evangelization – Page 2 – Mama Needs Coffee

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Evangelization, feast days

Calling on heaven – the feast of St. Zelie Martin

July 12, 2018

Because our littlest rooster woke at the ripe hour of 5:20 this morning (that’s what you get for uttering the phrase “sleeping through the night” on the internet) I’ve already been to the gym, showered, done dishes and laundry, and dropped more than half my kids at various locations across the city. Also LOLing at my former self who swore we’d never be an “activity” family. But I held out for as long as I could. 7 years ain’t bad.

The productive pace of a morning like that means that it was nigh 10 am before I realized that today was the feast of St. Zelie – and her husband, St. Louis – Martin, my youngest’s namesake.

I have loved the name Zelie since I first read “Story of a Family” a few years into this motherhood gig. (Highly recommend to any Little Flower fans out there. It’s the biographical account of the whole Martin family, including St. Therese, Servant of God Leonie, and of course the happy couple themselves, Louis and Zelie.)

This is a complete aside, but having St. Zelie canonized as such gives me a thrill that someday we could have a St. Joey or a St. Evie or maybe (longshot) a St. Jenny. Not Jennifer or Joseph (no offense to our given names); it just tickles me that she is forever remembered by her nickname and preferred identifier rather than the full Marie-Azelie, which was her formal name.

If you read the birth story I wrote for our little Z, you already know the tale I’m going to tell, but perhaps there are a few details I left out in my initial account.

We were still somewhat undecided on names. If baby was a boy, I’m fairly certain he would have been called … you know what? I honestly can’t remember what we decided on. I don’t think we ever did. Augustine, Anthony, Blaise, and Benedict were all in the running. We never agreed on one. I guess all that estrogen was blocking the creative process for potential male monikers. For a girl, we’d settled on Elizabeth Zelie, a nod to my sister and my dearest friend, both named Elizabeth.

When Zelie was born she was a little on the gray side. Not full-on blue, but not healthy and pink like our other kids had been. Her delivery went super quick at the end; we’re talking 5 pushes total. Turns out faster isn’t always better for baby though. She didn’t have the full benefit of the “squeeze” while she travelled gradually through the birth canal, so she had a lot of fluid in her nose and mouth that hadn’t cleared.

She wasn’t breathing well when she was born, and she didn’t make a single peep. At first the nurses placed her on my chest and began rubbing her vigorously, urging her to speak up. After about 30 seconds the vigorous rubbing and encouragement turned a little more urgent, and they whisked her to the bassinet across the room and began administering oxygen. They had already been suctioning her using the manual bulb aspirator, but someone called for the neonatal respiratory team to come in and administer deep suctioning.

As they worked on my girl and called out her oxygen saturation levels, I began to worry, but I didn’t freak out. (big for me)

I called to her from the bed where I was still being worked on: “Elizabeth, mommy loves you! Elizabeth, we’re right here. You can breathe. Use your lungs. You can do it, baby.” I remembered having read how beneficial it is for sick babies to hear their mother’s voice, so I continued my cheerleading while she continued to perform suboptimally in the respiration department.

I was becoming concerned that they were going to take her to the NICU, and that something was wrong either with her heart or her lungs. She was still very dusky in color and we had yet to hear a peep from her. The room was full of nurses and doctors now, and I couldn’t see her through the crowd around her bed.

I looked up at Dave and saw my own concern mirrored in his expression.

“She’s going to be fine, right?” I searched his face, looking for any sign that he was trying to protect me from reality.

He looked concerned but calm. “She is going to be fine.”

I felt that same strange confidence, even with a crowd of medical professionals around her bed and her frustrating silence. I had been praying Hail Mary’s aloud and I began also silently invoking the intercession of St. Zelie Martin. My inner dialogue with her went something like this:

“You’ve been in this place. You lost 4 babies. Please pray for my baby’s life to be spared. Please intercede for us. I’m not strong like you. I can’t lose a baby. I had so much anxiety throughout this pregnancy. I want to be proven wrong. Please God, let her breathe! St. Zelie, pray for her. Pray for us.”

I called to Dave from across the room where he’d moved to be nearer to her crib. “Babe, I think we got her name wrong.” He walked over and put his hand on my shoulder, “I think so, too.” We both smiled and said “Zelie. Her name is Zelie.”

And so it was.

You know how the story ends, since Zelie is very much alive and with us. She finally started crying at about the 20 minute mark. Not an eternity, but it sure felt like it in the moment.

Little by little her oxygen saturation came up in that first 60 minutes, until at last she was breathing normally and to the liking of the respiratory team. They ended up leaving our room without ever having to intubate her, which felt miraculous after such a bumpy beginning. She did stay in the hospital an extra day to be monitored for any desaturations, but she performed admirably and was with me the entire time. The best anyone could figure was she just had to work a little harder to clear the amniotic fluid from her airways, and once she did, she was out of the woods.

I know there’s more to the story than that, though. I felt certain of St. Zelie’s presence in that delivery room, and I continue to feel a deep kinship with her in my motherhood.

It was similar to the experiences I’ve had of John Paul II’s presence – I could feel her intercession as much as if I’d asked a friend standing next to me to pray. The veil separating the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant was a little thinner in that moment.

The Communion of Saints isn’t some bizarre pious tradition the Church fosters in order to justify the cost of statues and stained glass windows. Zelie Martin is alive in Christ; more alive than your or I, in fact. And she stands in the Presence of God and addresses Him directly with the needs of her brothers and sisters still on earth.

Talk about having connections.

Can I pray directly to God and ask Him for what I need? Of course I can. And I must. And I do.

And because God is generous and merciful and is not unfamiliar with the human condition, I can do this, and more. I can ask my friends who have already arrived to throw a lifeline back, to text me the directions and reassure me I’m going in the right direction. “I know you’ve already arrived. Will you pray I make it, too? Will you bring this particular situation before Our Lord? I believe He can hear me, God, help my unbelief…”

The saints are like a phone line between heaven and earth. We don’t have to use it, of course, but the coverage is excellent, and, just like with Google, the Big Guy is always listening in.

St. Zelie Martin, pray for us.

Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, Evangelization, Family Life, Living Humanae Vitae, Marriage, motherhood, NFP, Sex, Theology of the Body

Living Humanae Vitae: stories of faithfulness to the Church’s teachings on sex and marriage

May 1, 2018

How many times can she write about NFP?

I can write about it as many times as it takes in order for me to internalize the seemingly simple concepts undergirding this most perennially misunderstood of Catholic teachings: openness to life.

I’ve spilled plenty of digital ink on the splendors of HV in the past, and I don’t retract a single character of any of it, but boy, living it out day-to-day is a little different than studying it in abstraction.

I just finished reading a trilogy of stories set in ancient Rome, around 70 years AD, and the grit and virtue and boldness of the early Christians whose lives it chronicled astonishes me. Not only because of the certain death in the arena at the jaws of wild beasts which they faced if their clandestine faith was exposed, but because they were truly – at least in the fictional narrative I read- in constant conversation with one another and with God about His will.

It reminded me a little bit (and only a little bit) of practicing NFP. The willingness to look foolish, to feel foolish, and to be subject to some degree of rejection – varying from bemused to downright nasty – by the culture at large. This comparison both consoles and shames me, because on the one hand I probably don’t need to worry overly much about imprisonment and martyrdom in 21st century America (not at this precise moment, at least) and on the other hand, how embarrassing that the relatively benign cross I’ve been asked to shoulder feels so crushing upon my feeble shoulders.

Because for all the beauty and truth and goodness I perceive in the Church’s teachings on sex and marriage, living it out is often none of the above. I don’t want to spend the next 12 to 14 months “getting my body back” only to balloon to an unspeakable number on the scale again with another pregnancy. I don’t want to practice copious amounts of abstinence within marriage, feeling more like a roommate than a spouse while I learn the ropes of (yet) another method of NFP. I don’t want to peer anxiously into the mists of my 40’s and wonder if I’m going to be one of those lucky women who keep ovulating well into their 5th decade, thereby prolonging the suspense and surprise of another baby in the very twilight of my fertile years.

I don’t have the faith of Sarah and Abraham. I don’t have the confident humility of Mary. I lack Elizabeth’s joyful surrender. I spend a lot of time worrying about all of this, to be perfectly honest, and for the first time in my life, I can wholeheartedly empathize with the temptation of contraception.

But.

(It’s a big but.)

God knows my heart better. God knows our needs better than we do. And God asks so relatively little of us modern Christians in the developed world. My children have food and medicine and beds to sleep in. There is no conflict in our region that daily imperils their lives. We have medical care to bring them all, almost certainly, to adulthood, a reality unthinkable only a few generations past. We are richly, richly blessed. My life is not without its challenges, but should I come face to face with a Christian mother from the ancient world, I don’t think she would recognize my suffering as such. Maybe she would look around at the vast temptation all our technology affords us to ignore God – to become like gods in a real sense – and she would nod her head in understanding at the real difficulties this presents in raising a faithful family. But I think she would probably also look at our overflowing closets and dishwasher and running water and marvel at the sheer wealth and provision we tend to take for granted.

And I wonder if she would look at me with my access to a clean, safe hospital (and epidurals!) and good maternal healthcare and a supportive, faithful husband and no known health issues and steady employment and wonder why I was so afraid of bringing new life into the world.

I wonder that, too.

Is it because I’ve been conditioned to not overdo things in the gestational department by a culture that hammers us over the head with the message that two is plenty? Is it because I have unrealistic beauty standards for myself based largely upon the availability and use of contraception? Is it because we have little to no daily support outside our extended family (which alone is an enormous advantage) as we parent these children of ours, the village having since passed into the realm of history and metaphor?

All I know is that we had 5 babies in 7 years, and I’m tired. I want my body back. I want to sleep through the night again. I want to eagerly count down the months until all 5 kids are in school full time and my professional life can ramp up again during those 35 available hours a week.

Basically, I want motherhood and child rearing to have been a fleeting season that flies by (as I am repeatedly told by strangers at Target) and is gone in the wistful blink of an eye, but I also want to reject the cultural narrative that my children are somehow holding me back and that my fertility is something to be tightly managed, suppressed, and ultimately discarded.

I want it both ways.

I want to live in harmony with the culture of which I am a part while also raising children who transcend the culture to seek the Lord’s will over their own. I want to be confident in our choice to live faithfully the Church’s call to marital chastity and fruitfulness and also look great in jeans and effortlessly drop the pounds that pregnancy hangs on my diminutive frame. I want to fill my home with happy children and also be handed the keys to a Nissan NV with a wink and a smile from a God who, as it turns out, subscribes to the health and wealth gospel Himself, despite what the actual Gospels say, and will surely reward my faithfulness with material abundance and children who sleep through the night from birth.

I want a lot of contradictory things.

And my greatest discomfort lies in that friction between what I claim to want as a subject of Christ and what I pant enviously after as a citizen of the world.

I have some stories to share with you from friends and fellow Christians in the coming weeks as we approach the 50th anniversary of Bl. Paul VI’s prophetic text, Humanae Vitae, in July. They are stories of suffering and heartache. Stories of loss and betrayal. Stories of hope, of fidelity, and of a peace that surpasses understanding. They are the stories of ordinary men and women who are using NFP and struggling, failing, confessing, and getting back up again to keep at it because the struggle is worth it. Because the Church asks us to do this thing in Her wisdom, not in Her sadism. Because either we trust in the Apostolic authority handed down from Peter or we are each our own little magisterium and, as such, are tasked with an exhaustive and impossible list of things to discern for ourselves using the quivering compass of our own consciences.

The Church asks us to do much harder things than what Humanae Vitae contains. We worship the Creator of the Universe contained in a scrap of bread. We proclaim the Resurrection of the dead and immortality. We turn our cheek to let an enemy get a better angle for the second punch. And yes, we offer our bodies as a living sacrifice even in the bedroom, which is the very last place our culture encourages us to exercise any sort of restraint or charity.

It’s a wild ride. It’s an impossible mandate without Jesus. And it is going to the stuff that 21st century saints are made of, I’m firmly convinced.

I think after reading some of the stories I’ll be sharing over the next 2 months, you’ll think so, too. We hear plenty of stories of people who find the demands of Christ impossibly high and, like the rich young man in the Gospel, walk away.

But sticking with it when the going gets tough? Relying on the unfathomable depths of Jesus’ mercy when we inevitably stumble and fall?

Now those are some stories worth telling.

Evangelization, Family Life, large family, Marriage, motherhood, Parenting

Thriving, surviving, and tithing (+ a little miracle)

November 7, 2017

Since mid-October we’ve been battling a mild onslaught of illnesses of the childhood variety, along with your typical run-of-the-mill life with lots ‘o kids shenanigans. Evie kicked off sick season with a heart-stopping middle of the night croup episode that had us racing to the ER for oral steroids, nebulized epinephrine, and multiple albuterol treatments. We escaped a transfer to the PICU at Children’s by the skin of our teeth (and daddy’s fervent 4 am rosary, I’ve no doubt) and were discharged home by 6 the next morning. Cue huge sigh of relief at 1. a healthy kid and 2. not having to sleep for multiple nights curled up on a hospital chair at 7.5 months pregnant.

Unfortunately, she had a repeat episode about 11 days later (I blame the cold snap that accompanied trick or treating) and back to the ER we trotted. Evie is a tricky one with croup because unlike her brothers (whose airways are perhaps a tad sturdier?) she doesn’t respond to the usual steam/humidifier/shocking cold outdoor air tricks. She needed drugs and she needed them asap, both times. Praise God again that she demonstrated after only a single round of meds a sufficient degree of recovery to get her sent home. The attending doc was only willing to give her 1 strike rather than the usual 3 before ordering the transfer, since she was presenting with the same symptoms so soon after her first episode. Again, the prayers. Again, the miraculous pre-dawn discharge home.

Oh, p.s., according to the ER pediatrician, she also had pink eye. Eye drops all around, put it on my tab. I’m shameless in begging multiple rounds of meds for pink eye whenever one kid is diagnosed because duh. They’re all going to get it. Hell, I’m probably going to get it too. We’re all more or less symptom-free now, a week later, and pretty much recovered in the sleep department. Luke has been the last man standing in terms of the offending virus that started this whole mess, and so last night at 4 pm when he dropped his drooping head on my shoulder and passed out cold, I knew that it was at long last his turn to be up all night.

I was pleasantly surprised though, because after some cuddles, that ill-timed nap, and a little bit of children’s Motrin, he slept mostly through the night and so did the rest of us.

That extremely lengthy lead up is headed somewhere, I promise. I’m just setting the stage. Oh, did I mention that in the midst of this our van broke down?

Yeah, it was the morning after that second ER vi$it, so I was doing school drop off as a favor to daddy while he and Evie caught up on missed sleep. As Luke and I pulled away from the school parking lot, I heard an ominous thud. The rpm needle started jumping wildly up and down, and there was a distinct loss of power that had me pointing the car east to the mechanic’s shop (from whence we’d retrieved it yesterday – “nothing we can see wrong with it, ma’am”) for a second opinion. I drove approximately 20 miles per hour (because that was apparently my new max speed) through Denver rush hour traffic with my hazards blinking praying that we’d make it the 4 miles to the shop because I was makeup-less, pregnant, and toting a barefoot 2-year-old with a snotty nose in the backseat.

After a mildly harrowing journey, we pulled into the auto shop’s lot where the van promptly died. It was poetic. (But of course, it took another 3 hours for the guys working there to get it to demonstrate its bad behavior for them. But demonstrate at last, it did.)

Official diagnosis: transmission. Official estimate: $3,400-5,000, depending upon what degree of “newness” we were after in a transmission.

Did I mention we put $1,200 into this car in August and had deferred an additional $1,500 worth of work? Ain’t that the way it goes, though?

Dave Ramsey’s ominous proverb about Murphy “moving into your spare bedroom when you buy a house before you’re ready” was echoing in my tired brain while I tried not to cry (unsuccessfully) and called my sister. Luckily, we’d forgotten to pick up Dave’s car the night before after raging too hard at an All Saints’ party, and so there was a way for me to get home. That alone felt like a little miracle, and so I allowed myself to be cheered by it while I drove Luke and I to Starbucks to drown our sorrows (senselessly and ironically, considering the price) before returning home to a surprised and still-sleepy daddy to relay the news.

As we sipped our bankruptcy lattes in contemplative silence, it occurred to me that apart from the tears shed on the phone with my sister – which weren’t really all that unexpected considering pregnancy hormones – I wasn’t freaking out.

We’d just spent lot$ of time in the ER, our primary family vehicle was dead, we had a big, fat, new mortgage in our names and a fifth baby coming in 8 weeks or so and I wasn’t – am still not – freaking out.

This, my friends, must be what they call shellshock maturity? Or something like it. It wasn’t that I wasn’t tempted to panic about our finances, or the fact that all my kids had all the infections for all the weeks and surely the poor, defenseless newborn we’d be bringing home shortly will also fall prey when he or she arrives… I mean, those thoughts definitely went through my head, but then something weird happened: I let them pass right on out.

I guess it’s probably a good combination of effective meds, a gentler pregnancy experience, and just some plain old fashioned healing, but I am not drowning in anxiety. It really is well with my soul.

Last week we heard a homily about tithing that pricked my conscience because I’d just been mentally debating dropping our monthly giving below the 10% mark because finances have been so tight. I broached the subject with Dave after Mass and we decided, instead, to do something that’s objectively pretty stupid: to increase our monthly giving by $50 bucks.

Not a huge amount of money, but not nothing, either. And it looked really dumb on paper. Like, “maybe you should pay the water bill first” dumb. I think I even said out loud to Dave “I am consciously doing this to call down God’s blessing on us financially” (And yes, I know it doesn’t work that way. But I wanted to put the Almighty God on notice that I was expecting big things, and was doing so with ridiculous and possibly insane expectations.)

And guess what?

The day our car died, the day after our second ER trip in less than 2 weeks, about 4 days after that fateful “tithe more” decision, I got a message from a friend.

“Jenny, I’ve got to tell you something, and you can’t say no.”

I mentally steeled myself for whatever it might be.

“I have (a certain amount) of money set aside for personal use, and I want to give it to your family for a new mini van fund.”

It was many, many more dollars than $50.

I was speechless and immediately burst into tears, staring at the blinking message on my screen. Evie must have asked me 20 times during my half hour of intermittent sobbing “is everything okay, Mommy?”

Yes, baby girl. Everything is okay.

And it was. And it is. And we used the money for a down payment on a new-to-us van with “low” (80k, lol) mileage and – wait for it – 8 full size seats, meaning come December, all 5 existing carseats will fit perfectly inside it, like a winning round of highway safety Tetris.

I’m not sharing this story in a magical-thinking “this is what happens when you tithe, shazam!/prosperity gospel” kind of way, but to underscore the even bigger miracle (yes, bigger than the $$$ for the car): and the miracle was this, that I believed God was going to provide. Not that He did provide, but that I believed He would.

I’ve never been there.

I’ve never trusted Him – not when it came down to it – that I could completely hand off the reins and hope for the best.

I’ve always, always taken the “work like everything depends on you” piece of the old axiom kind of on it’s own. Sure, I might slip in the “pray like everything depends on God” with a kind of mental eye roll, but let’s all be real, grown ups help themselves.

How wrong I’ve been. And what an exhausting, impossible way to live.

For me, this has been the greatest gift of mothering a larger family: that I can no longer even pretend to be in control.

And when I at last travelled beyond (see: permitted myself to be dragged like dead weight) the point of no return, the I-can’t-handle-another-moment-of-this-nervous-breakdown (helloooo, last summer + the real estate market) I found that on the other side of all that fear, all that insomnia, all of that mind-paralyzing worry about things that are actually outside my control to begin with…He was there.

This must be the peace that surpasses all understanding.

Not that things are actually okay (though they pretty much are okay, if I’m being honest. Credit card debt and running noses notwithstanding), but that He will be my peace in the midst of of the storm.

The storm might still rage. The other car might break down next week. The kids could get really, really sick in a way that pushes us beyond midnight ER runs. And, ultimately, at the end of all our striving and planning and worrying…death.

But the peace is there. I think my little tithing “experiment” was as much a tithe of money as it was a tithe of trust, an act of blind confidence (containing no small amount of “fake it till you make it”) that God actually would make it okay. That He could be trusted to take the reins. Even as my brain screamed “illogical,” my heart surrendered “it’s possible.”

And it was. And it is.

And I don’t think I would have gotten here by any other path by this one. My confirmation saint is Rose of Lima, chosen (superficially) for her pretty name from a book of saints I idly flipped through while zoning out during confirmation class in high school. One of my favorite expressions from her is this:

“Apart from the cross there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.”

And so we climb. And the cross turns out not to be quite the horror I initially and intellectually shied away from in my younger years, but, at least for this remedial and oh-so-reluctant pupil, more of a gentle and slow death to self.

Death to preferences. Death to convenience. Death to comfort. Death to nap times lining up during the day and death to a perfect body and a good night’s sleep and uninterrupted plans. Death to a fully-matched 401k (which is a great thing to aim for!) and death to a preference for my own will.

But from all that death, a new life is being drawn forth into the light. And not just the little one growing beneath my heart and currently battering my ribs, but a new life for me too.

The miracle wasn’t only that He provided, though, miraculously, provide He did. The miracle is that He transformed my heart, and I believed He would.

“Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

benedict option, Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Evangelization, feast days

Saints alive: In the world, but not of the world

November 1, 2017

It’s the Feast of All Saints, which means everyone has a raging sugar hangover and we’re on our second round of costumes in 24 hours – which, I admit, sounds miserable but which I manage by encouraging, nay, insisting, that would-be Halloween costume contenders transition almost effortlessly into saint costumes. So, for example, this year we have Darth Vader/St. Ignatius of Loyola, Luke Skywalker/St. Francis of Assisi, a crazy cat lady/St. Therese of Lisieux on her First Communion day (okay, that one did not transition well AT ALL), and the Chic-fil-A cow/the holy cow of Bethlehem (what? I’m tired).

Jedi look an awful lot like Franciscans, don’t you think?

The point is, if I’m going to be a fun mom and let them trick or treat the night before, it sort of behoves me to bust my butt making sure All Saints Day isn’t a big ‘ol womp womp compared with the glories of trick or treating. Which, happily, in the Catholic mega-community we’ve worked at creating here in Denver, with some help from our friends and a huge helping of grace, is not difficult to do.

I have to admit to not loving the rush of hustling bodies into costumes for the second day in a row and skidding out the door for 8 am Mass at school (costumes optional. But not really, unless you want to be the weirdo without a halo), but I do it because it’s important – it’s essential to us – that our kids know the entire point of Halloween is to point us to this great feast of all the members of the Church Triumphant. In a supremely teachable moment last night, the stuff Twitter wars are made of, truly, 5 year old John Paul asked “mom, why do we celebrate something evil right before we celebrate something holy?” and I all but shouted to STOP THE TRAIN BECAUSE HONEY, we are not celebrating evil, we’re looking it in the eye and saying, “nuh uh, we know who defeated death. And the victory is His.)

But it was a good reminder of how hard we need to work to present an attractive, compelling, and profoundly true narrative to counter the culture’s obsession with death, gore, and all things temporal.

And probably I’m not going to get the neighbors to dismantle their sadistic graveyard for the entire month of October, but I can surely make certain that our family parties hard come November 1st, drilling it home to our kids that Halloween is the low-key dress rehearsal for the big dance. So we trick or treat and have fun with the neighbors, but the real party is the next day, starting with Mass, a huge feast with all our little saint icons and peg dolls gathered around the huge dining room table, and culminating with a massive party with 100 of our closest friends at the home of our favorite religious order, the Servants of Christ Jesus.

Could we skip trick or treating all together and pretend Halloween doesn’t exist? Sure, we could. And that would be fine. But it wouldn’t be super realistic. Our kids see the entire city decked out in ghoulish decor come late September, and they know something is going on, and so we ride the wave of momentum driving their excitement right on into November 1st, kind of the way we take the premature hype and hustle of retail Christmas during Advent and use it to point out to them how insanely excited the whole world is about Jesus’ birthday, “they can’t even wait till Christmas to start celebrating!” And then we have to follow up by keeping Christmas alive for 12 days, which is 11 days longer than even K-Love is willing to go.

But being Christian means being countercultural. And for our crew, we’ve determined that our counter-culturalism will take the form of willingly embracing what is good in the wider culture, and using it as a springboard into what is even greater: the truth of the Gospel.

We see these widely-celebrated secular holiday seasons as a kind of protoevangelium of what is good and true and beautiful, but which falls just short of the entire reason for joy: Jesus Christ.

So yes, Halloween, but only because it’s the eve of the festival of all the great saints of heaven, triumphant in eternity because of Christ’s trampling over death. And yes, Christmas cookies in early December, but only because we’re sharing in our neighbor’s joy that something so wonderful happened to the human race 2,000 years ago that we haven’t stopped celebrating since, even if many have largely forgotten the cause for celebration.

In entering into what is good and lovely in the culture and using it to reinforce the truths we’re installing in our children’s hearts, our prayer is that we’re forming not only good disciples for Christ, but good missionary disciples. Able to engage and participate in the culture of which they are very much apart, never forgetting for a moment they are very much set apart.

So today, we feast. We get up early for Mass as a family. We eat too much candy. I make dessert even though it’s comically superfluous in light of 4 overflowing pumpkins atop the fridge. We attend a raucous party on a school night that is wildly inconvenient and unwise in terms of sugar consumption. And tonight during bedtime prayers, we’ll light every candle in the house and crank Matt Maher’s “Litany of the Saints,” invoking the prayers and memories of all our heavenly friends. And did I mention we eat candy?

My kids know plenty about alllllll the Marvel superheroes. They have the Star Wars universe all but memorized without even trying. It’s not realistic for me to expect them to fall in love with the real superheroes of this world unless I put in the effort and the energy to make sure they are known, loved, and emulated. Challenge accepted.

(And sure, we could skip Halloween altogether. And if your family does, that’s totally cool.) Me? I like a little bit of a challenge. I like trying to out-cool the culture in terms of which party is bigger, badder, and lasts later into the night. I like letting our kids have a taste of what’s good from an earthly perspective and allowing it to whet their appetite for what’s good from a heavenly perspective.

And I love teaching them about the saints, our real-life friends in heaven, alive in the presence of Jesus and cheering us on as we run so as to win the race.

(Don’t have a favorite saint? Click here to discover a new heavenly bff of your very own.)

(Want to learn more about a specific saint? Check CNA’s saint archives here.)

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Evangelization, Family Life, feast days, liturgical living, saint days

Liturgical living for the lazy mom

October 26, 2017

Hey, do you have a kid or several and are trying to raise them Catholic and sort of had no idea, when you were growing up, that there were liturgical seasons, let alone an entire liturgical calendar cranking along in tandem with the secular year?

Yeah, me neither. I mean Advent and Lent, sure, but between public school and a decidedly lackluster parish, I credit my parents immensely that we ended up Catholic at all. Never mind that I didn’t know the Memorare till I was 23. They nailed the basics.

Lucky for you, for the past 7 delightful years, thanks to a combination of maternal hormones and the internet, I’ve been working to enthusiastically integrate feast days, baptismal day celebrations, and an holistic (I hope) recognition of the liturgical year in my own family. And I’ve got you covered for ideas.

Here’s why you should listen to me over some domestic goddess with finer attention to detail and legitimate retail-level crafting skills: because I am going to tell you how to do it in the absolute laziest, most basic way possible. On the off chance that there are other women out there who, like me, would actually prefer to do laundry or write up budget reports than craft elaborate saint-themed art projects, I figured it might be worth a write up.

(I happen to think those aforementioned domestic goddesses are pretty extraordinary, and I love catching a glimpse of their domestic liturgies through instagram or Facebook. But don’t ever show my kids what’s going on in their backyards, lest I have to devise something more profound than “here’s a marshmallow in your lunchbox: happy baptismal day, son!”)

Let’s make a little list, shall we? It seems to me we have a few categories at hand: major feasts and seasons of the liturgical year, family/personal devotions to particular saints, and baptismal days.

We’ll start with the major feasts/seasons, since Advent is very nearly upon us.

I’ve written a bit about how we’ve celebrated Advent in our family, and you’re welcome to check out some of these older posts for ideas. Since adding more kids and chaos to the mix (sweet chaos, but, nonetheless…) we’ve simplified further. First, an awareness that it *is* a different season for the Church. We point out the swapping of missals at Mass towards the end of November, telling our crew we’re entering into a season of preparation for baby Jesus as an entire Church. We point out the changing music, and we try to listen to a little bit of it at home. I try to keep the Christmas music to a minimum before the blessed event, but we’re not militant about that. If it’s a Sunday in Advent or a big feast day in our family (Juan Diego, St. Nicholas) we’ll crank dat Bing, never mind that we’re still weeks out from Christmas. But I try to steer clear of the 24-hour stations in the car, and impress upon the small people that while it’s exciting to prepare for Jesus, He’s not here yet, and so we’re going to make a tiny little sacrifice and not listen to Christmas music for a couple more weeks. (Full disclosure: this year, being uber pregnant and needing the serotonin boost, I may be much more lenient with this practice. And I may have listened to the James Taylor holiday station on Pandora for an hour yesterday.)

Some other Advent ideas include a little box of straw and a small wooden manger for the kids to fill with their good deeds and sacrifices. The better behaved the kid, the softer Baby Jesus’ bed. (And the more generous Santa will be). They totally get it.

Lent is a little tricker since they’re younger, but we take similar care to point out the changes happening at Mass, everything from the colors of the vestments to the changing liturgical decor of the building. We emphasize not saying “Alleluia” and they enjoy cackling gleefully when they catch each other slipping up. We also reserve desserts or special treats to big feast days only (St. Joseph, St. Patrick) and do our best to have a family penance of some sort. Last year it was no DVDs in the car and guess who that ended up being the most penitential for? Yeah…

The takeaway? It doesn’t have to be elaborate, artistic, or even particularly exciting. Just bringing a child’s awareness to bear on the rhythm of the Church’s year has a profound impact on them and helps universalize the experience of Catholicism for them. Isn’t it cool, I’ll ask, that kids in Africa are also lighting the 3rd Advent candle this Sunday? Isn’t it crazy to think that Easter is already going on in Australia right now, while it’s still Holy Saturday here?

Next up we have our favorite saint days. (A saint day = generally the day he or she died, but not in every case.) This is my favorite way to celebrate, and I love that the Church gets how often we human beings need to party. Lent is crammed full of feast days (and so is Advent, for that matter) which naturally break up the otherwise solemn nature of the seasons. And? It’s been a really handy tool to deploy in order to determine whether or not dessert is an option that day. My big boys have become trained to ask “is it a feast day?” with hopeful, gleaming eyes about 30 seconds into dinner, and if it is, and if it’s a saint one or all of us are devoted to or someone is named after, you can bet there’ll be sugar for the second course.

I am not much of a baker, so most of the time we’re talking a box of gf pumpkin bread from Trader Joe’s, a handful of tootsie rolls from the back of the pantry or, yes, a big marshmallow. Popsicles if it’s summer. A trip to 7-11 for Slurpees if it’s a major cause for celebration. (7 year old boys are deeply cultured.) I love this tradition we’ve settled into because a. it self regulates our sugar intake and b. it (hopefully) indelibly links the feast days of the Church to celebration and sweetness in the minds of my children.

Don’t have a favorite/patron saint? Why not peruse the CNA saint archives and see if anyone jumps out at you. Look up the saints for the days of each family member’s birthday, for your wedding anniversary, the day you finished your medical degree, the date of your engagement, etc. You might be pleasantly shocked by what – and who – you find. If your kids are named after saints, that’s an easy one. Find the corresponding day to their name and make it a point to learn a little about the heavenly friend they share a name with. Don’t have a saintly name? Maybe there’s a variant or previously unexplored wordplay connection, like choosing a Marian feast day for a little girl named Grace (full of grace) or commemorating St. Isidore the farmer for a little boy named Hayden (too much of a stretch?).

Finally, we have baptismal days. I’ve tried to get better about, ah, actually knowing which days each of us were baptized (any idea when mine is, mom?) and making it a point to mark that momentous occasion of our entrance into the communion of saints.

I don’t dig out their baptismal candle and light it or even show them pictures of the day, though both are good ideas! I literally just identify the lucky target and we give a round of high fives or applause for the day he or she became a Christian, and I stuff a marshmallow into their lunchbox (are you sensing a high-brow culinary theme here? Good.)

Sometimes we also take a minute or two for a brief catechesis on what baptism is (entrance into the divine life of Christ), what it requires of us (fidelity to our baptismal promises), and what it entitles us to (membership in the family of God.) I’ll remind them that just as they were born into our family and did nothing to earn that belonging, so also they were born into the family of God through no merit of their own, and that it’s up to them to decide whether they want to stay there. Boom, free will in a nutshell.

The biggest reason I try to emphasize these little domestic celebrations and the larger liturgical events of the Christian year?

It’s because I know that I am competing for the hearts and minds of my children, and that the very best bet I can hedge is to attempt to inebriate them with joy. The world is a flashy, exciting, delightful place, and if I want my kids to be as excited about St. Therese as they are about the new Star Wars movie being released, I have to bring my A-game. And that needn’t mean elaborate crafts or themed meals (though it sure could!); but an intentional awareness and joyful celebration of the liturgical feasts (and fasts) of the Church year.

Will it guarantee little grown-up Catholics 30 years from now? Nope. But it sure can’t hurt. And I like to think that for little hearts and minds that do stray, free will being what it is, a sweet memory from childhood of a candlelit dinner table and mom’s lackluster dessert could go far in reigniting a weakly-flickering flame in a soul that might be struggling.

It’s not just smells and bells for the sake of keeping our bodies and minds occupied, after all, but about communicating a deeper reality to our souls that sometimes finds greater efficacy in going directly through the senses.

Plus, it’s fun to party. And Catholics really should be anxious to defend the title of throwing the very best parties, culminating, of course, in eternity.

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, deliverance, Evangelization, prayer, spiritual warfare

I must confess: building a habit of the Sacrament of Reconciliation

September 21, 2017

When I was a Catholic kid growing up, like most Catholic kids I’ve ever known, I hated going to confession. I hated the sinking feeling in my stomach as I stood in line, palms sweating and heart speeding up as each penitent in line ahead of me disappeared behind the door with the red light overhead. I hated coming up with a list of things I was ashamed of and having to whisper them aloud to another human being, and I hated most of all knowing that Fr. Bob could probably tell just by my voice exactly who I was.

In short, I had a very human (and very typical) understanding of confession. That it was a painful, inescapable, and necessary (but why?) part of being Catholic, and I just had to soldier through it.

I think a lot of people stay in that place of understanding their whole lives. I think that’s why in a recently-released CARA study, data indicated that only around 2% of actively practicing Catholics go to confession at least once a month.

(An aside: the Church only requires us by canon law to confess our grave sins at least once a year. But, like dental hygiene and aerobic exercise, this is definitely one of those “more is more” situations).

When I was a senior in college, freshly transferred to Franciscan University of Steubenville, one of the most striking realizations I had during my first few weeks on campus was how into the sacrament of reconciliation everyone was. Daily Mass was one thing, but to see lines of college students 30, 40, 50 deep, wrapping around the back of the church not only on Saturday afternoons but during every single Mass on campus, seven days a week…that was something else. What was the deal with these kids? Were they struggling that intensely with some habitual sin that merited returning over and over and over again for fresh absolution and more grace?

As it turns out, yes.

But also, no.

Yes, they were in need of more grace, of more frequent absolution, and of greater accountability from their spiritual directors and priests. But it was precisely because they were growing in holiness that the hunger – and the need – for this beautiful sacrament of healing was that much more acute.

To borrow an analogy from the sporting world, as Michael Phelps or Philip Rivers or any other pro athlete increases in ability and performance, so too does awareness of the need arise to log more hours in the pool, to spend more hours watching film.

As God increases His activity in a soul, the sensitivity level rises, so to speak. St. John Paul II made a habit of weekly confessions during his papacy. I remember reading that sometime in my twenties and being like, um, what? WHAT? What could he possibly be getting into that necessitated 4 trips a month while I was getting by with Advent and Lent?

Holiness, it turns out.

Intimacy with the Father, bred through familiarity and a desire to conform oneself more and more closely to the heart of Jesus.

As I began to study about the sacraments on an intellectual level during my classes, (thanks, Dr. Hahn) the reality of the gift I was in possession of by nature of my baptism began to unveil itself to me on a heart level. I found myself wanting to go to Mass more than only on Sundays, not because I had to, but because I felt drawn to the Eucharist by familiarizing myself more and more with Jesus’ presence there. I was attracted to late-night Holy Hours and trips to the Port, not out of guilt or shame but because I was falling in love.

And while I’m no longer in a state of life where I can keep a weekly 2 am Eucharistic rendezvous in a shady adoration chapel downtown (Holla at me St. Pete’s) I can still avail myself frequently of the powerful, healing Sacrament of Reconciliation just by hopping in line on any given Sunday at my parish. (5 priests on staff and confessions before and after every Mass, 7 days a week. I know – we’re insanely fortunate.)

I’ve come to understand that confession is actually less about what I’m doing wrong and more about what God wants to make right in my heart. That bringing my sins into the light of His mercy and refusing to hide behind my own pride – masked as shame, but pride nonetheless – is the bravest thing I can do.

And oh, yeah, while it’s not for everyone, I stopped worrying about whether Father was going to figure me out from behind the screen and started plopping down in the chair right across from him. Half the time I have a squirming baby or toddler on hand, anyway, so what’s the point of keeping up the pretense? He’s heard it all, I’ve confessed the same sins so many times as to be, frankly, bored by them myself, and it’s a good dose of humility for me, to boot. Face-to-face might not be everybody’s jam, but it’s definitely my cup of tea now.

Father isn’t there to judge my heart or my actions on a human level, anyway. In the same way his hands elevate the consecrated host during the Eucharistic prayer, becoming the hands of alter Christus “another Christ,” he embodies the priestly person of Jesus once again in the sacrament of reconciliation.

It’s not magic, but it is mystical. And it’s just another part of our faith that defies explanation. Confess your sins to a priest? How absurd.

Yep, kinda like resurrecting from the dead. A virgin birth. Tongues of fire descending from heaven. Seas parting. Dead men sitting up and hopping out of bed.

Turns out there are plenty of things to choose from if we’re going to chat aspects of Christianity that beggar belief. We moderns just have some we more readily assent to than others.

A final thought and some practical notes on confession: sometimes it doesn’t feel good. Sometimes it feels really mechanized and routine and not at all mystical or transformative. Most of the time, I’d say. It feels about like it feels to fulfill your Sunday obligation and make it through Mass with a writhing lap-octopus whining a sustained C-minor into your ear for 60 minutes straight.

And that’s okay. I’m sure Michael Phelps has plenty of bad workouts and disappointing races. They, too, are necessary components of a larger training program and necessary building blocks in the larger puzzle of his elite-level success, same as the gold medals.

We should do hard things, even if they don’t feel good. We should humble ourselves before the Lord, allowing Him to show us mercy even when we least merit it, and take the chance of being surprised by joy when we least expect it.

I find it helpful to jot down some habitual sins or present struggles in my daily planner/journal/scraps of Target receipts I find in my purse. There’s no shame in bringing a list to the grocery store or into the confessional. And if you think it feels good to cross “cleaning toilets” off your to-do list, imagine how good it feels to drill a fat, black line through “gossiped about mom” or “swore angrily 4 times at that jackrabbit who cut me off on the freeway”.

Real good, I’m telling you.

Let’s make it to confession twice before the year is out. It’s late September, but that seems a reasonable target to hit in the next 14 weeks or so.

Sometimes it’s what God wants to do for us that matters far more than what we are asking for ourselves.

St. Padre Pio, St. John Paul II, St. Faustina, St. John Vianney, and all you other saints who made frequent recourse to the great Sacrament of Healing, pray for us!

*Updated to add: Dear Fathers, pastors of souls, if you are reading this, please accept my deepest gratitude for your sacramental ministry. Thank you for bringing us Jesus. I have heard stories of many of you who sit week after week in an empty confessional on Saturday with nary a penitent in sight. I have also heard from countless parishioners the world over how logistically difficult it is to get to confession, how little they’ve heard it preached about, how inaccessible their current parish model is. Would you consider in your insanely busy, sacrificial schedules, carving out an additional hour or two a week, perhaps on a Wednesday or Thursday night, and letting your flock know the light will be on? Would you consider sloughing off some lesser but organizationally pressing need to an admin or business manager, in order to make this logistically feasible for *you*?

I know it’s a lot to ask and our priests are so busy, but we need the graces of this sacrament so desperately. And I’ve seen it happen in my own parish in real time: if you build it, they will come.

So, if I may be so bold as to implore you: pick a night, open the box, preach it on Sunday from the pulpit, and invoke St. John Vianney as your patron of this new effort towards the holiness of your parish and your parishioners.

Culture of Death, Evangelization, motherhood, pregnancy, Pro Life

An open letter to the Duchess of Cambridge on the announcement of her third pregnancy

September 5, 2017

Dear Kate,

(Can I call you that? I feel like I know you since I follow your fashion account on Twitter. Or, rather, the person who stalks the fashion rags and reposts effortlessly elegant shots of you in that stunning, understated classic signature style of yours, whether you’re caught in 3 inch heels standing on a tarmac in South Africa or kneeling to reprimand an errant 3 year old in a perfectly chic blazer. But, I digress, the point of this tangent being: I admire you to the point of familiarity.)

Maybe it’s because you’re an everygirl’s princess, a lot like your late mother in law. (And while I know you’re not technically a princess yet, it’s tempting to project my childhood Disney dreams onto your gorgeous, growing family.)

I know you face a lot of scrutiny in the press, whether it’s for looking “too perfect” or for being adorably “just like the rest of us” for daring to bare an hours-fresh postpartum bump in each of your previous hospital-step photo ops. It takes guts to face a global press corp at a mere 6 hours postpartum, let alone 6 weeks. And girl, if you want to get your hair blown out before appearing on the cover of every rag and tabloid in Great Britain, power to you.

The reality is, you’ve married onto the world stage by marrying into the royal family, and you seem to shoulder the mantel of responsibility with grace. That you’ve chosen to make mental health one of the most public focuses of your personal advocacy work speaks volumes about your character; it’s not always easy or even civil to discuss mental health and the lack of care for those who suffer mental illness, especially in the public arena. But you seem no stranger to criticism.

I know that pregnancy is an enormous sacrifice, and that each of your pregnancies have been complicated by the presence of Hyperemesis Gravidarum, a serious and debilitating complication that can result in hospitalization and real trauma to the mother’s body, mind, and spirit. I know there are those who have scoffed at you for subjecting yourself to another nine months of “torture” (because I’ve read the comments online) just for the sake of another little bundle of royal needs. One intrepid Twitter genius quipped “there goes the rainforest” in reaction to your joyous news, as if 3 children were some hideous burden to lay upon the shoulders of the environment. As if a human person could possibly be reduced to the sum of their projected carbon footprint. As if a family of 5 were a ghastly vestige of the past, best swept into the annuls of history as we move boldly forward in our “enlightened” view of the human person as nothing more than a collection of electrical impulses, nerves, and appetites for consumption.

But you seem to know better. While chasing around two little toddlers, you’ve probably recognized the infinite value and capacity for love and innovation contained within the spirit of a single human person. The truth that no matter how many times you open your heart up to another little soul, it is not only your body that expands to accommodate them.

It is no small thing to bring forth new life in a culture that seems to be deteriorating all around us, to whisper that humble and magnificent fiat with your very body. In a world of increasing strife and violence, it’s easy enough to give in to fear and uncertainty, perhaps choosing to play it safe or decrying the sensibility of bringing forth innocent children into a place that, frankly, we’ve made a mess of.

But you’re a mom. So you’ve had a peek behind the curtain. You know that these children of ours are worth it, and that the future belongs not to those of us who rule from on high with money, power, and prestige (though you surely posses all three) but that it actually rests securely in the hands of our little ones. Perhaps you’ve come to the same conclusion that I have: that the only real, lasting impact we stand to make on the world lies in the intellectual and moral formation of our sons and daughters, in instilling in them a love and appreciation for truth, goodness, and beauty. That all the strife and suffering that exists in this weary world of ours cannot possibly be eradicated in our lifetimes, but could perhaps be in theirs.

Isn’t that always the hope? And isn’t bringing another child into the world, not in spite of but precisely because of the grim circumstances of it all, the most profoundly hope-filled thing we can do?

I know you’re going to be under the microscope for the next 9 months, even more intensely than you normally are. And I know there will be discussions on your hairstyle, on how big or small or perfectly round or disappointingly flat your belly is. I know whether you choose to convalesce for 24 hours before stepping out for photos or appear bright eyed and blown-out a mere hours after delivery, you will be scrutinized and judged by a sometimes unfeeling public.

But let mine be one small voice among many offering you congratulations, prayers for health and comfort in the face of hardship, and sincere gratitude for the courageous – yep, courageous – act of bringing forth new life in a culture that despises the light, and in a world that prefers comfort to courage.

It is no small thing to bring a new source of light into a world that loves darkness.

(And P.s. idk where you do most of your maternity shopping, but Target’s got a killer new maternity jean that you might want to check out if you ever feel like slumming it, sartorially speaking.)

Yours sincerely,

An American mum

benedict option, Evangelization, Family Life, motherhood, Parenting, school

Getting schooled at home (whether or not you’re homeschooling)

August 8, 2017

Like other neurotic and vaguely millennial (by the skin of my teeth, I tell you. 1982.) mothers of modern times, I stress somewhat obsessively over the choices we’ve made slash continue to make for our children. Gluten? Screen time? Appropriate catechetical formation? Vaccines?

The list of things to research on the internet and form opinions about (well informed or not) is basically endless, #thanksgoogle. And so I know that I’m not the only Catholic mother who has engaged in a little internal hand wringing about how I should maybe be thinking about homeschooling my children, sorely ill-equipped for such a venture though I may be.

A painfully necessary aside: I love homeschooling. I think it’s amazing and brilliant and that the majority of the kids who come out of it are overwhelmingly impressive, not to mention some of my favorite human beings on earth (most of my mother’s helpers have been wonderful homeschooled gals). And yet, I hope to God that our wonderful Catholic school never a. gets shut down by the government or b. becomes astronomically unaffordable…because I am in no way, shape, or form equipped to engage in it at this present moment in my motherhood. Also, I myself am a product of Colorado public schools, and right now, I can’t imagine sending my kids there in their present form. Your public school might be awesome. Many of our public schools here in Denver are … less than awesome. But yours might be! And it might be the best option for your family. This is not an essay written at you to shame your academic choices, so please click elsewhere if that’s what you were expecting to find.

So if you are publicly schooling your children, or homeschooling them, or letting them wander around your homestead keeping bees and marking up their nature journals and conducting astronomy experiments at night, or serving Mass at 8 am at the start of your local parish school day?

Then you are probably doing an awesome job.

As long as you’re engaged.

For the past couple years I’ve watched some of my homeschooling friends sit down to outline their yearly curriculum at the end of summer with something like a vague pang of envy, because while I have zero desire to engage in the behavior of homeschooling, I sure wouldn’t mind some of the outcome: brilliant kids with a love for learning and a companionable relationship to their mother/teacher. (A caricature, I know. But still.)

This year, however, it has occurred to me that I actually can have the best of both worlds. Our school encourages parental involvement and is earnestly forthcoming about curriculum and classroom goings-on, but I don’t just mean tracking what they’re learning and quizzing them on vocab words in the car, I mean engaging meaningfully over the ideas and content they’ll be soaking up and making the most of the time we have together, helping to connect the dots in their little brains between what happens in the classroom and what happens around the dinner table.

Public-schooled though my siblings and I were, the most valuable curricula on our schedules was transmitted not within the four walls of the school building, but around the family dinner table, when our parents would engage all of us in robust (sometimes alarmingly so, ask any of our childhood playmates) political and religious discourse, covering everything from current events to world history to politics to moral theology. It didn’t matter than the youngest in our sibling set was separated by 17 years from the eldest: we all got schooled in the fine art of loud family dinner table debate.

And thus it was there, in the domestic school of rhetoric and reason, that the most enduring lessons were driven home to my siblings and I: that logic is essential to comprehending reality, that reason and faith must be wedded to one another to make any sense out of life, and that if you didn’t have an opinion about something before one of our roundtable spaghetti-sessions, well, you might afterwards. Or else you’d have some good book recommendations assigned to you.

My parents engaged us in the art of daily living, and though we have our flaws and our domestic dysfunctions same as the next family, there is an enduring sense of unity and fraternity that knits the nine of us together, which I have no doubt is rooted in those hundreds of hours spent debating, discussing, and dissecting the universe.

So just because my little people will be out the door for 8 hours a day starting later this month does not absolve me from being up in their business and intimately engaged in the formation of their minds. Far from it! In fact, precisely because they’ll be out of my care for 40 hours a week, no matter the impeccable caliber of our teaching staff, it behooves me to be inversely more engaged during their time that we do have together.

For us, that might mean limited sports and social activities on school days. I figure if that becomes ingrained in our family culture from the earliest days, it will be that much easier to resist the surging tide of social pressure to sign up for All The Things.

I don’t mean that nobody will ever play soccer, just that family time and chill, unstructured sibling interaction will always take precedence. That dinners at home and breakfasts together, so much as is possible, will always trump completing homework assignments or attending tae kwon do classes.

We choose to send our kids outside the home to educate them, entrusting them to the care of competent strangers for 40 hours a week. But we do not cede our parental responsibility – or authority – during those 40 hours, or the other 128 in a week.

And because we send them out, it is even more essential that we do maximize those hours when they are home, and that we actively and intentionally engage with the content and curriculum they’re being exposed to in school.

As a public school graduate, I can attest to the hours and hours my parents – but mainly my mom – spent interacting with the local school board, meeting with teachers, questioning content and curriculum choices, and more than once choosing to exempt us from certain unit studies or entire courses altogether. (I’m looking at you, 5th grade sex-ed and 7th grade health class.) They weren’t being prudish, but prudent. I got a sex education at home, and in an age appropriate and mostly satisfactory manner, and my parents exercised their God-given authority over my education and moral formation.

Was it embarrassing to be pulled out of classes? I honestly remember being the envy of my 5th grade class because while they were blushing furiously, learning to insert tampons into plastic scale models, I enjoyed 45 minutes a day of free time in the science lab during those 2 weeks, fiddling with equipment and reading for pleasure. If I felt any embarrassment at being singled out or “othered” while my classmates were rolling condoms onto bananas, it was more than compensated for by the strong identity my parents formed in each of us that we were, in fact, different from many of our peers, intentionally so, and that it was acceptable and even preferable to be so.

So where I’m going in this rambling, kind of all over the place essay on parental authority is that you are the parent, and your authority is vested not by any municipality or school board, but by Almighty God Himself. And whatever He is asking of you this year where your children’s education is concerned, know this: the role of primary educator is intractable.

So whether you’re unschooling, homeschooling, inner-city public schooling or attending St. Gregory’s Classical Rhetorical Academy of Wisdom and Theology, you are ultimately responsible for exposing that kid to as much truth, goodness, and beauty as you can cram into 18 years, however your family deems best to achieve it.

And that won’t be on the standardized test.

Happy back to school season, fellow parents. May God inform and inspire all our choices where our children’s minds (and hearts, and souls, and bodies) are concerned, and may we be endowed with the mental fortitude to implement them.

Catholic Spirituality, Evangelization, feast days

Ignatian spirituality for moms

July 31, 2017

My spiritual director (who is probably off somewhere directing an 8 day Ignatian retreat right now) will probably cringe at this attempt to condense the richness of Ignatian spirituality to a blog post, but then again, he probably isn’t reading. St. Ignatius is a household favorite thanks to CCC’s “Francis Xavier and the Black Pearl” featuring a heavy supporting role by the original SJC himself, so it’s not uncommon in our house to see a kid running by holding up a giant plastic crucifix from the dress up box yelling “let this be our weapon!”

I was first exposed to Ignatian spirituality by my now husband while we were dating. I was in an emotional and spiritual tailspin after being cornered by a young priest after an innocent ice cream run one night with a group of visiting Nashville Dominicans. He urged me to continue discerning religious life since it seemed like I could be “running from a vocation.” Meanwhile, I’d been dating Dave for all of 4 weeks and sent him a frantic email (probably from a hotmail account) something along the lines of OH MY GOSH WHAT IF I’M SUPPOSED TO BE A NUN WE SHOULD COOL IT MAYBE?

To which he sanely, sagely responded with my first taste of St. Ignatius: follow the peace.

He said (and I paraphrase), when a soul is seeking to please God and do His will, the enemy will frequently act upon that soul with violence and unrest, trying to use anxiety as a tool to divert, distract, and destroy. But the Lord doesn’t work on our souls in anxiety, but in peace. God’s will beings peace, even when it is difficult, and sometimes even when it is excruciatingly painful.

As a person prone to anxiety in general, the idea that God’s will brings peace was a revolutionary concept. Because on some level I knew this, but on another level I was pretty sure that God’s will = whatever is most arduous and unpleasant. Don’t make me unpack that bad theology for you, just suffice it to say I had the wrong idea about the Big Guy.

After learning about this little nugget of Ignatian discernment, I was hooked on wanting to know more. I have yet to make an 8 day silent retreat (something about kids, responsibilities, etc.) but I’ve read his Spiritual Exercises, and there are some profound truths that are particularly applicable to the office of motherhood, namely, that the purpose of the Exercises, in Ignatius’ own words, is “to conquer oneself and to regulate one’s life in such a way that no decision is made under the influence of any inordinate attachment.”

If I could live my life based on that solitary concept, all my stresses and daily struggles would melt away. Melt, I tell you.

Because what is the problem most days living with a rowdy crew of small humans? It’s that I have these desires to regulate my life based upon, say, hours of daylight and a progression of productivity and pleasure while the small ones I have care of are continually presenting alternate routes involving bodily fluids, cuts, scrapes, and very distressing situations involving fidget spinners and stuffed animals that cannot be resolved at any other moment before bedtime.

In other words, I am inordinately attached to my plans. And therein lies the heart of most of my vocational struggles. I want to get a certain amount of sleep, achieve a certain level of cleanliness in the home, whip out a certain number of pieces in a set amount of time, heck, just plain drive places and show up at the time I said I’d be there.

Expectation, meet reality.

Ignatius says that in making his Exercises, it becomes possible “to conquer oneself.” I would settle for conquering even a small part of myself, say, my temper or my appetite for the internet.

The Exercises are divided into four “weeks” of varying length with four major themes: sin and God’s mercy, episodes in the life of Jesus, the passion of Jesus, and the resurrection of Jesus together with a contemplation on God’s love.

This last bit, the part about contemplating Jesus’s resurrection and God’s love, is kind of the summation of Ignatian spirituality: to find God in all things.

The tricky thing about the Exercises, as I found when reading them for myself, is that they’re really not designed for me to read, but for a director to read and then apply to me. The Exercises are not really a DIY thing, but the Examen prayer, on the other hand, is a super handy tool that can readily be applied by viewers at home.

The Examen of Consciousness is a simple prayer directed toward developing a spiritual sensitivity to all the ways God approaches, invites, and calls. Ignatius was big on a spirituality of presence: of being present to one’s life as it is actually unfolding, and to what God has put into your path each particular moment.

Ignatius recommends that the examen be done twice a day, suggesting the following five points:

Recalling that one is in the presence of God (even if someone is screaming softly in the background)
Thanking God for all the blessings one has received (yes, even the mixed blessings that were kind of cross-shaped)
Examining how one has lived the day (air that dirty laundry)
Asking God for forgiveness (and make a note of any little humans whose forgiveness you need to ask)
Resolution and offering a prayer of hopeful recommitment (ah, the sweet relief of the bedtime fondness one has for all one’s children)

See? Basically custom tailored for motherhood. (Or fatherhood. Just, I’m a mom so, you know, write what you know.)

Today being the feast of St. Ignatius, I can’t think of a more appropriate habit to take up than printing out an Examen to tuck into your Bible or prayer journal or tape to your bedside table and give it a go.

And someday, somehow, I’m going to make that 8 day retreat. Maybe in another decade or two 😉

St. Ignatius of Loyola, patron of soldiers and educators (alternative titles for “parent” if ever I read them), pray for us!

St. Ignatius of Loyola by Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1620-22

About Me, Culture of Death, Evangelization, Homosexuality

Love me enough not to leave me there

June 26, 2017

My college years were wild. They could have been worse, but they could also have been a whole lot tamer, which is always thrown into stark relief when I swap stories with my FUS pedigreed husband and fellow alums. You see, I did 4 years at CU Boulder before I transferred to Steubenville, so I had a sort of best (and worst) of both worlds college experience. Drinking, drug use, promiscuity, partying that bled into academic pursuits and, kind of, um, annihilated them? Check. And then. Festivals of Praise? Homeless ministry? Serving with the CFRs in the Bronx and praying at the abortion clinic in Pittsburgh? Also check.

It was a wild 5 years of undergrad, spanning a diverse and confusing range of experiences and friendships. And while I used to wish I could go back and erase certain chapters (especially from my junior and senior years at Boulder) I have become acutely aware that these encounters shaped me, too, for better and for worse, and that there are specific parts of my story that are relevant to other people I encounter precisely because they are relatable. I have no hope of ever ending up a St. Therese or a St. Dominic Savio. Best I can hope for is St. Augustine or St. Francis Xavier. (ha!) A little world weary, and a little too familiar with precisely what it is “the world” is struggling with.

I had some friends who were also Catholic or some other Christian denomination during my darker years, and many of them were lovely people who I had fun with. But they didn’t call me on. They saw no tension between the faith I professed on paper and the life I was living in reality. I was fun, and besides, we were living similar variations of the same story. We justified each other’s crap, to put it very mildly, and we demanded little from our relationships with one another beyond exhilarating company and tag teamed bar tabs.

There were a few other friendships, too. Not close ones, more acquaintances, technically. But these handful of beacons stood out in a time of seemingly impenetrable darkness and remain in my memory, even now, 15 years removed from the experience, shining monuments of hope and encounter in a dark and confused period of my young adulthood. The FOCUS missionary who called me every month to invite me to Bible study. Who still smiled and made conversation when we crossed paths on campus, even as I rejected invitation after invitation. Who stopped to chat in the street on the morning of her engagement, effusive with joy, dropping the yet unheard phrase “Theology of the Body” like an explosion into my curious brain. The kindly RA who lived down the hall and who would always wave to me at Mass the weekends that I made it there. The welcoming and non judgmental regular patrons of the Catholic student center who moved aside and let me awkwardly crash their (sober. astonishing to me at the time) movie nights, making room on the ratty couches for a cynical party girl who’d sworn off the bar scene for a month and found herself with a wiiiide open social calendar.

These were the people who invited me to consider that there was perhaps another way to live. These were the people who gently, mercifully called me to something more. They didn’t shout me down for the way I’d been living. They just opened the door and invited me in.

I think this method of genuine encounter is what is so desperately missing in the world. The Jesus eating with tax collectors and chatting with prostitutes mode of being. We lose sight of the necessity to encounter the other where they truly are and to then invite them into something more. To love them enough not to leave them there. It’s so easy to focus excessively on the feel good “I accept you how you are” and to drop the “and I love you enough to tell you the truth” ball. It’s equally tempting to forgo the acceptance/meeting phase and jump straight to Defcon “this is why you’re dead wrong.”

Neither way is Biblical. Jesus encounters and calls to conversion. He never separates the two. We live in a culture obsessed with being “tolerant” and “openminded.” But my tolerant friends were content to leave me paralyzed, on my mat, not costing them anything except maybe another round of Jaegerbombs. And in reality, maybe they didn’t – or couldn’t – realize how sick I was. How sick we all were. I was a stock character in their own dramas, as they were in mine. We were all of us hurting, medicating away some pain, covering up some insecurity or wound with a mode of being that allowed for numbness and oblivion.

The second kind of friends were the full package variety. They encountered and called on. They lifted up my mat. They opened their doors and offered a seat at their tables and looked me in the eye and said, in so many words, “neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”

This is what real acceptance looks like. Not empty platitudes and affected camaraderie, but authentic, intimate encounter and acceptance. Something that cost us each something. It cost me my pride and my lifestyle. And it cost them their comfortable existence and their hospitality.

And we each gained immeasurably more than we could have hoped for.

But not finding any way to bring him in because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and let him down through the tiles with his stretcher, into the middle of the crowd, in front of Jesus. Luke 5:19

I read this powerful testimony from a small group of friends who attended San Francisco’s gay pride event over the weekend and practiced an authentic and humble ministry of encounter there, meeting, welcoming, not judging … and being willing to lift the mat. Worth the click.

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