is actually fairly disastrous. Particularly to women and children.

Rather than making us – especially women – more free, contraception has resulted in deeper slavery – sometimes literally as we witness in the growing global scourge of human trafficking (which is fundamentally enabled by and dependent upon the availability and effectiveness of contraception), and sometimes solely on a spiritul level, no less real, but often unseen and unacknowledged.

Because sex, divorced from love, divorced from its life-giving potential…is just another bodily function. An exchange of fluids and pleasantries, and an opportunity to use and to be used; perhaps with a stranger or perhaps with your spouse.

And this is the antithesis of what God designed it for, designed us for – to give and to receive love.

And in each of those scenarios I mentioned above – the one night stand, the casual relationship, the paid transaction – made possible by the availabilty of contracption, there is damage done to both the relationship and the participants.

Because in reality?

There is no such thing as casual sex.

There is no such thing as protected sex.

And there is no such thing as “safe” sex.

Sex isn’t casual, even if the two (or more!) constenting parties spit shake and swear on it. You can’t unhitch a thing from its meaning just by saying so.

And since sex is not a human innovation but a divine invention, purposefully and intelligently designed for us and for our good…we’re not the ones who get to write the user’s maual on it.

Stay tuned for later this week when we’ll talk about the hard cases, the heartache of infertility, and the fundamental difference between NFP – Natural Family Planning – and contraception.

{click here for part 1 in the series}

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