Catholic Spirituality – Mama Needs Coffee

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, deliverance, Evangelization, Lent

Guide to making a great confession

February 26, 2019

Our eldest made his first confession last month, and I decided to avail myself of the opportunity to (finally) memorize my Act of Contrition. I figured at age 36 and with a moderate following on the internet of people coming to me to read about Catholic Things, I should perhaps be prepared to recite this basic prayer I’ve been saying at least a dozen times a year, on average, since childhood.

If you’ve spent any time in the confessional then you are perhaps acquainted with the existential terror that can fill one’s soul when the moment is drawing nigh: Fr. is winding down his “advice and accompany” section of the Sacrament and you’re about to go onstage, so to speak. With sweating palms your eyes dart right and then left, looking for the laminated card kept on hand, I suppose, for 8 year olds and people coming home after a couple decades away from the box. (Because surely everyone else has memorized this thing by now.)

Sometimes you find the card, and other times you maybe fumble through something fresh and original like “O my God I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee who are so good and I firmly intend to avoid the near occasion of sin and MY GOD JESUS WHO DIED ON THE CROSS HAVE MERCY ON ME.”

Now dripping with sweat and performance anxiety, you make eye contact with your bewildered confessor and smile uncomfortably trying to telegraph that you are, in fact, done now. And he may or may not stretch out that awkward pause trying to figure out if he just heard your act of contrition or some original spoken word poetry and then you get your penance and you’re done.

Anyway, as we worked alongside our school to prepare Joey for his first confession, I availed myself of the copied print out he brought home to memorize. Before he turned off his reading light each night we’d say it together, at first using the paper and eventually, sooner than I’d have guessed, reciting it on our own.

Who knew how quick it would go, memorizing it? Not I, who recited some garbled approximation of it with increasing panic during each confession of my adult life.

This experience got me to thinking, what other tweaks could I make to best avail myself of this precious Sacrament of healing?

1. Go frequently

I love going to Confession. That wasn’t always the case, but about 5 years ago, right around the time we moved back from Rome, I started going once a month. Not a huge increase in frequency, but enough that it became both easier to examine my conscience and recall my sins and also more comfortable – joyful, even – to make my confession.

According to canon law one is obliged to confess only once a year, and only mortal (grave matter, full knowledge of the gravity, and willful intent to commit) sin at that. Frequent confession is permitted and even, it seems to me, encouraged, in this section here:

Can. 988

1. A member of the Christian faithful is obliged to confess in kind and number all grave sins committed after baptism and not yet remitted directly through the keys of the Church nor acknowledged in individual confession, of which the person has knowledge after diligent examination of conscience.

2. It is recommended to the Christian faithful that they also confess venial sins.

If I’m confessing venial (not grave moral matter, not premeditated) sins, which comprise the bulk of my sins these days, thanks be to God, then the more frequently I confess, the more venial sins I unload – because I’m guessing I rack up a couple dozen a day. Or so. Maybe more on Mondays.

I have found that the more I practice examining my conscience, the more sensitive my conscience becomes, funny that.

I’m still not up to a regular, daily examination, though I would like to get there eventually. It helps to take more frequent inventory, though, and brings failures and acts of cruelty and anger to the forefront of my mind so I can file them away for next time. I want to compare it to going grocery shopping without being home to look in the fridge or pantry first. You have a general sense of what to put on the list, but it might surprise you to know how exactly how little milk is left in the fridge.

2. Find a regular confessor, or try to go to the same priest every time, if multiple options are available.

Having a regular priest with whom to practice this sacrament can be a tremendous source of spiritual progress. Maybe confession isn’t readily available in your area, and if so, you’re not alone. I firmly believe that the supply has to rise in response to the demand, and that if more Catholics start turning out for Confession, the parishes and dioceses will have to reform the availability to meet the need. If a line of 20 souls, or even 10, are routinely turned away over the course of a month of Saturday afternoons, perhaps it will occur to Father to extend access beyond that single 40 minute time slot. If it does not occur to him and if polite requests are not well received, perhaps you can communicate yourself best in a letter or an email, signed from all of his confession-desiring parishioners.

If all else fails you can always contact your bishop and respectfully (kindness goes a long way, too) inquire whether there might be a way to increase access to the sacrament in your diocese. It would be a tremendous motivation to (most) bishops to hear this from their flocks.

If you do have good access to the sacrament already, consider having a standing arrangement, either formally or informally, to confess to the same priest each time. Better yet if you can, make your confessor your spiritual director; to be able to receive this sacrament of healing in the context of spiritual direction is a tremendous gift.

3. Make it a (family) habit

In my research into other moms’ best practices for raising Catholic kids, many of them seem to be working from the same playbook. Have a regular day each month for family confessions, and make it opt-out rather than opt-in. Just assume your kids all need to go, as you do, every month, and make a regular appointment out of it.

Extra credit points for taking them for ice cream or hot chocolate afterwards to emphasize the sweet taste of forgiveness.

4. Write it down

We encouraged our son to do this for his second confession after he’d revealed that it was awfully hard to remember more than one sin. He especially liked the possibility of burning the paper afterwards, though I think we ended up just tearing it up and tossing it out.

It’s helpful to get things down on paper sometimes, and can be useful in looking for patterns and occasions of sin, etc. Having things listed out with dispassionate objectivity can really help dispel any shame or anxiety around saying the thing you’re dreading having to confess.

Spoiler alert: if he has been hearing confessions for even a month’s time, the priest has heard it all. Seriously, all. My friend told me just 5 weeks after his ordination he had already heard every possible existing sin confessed at least once in his second month of priesthood.

You won’t shock him, trust me on this one.

5. Find a good examination of conscience

(and commit yourself to making a frank and regular assessment)

This is the best examination of conscience I’ve found, and it helped me to identify some bad habits that, frankly, I was failing see as sin and therefore failing to confess. For example, I’d seen my habit of working on Sundays as more of a minor shortcoming because #reallife.

Now I’m recognizing more and more that when I seek out big house projects to work on, take big shopping trips beyond what is absolutely necessary, and toss in load after load of not-technically-essential laundry on Sundays, I’m failing to set aside the Lord’s day both to worship the Lord and to enter into His rest, trusting that He will make up the difference. I realized that no, I didn’t trust God to make up for lost time on Sundays. That maybe other people could take that day to worship and relax and recharge, but that I could have used an 8th day of the week, frankly, and so used Sunday more or less as a second Saturday + Mass tacked on.

Finally, maybe this one is obvious, but invite the Holy Spirit to come into your heart and illuminate your sins when you are preparing to confess. It is to Him that we are seeking to be reconciled, and it is Him to whom are hearts are most fully known.

And it is also to Him whom we confess.

Father is the open phone line, the email server, the wifi router to heaven. He is there to receive contrition and to transmit grace and forgiveness and freedom, in return. He is not the source but the conduit of grace. And his is not the power to absolve, but Christ’s alone, entrusted through the ministry of the Church to His faithful servants, His priests.

It bears pointing out that even bad priests can hear confessions, and that even wicked men can say the Mass and confect the Eucharist and, in the name of Christ, absolve us of our sins. It is a profound mystery that Christ would entrust His treasury of graces to fallen human beings, and would extend these saving graces to us through other broken, fallible human beings equally in need of salvation.

Lent will be here in a little more than a week. Perhaps the Lord is calling you to make time for confession this year, perhaps for the first time in many years. A priest gave us his number one tip for confession at a retreat I attended last weekend: just chill out. And come.

He is waiting for you.

About Me, Catholic Spirituality, deliverance, Evangelization

Evangelizing with your story

January 17, 2019

I tend to lean pretty far in the self disclosing direction when I share here on the blog. I’ve pulled back a little bit as the kids have gotten older as far as the specifics I share about them, images, etc, but I’m still a fairly open book with my own story. I share bits about our marriage that Dave approves, but for the most part I’m a one woman show in this space.

The reason I share so much about my own life and my ongoing conversion is because I believe so deeply in the power of story.

When I was reawakening to the truth towards the end of my first run through college (I basically had two separate college experiences – 4 years at CU Boulder where I did my level best to uphold the party school reputation, and 3 years at Franciscan University of Steubenville where I finished my BA and started my MA) much of the awakening happened while listening to CDs and tapes (this was pre podcast era, people) of other people’s conversion stories.

I found Dr. Scott Hahn’s story particularly riveting. I remember one night with particular clarity. Hidden away upstairs in my converted attic bedroom, I could hear the happy, sloppy sound of my roommates and their friends banging around downstairs as they came home from the bars, sliding furniture across the battered floors of our rental and clinking bottles. Barricaded in my room, I pushed play on a borrowed boom box and listened for the third or fourth time as Hahn described his surprising journey into Catholicism.

I was a cradle Catholic with at least a tenuous grasp on my faith, so it wasn’t as if the details of his tale were totally unfamiliar to me. It was his conviction that gripped my soul, wearied as it was after years of blurry football games and black out partying and inch-deep friendships. Could somebody really take God this seriously? To turn away from their life, their career, leave everything behind to jump in faith?

The things coming out of the speaker sounded more like the stuff of Bible stories than current events. In my twenty-something years of living as a Catholic, I hadn’t encountered what seemed to me a radical application of Catholicism; not merely part of life on Sundays or used as a modifier to describe oneself, but as the essence of a person. His identity seemed to rest, now, post conversion experience, entirely in being Catholic.

I didn’t know anyone like this in real life. My parents didn’t count, at the time, because caught in the snares of my adolescent misery, I couldn’t see clearly how much love they’d expended, how hard they’d tried.

What I knew of being Catholic was duty, sacrifice, and a sort of stoic resignation. I’d stopped living my faith in any meaningful sense except one: I still went to Mass most Sundays. But I was not sober, I was not chaste, I was not kind or honest or patient. Duty-bound, I dragged my hungover body out of bed for the latest possible service on Sundays, head down and heart numbed in the pew as the liturgy – often banal and irreverent because Boulder – washed over me in a comforting, familiar rhythm.

What caused this profound disconnect between my head and my heart? What allowed me to profess the Creed with my fellow parishioners on Sundays and party recklessly with my fellow classmates on Fridays? I can’t say for sure, but I imagine it had much to do with a lack of community. With a fragile catechesis that only went skin deep, the profound truths of the Faith I’d professed since childhood eluding me as a jaded young adult.

I knew who Jesus was as a historical character and, theoretically, Who He was in the Blessed Sacrament on the altar at Mass. But I didn’t know Jesus as my Lord. He didn’t call the shots in my life. I was living for me, directed by me, and in pursuit of what pleased me. Jesus was an afterthought, and His Church was the window dressing I put out as a flag to signify to others what I was about. Being Catholic defined me in the same way being an American did, or being a woman. It was something intrinsic and immutable but nothing I had real agency in.

When I started hearing stories like Dr. Hahn’s, the universe tilted. I came to recognize that faith was as much a gift as a choice. That this man, and countless other men and women throughout history had chosen Christ, had made a decision to orient their entire lives around Him. Not by reciting an “I accept you as my Lord and Savior” prayer – though a well-meaning roommate had once coached me through that, sensing an opening in my confusion over the question of whether or not I was “saved”. The fact that we recited the prayer after smoking pot in her Honda Accord did not seem to deter her from helping me go through the motions.

I don’t fault her for her confusion – my faith wasn’t any deeper! Her “Lord and Savior” line was similar to my weekly attendance at Mass, in that we were both going through the motions we’d been taught, unsure of what it meant to concretely apply our belief in Jesus to our lives, or unwilling to make the leap.

The joy I heard in Dr. Hahn’s story was infectious. I can’t think of any other reason I’d have wanted to replay over and over again this recording of a forty year old man telling his life story.

Later in the night my roommates came and pounded on my locked door, begging me to come out and join in the festivities. I feigned sleep as I lay there in the darkness, the CD still playing and hot tears rolling down my cheeks. I wanted out. I wanted joy. A fire had been rekindled inside of me earlier that semester with the death of the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II.

His passing had left me dazed and weeping, shocking me with an intensity of grief and regret such as I had never felt. I was still dazed, some weeks later as I lay there listening to my old life progress outside that bedroom door and feeling certain that something new was on the horizon.

My path back into full practice and belief was not linear. For brevity’s sake and to construct a coherent narrative, it sometimes reads that way. The years that would follow, however, were marked by pain and uncertainty as much as by profound consolation in prayer and joy in newfound Christian community. And as I learned to read The Story with new eyes, my heart burning as the Scriptures were unfolded for me, I came to recognize the power of my own story, too; to console and to inspire and to attract.

We tell our stories because we love to share ourselves, but also because apart from the grace of baptism, the story God is writing with each of our lives is the most miraculous thing that will ever happen to us.

When I look back over the seemingly disconnected events in my life, the unexpected twists and turns, the disappointment of unanswered prayers, the highs and lows, it can seem random. When I do so applying the lens of faith, the resolution seems to improve a bit, the principal image coming into clearer focus: I love you.

God is writing a love story with each of our lives. When I remind myself of this, when I remind other people of this by sharing parts of my story, I pull back a little corner of the veil between this world and the next, a burst of His light and love escaping forth into the darkness.

We live in a world shrouded in darkness. We needn’t – shouldn’t – let the fear of humiliation or a little stage fright hold us back from lighting candles in the darkness. And every Christian has this light burning within them, ignited by the specific, personal love Jesus has for every single person ever created. Every single soul is the story of salvation history all over again: rejection and redemption, suffering and salvation.

Later this week, the Catholic Woman will publish a letter I wrote about my younger years. While parts of my story are painful to share, the cost is more than warranted when I consider the immensity of what I have received.

advent, Catholic Spirituality, christmas, decluttering, ditching my smartphone, feast days, minimalism

A minimalist guide to the last week of Advent

December 17, 2018

Today marks the beginning of my absolute favorite period of time of the whole year: the O Antiphons. It’s the beginning of the end, the final countdown till Christmas. Advent’s last hurrah.

I have not strictly observed the Advent action items – or inaction items, as it were – which I laid out for myself back in November. I never did quite get up the self discipline to cut off the Christmas tunes in the car, so we’ve been thrilling in hope and wearily rejoicing all these past long weeks. I did limit our options to the Christian station and the 24 hour Christmas station, so we were at least constantly being filled up with positive noise, if indeed we had the radio on at all.

It has been glorious. No toggling between NPR and catchy-yet-slutty pop music that my kids probably don’t understand yet, but that I honestly shouldn’t even be listening to myself. No negativity streaming into my ears from another breaking news world report detailing some heinous atrocity half a world away.

I’ve also been steadfastly abstinent from social media, save for a brief click on Facebook to drop a link to a new piece of writing I’ve published, or to highlight some truly interesting and important bit of information.

I don’t flop down at the end of a long weekday of mothering and writing depleted beyond all recognition, capable only of streaming and scrolling. I’m still very tired, but it’s the normal kind of tired from caring for people and performing the day’s labors. I’m not overstimulated and hyperactive, looking to my teeny screen for my next dopamine hit.

So if I could make any sort of suggestion for you, gentle readers, as we cruise into this last week of Advent and preparation for Christmas day, it would mostly revolve around reducing your screen time.

Leave your phone plugged in on the counter at night. Crawl into bed with a book – electronic or otherwise – and leave the notifications and blue light downstairs/in the kitchen/far from your sleeping quarters.

Turn off the radio in the car, or, if you must drown out the ambient noise of screaming children (and I must) turn it to K-love or pop in a Christmas CD. Matt Maher’s new Advent album is phenomenal. These two tracks in particular.

Take a fast from social media from now until December 26th. Nothing bad will happen. You will not miss anything. Anyone who desperately needs to get ahold of you already knows how to do so, using the numbers connected to that tiny screen in your pocket that you’re going to plug in downstairs tonight.

I have missed literally zero important things in my month and some change fast from Instagram and Twitter. I’m more present to my family, have enjoyed connecting intentionally with friends and neighbors, and have been forced to confront some lazy habits which were preventing me from investing in relationships with people in my immediate physical proximity.

I’ll never abandon Voxer and the digital connection it allows me to enjoy with far flung friends and relatives, but social media is only a one-dimensional substitute for real connection. Anyone who has ever had a heartbreaking conversation with a friend and then experienced the cognitive dissonance of scrolling through their cheery Instagram feed later that day knows exactly what I mean here: social media only tells one side of the story, and a curated side at that.

Pull away from the 24 hour news cycle. If you absolutely must stay up to date for your job’s sake, then pick one or two trusted sources and go directly to their homepages to check the news, once a day. Declutter the dozens of apps and any and all push notifications. You do not need to know when a new related story pops up, or be alerted every time you receive a text message. If someone needs you badly enough, they will call you. Obviously work is work, but the average Joe or Jane probably doesn’t need to be 24/7 available and plugged in. Be honest with yourself in this regard.

Commit to a nightly family rosary/decade/reading of the scriptures associated with that day’s O Antiphon with your family or roommate(s). The Hallmark movies you haven’t watched yet will still be there when you’re finished. Dim the lights, light some candles, and make space for quiet reflection in defiance of our frenetic culture.

Stop buying stuff. Seriously. You probably have enough gifts for everyone in your life already. Your teachers/principals/service workers/coworkers/neighbors/distant acquaintances don’t need anything from you that you can find on Amazon. If gift giving is your love language and you are horrified by this suggestion, then go to Trader Joe’s and buy some nice dark chocolate and a few mid range bottles of wine and pass them out. Nobody needs another cheap (insert item here) in their home. They just don’t. Give a bottle of wine, a nice chocolate bar, some homemade cookies, a coffee gift card, or a great hug. Let each other off the hook to partake in the frantic consumption cycle. Make a donation to a morally sound and meaningful charity in someone’s honor. Pray a rosary for someone and present them with a beautiful hand-lettered card letting them know about it. It is so good for our hearts to stop shopping before Christmas. (And I’ve never met a teacher who didn’t want a bottle of wine or a gift card for coffee or burritos.)

If you’re still really itching to shop, try a decluttering spree instead. Grab a couple trash bags or discarded Amazon boxes and fill them with broken toys to recycle or toss and gently loved or new toys + clothes to donate. It never ceases to amaze me how similar the surge of happiness is between buying and giving away. It’s the novelty that fires the good feelings, I’m sure of it. Plus you’ll have a beautifully pared down playroom/basement/garage/living room come Christmas morning.

Give something up for this final week of Advent. Maybe it’s chocolate. Maybe it’s wine. Maybe it’s one of the above mentioned practices. Make a little space in the inn of your heart for the baby savior by pushing something aside, even – and maybe especially, a good something. The king is coming. He is coming to personally enter into each of our hearts, and He will come again in glory at the end of time, when we won’t have the luxury of a season of preparation to ready ourselves.

He is coming.

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Evangelization

Why do Catholics go to church every week?

December 12, 2018

Alternate title: Aw mom, again?!

This past weekend we had a double whammy of obligatory worship: a holy day of obligation on a Saturday and then the regular Sunday obligation of Mass the next day.

My kids whined and squirmed and demanded to know whyyyyy we had to go baaaaack when we had just been there the previous morning. There were some sniffles and a lingering hacking cough, involved, too, so, in total, we actually ended up attending 4(!) separate(!) masses(!) to get all the healthy-ish people where they needed to be.

I was thinking about the feat we accomplished and the juggling required, and grateful that we both have jobs that don’t typically require weekend work and free us up to attend pretty much whatever Mass time works for us. We also live in a major city and have a laundry list of different times and locations to choose from, which is a luxury I don’t take for granted.

I explained that having to go to Mass is a privilege and a gift, not a drudgery and a drag. I also admitted that yeah, it’s not always entertaining. That even adults struggle to pay attention and to sit still, and that I don’t leap out of bed with joyful expectation on Sunday mornings and run to Jesus.

Still, the reason we go has less to do with God commanding us and more to do with God giving us what we need to flourish.

God gives us our Sunday obligation to meet our needs, not His. He gives us Himself in the Eucharist to sustain us.

While it’s true that our obligation to participate in communion, receiving the Lord in His Body and Blood, is only annual according to canon (,), our presence with Him at Mass is required on a weekly basis. (And if we are in a state of grace and properly disposed to receive Him – recently confessed/not in a state of mortal sin – then He gives Himself to us willingly, over and over again.

This is what is known as the Sunday Obligation, and it requires a Catholic to attend Holy Mass every week, either as a vigil Mass on Saturday night, or on Sunday itself. Missing Sunday Mass intentionally with full knowledge of the gravity of doing so is actually itself a mortal sin.

Crazy, right? Of course, there are circumstances beyond our control that might keep us from church: sick kids, a serious injury, a deployment, a career as a first responder requiring shifts that would all of Saturday and Sunday sometimes, etc. But to miss Mass intentionally for a soccer tournament, while on vacation, or out of a desire to sleep in or hit up Home Depot bright and early?

Nope. Not sufficiently grave reason to excuse the Sunday obligation.

What a demanding God we Catholics worship. Couldn’t He lighten up a bit and given the frenetic pace of most modern family’s lives?

Let me put it another way. I feed my children every night. I am richly blessed to be able to do so, and I want to nourish them as well as I am able. (Some nights the level of nourishment is more apparent than others, but for our purposes here, the analogy is sufficient.) I invite them to the table and fill their plates every night because I love them and because I care about their health and wellbeing. I could feed them less frequently, but it wouldn’t be best for them. I could also excuse them from sitting down at the family table and toss a granola bar their way while they engaged in some other activity, but it wouldn’t serve them well long term. It wouldn’t build our family relationship the way a meal around the table does (or is meant to, anyway. Fingers crossed for better behavior from the preschool set at some point, eventually)

They need real food that nourishes their bodies, and real connection as a family to nourish their hearts.

God didn’t have to leave us a tangible, fleshly reminder of His presence. Didn’t have to pour Himself out, literally, as physical food and drink to be consumed.

But He did. He chose to give us more than could be reasonably expected. He lavishes us with the physical gift of Himself because He knows it will meet our needs – physical and spiritual – more completely than anything else in this world.

Even if we don’t fully understand it. Heck, even if we don’t fully believe it. Even if we feel utterly unworthy to approach it. There is a reason we recite the words of the Roman Centurion just before we approach to receive Communion: “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.”

There can be any number of reasons for our unworthiness. Doubt, fear, anger towards God, apathy, lack of faith…the list is as endless as the number of faithful in the pews. But He still comes. And because He knows how good it is for us, He requires us to come back again and again, every week, for as long as we draw breath.

God doesn’t need our worship. But we need to worship God.

We are created beings, externally oriented toward the Creator. We can turn away from Him, of course, and we do so over and over again, sometimes permanently. But it hurts. We were made to be in relationship with Him and with one another. When we turn away from that for which we have been made, we fracture something essential to our happiness, to our wholeness.

This imperfect nugget of “why” is something I’m trying to give to my kids. Trying to help them frame their understanding of God as lavish Father, not demanding dictator.

Catholic Spirituality, christmas, Family Life, liturgical living, motherhood

Motherhood + Holiday Magic

December 10, 2018

I love this time of year more than any other. I look forward to this particular stretch for months, such that when it does finally arrive most years, I’ve perhaps overplayed my enthusiastic hand just a tad.

This year, being that I am neither nursing, pregnant, nor newly postpartum, I’ve had the chance to look around and take an honest inventory of where we’re at as a family and come to the conclusion: I can try adding in some little extras this year.

We were talking customs and family traditions as an office the other week and I maintain that mine was the weirdest and least liturgically sound: my siblings and I would gather in the family room on Christmas Eve after the littlest kids had been put to bed, and we would crowd around the newest non-believer in Santa and let them in on the secret. Wrapped in an unfortunate poinsettia apron and knighted with a roll of wrapping paper, we would solemnly induct him or her into “the Christmas club,” making them promise to protect the secret of Santa for the little ones who still believed, and just generally making a big fuss over their entry into adulthood. There was a real oath we made them swear and everything.

Were my parents even aware of our antics? Did they model the Christmas Club for us in any way? No. No, I really don’t think so. If memory serves, they were probably crashed out upstairs with a newborn, my mom exhausted by the previous month of effort to find, buy, and wrap presents for everyone.

In fact, a significant focus of the Christmas club in future years would come to be our procurement of trinkets and the stuffing of all the stockings, the last-minute late night wrapping of some – and eventually, most – of the family’s presents, and of course the careful gnawing of reindeer carrots and the splashing and nibbling of Santa’s milk and cookies.

So my expectations for holiday season 2018 are … modest.

I can plan and execute the perfectly curated holiday scenario, but I can’t select which memories will make their way down into their little hearts.

That’s part of the beauty of childhood, I’m coming to find as a mother of slightly older kids. There are so many sensory experiences to choose from, especially as a Catholic, and different things will stick with different kids. And the things they’ll stubbornly choose to hold onto? Totally not my call.

One might remember the sticky wax dripping from the Advent candles we’ll light every night at dinner, singing a verse of “O Come O Come Emmanuel (yes, again, put your fork down and stop eating until we’re done) Another will just remember that mom didn’t really seem to cook for the entire month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and gosh, we ate a lot of crock pot chili that time of year.

Like, a lot.

Which I’ll totally present to them as a our small effort to scale back and simplify and make the little sacrifice, and not solely due to maternal holiday fatigue.

Some of the tried and failed activities of years gone by: making personalized Christmas ornaments, and homemade Jesse tree + ornaments crafted lovingly each morning as the corresponding Scripture passage was read aloud. We got 17 days in before everybody’s enthusiasm evaporated, mine first. Now we have a ziplock bag of tattered yarn and construction paper creations that has spent 4 years in Advent decor exile, and this year I’m giving myself permission to toss the thing and admit Jesse tree defeat.

My sister and I were recalling our childhood advent calendar – a quilted fabric banner which hung on the fridge with numbered pockets for each date, a traveling star moving from space to space until finally arriving at the top – baby Jesus! – on Christmas eve.

I can’t believe mom made that, my sister recalled with awe, shaking her head in wonder.

“Mom didn’t make that, she bought it at that weird craft fair held at the high school every year.”

We regarded each other solemnly and laughed. Our memories, too, are tinted rose by the beautifying and forgiving mists of time.

Absent are the Christmas mornings filled with wailing and gnashing of teeth over awful presents or unfairly distributed loot; the indignity of being prodded and brushed and stuffed into itchy tights to suffer through a long, cold Dan Schuette-fied liturgy in the gym, exiled to the overflow crowd of which we always seemed to be a part, shifting our feet miserably in puddles of dirty melting snow as we stood on the edge of the basketball court.

I dreamily recount my own fond memories of “the Christmas club” which, at the time, was almost certainly born of necessity, my mother tossing up her hands in exhaustion and flinging rolls of scotch tape and dollar store wrapping paper at her adolescent children at 9 pm on Christmas eve. Which, if you’re reading, mom, is deeply comforting to your now thirtysomething daughter who is exhausted by the prospect of providing your grandchildren with all the comfort and joy this holiday season.

When I say I can do more this year, what I mean is that I can be somewhat intentional in my direction for our family celebration. But I can’t guarantee that the highlight of the season won’t be yogurt tubes for breakfast, lunch, and every snack between.

“Remember when mom used to give us Go-gurts to help us enter into the penitential season of Advent? So we’d always be a little bit hungry and think of the Holy Family journeying to Bethlehem, unable to find shelter?”

I can imagine my extremely literal 6-year-old pointing out to his brother one December night in the future, perhaps over beers, that “mom was probably just really tired and all she bought was yogurt that year.”

Touche, future John Paul. You found me out.

Some plans for executing said intention?

More family time doing spent nothing more than snuggling on the couch with candles lit. Maybe we’ll pray a decade of the rosary. Maybe we’ll just stream the James Taylor holiday station each evening.

More nights where I surprise them with thermoses of hot chocolate and we jump in the car for an impromptu drive through the fancy neighborhood for light peeping.

More focus on little details like candles always lit, Christmas jammies worn for a month straight, the occasional daily Mass as a family, and tiny fake Ikea Christmas trees in bedrooms.

I want to sit back and enjoy this season, in order that they get to really enjoy the season. Less planning, yelling, and scrubbing, and more saying yes to marshmallows and requests for movies and my participation in coloring time. Letting them touch the nativity scene figures if they want to, the real ones from Italy, and smudge up my perfect holiday decor.

They’ll still probably choose to remember fondly, during Christmases to come, the butt joke we weren’t quick enough to bleep out from the beginning of Home Alone instead of a charming homemade craft their loving mother slaved over, and that’s okay. This time of year was never about me, after all.

Motherhood is nothing if not a slow suffocation of the ego, the self annihilating and oddly liberating realization that you are not, after all, the center of your own universe.

No better time to put that knowledge into practice than the most wonderful time of the year.

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.

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, Evangelization, Marriage, NFP, planned parenthood, pregnancy, Pro Life, scandal, Sex, sin

NFP for clergy

November 7, 2018

That title, right? I know. But, yes. Seriously.

After one of the talks I gave in Nashville last month, a group of nice young Catholic guys who were, I surmised, discerning the priesthood, came up to chat afterwards and to say thanks for being on campus. We got to talking and one of them in particular was a little taken aback when I enthusiastically expressed my hope for every priest and seminarian in formation to get a basic education from a trained professional (or an experienced married couple) in at least one method of Natural Family Planning.

“But why,” he wondered (sincerely and earnestly, I must say) “would a priest need to know about that…stuff?”

I smiled and started to tick off the reasons one one hand. “Well, for instructing engaged couples, for assistance when giving spiritual direction, for time in the confessional, of course, so that their homilies will be challenging and well informed, so they can walk alongside couples in their suffering and in their joy. Just to name a couple off the top of my head.”

His eyes widened as he nodded his head, “I guess I hadn’t thought about all the ways it could be helpful.”

For parish priests especially, the bulk of their flock will likely be made up of people who are married or will be eventually, so it would serve them well to be prepared to speak on something that is as foundational to marriage as sex and procreation.

Many, many priests with whom I have corresponded or spoken with over the years have reported having little to no formation or formal instruction, if any, on NFP. Is it any wonder that so few Catholics practice NFP when so few pastors have ever spoken of it from the pulpit, let alone in the confessional?

I don’t mean to imply that there are no good priests striving to teach and preach what the Church does on love and marriage. There are! But we need more of them.

Tomorrow morning I will have the privilege of speaking to a classroom full of seminarians, future priests all, God willing. I’ve been invited by their sexual ethics professor to talk about the “lived experience” of NFP, specifically:

“It would be great if you could:

– Offer your testimony.

– Show the different sufferings and difficulties of periodical abstinence/ with the Fertility Awareness Based Methods (NFP) for a couple. Don’t be afraid of making it real. That will be a great preparation for the seminarians.

– Touch on the just causes (psychological, physiological, financial, social) that may make NFP necessary. Why it is good that we (the Church) don’t have a concrete list of situations.

– The blessings of NFP – Even if it is very difficult, it is the only way of living with true love… How NFP has helped you or other couples in their communication… And therefore, why NFP is not “Catholic” contraception.

– Different methods of NFP and contraception.

– Of course your personal experience with couples opposed to NFP

– Experience about how contraception is different…”

So, you know, just the basics. Gulp. I figure I’ll at least have time to touch on what our own experience with NFP has been.

The elevator pitch version goes something like this: get engaged, sit inattentively through CCL (sympto thermal method) classes as part of marriage prep, disregard all charting with joyful abandon and conceive honeymoon-ish baby. Welcome another baby 18 months after that. Nervously learn Creighton (mucus based method) bc postpartum NFP is hell on wheels. Move overseas, change diet and lifestyle radically, conceive “method failure*” Creighton baby. Move back home. Conceive second Creighton baby, this one with some intentionality. Learn Marquette (monitor based method). Successfully postpone for 18 months. Conceive “operator error” Marquette baby. And here we are now, almost 9 years into marriage and coming up on baby number five’s 1st birthday next month.

In sum? We’ve learned – and trial and errored – our way through 3 different NFP methods at this point. Marquette is the clear winner for us, for my physiological makeup, for our circumstances, etc. etc. etc. But we had to keep trying, keep making adjustments, and most of all, keep seeking out help and additional education.

(*None of our children were “unplanned,” or “mistakes.” We are fully aware that the nature of sex is ordered to procreation. That even if all the signs and symptoms point to infertility during a particular time in my cycle, each time we enter into the marital act we do so prepared to welcome new life.)

Fertility awareness based methods of family planning are not for the faint of heart. They aren’t “Catholic contraception,” though as with any human endeavor in this earthly life, they can be used in selfishness.

But they are inherently morally sound.

They require communication, selflessness, patience, sacrifice, continuing education and, yes, chastity. Chastity which is the universal call of every Christian. Chastity which our Church so desperately needs a remedial course in. Chastity which frees us rather than oppressing us, opening up the cramped enclosures of our naturally selfish hearts to be more receptive to the other, to be able to see more clearly the value and dignity of the beloved.

It ain’t easy, that’s for sure. And if you grew up in a family where contraception was the norm, went to public school where the Planned Parenthood sponsored health curriculum was taught from 5th grade on, started taking hormonal birth control yourself as a young teen with “skin problems,” it can sometimes feel like living in an actual alternate reality.

I always like to point out when discussing the current situation of the Catholic Church in America that our pastors were raised in the same cultural milieu we were. If you’ve never heard of NFP until you’re a twenty-something doing mandatory engagement courses in one of the dioceses that actually require NFP instruction, what makes you think that your 60-something pastor who went to Holy Mountain of Mediocrity for seminary in the seventies has ever learned anything about it himself?

We may be starting from a broad baseline of ignorance, in many ways. And it’s good to acknowledge that, yes, the Church has largely failed to transmit this teaching. The Church in the sense of we, the laity, have largely failed to receive this teaching. And the ambient culture has certainly rejected this teaching.

So we have work to do. Let us begin to make progress in supporting the couples who take up the cross of monitoring and consenting to the reality which is their actual fertility, whether it be high, low, or non-existent.

Let us ask more from our pastors, from our bishops, and from the men in formation to become our future priests. Let us take it upon ourselves, as laywomen and men, to continue to delve into the teachings of the rich Christian tradition of marriage and to pray for greater understanding and greater unity with our spouses and with our Lord.

Fathers, we need to hear from the pulpit, in the confessional, and in passing conversation that you understand what the Church teaches about married love, and why.

That you have yourself a basic working knowledge of NFP. That you have resources for your flock, and if you don’t, that you are working to provide them: things like subsidized instruction, free meeting space on church grounds, regular invitations to certified method instructors (multiple methods, please!) to come in and give weekend seminars and postpartum refresher courses for your parishioners. Qualified and orthodox teachers to share the wisdom of Theology of the Body and a basic knowledge of Fertility Awareness with your teens and young adults. Low or no cost babysitting (safe environment certified care providers, of course) for couples who need to learn a new method, or who never learned any kind of NFP at all.

Being a priest in 2018 is, I imagine, no easy row to hoe. We know you’re overworked and underpaid and stretched too thin, and we are profoundly grateful for your yes to Jesus.

We also wish there were more of you.

Teaching Catholic parents about openness to life and the ongoing art of discernment of family size could be a real, practical way to address the vocations shortage in the long haul. It’s no panacea, but it would certainly help.

And hey, fathers? We’re rooting for you.

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, Catholics Do What?, Evangelization, feast days

Our morning at the congregation for saints

October 11, 2018

One of the best/weirdest parts of Catholicism is definitely the Communion of Saints. If you think hard enough about how the Bible talks about dead people and how all Christians uniformly revere St. Paul and St. Luke and St. John and the rest of the NT crew, it’s not too difficult to wrap your brain around what we Catholics believe about our heavenly intercessors, and why. But for some people it proves to be a real theological and conceptual sticking point.

Some common objections: “but they’re dead!” Well, not if you believe in eternal life with Christ.

“You can’t pray to a human person! Only Jesus answers prayers.” But we don’t pray “to” the saints, we ask them to pray for us. Which is Biblical.

“Who are we to say that someone is definitively in heaven? That’s just silly.”

Well, not to keep beating the dead horse that he fell off of, but St. Paul comes to mind. And the Virgin Mary. And St. Joseph. Moses. St. Timothy. St. Barnabus.

“Okay, okay, but anyone past Biblical times … we can’t know for sure if they’re up there. Sola Scriptura and all.”

Well, there is the small matter of the Catholic Church having compiled and declared which books of the Bible were canonical, preserving the words and eyewitness testimony of Christ (along with the Jews and the Jewish Scriptures) from antiquity to the present day.

Really it comes down to a matter of faith. Either you believe that Jesus is God, that He died and rose again, that He took our sins upon Himself on the Cross and offers us salvation and eternal life with Him in heaven, or you don’t.

If you do believe, I highly recommend cultivating a relationship with His saints and martyrs so as to have some great role models and powerful intercessors to lean on. (Some of my personal heroes: Mother Mary, St. John Paul II, St. Maximilian Kolbe, St. Zelie, St. Joseph, St. Therese, St. Joan of Arc, St. Thomas More, St. John Vianney, St. John Bosco, St. Padre Pio, St. Mother Teresa, St. Michael, St. Josemaria Escriva, and Servant of God Julia Greeley.)

Our trip to Rome last month was for one primary purpose: to deliver the documents detailing the diocesan investigation of the cause for canonization for Servant of God Julia Greeley. Learn about her here if you haven’t heard her name before. The tl;dr is that Julia, a freed slave who worked and lived in Denver at the turn of the 20th century, is known as Denver’s “angel of charity” for her service to the poor, her apostolic zeal, and her devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. My husband was appointed “vice postulator” to her cause, and so we’ve spent the past 3 years getting a unique up close view of the Church’s saint-making process.

That he was tapped to head to Rome as the official carrier of the documents was icing on the cake. Zelie and I couldn’t resist tagging along for the ride as his plus one and two. We were in the Eternal City for a little under a week, and it was a beautiful, restorative and almost entirely stress-free affair (the flight home is sealed deep within my subconscious memory for future nightmare material.)

On the Friday morning of our trip, we got up bright and early and headed to 8 am Mass in St. Peter’s with my Italian co-workers, the CNA/EWTN Rome staff, lingered with the crew for a brief coffee break, and then dashed back to our hotel in the Borgo to retrieve the documents for Dave’s big appointment at the Congregazione delle Cause dei Santi.

Now when I reference “documents,” I don’t mean a nice leather portfolio with a few signed papers, or even an accordian file, but 4 enormous legal boxes (wrapped in red ribbon and sealed in wax with the Archbishop of Denver’s episcopal crest) which contained more than 17,000 pages of documentation. As the gentleman serving as postulator for Julia’s cause quipped while we waited in the lobby “that’s a lot of words for a woman who was illiterate!”

The documentation details everything known about Julia’s life, from her time on a plantation in Missouri as a domestic slave, to her life of charity in Denver, and included the forensic analysis of her mortal remains and countless first hand testimonies culled from various ecclesial and government archives about her character and her work.

After some deliberation about how exactly to get all that stuff to Italy, we ended up checking each of the 39.9 lb boxes as our checked baggage (thanks, Air Canada!) and prayed anxiously at the baggage claim at Fiumicino that they would arrive unscathed.

Arrive they did, and with wax seals still miraculously intact.

As we ducked back into our hotel room that morning to load up the boxes, Zelie had a wardrobe malfunction that required some serious scrubbing and swapping of garments. I urged Dave to leave without me, figuring I’d definitely be able to catch up with a guy in a suit dragging 150+ lbs of cardboard boxes across the cobbled streets outside St. Peter’s Square in the late morning heat of Rome.

Well, I was wrong, and when Zay and I did arrive at the building south of the Square where I knew the office to be located, there was no husband in sight. Trusting myself to the mercy and kindness shown to women with babies by every Italian man I’ve ever met, I tickled Zelie’s chin to make her smile and confidently pushed the stroller past the armed guard in the courtyard and up to the security station inside. Using my broken Itanglish and pure native charm, I convinced the bemused gentleman that he should wave us into the secure elevator and up to “Santi, santi!” to catch up with my beau.

Baby power being what it is in Italy, he acquiesced, and so Zelie and I burst into the outer office for the dicastery in the midst of a confused crowd of nuns and monsignors sitting behind desks. (Okay, okay, they were sisters, technically.) They cocked their heads at us as I smiled and asked if anyone had seen an American guy with a lot of boxes.

Eventually we reunited with Dave and our postulator, a dapper German fellow in a bespoke suit who bemusedly pushed the umbrella stroller through the marble corridors once I’d switched Zelie to the baby carrier to quiet her shrieks.

While waiting for our appointment (running predictably on Italian time, to sweaty Dave’s chagrin) I surveyed the tables near our seats. They were covered with holy cards depicting Blesseds, Venerables, and Servants of God from all over the world – an array of currently open causes of the Universal Church. I grabbed a few cards for Fr. Jacques Hamel, martyr priest from France, slaughtered at the altar by Islamic terrorists while praying the Mass a few years ago.

When it was finally our turn to meet with the priest who reports to the head of the dicastory, Zelie was fast asleep, and so I was able to pay close attention to the proceedings.

Causes awaiting finalization, filed and waiting. When a cause is completed, it will eventually moved to the Vatican’s secret archives.

I have to say, after years of research and work and a few formal liturgical ceremonies on Denver’s end, Rome was so typically Italian that I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. At one point the monsignor looked up from the documentation he was affixing his signatures to and quipped “the director’s office is one side of this wall, and the Adoration chapel with the Blessed Sacrament and the office of miracles is on the other. So you might say everyone who is filed away here my office is in Purgatory, stuck right between Heaven and Hell!”

Once the signatures were complete and the interview finished, Fr. opened a door in the side of the room to a – I’m not kidding – giant, overstuffed utility closet filled with packing bubbles, cardboard boxes, and giant Rubbermaid containers. Our clean white boxes jauntily tied with red satin ribbon and embossed wax seals trundled into that closet looking like American overachievement incarnate.

Looking a little wearied by the state of the storage room, Father dropped to crouch and shoved some cardboard boxes aside, using his foot to nudge a pile of bubble wrap further out of the way.

“Here you go, let’s put Julia* right here. No, no, let’s push that other box over, she should stay together.”

(NB: Julia’s mortal remains are not in the boxes, just her files.)

And after a few photos and a handshake, that was that.

Afterwards Dave and I toasted his success with prosecco for Julia, “I’m glad you got to come with me, babe. That was pretty amazing.”

I kind of thought so too.

We clinked our glasses together, laughing over how she would probably respond to all the pomp and circumstance surrounding her, and how typically Italian Italy is, and always will be.

I hope I get to sit down with her one day in heaven and find out. Until then, Servant of God Julia Greeley, pray for us!

(If you have miracle stories of answered prayers from Julia’s intercession, submit them here.)

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:

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.

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