relativism – Mama Needs Coffee

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Apparently, it’s because fairy tales “encourage outdated gender norms” and that children “as young as four” are reportedly manifesting “gender biasing behaviors” in their play and make believe.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

Catholic Spirituality, Evangelization, Homosexuality, relativism, Theology of the Body

Lost friendships, hard truths, and homosexuality

September 9, 2016

This is a sensitive topic, and it’s a post I’ve been mulling over in my head for a long time. My closest male friend in college was gay, and I loved him. We spent many a lazy afternoon together drinking margaritas on the patio of our favorite Mexican watering hole, singing Tim McGraw karaoke and enjoying the endless sunny days Boulder, Colorado had to offer. The last time we spoke, it was to meet for drinks when I introduced my now husband to his then boyfriend. We shook hands, we laughed, we played pool, and we never spoke again.

That was almost 8 years ago now, and I think about him from time to time and go over the slow drift that pulled us apart after college. I wonder if there was some way we could have kept going forward, he living an openly gay life which I never once condemned him for, and me a practicing Catholic, married with a vanful of kids. I don’t know that we could have done anything differently, either of us, to keep things on track, but it hurts my heart to think about what we left behind because of seemingly irreconcilable differences.

I know that part of what caused the drift was his knowledge that my position on homosexuality was immovable. That much as I loved him unconditionally, I would never affirm him in his lifestyle choice. We both smoked at the time and while it was enjoyable, we both knew we should quit – tried to quit together, several times – because we knew the pleasure came at too high a cost. I am not drawing a moral equivalent between homosexuality and smoking, only pointing out that the tension between human desires and cravings and what is actually good for the human person is as old as humanity itself.

The final time we saw one another, I think we both recognized it as such. As much as we practiced kindness and respect for one another, what he wanted from me was compete acceptance of his homosexual relationship, and that I could not give. It simply wasn’t enough that I greet his boyfriend with friendliness, that I shake his had warmly and laugh with him over vodka sodas. He wanted more. And I don’t blame him. The differences that drove our friendship apart are heartbreaking, but they remain irreconcilable.

All of my love and kindness weren’t enough, so long as they fell short of total acceptance of their relationship.

Why, some of you may be asking, couldn’t I just get over myself for the sake of our friendship and tell them that I was happy for them? Why rock the boat so hard someone had to fall overboard?

I guess the answer is twofold. First, we never actually had the “I don’t approve of your lifestyle but I love you unconditionally” talk. We didn’t have to. He just knew. Without my explaining a single thing, he understood that I was Catholic, and that the same morality that precluded premarital sex and marked me out so singly at 1 am down on Pearl Street was the one that informed my view of homosexuality. He also knew I loved him like a brother. He felt the irreconcilability of our opposing positions, and it hurt him. It hurt me, too. But while my other roommates never forced me to choose between accepting their IUDs and sleep-over boyfriends and them, he did.

And thus we come to the real difficulty with the age we inhabit: Anything short of total acceptance is insufficient, and agreeing to disagree no longer seems agreeable enough to remain on one another’s Christmas card list. Or, in a more modern twist, to remain Facebook friends. Because that’s how it played out in real life. With the single click of a button, I was banished.

He wanted not only friendship, but tacit approval. He wanted me to change my moral position to suit his, to jettison my code of ethics and to adopt his own. Because it is uncomfortable to know that someone you love doesn’t approve of what you’re doing.

Just ask the family with 6 kids who gets ridiculed and chastised by extended family for going overboard in the procreation department. Ask the chaste, 32 year old female staffer on Capitol Hill living the single life in a sex-drenched social scene. Ask the young guy discerning the priesthood – and a life of celibacy – at a public university, regularly raked over the coals by his progressive sociology professor for colluding with an archaic patriarchy.

It is difficult to maintain your core values in the face of criticism, rejection, and hostility. It is even more difficult when real, live friendships are on the line. But what does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he loses his soul?

This scenario will only become more common as homosexuality becomes more widely accepted, and gay marriage becomes the law of the land the world over. Christians cannot run from the issue. We have to face it, head on, with clarity, charity, and utter humility. The time for polite private disagreement and crossing one’s fingers it doesn’t happen “in our family” has passed. It will happen. Because homosexuality is being advanced in public schools and universities and embraced by popular culture as a new, essential value. And those of us who refuse to recognize – to wholeheartedly embrace – this new value, will be made to suffer the consequences.

And that’s okay.

It is okay to suffer for your beliefs. Actually, if we aren’t suffering for them, I wonder if there might be something not quite right, as the Lord Himself flatly states in John 15:18.

So I want to wrap up with a charge and a challenge. The first is to know your beliefs, to read deeply and pray intensely into the issue, and to search the Scriptures and the documents of the Magisterium to know what you believe, and to be ready and willing to explain it and defend it. If you are struggling with the Church’s position on homosexuality – or anything else for that matter – then it is your responsibility to inform and then reconcile your conscience to the Truth. There have been numerous issues over the 33 years I have lived as a Catholic that have stopped me almost in my tracks. And my response can only ever be to question, to challenge, to study, and finally, to accept with humble obedience even when I do not understand.

The Church’s teachings are the teachings of Christ. If one of them is a sticking point for me, then it’s me who has to move. Not Him.

The second challenge I have is this. Do you have a friend, a neighbor, or a relative who is gay? Do you keep the relationship at arm’s length, hoping the difficulty won’t rear it’s inconvenient head? Are you being authentic in your love for this person, or are you intentionally keeping it surface level to keep the peace?

Don’t do that.

If there’s one thing I wish I could do over with my lost friendship, it’s that we talked more openly and more intentionally about that elephant in the dorm room. I don’t know that it would have changed the outcome, necessarily, but I think I’d wonder less about “what if?” and I know that part of what held me back was cowardice. Was wanting to keep things agreeable, friendly, light.

But look where that got us.

I hope he knows how much I loved him, and how much I love him still. And that no amount of disagreement between us had to end things. If he called tomorrow, we could pick right back up. I know a great margarita place just down the street, and we could talk for hours.

(Comments on this post are closed. Respectful dialogue is welcome on Facebook.)

Abortion, Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Evangelization, Homosexuality, politics, Pro Life, reality check, relativism, sin, Suffering

The power of language and the witness of words

August 9, 2016

It is a curious time to be a Catholic Christian. (Is it ever not, though? I think maybe we all fall prey to a little good old fashioned chronological snobbery, whether or not we care to admit it.)

On the one hand, I live in America and for the most part, shuttered adoption agencies and defunct bakeries and cancelled after-school Bible clubs aside, the persecution that Christians face here is still on the lightish side. And many would shrug off the aforementioned incidences not as persecution at all, but as the rightful assertion of a collective morality over defiant and wrong-headed individual dissenters.

On the other hand, it is gravely concerning how very much the pace of things has accelerated, for society to embrace, wholesale, things that a decade and a half ago would have registered clearly on our collective consciences as “wrong.” There are now plenty of Christians who wouldn’t bat an eye at a 12-week abortion, embryonic stem cell research performed “for a good cause” to fight the horrors of ALS, of helping an elderly parent or terminal cancer patient end his or her life with a prescription written by the hand of their own physician.

In Colorado this last piece is coming to the ballot this November, under the tidy euphemism “physician-assisted suicide,” but more popularly nicknamed “death with dignity.” So as you exit your favorite natural grocery store you might be intercepted by a cheerful, clipboard-wielding volunteer in a neon green t-shirt earnestly inquiring into your concern that sick and elderly people have “dignified end of life choices.” Which is a whole lot harder to answer “no thanks” to than, say, “should Coloradans vote to let people who want to die kill themselves with a prescription written by a doctor?”

Language carries the day. As it always has. And it becomes essential for those of us who believe in a God Who is the Author of life to reclaim these conversations on a linguistic level.

It seems a small thing, a popular word or commonly-accepted term here, a turn of phrase there. Look how much traction gay “marriage” has gotten in a few short years.

When the phrase first came into existence, Christians and other people who recognized the impossibility of two same-sex individuals, however sincere their love, contracting what we all commonly understood to be marriage, had no problem throwing quotes around the term, because it was an imprecise and incorrect application of a recognized reality. But repeated loudly and often enough, we’ve now all but lost that point.

There’s no longer any room in the national conversation to point out “actually, marriage is a covenant contracted between two consenting opposite-sex adults, for the purpose of creating and raising a family and contributing to the development and continuation of civilization.”

I guarantee if you bust out that last sentence at the neighborhood block party, you’d either get a drink tossed in your face or find yourself with a semi-circle of bewildered acquaintances backing away from you in a hurry.

Because we’ve conceded that point on a linguist level and on a legal level. And now we must hide behind our “personal beliefs” or “chosen religious faith” when making the point, which, in a secular society governed almost exclusively by the court of public opinion, is a weak position to operate from indeed.

By forcing religious belief and morality into a corner, meant now to be tucked handily into one’s pocket and not revealed in polite company, the secular Left have employed a chillingly effective strategy, with hardly any real persecution necessary. We zip our own lips instead, avoiding tough topics with friends and coworkers, afraid of causing a scene, afraid of professional fallout, not looking to start a fight.

Guess what? That isn’t going to work much longer.

Every inch that Christians give over as a forgone conclusion: that children don’t deserve to be protected by their parents, that religious belief is a private matter that must be exorcised from the public square, that the government dictates morality to the people, and not vice versa…every one of these small skirmishes that we offer up in embarrassed silence, not wanting to muddy the waters, brings us closer and closer to a civilization in which we have no voice.

Because we stopped using our words.

Because we stopped having conversations at the only level that truly matters: personal, one-on-one, and rooted in trust and authentic relationship.

How on earth can we expect our gay neighbor to ever understand our position, however rooted in love and respect, if she does not hear it from our lips, but relies instead on Rachel Maddow’s punditry to inform her how we – Me! Her friend next door! – really see “them.”

How can our children defend their position on abortion to a school bus full of teammates if they’ve never participated in compassionate and nuanced conversations around the dinner table about human dignity and real feminism and authentic healthcare?

How can we expect our leaders to legislate based on objective morality rather than creating morality based on subjective legislation if all of our voices fall silent, all at once, afraid to break the peace, afraid to ruffle feathers, afraid to look foolish.

It is time to look foolish.

It is past time.

It is time to answer truthfully to the question “do you plan to have more children?” Or “have you thought about scheduling a vasectomy” with His truth, not the truth of the day. It is time to explain to a curious coworker that no, you couldn’t vote for a woman who holds up abortion as a fundamental human right, no matter how compelling the circumstances might seem. To defend your position on the intrinsic evil of torture around the campfire at a guy’s fishing weekend. To explain to a friend with an aging parent that some things are worse than suffering, and that some choices are always wrong.

It is time to struggle with hard topics and harder choices out loud, in a way that is authentic and vulnerable and worthwhile, so that someone else who is searching for the truth might see a glimpse of it reflected in your life, however much you might be screwing it up and failing.

Because that is what it means to be a Christian. It means to wrestle with God, accommodating ourselves to His reality, humbly admitting that we don’t understand, that we aren’t doing it perfectly, and that we’ll get back up again and try – with His grace – to do better next time.

But it does not mean falling silent while evil is perpetrated all around us. It doesn’t mean (guilty here!) sliding into a comfortable, surface-level relationship devoid of authenticity with your neighbors so that nothing unpleasant ever comes up to muddy the waters.

We must use our voices while we still have them, because our words have power, power given to us by the One in whose image and likeness we are created.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Christians, it is time to speak up.

“The days of socially acceptable Christianity are over, the days of comfortable Catholicism are past…It is no longer easy to be a faithful Christian, a good Catholic, an authentic witness to the truths of the Gospel. A price is demanded and must be paid.”

– Professor Robert P. George, Princeton

Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, euthanasia, relativism, sin, Suffering

What’s wrong with the world today?

June 23, 2016

I am.

Me, me, meeeeeeee.

GK Chesterton was and is and will be until kingdom comes, right about that.

As any sense of sin and evil and wrongdoing has receded into the background of our collective consciousness, I’ve noticed an alarming uptick in the propensity for people to sling vicious mud at one another all the while maintaining that notions like wrong, evil, and immoral fade into antiquity.

How can a culture embrace atheistic secularism wholesale, jettisoning any shared code of moral ethics, and expect to remain cohesive? How, if there are no objective standards of reality, of common decency, of truth tethered not in fads and feelings but in time-tested knowledge about reality and human nature, can we go forward?

The past several months have seemed increasingly insane. Because the world is going mad.

How can we converse in earnest about women’s safety, bemoaning the rise in rape culture while all the while continuing to protect the “rights” of hardcore pornographers and pimps in the entertainment industry?

How can we pontificate on the horrors of modern day slavery and sex trafficking while continuing to champion – and publicly fund – Planned Parenthood, perhaps the largest corporate enabler in the West of underaged victimization?

How can we champion inclusivity and acceptance for some disabled persons, while actively campaigning for the deaths of others?

Easy. Because we’ve jettisoned our individual consciences.

When human beings outsource morality, which was designed to operate in accordance with a well-formed conscience, we get the tyranny of the now.

When we allow the larger culture to dictate morality back to us rather than speaking wisdom and life into the culture from the knowledge contained in our own soul, meant to be the dwelling place of Wisdom, then we are met with chaos. An anarchy of opinions and competing worldviews, and an utter lack of consensus on what it means to be good, to do good, and to refrain from evil.

If you carry relativism to its logical conclusion, you arrive at a world so totally unmoored from reality that there is hardly room for a conversation about anything of substance.

When we stop informing our own hearts and forming our own consciences with something – Someone – greater than ourselves, we become enslaved to sin. Even if we won’t admit sin exists.

And only a world bereft of properly-formed consciences and selfish, small hearts (raises hand) could produce times such as those we are living in.

Rejecting the notion of sin has not liberated us, as was promised.

Plugging our ears and closing our eyes to the reality of evil has not rendered for us a more humane planet on which to dwell. If anything, the less religious our society becomes, the more cruel and the more brutal – however masked by convenience and technology – our lives become.

Jettisoning traditional religious practices and a stodgy, smothering Deist worldview was supposed to make us more free. So why then is our society coarsening as we strip away traditional values and reject moral norms?

Because we weren’t made to work this way.

Because original sin.

Because everything that’s wrong with the world we’re living in, past, present, and future, has its locus in human frailty. And the moment I forget that and try to remake myself in some benign, secular post-modern image is the moment I begin to lose sight of my neighbor’s humanity.

Of her needs and her pain. Of her fundamental orientation to love and to be loved, in her entirety. Of the truth that certain rights belong to her, utterly separate from my opinions or ideas about her, by virtue of her human nature itself, created in the image and likeness of a Creator.

Otherwise, if her rights depend upon my capricious appetites and ideas? Quite frankly, she doesn’t stand a chance.

Listen, I believe people can be good and just and noble apart from practicing a traditional religion. But only when they behave accordingly: justly, nobly, and with goodness. And noble pagans such as these are practicing the essence of Christianity, whether or not they acknowledge it as such. And that’s how civilizations flourish. Because without it, there is only suffering.

Plato, in his Republic, said as much: “In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature,” and “there is no conceivable folly or crime which . . . when he has parted company with all shame and sense, a man may not be ready to commit.”

This thing we’re giving a go right now here in 2016, with individual “rights” rooted in appetites and passions and personal opinions unmoored from reason or reality, is not gonna fly. And to the extent that I can properly form my conscience and then (the hard part) behave accordingly, I can help to save the world.

Because we each of us, simultaneously, both “what’s wrong with the world,” and also the antidote.

Chesterton was right, And Plato was too. We are what’s wrong.

And we can become what is right, to the extent that each of us makes the effort to form and then follow our consciences, based not in passing trends, but in timeless truths, which are far less likely to be persuaded that some lives, after all, may be more valuable than others.

Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Evangelization, Family Life, relativism, social media, Suffering

What can we do? Practical steps for living in an age of terror

June 13, 2016

God, I’m sick of this.

I’m sick of opening my computer in the morning and seeing the latest body count splashed across my newsfeed. Of my husband cautiously, almost furtively asking me over the din of a weekend breakfast table, masking the gravity of the situation from tiny ears, “did you see the news about Orlando?”

You don’t even have to wonder, anymore, when someone asks “Did you see …” Heart sinking, thoughts racing, inevitably, another terror attack.

Maybe it’s not any more dangerous to raise children in this age than in any other, and maybe that’s the illusion of an unceasing news cycle and the flat, digital world we dwell in, but it seems a hell of a time, just the same.

One week we’re agitating for more death, for death enshrined by law, slickly sterilized for public consumption by that convenient mechanism dubbed “privacy,” and the next we’re reeling from another mortal blow, more death, death in unprecedented numbers, death by ambush.

Death begets death.

And reading the news today makes me want to cry. To curl up into a ball and gather my children under my arms – not that they all quite fit there – and hide.

I didn’t sign up for this. For raising kids in a culture that is self destructing. For growing a family in an age of terror and hatred and so much uncertainty.

Except that I did.

Yesterday at Mass, before we’d had news of Orlando, our parish welcomed two new Christians into the family. As their parents held squirming toddlers over the baptismal font and their godparents clutched newly-lit flames kindled from the Easter candle, from Christ Himself, the adults promised on behalf of those squirming babies to reject Satan, and all his works, and all his empty promises.

To reject the glamor of death, the allure of evil.

Because it’s real.

And, for reasons God felt sufficient to merit the decision, our free will allows us to choose evil.

I choose evil every day. I give in to a surge of anger at a traffic light, tapping my horn in frustration, muttering under my breath about a texting driver (like I’ve never done the same.) I raise my voice to my children. I spend too much time surfing the internet and not enough time on my knees. I have a moment of pure rage towards someone well up in my heart, and rather than reject it outright, I nurse it, just for a moment or two, relishing the feeling of being angry. Of being right.

The only real answer to the problem of evil in our world is the very same answer to the problem of evil in my own life: conversion.

Continual, frustrating, and sometimes humiliating conversion. Because life without Christ is hopeless.

This world is a mess, and truthfully, it always has been. And yet He saw fit to redeem it.

But we must participate in that redemption, because He loves us so much He drew up the contract along those lines: active participation.

So here are some practical ways we can fight terror in our own homes.

1. Mother Teresa will be canonized this Fall, and one of my favorite one-liners from her is the best medicine for our age:

“What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.”

Love begins at home, in the family. It is where our children will learn – or will not learn – their intrinsic value. It is where they will learn to share, to give and receive a sincere gift of self, to witness sacrificial love, to be heard and to be seen, to be convicted of the inestimable value of every single human life. Give your children, your siblings, your family members more love than you can bear to give. Ask God for more patience, more humility, more courage, and love your children and your spouse with a love that is truly outside your self. I fail at this every day. I must keep trying.

2. Frequent confession and reception of Holy Communion.

Look, the world we’re living in, even if the internet is contributing a bit to the impression, is bat.shit.crazy. It’s not okay that I think about terrorism when I’m queuing up for my next flight, when I take my kids to a museum or a baseball game. But the number one thing I can do to protect them – and myself – is to live, as much as possible, in a sacramental state of grace. That means daily Mass when possible (note to self: even when 2 year old is kicking me in the throat), Confession every couple of weeks, and making a daily examination of conscience.

Not only does this contribute to a higher likelihood that I will die in a state of grace, please Lord, but it makes me a better person.

Without Jesus and the grace of the Sacraments, I am, as I’m sure is evident in some way from this blog, a fairly miserable loser. That’s just me being honest. If I can continually be redeemed and recreated as a better, happier, holier person, how far might that go in influencing my immediate neighbors for the good?

3. Devotion to the Rosary, and to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

We’ve been meaning to get our home enshrined to the Sacred Heart for a couple months now. We bought a beautiful icon, hung it in a prominent place, and have since somehow failed to have a priest come over for the official “enthronement,” despite knowing, oh, 2 dozen or so, personally. (If that’s not commitment to laziness, I don’t know what is. But I digress.)

We do plan to do it soon. But just having the image in our living room has me stopping multiple times per day to place a finger or a kiss across Jesus’ heart, reminding myself as I look at His image what I’m supposed to be doing, and for Whom. (For a quick explanation of how keeping pictures of your loved ones in your home is not idolatry, click here.)

I try (and mostly fail) to pray a Rosary each night. We’ve had off and on success praying a decade with the kids at some point during the day, this season being more on the “fail” side. Our kids sleep with rosaries at their bedsides for easy access during the night. They’re comforting sacramentals – tangible reminders of the real graces available to us through prayer and devotion – and, as my 4-year-old likes to remind us, “Mary kicks the devil’s butt.”

Yeah she does.

4. Smile.

Smile at strangers. Stop and help someone who’s car is broken down, if you’re in a safe area and you’re able to do so. Give that guy a dollar. Buy someone’s coffee behind you in line. Call your sister or your friend and offer to pick up some extra milk and diapers while you’re at Costco. Tell your husband to sleep in while you get up and make the oatmeal. Call your mother in law and tell her you love her. Put your phone away and talk to the checker, the barista, the girl sitting next to you at the pool. Tell your server if you like her nails, his glasses, her hair cut.

Reach out, reach out, reach out.

We live in a lonely world. We can each be a little light in the loneliness, and give someone else the gift of knowing that, at least in that moment, they aren’t living in an age of terror.

Hatred needn’t have the final word.

Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Pro Life, relativism

The unsexiness of death (or what ‘Me Before You’ is missing)

June 3, 2016

One of these days I’m going to write a nice, fluffy post aaaaaaall about my favorite organic non-hormone disrupting eco-friendly non-GMO spray sunscreen. Or something like that.

Today is not that day.

This weekend marks the opening of Hollywood’s latest offering in the relatively new genre of “death porn,” and it’s a doozie.

I haven’t (and probably won’t) see the movie, because I prefer to remember Finnick losing his life in a heroic act of self sacrifice in the fetid sewers beneath the Capitol, not (spoiler alert) committing suicide while his approving-yet-heartbroken girlfriend holds his hand, and the bottle of pills.

But I did read the book.

And this story, this little love-story-that-actually-wasn’t, is, I think, more dangerous than some of Hollywood’s earlier attempts. Million Dollar Baby sent a depressing message about the value of an elite athlete’s life post-major-trauma, but the confused message of “loving someone enough to kill them” at least wasn’t mixed in with romantic love. It’s a small “at least,” but a notable one, I think, for our culture which has sexual love on a perilous pedestal indeed.

This story is a little different, because the main character is already paralyzed and clinically depressed when he meets his would-be lover and eventual suicide accomplice. It wasn’t a tale of knowing the man before the profoundly life-altering trauma, but knowing – and falling in love with – only the man he was afterwards: the crippled man in the power chair.

So it’s possible, then, to fall in love with a human being who has been profoundly damaged by disease or accident. Because his essence, his intrinsic value, is unchanged. But what this movie gets so wrong is it’s seminal manifestation of love. The climax in this love story isn’t a sex scene, but a suicide scene.

Hollywood has sex pretty backwards, as it is, but things take a complicated cultural turn when we move from letting our feelings be the sole barometer for our sexuality (check) to letting our feelings be the criterion against which we measure the goodness of our continued existence.

Do I feel like I’d be better off dead? Do I have a plan for how I’d like to make this happen? Could I get my loved ones to endorse and even participate in this plan? (This used to be called clinical depression with suicidal ideation, and I’m pretty sure it’s still in the DSM. For now.) Great! Cue next major Social Movement of Great Significance, which you’d better get behind or else you might be a Bigot with a capital-B.

Eons ago, the year before last, Brittany Maynard was catapulted into global fame for her own battle for “death with dignity.” Physician-assisted suicide enthusiasts “Compassion and Choices” jumped onto her bandwagon and road it hard and fast to her eventual suicide death, on November 1st, 2014. It was, by that point, such a Truman Show-esque spectacle, one wonders whether she was able to exercise complete freedom, in the end, or if the intensity of nearly worldwide scrutiny and a nasty public debate signed her death certificate months before the actual event. It was a tragedy.

Telling clinically depressed, chronically ill, and paralyzed people that their lives are not worth living is a tragedy.

Inviting millions of viewers into the complicated, imaginary love triangle between Lou, Will, and his quadriplegia and driving home the message the the charitable, noble, and humane solution to his suffering is death, is a tragedy.

I hope this movie’s legacy is that it gets people talking about the chilling double standard which exists between disabled people – cripples, as one feisty wheelchair-user prefers we call her – as opposed to us able bodied “regular” folks.

Is a human life only as valuable as the sum of a body’s working parts? To the extent that it’s wanted? The right color? The preferred age, weight and gender?

Either all human life is valuable, or none of our lives have value. Not yours, not mine, not Barack Obama’s or Pope Francis’ or Taylor Swift’s.

Our value does not fluctuate with age. Ability. Wealth. Employment status. Health.

Stand up for life this weekend by having a conversation with someone about this movie, and about the idea that a person with a disability is somehow exempt from being assessed against the same mental health criterion as an able-bodied being. Be prepared for some discomfort. But don’t be surprised if, 5 years from now, we’re not watching romantic dramas about euthanasia between consenting adults, but about parents dispatching terminally ill children “out of love.”

Ever read The Giver?

Things always sounds crazy and far-fetched until suddenly they start to sound a little more like common sense. Maybe because we’ve heard them repeated loudly, and frequently, enough.

Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Evangelization, Pro Life, relativism, sin

Gorillas, internet mobs, and the culture of the living dead

May 31, 2016

“The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual . . . what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”

So reads an excerpt from a 2012 study from the Journal of Medical Ethics, edited by Prof Julian Savulescu, (the director of Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, who will presumably have his ass kicked by CS Lewis at the moment of his death. But I digress.)

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons,” the study explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

Simcha Fisher wrote a piece last month that resonated deep, and wiped the last vestiges of hope from my brain that Western civilization could be rehabilitated, wholesale. We’re beyond that. Once death becomes an option, Simcha reasoned, then it becomes the only option. For there will always be a perfectly reasonable explanation for culling the herd of humanity for someone else’s sake.

When our lives cease to be acknowledged as divine in origin, the claim to any sort of inalienable right falls on deaf, progressively aloof ears.

How can a clump of cells be valuable, except to the host who carries it in her womb, and even then, only to the extent that she desires it?

How can a tangled, palsied mess of stiff limbs and a vacant stare be valuable to parents who signed up for a baby, doesn’t matter boy or girl, “as long as it’s healthy,”?

How can a defiant, aggressive, self or sibling-harming 2 year-0ld (most of whom are borderline feral, as any honest parent will admit) be anything other than a mistake we could perhaps scrub from the roster and make another go at?

How could an ailing, demented parent with glaucoma and the first stirrings of Alzheimer’s be worth keeping, to the tune of $20,000 a month, in an assistant living facility, fading in and out of twilight and burning through the grandchildren’s inheritance?

How, indeed.

How, any of us?

Who among us is universally convenient. Useful. Pleasant. Smart. Sweet-smelling.

Who among us has never been a burden to another human soul, and can solemnly swear to avoid the near occasion of burden for all their days, so long as they live?

People have become so very disposable. And real love, the 21st century reasons, means learning to say “I’d kill you” should the circumstances demanded it.

(Oddly enough, real, live disabled people – or differently abled, as it were – don’t seem to share that opinion.)

A 4 year-old falls into a gorilla enclosure because his reckless, negligent mother had the audacity to lose him in a crowded zoo, and the world falls to pieces over the death of, wait for it … the ape. The mother of the nasty little boy who I presume ought to have been left to face the consequences of his own poor choices, Hunger Games style, is now receiving death threats by the hundreds and angry, internet-fueled hate missives by the thousands.

The two leading presidential candidates for the United States of America have either tacitly or explicitly endorsed the wonderful work done by Planned Parenthood, that behemoth of death, again and again.

We’re not sure if we want to live any longer.

We’re not sure if it’s worth living any longer.

Welcome to the dictatorship of relativism. Welcome to an existence so tentatively fixed in reality that one rough semester of junior high could determine whether you live to see your high school graduation, and which locker room you’ll use to change into your cap and gown, should you begin as Brad but end up as Brittany.

Everything is fluid, nothing is certain, and a subjective emotionalism seems to have swept into the vacuum left by our collectively-vacated common sense. Can a society survive the complete abdication of reason? And is it possible to maintain peace without an objective standard of goodness to which we all of us citizens aspire and cling?

I’m not talking about multiculturalism or pluralism, because of course, civilizations have flourished in their diversity, and precisely because of their diversity. But even pluralistic societies tended to be composed of citizens who hold to objective moral truths and adhered to a shared moral order, something along the lines of “don’t kill, don’t cheat, don’t steal.”

We’re beyond that, now. We’ve thresholded to a new echelon of humanity, where the old stodgy moral norms of the Abrahamic religious traditions can at last be swept away like so much patriarchal tartar, built up over millennia of brainwashing.

We have new gods: convenience and technology. All the rest can be jettisoned.

This is depressing as hell to read, isn’t it?

Because it is hell. This is actually what hell is like: an utter disregard for the good of the other, a complete rejection of God, and profound, terminal selfishness. So when you look up, bewildered, from another spiraling news cycle and wonder what in the hell is going on in the world, you’re on the right track.

Hell is precisely what is going on, in the world.

And that is why He came. That is why He’ll come again.

Jesus is the only possible solution to a world as broken as ours. And whether or not it’s broken any worse than Nazareth circa 2 BC is up for debate. But He is and has always been The Only Possible Solution.

It’s not a nice story. He’s not a happy, aspirational character from the annuls of history. He came so that we might have life, and life in abundance.

Because without Him? There is only death.

Look around.

About Me, Evangelization, relativism, social media

Antisocial media: the isolation of over-connectedness

May 19, 2016

I spend a lot of time online. Too much time, truth be told. I’m considering taking a serious social media hiatus this summer, with a house full of children and a backyard filled with wading pools.

And maybe this time I won’t come back.

I don’t mean I’d stop blogging. Just that I’d stop with the other stuff. The posting and cultivating an online presence. The consuming of news culled from anonymous “relationships” on Twitter, the ingestion of a never-ending stream of content and beauty, captivating though it may be, from a thousand different sources on Instagram. And the everything on Facebook, that deepest-seated enemy of human productivity. (At least for this early adapter.)

I don’t think the human mind was much designed for endless scrolling. And it’s making me stupid.

Stupid, and discontented.

I know that’s a crazy thing to say given that I am, in fact, a writer who depends upon the internet to promulgate her work. The irony is not lost on me.

But the internet, increasing, is becoming less of a tool for me and more of a master. I’m stuck in Q1 with inboxes from multiple platforms overflowing, demanding daily attention, and then, tired from so much reacting, I sit and I scroll, mindlessly consuming and consuming and consuming until suddenly, it’s 10 pm and I’ve read some fascinating things about artisanal cheese-making and travel tips for the summer season but I’ve also seen a lot of pictures of weird celebrity awards show couture and pictures of Scandinavian living room furniture groupings. And bohemian paint colors.

So poor me, I work online and the online world is working me over. Boo hoo, right?

Here’s the thing; I believe that God has called me to the work I’m doing now in this little space, telling truths and distilling teachings and connecting cultural dots…and I also believe He is calling me to something bigger and, for me, much, much more challenging.

And it’s my neighborhood.

It’s the real world.

It’s my friend across the street who has given me bags and bags of adorable girl’s clothing and sippy cups over the years, and has never heard a word from me about Jesus.

It’s the guy at Costco who compliments me on my kids’ behavior, despite the number of them, and who gets a vague half smile and a half answer when he presses, wanting to know if we’re “done” now.

It’s the girl in my mom’s group at church who is really hurting, who doesn’t have a dozen girlfriends and sisters at her beck and call and is hungry for real fellowship with a living, breathing human person.

Those are all areas where I’m so much more comfortable hiding behind a screen.

I frequently field comments along the lines of “I’d never be brave enough to say/write that…” but the truth is, it’s easy to be brave online. Just like, I imagine, it’s easy to be truly horrible online.

The cost is modest. The stakes are low. And while it takes a certain thickness of skin to speak truth to darkness, it takes a far thicker skin to say it in person, in love, to someone in real relationship with you.

I love the online community I’ve found in the Catholic blogosphere and through connecting with other women. And some of those relationships are undeniably real, though limited in their depth and scope. But the ones that have grown and developed have involved taking further steps: phone calls, voxes, in-person meet ups while traveling. Participating in a deeper way in each other’s lives. So while they may have been planted in social media, they’ve bloomed in reality.

Social media has an ability to bring people together. But it also has a chilling segregating effect, enabling little intellectual ghettos, little echo chambers, to coexist almost entirely unbeknownst to one another, helping to foster the illusion that everyone else is like me, everyone else understands this.

And we who live under the dictatorship of relativism are hard pressed to find common ground, with all truths being subjective and all options being equally valid, to converse in a truly productive fashion with those who hold differing opinions.

If we disagree mildly, it’s inconvenient. If we disagree strenuously, we turn away from one another in disgust, branding the Other a bigot, a hater, a whatever-phobic.

There is no room for relationship. We’re all so utterly detached from one another, thanks to our screens and our self-imposed lines of segregation drawn across our newsfeeds and curated, click by click, by our own preferences and points of view.

When I encounter my neighbor, smiling awkwardly from behind her own garbage can as we drag our blue beasts to the curb, we exchange bland small talk about the weather, the downed tree limbs from the recent storm, the impending end of the school year. I don’t know what she thinks about Planned Parenthood selling baby parts, or who she’s going to vote for in November, or whether or not she’s considering taking her kids on a mission trip to Malaysia or if her marriage is in trouble. I don’t even know how old she is, to be honest.

And we scurry back inside, comfortably at ease from the up-closeness that breeds such a particularly American kind of discomfort. It’s the same reason I don’t know a thing about the girl who makes my favorite cappuccino down the street at Peets, but in Italy, at All Brother’s Bar outside St. Peter’s Square, I had Tonio’s email address and knew his children’s names. He would take Joey in his arms and bounce him behind the counter as he pulled shot after shot of sweet black gold, filling orders and calling out greetings to his patrons while bouncing a blonde toddler on his hip.

I want that kind of life again.

(I want that kind of coffee again, while we’re on the subject.)

I want the kind of forced closeness and relationship that seemed to come so effortlessly and so inevitably in Italy, where my language skills were so limited, but my relationship skills were challenged and strengthened just by grocery shopping.

And I don’t want to romanticize things because boy, we had our struggles there, and I would have given a dozen friendly baristas for one close mommy friend or a sister down the block in Rome. But there was something utterly communal, in the deepest sense of the word, about how we lived there.

And I want to live that way again.

And I think I can…or at least, I think I can make a go at it. I’m sure we’ll never find another Tonio, not in suburban Colorado anyhow. But I think I can slam the laptop shut for the bulk of the daytime hours and wander out into my neighborhood with my phone holstered safely in my bag or, better yet, left to charge alone on the counter. Maybe I can walk the 15 endless feet that separate our two driveways and invite Steph over for a glass of wine on the porch. (The introvert in me recoils in terror)

Maybe I can answer in the most powerful way possible the question of what’s wrong with this crazy world we’re living in? with the one thing that’s ever really changed the world: a sincere gift of self.