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Bioethics, Contraception, Culture of Death, current events, Women's Rights

Rejecting fertility and rejecting God

March 19, 2019

The article begins like this: “A  movement of women have decided not to procreate in response to the coming ‘climate breakdown and civilisation collapse’. Will their protest be a catalyst for change?”

I can hardly think of anything I would enjoy reading about more on a frigid morning in March, so I click.

What I read is predictable but still sad, peppered with photos of earnest looking young women who report being so traumatized by the current state of affairs, whether politically, or environmentally, that they’ve opted out of procreation indefinitely, until or unless things dramatically improve.

The pain these women express as having motivated their decision to forgo motherhood is real, and their concerns are sincere. But the conclusions they have reached are so vastly upside down, so diametrically opposed to reality, such a radical rejection of what it means to be human, that it is hard to read them without getting angry.

Because these women have been fooled. They have bought into the most fundamental lie of all, that we can be like God, can take matters firmly into our own hands, and that we can save ourselves.

Most distressing and ironic is that in rejecting the possibility of motherhood, they are choosing to reject the very thing that makes us most like God: the ability to bring new life into the world, formed in His image and likeness.

I can hardly think of a more diabolical or effective strategy than one which would seek to convince women that in order to save the world, they must forgo participating in the creation of humanity.

Is it any wonder that satan would invert the order of salvation, convincing women that though it was through one woman’s fiat salvation entered the world, now that humanity is all grown up, woke as we are, we find our salvation on our own terms and by our own hands, through the closing of our wombs?

I don’t fault any woman who falls into this trap; many of us have been relentlessly instructed as to the grave dangers of our fertility, almost from infancy.

Even if we received a different message at home or in church, the incessant drumbeat of the culture and the media are loud and clear: fertility is a liability, femininity is a disability, and motherhood is a degradation and a sometimes dangerous demotion.

In order to retain our autonomy and minimize our risk and, apparently, to save the planet, perhaps it is best we not give birth to any sort of future at all, save for one which we create ourselves, for ourselves.

At its heart, rejection of procreation is a rejection of eternity, a rejection of the future.

It is also an echo, however little those who speak it might realize, of the very first non servium uttered in all of creation. It mimics the father of death in his refusal to submit to a larger vision than his own, to participate in a plan outside of his own control and design.

Reject the framework you’ve been given by your Creator, reject the mission He has revealed for you, and it’s no great leap to reject the Creator Himself.

The most audacious and revolutionary thing that a woman can do is to nurture new life into existence in a world gone dim, whether she nurtures that life in her womb or in her heart.

This is the world-shaking, culture-shaping power of motherhood. Its fruits outlive any regime, and its impact outlives any policy or programming.

To speak fierce, radical life into this flaccid, decaying culture of death, to say that come what may, I will choose to shepherd more of God into this world, to stake my life, my livelihood, and my own comfort on the possibility that He has something bigger in mind. . . this is true activism.

Don’t let the world sell you short, women. This is our moment.

“And who knows but that you have come into the kingdom for such a time as this.” – many of us are familiar with that line from the book of Esther. I think the line directly preceding it might be even more crucial: “For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish.”

We can’t let ourselves be fooled by what passes for wisdom in this day and age. God has something so much grander in mind for us.

abuse, Catholics Do What?, current events, Evangelization

2 things I believed about the Catholic Church that were totally wrong (and why anyone would stay Catholic)

February 12, 2019

How about a little remedial ecclesiology today? (Trigger warning: if you don’t like going past 1200 words, this piece might stretch you 5 uncomfortable minutes past your limit. I know, I know. Same! I tried my best to rein it in.)

The summer of shame is well in the rearview now, and we’re underway into a whole new calendar year. As 2018 waned, the days shortening and the nights darkening, it seemed that there would be no end in sight for the rage and pain felt by faithful and lapsed Catholics alike; how could this vile evil be seeping forth from the Church we knew and loved?

For survivors of abuse – men and women who knew all too well the evil that often lay hiding in plain sight – this pain was compounded by perceived silence and cowardice from high. Where were our pastors and shepherds back at the height of the summer’s scandalous and widely-splashed headlights?

Little by little we began to grapple with the ramifications of too few pastors speaking out due to, perhaps, their own lack of credibility. It’s awfully hard to condemn the log in your brother’s eye when you’ve got a telephone pole sticking out of your own retina. Others held back out of fear, perhaps at the advice of legal counsel. Still others felt – rightfully – personally horrified and enraged by the failures of their brothers when they had themselves been struggling heroically, often with little support, to walk the walk.

Many Catholics left. Some had distanced themselves eons ago, but made their separation a public affair after ingesting the wretched evil laid bare in the Pennsylvania report.  

Others quietly stopped trusting, stopped believing, and stopped attending.

For those who stayed, each of us have had to answer, if only for ourselves, why we did.

Peter, do you love me?

God knew that each of us who profess a faith in Jesus Christ and the Church He founded would need to dig deep in these days “to give an explanation for the hope we possess.”

It’s not like this was a curveball to the Almighty. He tells us plain, “Whatever is done in the dark will be brought into light.”

In other words, truly private sin is a human fantasy. Maybe it’s one of the oldest fantasies – I wonder if Eve thought, somehow, that the same God who had fashioned her from nothing, breathed life into her lungs, would somehow fail to notice her small act of rebellion? Like He was super busy checking on the mountains and fish and stuff.

Anyway, I’ve had numerous conversations with Catholics and non-Catholics alike over the past 8 months. Answered hard questions from strangers about why we’ll stay, about why we’ll never, ever leave.

But I can’t say I haven’t considered it. Back in July when revelations were coming to light seemingly faster than the Internet could link to them, I was daily overcome with rage and sorrow. And confusion. What I knew about the Church, the papacy, and the gates of hell all seemed, well…wrong. And I felt adrift.

I am a JPII Generation Catholic, as they say. I fell in love with the mystery and the history of Catholicism during the early years of Benedict’s papacy, called home by a mysterious grace seemingly wrought just for me in the final hours of St. John Paul II’s life. My conversion solidified and matured at Franciscan University of Steubenville where I encountered the word “theology” for the very first time. I probably know more about Catholicism than the average Sunday Mass-going Catholic, if only because of the Aquinas and Kreeft and Hahn and DeLubac I was assigned to read.

And I still considered leaving.

It turns out you can’t reason your way into continued belief. Faith is, at the end of the day, a gift. And an act of the will.

I am becoming increasingly aware that faith is both gift and choice. And that, having been handed the gift, I will be asked over and over throughout my lifetime to reaffirm my choice, and to continue to grow both in love and in knowledge of the Faith with a capital F.

Catholicism isn’t mine to interpret or define as I see fit. A radical notion for a postmodern mind, but one that we all fall prey to from time to time. My impoverished philosophical foundation led me to believe some fairly common fallacies about the Church which greatly intensified my pain and confusion this past year. Here are two of the errors I didn’t even realize I was carrying around in my brain; consider this a sort of “Ecclesiology 101” (ecclesia = church, ology = study of).

Myth 1: The Holy Spirit picks the Pope.

I don’t know that I literally thought this was what happened, but I certainly behaved as if I did.

Standing in a sodden St. Peter’s Square and breaking into wild jubilation with a hundred thousand strangers while watching that white smoke billow out of the Sistine Chapel chimney on the night of Pope Francis’ election didn’t do much to help dispel this myth. The papacy has always felt big and kind of magical to me. Probably because of the circumstances of my awakening to the Faith, and because of the big moments we’ve shared as a family with different Holy Fathers.

Nevermind that the Church, in 2,000 years of Petrine ministry had numbered in her ranks countless ineffective popes, weak popes, mediocre popes and outright evil popes. Because my Church history was an inch deep and my love for the modern popes was a mile wide, I was primed to be deflated by any shortcomings in a Roman Pontiff, either perceived or actual.

Reality: The Holy Spirit inspires the actions and deliberations of the College of Cardinals, assuming they are actively seeking His Will and living lives of virtue. (If I could double bold that last line, I would.) And then the Holy Spirit guarantees that whomever is elected can’t make a fatal mess of things.

As best as this armchair theologian can figure, the Holy Spirit really does this heavy lifting when it comes to preserving and protecting the Deposit of Faith:

The apostles entrusted the “Sacred deposit” of the faith (the depositum fidei),45 contained in Sacred Scripture and Tradition, to the whole of the Church. “By adhering to [this heritage] the entire holy people, united to its pastors, remains always faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. So, in maintaining, practicing and professing the faith that has been handed on, there should be a remarkable harmony between the bishops and the faithful.” CCC 84

…And in preventing heretical or erroneous teaching being promulgated “ex cathedra” or “from the chair” of Peter. Translation: The Pope cannot err when proclaiming, with the full weight of the Magisterium and in keeping with the revealed Tradition of the Church, the truth of something pertaining to faith and morals.

Can the pope have a mistress? Father illegitimate children? Be a heretic, privately? Give dumb answers to questions journalists ask? Believe wrongly that the superior flavor of gelato is crema? All yes. Which is so freaking hard to believe. But bear with me. Because myth number two which I believed was:

Myth 2: the Pope is the head of the Catholic Church

I mean, we do have a hierarchy, do we not? As an American who lives in a society of rules and laws and order, familiar with the organizational structure of human institutions, this is another one which I, frankly, sort of took for granted. Hence the outraged tweeting for the Holy Father to DO SOMETHING. FIRE SOMEONE. WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING??? last summer.

But, um, guys…the Church is not just a human institution.

Protects, defends, and transmits? Occasionally, when it suits, and sooner or later.

He is the leader of the Church on earth. The head of the Church’s hierarchy, the shepherd of the Universal Church on earth. But it isn’t Pope Francis’ Church, any more than it was Pope Benedict’s, or Pope Innocent’s, or Pope Gregory’s, or Pope John Paul II’s. 

Reality: Jesus Christ is the head of the Church.

“Christ is the Head of this Body:” Christ “is the head of the body, the Church.”225 He is the principle of creation and redemption. Raised to the Father’s glory, “in everything he (is) preeminent,”226 especially in the Church, through whom he extends his reign over all things. CCC 792

Jesus died for us, for His Church. Jesus had to forfeit His life in exchange for ours, hot mess that we were/are. And in an interesting throwback to myth number one, Jesus only personally chose the first pope: Peter.

So why have a pope? Why have a Church? Why have a Bible? Why not start from scratch every generation and do archeological and anthropological research to try to piece together anew what the OG Christians of Corinth circa 67 AD must have practiced and believed?

Is that what Jesus willed for us? To have to start from zero every time the saving water trickles over the brow of a new Christian, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son…”

The Trinitarian formula for baptism, by the way: how are we sure that’s a thing? Should we each be researching and verifying and making sure for ourselves way out here in 2019 that we’re practicing Christianity as Jesus Christ intended? If that’s the case, thank God for Google, rising adult literacy rates, and the printing press, right?

But the Church is for all people, for all times. The Church is not only for moderns with internet access and small group Bible studies. The Church is not only for white people with comfortable sanctuaries and good youth programming. The Church is not only for prisoners in need of mercy, for orphans in need of fatherhood, for prostitutes in need of conversion and redemption.

The Church is for all of us, for all of humanity, past, present, and future. The God who promised “I will not leave you orphans” has not abandoned us to our own devices.

We do not have to rely on our own wisdom, our own clever understandings of theology – or our not-so-clever understanding, for that matter – or even on the goodness of one particular person who holds a position of power at a given time in history.

St. Jerome says “ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.” The words of the Old and New Testaments wash over me every time I go to Mass, whether I’m sitting in recollected silence or wrangling an nasty toddler. I am steeped in Scripture when I sit in the church, which is mysteriously both a building and the Body of Christ, of which I am mysteriously a member and an essential physical component. I am brought into deeper relationship with Jesus Christ through the ministry of His Church and the encounter of His Word. The Church is both guardian and guarantor of the written, living Word of God.

I cannot turn away in solitude from the Body of Christ while clutching the Word of Christ to my heart.

What I read in Scripture casts new light in what I practice on Sundays. The liturgy is rooted in – not added on to – the Bible. Without the Church, we’d have no Bible.

Without the Church, we’d have no Sacraments. Without the Church, we wouldn’t know what to believe- we need the Church’s authority to teach, lead us, and sanctify us.

Because we can’t live without Jesus.

No matter how badly we humans behave. Perhaps because of how badly we humans behave; we need Him all the more. Come hell or high water – and perhaps the water will come right up to the gates…we need Him.

books, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, current events, decluttering, design + style, minimalism

Coffee clicks: What the Friday?

February 9, 2019

This week was one for the record books in terms of watching news come across the wires and wondering not once, not twice, but, well…a lot more times than that if we are, in fact, all still living in reality.

The Virginia governor who suggested keeping resuscitated hypothetical newborns comfortable until “doctors and parents” decide whether or not to….what, kill it? Literally we’re discussing after birth abortion now. Aka murder.But massage that language enough and you’ll get fascinating mind benders like “post-birth abortion” and “4th trimester abortion” and “newborn fetus.” Anyway, seems like he was a great guy in high school, too.

But wait, that’s not all! During President Trump’s SOTU address he made a few impassioned pleas for unity around the idea of not killing babies who accidentally survive abortions. Unsurprisingly, by this point in the week, these were not pleas that enjoyed bipartisan support.

But you know, it’s not all bad news. This episode of CNA Newsroom was one of the more beautiful things I’ve listened to in a long time. The comment towards the end of the second segment where the mother speaks about “emotional closure” is a profoundly edifying concept to meditate on, particularly in light of our culture’s desperate, clawing fear of suffering. We’ll do anything to avoid it, crush whatever innocent thing stands in our way, and yet the true path to serenity and long term emotional wellbeing is often found cutting directly down the middle of that suffering.

This is the real poverty of nihilism and atheism: To be alone, to be made to suffer alone and without meaning. For this reason I can think of almost nothing more devastating than abortion, separating mother from child, severing a most fundamental human relationship, and leaving a child to suffer terribly, and alone. Abortion is never the answer. Yes, even when it’s “medically necessary.”

Ashley’s ode to her oldest on his 9th birthday had me thinking how crazy fast things are starting to go. Especially as I did the math and realized I’m half a year away from having my own 9 year old. That’s wild to me. I must be getting older, because those “blink and you’ll miss it” statements used to make my eyes roll. Now they make them water:

“With a blink, it will be gone and ghosts of Lego messes and dance parties past will haunt me with such longing—uncaring that I spent every waking moment with them. It won’t ever be enough..”

Should Catholic politicians who publicly endorse – even clamor for – abortion be excommunicated? Perhaps. But I think it’s unlikely to happen, and even less likely to accomplish anything meaningful in the life of the excommunicated, as per the intention of the censure. Better to withhold and restrict reception of the Holy Eucharist which is the public affirmation we make as Catholics that we are united in practice and in belief with the Catholic Church and all that She professes.

Possible alternate headline: “Millennial takes socialism to its (il)logical conclusion”.

Tearing through this book, “Cozy Minimalist Home” – Myquillen Smith’s follow up to her runaway bestseller “The Nesting Place” – and guys, I AM HERE FOR IT. I rearranged my entire main floor this morning and it looks like I spent a grand at Home Goods. (Husband: I did not. I spent nothing.)

Before: 

After:

p.s. My entire “what I read in 2018” book list is here if you’ve got a case of the Februarys.

Have a great weekend wherever you are!

abuse, advent, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, current events

The “smaller church” is already here

November 30, 2018

Yesterday morning over coffee I sat down and read a news analysis piece published on our site, and a report from the National Catholic Register.

Both left me with a roiling stomach and an aching head. I fired off a message to a coworker thanking him for his excellent reporting and also confessing that I would very much like to commit murder after reading it.

Just when I think I can’t be shocked any further by the level of depravity and corruption within some leaders of the institutional Church – within the human soul – I am naively shocked anew.

I was raging about this to my husband this morning at the breakfast table and he asked me, kindly but frankly, “did you really not think this existed? Does this really surprise you?”

No. And yes.

And each time I read about another child’s life destroyed and another diocese or parish deceived by and forced to endure a predator in their midst, the rage bubbles up anew.

“You have to understand,” I began frustratedly, “that for an almost pathologically self-disclosing choleric like me, this level of duplicity is unfathomable.” I made the point that to live a similar level of deception would involve, for example, my obtaining regular secret abortions and having an IUD while continuing to publicly blog about the sanctity of life and the immorality of contraception.

“Give me,” I said dramatically, “all the gay pride marchers in the Tenderloin over a single, closeted gay bishop committing child abuse or sodomizing seminarians. At least they’re living in reality.”

How someone can preach the Gospel on Sunday and destroy a young boy’s life on Monday is beyond comprehension. I feel such impotent maternal rage. Dave made the comparison to Mary Magdalene; I snapped back that she wasn’t masquerading as a Pharisee while making her living as a prostitute.

Give me all the St. Mary Magdalenes throughout all of history over a single Judas. (Also, aren’t you glad you’re not living in a household headed by two adults who both work for or around the Church right now?)

I have no idea the point I’m making here, just that every time I read a new report or hear about another facet of the scandal, the rage boils anew. I made my long-suffering husband list off with me the number of good and holy bishops we knew personally. Maybe there are lots more, we don’t know all that many in the larger scheme of things. It was a modest list.

For all my adult life I’ve imagined that then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s infamous line about “a smaller, holier Church” would involve social collapse and government persecution. Now I feel quite certain that here, in the US at least, the smaller Church has already arrived.

It consists of Catholics who profess, believe, and live out the teachings of the Catholic Church. And who get their asses to Confession when they fall short, again and again. Clergy and laity alike.

It’s tempting to stay here, in a self righteous pique of rage. Every time I read another story of a cover up, a failure to act, a man who was entrusted with representing the fatherhood of God acting like another satan instead, I want to throw in the towel.

I won’t.

Especially considering this: that even within the embrace of holy Mother Church, I am still basically a miserable human being. I would be dead without the grace of the Sacraments. Spiritually, yes, but possibly physically too. I was reflecting on this as I was alone in my car yesterday afternoon, a rare moment of solitude. I turned off the radio and forced myself to reflect in the silence; there is precious little of it in my life in this present season.

I’m being a hypocrite. I was Catholic in name only in college. I was a miserable, wretched, pharisaical sinner.

I’m still a sinner. But back then, if somebody held me and my selfish, sinful, degenerate lifestyle up as a model of what Christians are like, my God, they’d lose their faith in an instant.

It’s not a perfect comparison. I never took vows of chastity or poverty or obedience. I wasn’t presenting myself as the public face of the Church. Not institutionally, at least. But I was, just the same, a public witness to the person of Christ.

What would someone who encountered Jenny of 2003 think of Catholicism? Of Jesus? Of His Church? It makes me acutely nauseous to consider.

And yet in my wretched poverty, He didn’t turn His back on me.

People within the Church who were pursuing lives of holiness and integrity welcomed me with open arms and refused to be scandalized by my sin.

Who am I to judge now, then? (And I’m not saying that the sinful and illegal actions in each of these cases should not be judged and prosecuted when they do come to light – just that perhaps it’s not my particular job to do so.)

I have to put aside my natural rage and the deep, deep desire for justice to be served and submit these impulses over and over again to Christ. Everything I’ve dragged to the confessional for months now has been this, and almost only this: that I cannot stomach another abuse report, cannot stand to read about one more instance of inaction from Rome, struggle mightily to rein in my imagination from making leaps to judgement.

But I must not leave. We must stand firm no matter how dark the days become. And I do believe they will become much, much darker.

I read this piece from Elizabeth Scalia this morning with tears springing to my eyes in public, hardly caring if the guy on the treadmill next to me saw.

Yes, Lord. It felt like I was reading words from the depths of my own heart, spilled out in someone else’s words.

Strengthen my faith, Lord. Don’t let me turn away when it becomes even darker.

Maranatha, Lord Jesus.

Culture of Death, current events, Evangelization, Homosexuality, Parenting

A transitioning culture

November 26, 2018

It started out as a little nugget of an idea, born from a series of quiet alarms going off in my head. Little things at first: a questionable book about penguins here, a little boy in a tutu, lipstick, and sparkly high heels at the library there, innocent encounters with my own kids where I’d gently redirect their wishes to marry their father, their same sex sibling, the family cat, batman, etc. to the reality of love and the gift of marriage and the truth which God has written into our hearts in creating us to – and for – love.

I remember vividly one such incident, explaining to my then two-year-old son that he can’t marry daddy or his big brother when he grows up because boys marry girls – if marriage is indeed the vocation they are called to – and glancing furtively over my shoulder to see if anyone at the neighborhood pool had overheard my bigoted explanation. Also, incest is not culturally appropriate. Yet.

Insanity, thy name is trying to parent in 2018.

That I, a seasoned mother of 5 and no stranger to the weirdness that is the little kid stage, would give pause to wonder – and worry – whether another parent might overhear me in a conversation with my toddler about what marriage is, is ludicrous. Should I pause with the same social trepidation when explaining to him that Batman isn’t real? That he can’t become a dog when he grows up? That he can’t marry his own sister, either?

We have become positively unhinged in our efforts to embrace anything – and everything – in the name of diversity. “Diversity month!” our local library cheerily announced on rainbow colored display boards, featuring pictures of, among other personalities, Mother Teresa, a kid in a wheelchair, a black female scientist, and a drag queen. Because the unifying factor in each of these unrepeatable images of God is…what, exactly? Since when is having a differently abled body or a call to serve Christ in the distressing disguise of the poor or being a woman of color advancing in the sciences on par with a man dressing in women’s clothing?

We are being slowly and steadily numbed to the oddness and the illness that is gender confusion. In the name of tolerance and marching under the banner of progress, we are being fed a diet of media and public policy proclaiming the end of the gender binary.

Progress! Select male, female, or other. Write in your own answer, depending upon what suits you. Encourage your children to think outside the biological box if they’d rather play with dolls and wear dresses, or prefer kicking a soccer ball to ballet lessons. Your penis is incidental, son. Your breasts are an aftermarket upgrade that we can easily have removed or modified to suit your taste, darling.

A human being is, after all, a blank slate, a tableau rosa upon which we may in this brave new world inscribe an identity of our own design. In this ultimate expression of materialism, the body itself becomes mere matter to be manipulated at will, a physical apparatus to express the inner self.

And it’s so close to true. It’s almost reality. Satan is never far from the truth. Indeed, his trademark is to manipulate and twist and tweak until it looks pretty darn close to the real thing.

A body is, after all, the incarnate expression of the person. Jesus Christ took upon Himself a human body in order to mediate the salvific love of the Father to fallen humankind. Christ’s body is an outward sign, a physical image of a spiritual reality. God became man and dwelt among us as a Son, a brother, a man. But His body was not insignificant to His incarnation; indeed was essential to the Incarnation.

Materialism would have us be masters of our own reality, manipulating the flesh at will like one more technology to be mastered. Bodies are reduced, in this vision, to incidental flesh-prisons that propel us through our earthly existence.

If my body has no meaning, no intelligent design, contains no intrinsic value endowed by its Designer, then why should I not manipulate it as I see fit?

There are real people who really do suffer from gender dysphoria. And some people are born with genetic deformities that render their secondary sex features unintelligible. Disease and dysfunction plague us on our earthly journey, reminding us that this side of eternity will always fall short. That this world is not, ultimately, our home.

But because a thing such as blindness exists does not justify us in gouging out our own eyes.

We are a culture infatuated with progress. We celebrate the destruction and reconfiguration of every cultural edifice, every possible human institution, figuring that if it has always been done one way, a new way is surely better. But the human person is not an iPhone. We shouldn’t approach our bodies as material to be upgraded and adapted to suit the latest trends. We have a Creator, and His design is intelligent, not incidental. When we forget that we were created by a loving God, that we were made for love and by love, then we begin to lose our bearings in reality.

And that is where our culture sits, in the West, in the year of Our Lord 2018.

We have forgotten who we are, and Whose.

If we are random creations of a chaotic universe, what does it matter if we want to mold and sculpt and reject and revise any part of our material selves? If life is meaningless and random, and humanity a stroke of dumb biologic luck, what harm in a little tinkering?

But we know better than this, as Christians. We know that we are not the random offspring of an impersonal universe, balls of genetic material that happened to lurch out of a primordial sludge at the right moment.

We are the willed, known, and loved children of a loving Father. Created to be sons and daughters who, in our sexual diversity as male and female, uniquely communicate some aspect of God’s nature to the world.

God is glorified in my femininity as woman who seeks justice and does not flinch from confrontation. These historically “masculine” characteristics do not suggest that I am a man trapped in a woman’s body, but that history has been incomplete in portraying the full human diversity exemplified by members of both sexes, as anyone with a fleeting understanding of how history came to be will concede.

Was Joan of Arc actually a trans man who donned armor and led armies into battle? I’m sure there are revisionist “gender theory” experts out there who would say so. In an ironic attempt to foster diversity, our culture ends up reinforcing the most stereotypical aspects of both sexes. Sensitive boys who prefer quiet activities and shun athletics might be gay, or might actually be in the wrong body altogether!

Or they might just be…sensitive boys. Men who have a broader spectrum of emotional awareness than the average male. Still fully male, and still uniquely and intelligently designed.

Rather than slavishly conforming to the narrow 2018 view of what constitutes our maleness and femaleness, we ought to push back and boldly proclaim the truth. That we are wonderfully made, and utterly unique. That each of us are personally willed, known, and loved by God. And that we live in a fallen, broken world that has been redeemed by Him and continues to be redeemed as we conform more and more to His nature, not to this present world.

If my 3-year-old unearths a stack of five (5!) copies of “I am Jazz” at the local library, you can bet those puppies are going straight to the bottom of the circular file. Because yes, I am intolerant of children being indoctrinated by a culture that would have them at odds with their very selves, questioning the goodness and the intention of their own bodies. I am bigoted against sin, which eats away at the human heart and separates us from the One who made our hearts. And I am positively rigid that children not be abused by their own parents, even at the expense of their very pressing wants and needs. My child believes that he can fly, use matches, and ride in the front seat of the car. I resist him on all fronts and continue to mentor him in reality; I don’t surrender to his capricious demands because he persists in them.

It’s not a matter of tolerance to allow poison in our children’s diets, no matter if the clamoring mob decides that arsenic is the new kale. We are called to fight for our children and to fight against the rulers and principalities of this world, those who seek to enslave and to destroy, to disfigure in any possible way the living image of God.

All that is necessary for this evil to continue to flourish is for good men and women to do nothing, to continue to turn away in discomfort, to keep the cable subscription or the streaming service with all the questionable content, to push the book back on the shelf and say nothing, to shrug our metaphorical shoulders, rationalizing “you can’t fight progress.”

Walking the wrong way into oncoming traffic isn’t progress. And sitting back and allowing the culture to continue plunging, unchecked, into debauchery and delusion is no progress either.

The time for going along to get along is long passed. If your kids are in public school, you can guarantee they’re getting schooled in the finer points of transgenderism on a regular basis.

The books that so disturb me when I encounter them in the library? They’re being actively circulated into school libraries and curriculums by forces with a vested interest in communicating with your children early and often, encouraging them to question reality and undermining their philosophical foundations. It is worth asking the question, why are some adults so invested in encouraging children to question their identities?

And why are adults who know better not rising up, en masse, to resist the insanity?

Because we have been steadily numbed to the onslaught of culture “progress” made in the past decade. Because what was unthinkable and illogical for all of human history has suddenly become possible and is therefore passably normal in 2018.

Human nature has not changed. God’s design for the human person has not altered. What was good in the beginning – male and female, He created them – is still good, even now.

And if reality appears to be moving away from that fixed point of reference, it bears asking, are we moving in the right direction? Not all movement is progress, after all.

(Thoughtful discussion and civil comments welcome on social media, though I won’t be there to read them)

abuse, current events, Homosexuality, Living Humanae Vitae, Pope Francis, prayer, Rome, scandal, Sex, sin

Disillusionment with the Church

November 12, 2018

Remember believing in Santa? Shhhh, my kids still do. Maybe that’s a bad analogy. Maybe you never believed in Santa. What about this: maybe you believed your mom or your dad to be invincible. Kind of superhuman or untouchable. And then you weathered your first big blow up between parents and an adult child. Or a shocking cancer diagnosis or the revelation of some kind of massive failing. I’m reaching for that feeling of deflation and just raw sorrow, of sort of coming unmoored and feeling unrooted. That has been the past 5 months for me, as a Catholic laywoman.

The Church whom I trusted implicitly, all my life, has broken my heart. Every morning there is a new story about some scandal, a message in my inbox about a parish whose pastor went on “administrative leave,” was arrested following – or at least incriminated by – some new allegation come to light.

The weight of it has ceased being a conscious burden; now it just feels like a sort of lingering heaviness, not unlike the way a clinical depression blurs the edges of reality and tamps down the colors and delights of daily living. I don’t mean exactly that I feel depressed about the Church, but that my perception of the Church has been shattered.

Even writing “the Church,” I’m not longer entirely sure what I mean. Do I mean the Roman curia? The Pope? The local bishop, who is technically my reference point for the authority of the hierarchy? Do I mean the parish down the hill where we worship? Our wonderful priests there who hear hundreds of confessions a week?

In many ways living here in Denver with such a vibrant Catholic community we have been isolated from much of the pain and scandal on an immediate level. In another sense, this makes things very strange when I feel “safe” in my own parish but feel utterly ill at ease in “the Church” at large. The Universal Church.

Our time in Rome this Fall, however beautiful, was also painful. Walking on a tour through the Vatican gardens, for example – what should have been a thrilling opportunity – was marked with sadness. “Here is the monastery where Pope Benedict retired to. There is the place where he used to like to pray, when he was more mobile.” My heart clenched painfully as I wondered, not for the first time, why God has allowed this season in the Church to come to be.

Why are we here? What does God, in His Providence, plan to accomplish with this wreckage and chaos?

And what can I possibly do, a mom with five kids, a little bit of internet real estate, no theology degree and no real position of influence within the Church?

Pray, obviously, which I have been. But I want to be transparent with you guys about how much I’m struggling with this. Every other week or so I try to make it to confession (see above: amazing parish) and one of my predictable recurring sins right now is one against charity towards the Holy Father, towards the bishops.

My choleric and justice-oriented mind does not comprehend that while I have been hustling and doing my level best to hold up my end of the bargain with God (and failing over and over and over again, naturally, bc sinner) there have been predatory priests preying on children. Homosexual bishops grooming and raping seminarians. Company men more concerned with promotions than with the people whose souls they signed up to shepherd. (And yes, I know there are good priests. And mediocre priests. And priests who are struggling manfully with heavy habitual sins. These aren’t the guys I’m thinking about.)

Priests hearing the confessions of ordinary Catholics who come to the sacrament of absolution struggling to live chastely, who are wrestling with any kind of addiction, who are trying to get their temper, their lust, their appetite for whatever in check; who are failing, crying out to the Lord for mercy, asking for absolution, who are coming back again and again and swimming upstream in this miserable culture of death, priests who meet up with an illicit lover later that same night, who shuffle an abusive priest to another assignment, who turn a blind eye to the failings of their brother bishops and keep on keeping on…

It boggles the mind.

And so while the surprise has abated and the rage has cooled, the lethargic sorrow remains. I thought I knew what the Church was. I never believed the clergy to be above reproach or without sin, but it didn’t occur to me that there would be priests leading double lives. Why not? I don’t know, I guess I’m an idiot? An idealist?

I don’t have a good wrap up. And it’s not like I’m over here wallowing in sorrow and questioning the existence of God or anything. But I am wrestling with what it means to be Catholic right now. Not because I would ever walk away, but because I am so angry that none of these guys did.

I know so many good priests. Good bishops too. As a parent, this is probably the most frustrating part of the whole crisis: are my children safe in the Church? Can we trust the men who we do know and love, going forward? I trust our bishop, and our parish priests. I love and respect and believe the religious community who we share so much of our lives with. Is a personal relationship going to be the necessary litmus going forward? Trust but verify?

I hate this place for our family. And I hate it for our Church, even more. There is no such thing as a personal sin. All sin is corporate. And everything that is done in the darkness will be, eventually, revealed in the light.

(p.s. This was written last Friday. How much more appropriate it seems today.)

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!

Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, current events, Evangelization, synod2018

A mother’s hope for the synod

October 3, 2018

“The Church is in turmoil.” Archbishop Charles Chaput

Today begins a multi-week convergence in the Eternal City of some of the best minds from around the global Church. Laypeople, seminarians, priests, bishops, and the Holy Father are coming together to discuss that which is the future of the Catholic Church in a very literal sense: her youth.

The working document for the 2018 synod on young adults, the faith, and vocational discernment is, one can only hope, a jumping-off point from which deeper conversation and consideration will flow. It touches nicely on some of the sociological and psychological needs shared by youth the world over, but is light on faith and belief. It misdiagnoses the illness, if I may be so bold. Allow me to explain.

I am the young-ish mother of five little kids. A millenial by the skin of my teeth and 10 calendar days, I’ve observed – and participated in – the digitalization of life and culture. I’ve participated enthusiastically in the social media revolution. I have friends of all stripes and types. I like pourover coffee and locally roasted beans.

I also recognize that we are hemorrhaging believers, and belief. That our modern way of living lacks a depth and breadth that once rooted people deeply in their communities and in their families.

Young people are delaying or forgoing marriage. Couples are refusing to have children. Mothers and fathers are losing a sense of the deep sacrificial identity of parenthood, and how it disciples us to become more and more like God our Father. And no wonder, since many young people can’t look to an earthy father – or mother – for an example. Increasingly, there are fewer spiritual fathers that can be trusted, as this summer has shown us in spades.

As I read through the Instrumentum Laboris, the working document for this gathering, I kept coming back to the idea that “you can’t give what you don’t have,” and there’s the rub: I don’t think the Church is living in a way that is sufficiently attractive to most young people.

Simply put: holiness is attractive, and examples of authentic holiness, both within and outside of the Church, seem in short supply.

If the Church is wrestling with attracting and retaining young believers, it is because she has too few saints perfuming her earthly body with the aroma of sanctity.

JPII had no trouble drawing crowds of millions. Mother Teresa, too. Were the times in which they lived any less complicated?

I look into my kids’ faces and think about their futures, and my larger concern beyond all the talk of identity and accompaniment and inequality that I found in the IL is this: “when they are mature, will they find that our Church that is sufficiently attractive to capture their hearts?”

Only Jesus, our Eucharistic Lord, can do this work. To the extent that we preach the Gospel and allow Jesus to transform our lives, we will evangelize the culture. Including the youth culture.

It’s ridiculously, pathologically simple.

Young people need priests who would die for love of the Eucharist. Who spend hours a day on their knees in prayer, celebrating the sacraments for their flocks. Who shun political and social media hyperactivity and draw deeply into the presence of the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament every single day. Who are intensely masculine in the sense that their capacity for self-sacrifice grows and grows as they enter more deeply into their identity of being an alter Christus.

Young people need mothers and fathers who prioritize faith above all else. Who would sooner miss a season of soccer games than a Sunday Mass. Who spend more time praying for and over their children than they do checking social media and the family activity calendar. Who prioritize their faith lives above all else, including their professional lives.

Young people need to be exposed to a radical idea: that Jesus Christ is the only answer to the deepest longing of the human heart, and that Jesus Christ alone can give them true freedom.

No focus group can come up with a better form of accompaniment. No clever theologian can sufficiently modernize the Gospel to make it the most compelling choice in an endless buffet of attractive offerings.

This was the most disturbing section of the IL for me to read:

  1. Consequently, the Church “is brought into being” with young people, by allowing them to be true protagonists without telling them “it has always been done this way”. This perspective, which determines a pastoral style and also a way of internal organisation for the institution, is perfectly in tune with the request for authenticity that young people are addressing to the Church. They expect to be accompanied not by an unbending judge, nor by a fearful and hyperprotective parent who generates dependence, but by someone who is not afraid of his weakness and is able to make the treasure it holds within, like an earthen vessel, shine (cf. 2Cor4:7). Otherwise, they will ultimately turn elsewhere, especially at a time when there is no shortage of alternatives (cf. PM 1.7.10).

This fundamentally misunderstands what the Church is doing wrong, if I may be so bold. She is not failing to fragrance the modern world with sanctity because she is “unbending judge” or “hyperprotective parent,” but, rather, because she is a neglective mother and an absentee father.

We are in a crisis of parenthood. Nowhere is that more brutally evident than in the Pennsylvania report. In the McCarrick story. In case after case of Fathers failing their children utterly, destroying their lives when they should be offering their own as a willing sacrifice.

The Church will continue to fail to compete with “no shortage of alternatives” so long as she is playing on the same field as the world.

We can’t win in any other category but holiness.

It is our smallness, our seeming weakness – perhaps especially financially and politically in the coming decades – that magnifies the largeness of God.

These weeks of discussion and document drafting in Rome would be well spent hemmed in on all sides by deep, authentic and personal prayer on the parts of every participant. Would that the Holy Father would lead a public, global day of penance, on his knees, in front of the Blessed Sacrament, exposed for all the world to see on the altar in St. Peter’s Basilica, or out in the Square.

Therein lies our hope. There could be no more powerful witness.

Catholic Spirituality, current events, Pope Francis, Rome, sin, Suffering

Finding grace in the Eternal City

September 19, 2018

I woke up blinking and disoriented in the chilly darkness of our hotel room, craning my neck to see if any light was squeezing through the cracks of the blackout shutters. I rolled over and grabbed my phone, which was displaying the current time on the east coast of the United States in military format. Zelie’s morning chortles echoed from down the hall, bouncing off the marble floors and reassuring me that it was, in fact, morning and we’d all mostly slept through the night.

I roused Dave, lifted the baby from her plush Italian pack-n-play, and we padded upstairs to the breakfast room, situated on the enclosed rooftop of the 7-story apartment building-turned-boutique hotel 5 blocks from St. Peter’s Square. We blinked in wonder at our birdseye view of the cupola while wrestling Zelie into a comically oversized Italian highchair, un seggiolone, threading a swaddle blanket around her waist and securing her to the chair with a sloppy, oversized knot. That blanket would become at turns a changing table, sun cover, sweat towel, handkerchief, and soothing object in addition to a lap restraint. I’m always amazed by how little baby gear we can get by with while traveling.

As we munched on prosciutto and powdered scrambled eggs, we discussed plans for our first full day in the city. The flight over was arduous but manageable (unlike the flight home. Ahem. #foreshadowing) and we’d taken only a modest nap the day before to ensure a quick adjustment to local time. The whole day stretched before us with possibility, already shimmering with the late-summer heat of the city. I wanted to hit a few churches – one, St. Mary Major, I couldn’t remember having been inside at all. Also on the list: The Gesu. Sant’ignacio. Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Sant’agostino. I was hoping to find Ignatius, Catherine of Siena, Francis Xavier. I had some specific prayers in my heart to entrust to the earliest Jesuits, those spiritual and missionary giants. We made it to every church on the list, but mistimed our visits to Santa Maria Sopra Minerva and the Gesu to coincide unfortunately with siesta.

Santa Maria Maggiore was a wonder. It is deceptively nondescript from the outside, rendering the breathtaking vaulted, gold coffered ceilings all the more striking. We wandered around the perimeter, pushing Zelie in her $14 umbrella stroller with the squeaking, battle weary wheels tested by cobbled streets. We’ve learned our lesson never to travel with the “good” stroller. Zelie’s legs dangled from the fraying hammock of the seat, kicking like plump sausages and delighting the crowds of tourists we threaded through.

The basilica houses a relic of the creche – of the manger itself, where Mary swaddled Jesus and laid him to rest on a pillow of straw. It was hot and crowded in the crypt beneath the altar, different languages flowing past my ears like water while I struggled to focus my mind and heart in prayer. I don’t pray well when we make these trips, battling the temporal elements of travel: the sleep disruption, the weather, the crying baby. I’m a comfortable American, safely ensconced in a suburban neighborhood marked by convenience and privacy. I’m never more aware of my personal shortcomings and my impoverished capacity for suffering than when I’m in a foreign country.

Rome is neither comfortable nor private. It is gaudy, glittering, dirty, ancient, intimate, and overflowing with humanity. There are architectural masterpieces on every corner and there is graffiti on most surfaces. Pigeons and garbage, relics and riches. It is a study in contradiction, a layer-cake of human history piled one era atop another, the ancient crumbling in the midst of the modern. Workers erect scaffolding to update and reinforce, polishing away layers of pollution and grime while dropping pieces of trash and debris around their workspace. Ducking into a shabby, off color apartment building on a nondescript sidestreet can yield a magnificent grotto carved from plaster and beams, a 5-star culinary mecca hiding behind the peeling stucco facade.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed in Rome. Spiritually, emotionally, certainly physically. The soundtrack of wailing sirens whose cadence is off just enough to remind you how far you are from home, bells tolling joyfully or solemnly at turns from the thousands of bell towers dotting the skyline. The steady, constant thrum of traffic, of motorbikes weaving through throngs of pedestrians and taxis scraping down streets that seem too narrow for golf carts.

I stood in St. Mary Major with all the feelings of the past summer swirling in my head and my heart, willing myself to connect emotionally with what I saw before me: a piece of the cradle that held our Savior. I was tired, sweaty, and heavy with the grief of being Catholic. As we’d walked out of our neighborhood and past St. Peter’s that morning, we heard the Pope’s voice ringing out from the loudspeakers, drifting down Via della conciliazione during his regular Wednesday Audience, causing my heart to constrict painfully in my chest. We didn’t attend the audience, didn’t even linger at the perimeter of the undersized crowd.

I was too angry.

Ascending the steps from below the splendid altar in St. Mary Major, I made my way back to Dave and the stroller. We spotted a traditional confessional where a white robed Dominican priest was seated, administering the Sacrament of Reconciliation to an Italian woman standing as if at a drive through window at a bank. The sign affixed to his booth read “Polish/Italiano/English” so we took our places in line.

When it was my turn to confess, I lowered my head and laid bare my anger, my hurt, and my rage at the seeming impotence of the episcopacy, the sorrow at being in Rome and feeling estranged from my own faith. The confession was brief and, I hoped, thorough. Father cocked his head to the side and looked at me thoughtfully, speaking perfect English in a thick Polish accent,

“It is okay to be angry. It might even be good to be angry. We are all angry. This is a difficult moment for the Church. Particularly the Church in America.” He smiled sadly, “but the Church is hurting everywhere at this time. And if God is giving you anger that will not leave, He may want you to do something with it.”

I searched his face while searching my own conscience, probing to see whether the anger I harbored was righteous and rightly-ordered, or whether it was shot through with self interest and pride.

I think it was both, to be honest. Anger over the profound injuries caused, and the egregious sin. Anger for the victims’ suffering. Anger for the hypocrisy of churchmen who lived double lives as predators.

But also anger at being humiliated by my own Church. And this may be the selfish, pride-filled anger that had no useful function. The anger at being exposed for being a fool for taking seriously the moral teachings of the faith while men in positions of power and influence laughed and derided our sacrifices. Was I living my faith for the approval of some bishop or cardinal, then, or even the Pope? If all of these apostized and rejected the faith wholesale, would I also leave, citing the evolution of eternal truths into something more relevant to modernity?

I saw immediately the distinction between the anger that father spoke of as being righteous, and the anger that was rooted in self interest. The first kind of anger, Father explained, was given as a kind of energy by God, it was a right response from a properly formed conscience.

“Righteous anger,” he explained, was “applying your energy to make right the wrongs.” He encouraged me as a parent to embrace this righteous anger, pointing out that if I had no immediate capacity for righting the wrongs which I encountered but still harbored this anger, that perhaps God was giving it as a gift, designed to be transformed into fuel for the engines of prayer and sacrifice.

“Anger has a purpose.” He concluded. “Anger that is free from sin and persistent is God offering you an opportunity. Do something with the anger. Ask Him what he wants from you.”

I left that Confession feeling 20 pounds lighter. I’m still angry, sitting at home a week later, nursing a slight headache from the jet lag while I pound the keyboard. But the anger no longer feels suffocating. I can pray and be angry. I can be faithful to my vocation and be angry. I can go to Mass, frequent the Sacraments, pray for the Church, and be angry.

That Confession in the heart of Rome left me with a new understanding of what St. Paul means when he says: “be angry, but do not sin.”

Of all the beautiful sights and sounds from our trip, the sacramental conversation I had with a stranger from Poland is the one that stands apart from all the rest.

abuse, Catholic Spirituality, current events, Family Life

Go to Joseph

August 28, 2018

“May you live in interesting times.”

This purported ancient Chinese proverb is usually ironically bestowed as more curse than blessing. We are certainly living in them, we Catholics in these waning days of the summer of 2018.

I feel an almost crushing burden of confusion, more than anything else, when I spend too much time going down rabbit holes and clicking over to related content, my mind swirling for somewhere firm to land. I told a friend this morning that I’ve had the sensation of my brain, not unlike an airplane, circling the airport looking for an open runway and, finding nowhere safe to land, being forced to remain in a frustrating holding pattern. I feel like I’m running out of fuel, to add insult to injury.

But when I ponder these days of crises with a more sober and serious disposition, I am forced to admit that my lived reality, my day-to-day tasks and struggles and responsibilities, remain almost maddeningly the same: deepen my own interior life. Be faithful to my vocation – and to the sacred vows I made. And teach my children the Gospel.

All else is, as they say, vanity.

And perhaps if I spent overly much time before July of this year letting priests and bishops and “the hierarchy” carry water for me, spiritually speaking, that time has passed. I cannot rely any longer on my own nasty little habit of clericalism, assuming the best of men of the cloth.

Are there good and holy priests? Of course. Real saints among us. And devils, too? Yes. Aren’t we finding out how very many…

And yet, what is this to you, and to me? Will a holy priest get me to heaven? Not if I don’t avail myself of the Sacraments of which he is a humble custodian, pursuing my own path of holiness with the aid of the mysterious sustenance Christ left for our earthly sojourn. A wicked priest is, too, only a humble custodian of God’s mercy, no matter the delusions of grandeur or murderous arrogance he may harbor.

I keep coming back to the thing I know to be true in these difficult times: Jesus.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. As I am not without sin like the first two, I find myself wanting to cling to the best practices of that last guy and live as closely by his example as possible.

How did Joseph become a saint?

He lived with Jesus and Mary.

He was probably rarely outside of their physical presence, and he carried their spiritual presence with him like a flame in his heart at his work table. How often he must have paused in his necessary, earthly, mundane, exhausting work to take a cool drink offered by the little boy Jesus, to share a quick visit with Mary and feel the consolation of her gentle hand on his aching back. His sole concern as their provider and protector was to do his work to the best of his ability so that they would be fed, clothed, and sheltered for the glory of God.

Are my responsibilities as a mother much different? Can I push aside my immediate responsibilities to fret over what more I should be doing besides working quietly to the absolute limits of my human frailty to provide for the family whom God has entrusted me with?

Maybe you’re not a parent. Maybe your current vocation is to a classroom full of children or a conference room full of employees, or even an auditorium full of fellow students. But I feel certain that we are each being called to emulate Joseph to the best of our abilities, executing our work on earth with as much care and humility as possible.

I cannot hope for Mary to hand me a cool drink of water or offer a clean cloth to wipe the sweat from my brow while I toil in the laundry room downstairs, fighting spiders and acedia to fulfill my daily duties, but I can turn to her in the rosary. I can align my heart with hers, praying for her Son to intercede in the lives of those other sons of her heart, her priests, that they would become more conformed to His passion.

I can’t open my arms for toddler Jesus to come running full tilt to leap in after a long day in the woodshed, but I can open my arms to my own children, pulling them into my lap to pray through the Scriptures, or bringing them along for the world’s fastest and least reflective visits to Jesus, fully present in Eucharistic Adoration.

I can go to Joseph. The first disciple of Jesus Christ in so many ways. I can love what he loved and live for what he lived for: the Mother, and the Son.

St. Joseph, terror of demons, pray for us.