culture of death – Page 3 – Mama Needs Coffee

Culture of Death, mental health, Pornography, Sex, sin, spiritual warfare, technology, Theology of the Body

Sex, violence, and the internet: every parent’s battle

August 9, 2017

My boss brought to my attention a startling and, frankly, disturbing piece of research that surfaced last week correlating the age of a boy’s first exposure to pornography and his resultant attitude towards women. In results that ought to startle nobody who is familiar with the concept of the “latency period” in human development, according to this small study of 300 college-aged men, the younger a child is introduced to pornography, the higher the likelihood of violence in his interactions with the opposite sex.

The study authors were surprised, as they’d been expecting to see a correlation between promiscuity and earlier age of exposure. What they weren’t expecting to find was that the younger the child was when he was exposed, the more likely that he would hold a violent attitude towards women:

“That was a shock because scientists had expected that men would be more promiscuous the earlier they came to pornographic material.”

For male children who are exposed to pornography later in life, their attitude towards the opposite sex tended toward a “playboy” mentality leading to higher rates of promiscuity and an increased number of sexual partners.

I feel like any parent in possession of a grain of common sense could have predicted the outcome of the study, provided they were familiar with what the Church has traditionally identified as “the latency period” of childhood development. The notion being that pre-pubescent children are, by design, not in possession of the necessary mental faculties to process sexual images or events when they are prematurely exposed, and thus sex can actually become conflated with violence.

This is part of why sexual abuse of children is particularly horrifying, and why the normalization of pornography in our culture has such profoundly troubling consequences.

You see, introducing children “gently” to pornographic content and premature sexual information, ala Planned Parenthood’s method of classroom instruction of school children, is not the way to craft sexually healthy humans.

Putting porn into tiny, still developing brains that are neither emotionally nor biologically equipped to receive or process such information leads not to sexually-savvy adolescents down the line, but to children whose neural pathways have conflated sex and violence in a devastating intersection of dopamine and digital content.

In a society plagued concerns about rape culture and violence against women, this is something that should grip our attention. The more we learn about pornography and it’s effects on the brain, the greater our efforts to prevent – and honestly, at this point, mitigate – a massive public health crisis.

Porn is not harmless.

It’s not harmless at age 5, (the youngest age at which the men in the above study were exposed. Sob.) and it’s not harmless at 26 (the upper age range of the study). It’s not harmless at 13, which, according to this study, is the average age of first exposure. The wider-studied average appears to be age 11.

And this is really important:

Most said that they had first encountered it by accident, rather than searching it out or being forced to watch it. And how exactly that happened didn’t appear to determine how men would relate to women.

Whether they’d been exposed by accident or by design, it was the age at which they were exposed, not the method (or intention) of exposure, that determined whether they’d tend more towards violence or more towards promiscuity.

Parents, teachers, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, caretakers: this is on us. We cannot turn our children loose with internet devices, however carefully we’ve filtered and password-protected them. We cannot hand over the remote and expect kids to safely navigate Direct TV or Netflix. We cannot check out of the essential and critically important task of raising healthy adults who have a shot at a healthy interior life and decent sex some day.

Porn is not harmless. And it is not inevitable, either.

At least it doesn’t have to be, for our children.

I spend hours each day on the internet, and it has been years since I’ve come across hardcore pornography. Softer porn is harder to avoid, but as an adult with a fully formed brain and conscience, plus the necessary technological and common sense, I can easily click away plus take steps to avoid questionable content in the first place, based on the sites I click and the search terms I craft.

But I am 34 years old and female. And if I can still not help the accidental exposure to soft core porn in my daily use of the internet, imagine with the digital landscape holds for your 10 year old son or your 15 year old daughter.

Do not give your kids smartphones. Do not allow them to peruse the internet without the screen in your plain site and safeguards in place to enable safest searching. This isn’t prudishness; it’s sanity. It’s not a matter of cultural or religious preference, it’s the difference between living in a civilized society and a barbaric wasteland. Does it sound weird and inconvenient? Yep. But the devastating public health crisis we find ourselves in the midst of demands some weirdness and inconvenience of us, the grown ups.

Why do you think co-eds get raped while lying unconscious behind dumpsters on college campuses? That kind of behavior doesn’t develop in a vacuum. A normally-developing and sexually healthy 19 year old male doesn’t violently assault an unconscious female simply because he’s had a drink or 10. That is not normal human behavior. It is the result of a broader cultural dysfunction that has whispered temptingly that we can have our cake and eat it, too. That porn is healthy and acceptable and normal under the right circumstances, and that the consequences of what is done alone behind the privacy of a screen doesn’t reach out tentacles into the wider community.

Wrong.

We were wrong, and it is beyond time to correct course.

Fight for the future generations of men and women who will become the mothers and fathers and leaders of tomorrow. Don’t resign yourself to the inevitability of a sexually depraved future of men unable to care for or bond to women, of women unable to imagine or demand anything more of the partners they’ll settle for.

We can do better. We can do better than an unsupervised 5 year old whose 14 year old neighbor shows him porn on an iPhone. We can do better than a 14 year old girl sexting topless pictures to her first boyfriend, but actually to the entire lacrosse team, whose goalie will upload the images to an amateur porn site specializing in underaged content.

Talk to your kids about porn. Talk to your kids about technology. About social media. About boundaries. About saying no to immediate perceived goods for a greater good down the line.

We do not have to settle for the status quo when it comes to kids and healthy sexual development.

And neither do we have to wring our hands and lament the passing away of the civilized world. Stand up and fight! Your kid will not die without an iPhone. Your kid will not die if you pull them out of public school for their own safety and sanctity, if that’s the reality of your particular situation. Your kid will not die if you forbid the viewing of “Game of Thrones” or “Girls” in your home. Your kid will maybe even thank you some day, on the precipice of 40, surveying a wasteland of divorce and domestic destruction all around him and observing the apparent miracle of his own reasonably happy family.

We cannot settle for this. We must not settle for this.

Some excellent resources for educating about porn, combating the effects of habitual usage, and best practices for parents:

Digital resourcs:

The Digital Kids Initiative

Fight the New Drug

Porn Kills Love

Print resources:

Good pictures, bad pictures

The porn myth

Freedom: Battle strategies for overcoming temptation

Your brain on porn

Good pictures, bad pictures jr.

Theology of the body for tots

Culture of Death, euthanasia, Parenting, Pro Life, Suffering

Charlie Gard: martyr of the culture of death

July 28, 2017

Sorry, is that language too strong for you?

It must be the pregnancy hormones rendering me a raging, maternal she-bear grieved over the state-sanctioned murder of an innocent child.

But, but, he was going to die anyway. Extraordinary means! The Cathechism says! Etc. Etc. Etc.

True. All true. And yet, his parents wanted to pursue further treatment. His mother and his father, the two human beings who, entrusted by the God with whom they co-created a child with an immortal soul, were tasked with the immense, universe-altering task of making decisions on his behalf.

It’s called parenting.

And when the state steps over the bounds of parental interests – nay, tramples upon them – insisting that government knows best what is best for its citizens, (particularly when government is footing the medical bills as is the case with the socialized NHS) then we should all of us, no matter our religions or our socioeconomic statuses or our nationalities, be alarmed.

Charlie Gard was a victim of the the most heinous sort of public power struggle: a child whose humanity was reduced to a legal case and an avalanche of global publicity. And no man, not the President of the United States or the Pope himself, could do a thing to turn the tide in little Charlie’s favor once the momentum was surging against him.

The British courts and the Great Ormond Street Hospital, convinced of their own magnanimity and virtue, ruled again and again against the wishes of Charlie’s parents, frustrating at every turn their attempts to seek a second option, to try experimental treatments, to spend privately-raised funds to secure care for their child not available in their home country.

To no avail.

Charlie Gard, baptized earlier this week into the Catholic Church, went home to be with Jesus today. His innocent soul in a state of grace, we can be confident of his intimate proximity now to the sacred heart of Jesus and to the sorrowful heart of Mary. May his parents feel the comfort of knowing that they fought the good fight, and that they brought their child to the font of eternal life by baptizing him into Christ’s Church and surrendering him into heaven’s embrace as he passed from this life.

And may they find, through the powerful intercession of their little son, now whole and free from suffering, the grace to forgive his tormentors and executioners here on earth.

Charlie Gard, pray for us.

(*Comments are closed because I won’t spend my weekend arguing with people about how this particular baby is better off dead.)

Abortion, Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, euthanasia, guest post, Parenting, Pro Life, Suffering

On Charlie Gard

July 7, 2017

(I’m honored to introduce today’s guest author: JD Flynn. He is a husband, a father, a canon lawyer, and a great friend.)

In the middle of the night, when she was just six days old, our daughter Pia went into cardiac arrest. Twice. Pia was in the hospital already, and so doctors and nurses rushed into the room and saved her life. Twice. It was terrifying, and we were powerless. Pia is alive because of the Providence of God, and the medical care she received.

There are, doubtlessly, some people who might have asked if saving Pia’s life was the right thing to do. Pia has trisomy-21, the chromosomal defect known as Down syndrome. And the day before her heart stopped pumping blood, Pia had been diagnosed with a rare and untreatable kind of cancer. We didn’t know whether it would run its course, develop into something worse, or end her life. We accepted this prognosis, and we knew that her diagnosis would lead to suffering.

There are, I’m sure, some people who might have thought that a disabled girl facing a battle with cancer would have no meaningful, worthwhile, or comfortable life. People with Down syndrome are aborted at staggeringly high rates, in part because of a false compassion that believes their sometimes-difficult lives are not worth living. Three years ago, some ethicists began suggesting that aborting children with Down syndrome is a morally virtuous—and ethically normative—thing to do. And the euthanasia of sick and suffering children—children facing battles like cancer—is also becoming acceptable in many parts of the world.

I shudder to think it, but there are doubtlessly people who thought that a sick and disabled little girl, like our daughter, would have been better off dying that night. That her suffering wasn’t worth it.

But doctors saved Pia’s life anyway, because saving lives is what medicine is all about. Pia has Medicaid: the government paid for her treatment because supporting families in need is what government is supposed to be about.

Today she’s four. She has endured a lot of suffering. But she is also the most joyful person I’ve ever met. And we, Pia’s parents, don’t see “Down syndrome” when we look at her. We don’t see “cancer.” We see our daughter. We see a person, not a calculation. We can’t help that: we’re her parents. We would have done anything possible to make sure she lived through that terrible night.

Charlie Gard’s situation is not the same as Pia’s. Charlie Gard will almost certainly die, and soon. But I can imagine what his parents might be feeling right now. They don’t see Charlie as a media sensation, the center of an international debate over human and family rights. They don’t see him as a tragic medical phenomenon. They don’t see him as the sum of a dispassionate calculation of suffering, usefulness, and “quality of life.”

Charlie Gard’s parents see their little boy. They see his mother’s nose, and his father’s eyes. They see a baby they just love to be with. They see, maybe, a gift from God. And they’re hoping that someone—some doctor or scientist– will rush into the room, and save Charlie’s life. They’re willing to do anything—to go the ends of the earth—to try to help their little boy.

The treatment Charlie’s parents hoped to try had very little chance of success. But they wanted to try. Not to become culture-warriors or advocates for parental rights. Just to save their little boy.

The court did not support Charlie’s parents because, in the words of Charlie Camosy, they “do not think Charlie’s life is a benefit to him. They think it is in his best interest to die.”

Charlie Gard’s parents are not allowed to try, because powerful people think that the life of a seriously disabled boy is not worth living.

Pope St. John Paul II wrote that the culture of death is “a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favored tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of ‘conspiracy against life.’ is unleashed. This conspiracy involves not only individuals in their personal, family or group relationships, but goes far beyond, to the point of damaging and distorting, at the international level, relations between peoples and States.”

Charlie Gard is the victim of a “conspiracy against life.”

Doctors, governments, and courts which can look at parents like Charlie’s, and judge that they must give up the fight—that dying is in the best interests of their suffering little boy—have lost their humanity. They’ve forgotten, or rejected, that even difficult lives are gifts worth protecting, supporting, and saving. A case like Charlie’s reveals the inhumanity, the callousness, and the dictatorship of the culture of death.

Charlie Gard will likely die soon, and we’ll move on to some other media sensation. Some other tragedy will show up in our Facebook and Twitter feeds. We’ll read think pieces about something else. But Charlie’s parents won’t move on. They’ll mourn their son, whom they know in a way that no one else does, and whom they love in a way that all of us should understand. And they’ll wonder why, as their son lay dying, no one rushed in to help them try to save his life.

(Find more of JD Flynn’s writing here.)

Charlie Gard. Photo: Facebook, Charlie Gard’s Fight.

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.

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

NFP survey headed to the USCCB (more or less)

May 30, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m sorry.

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

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

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

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

Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, Evangelization, guest post, infertility, Marriage, motherhood, NFP, reality check, Sex

Waving my white flag {guest post}

May 19, 2017

A dear friend wrote something so important, so beautiful, and so honest for me, and it is my privilege to share it with you here today. A wife of 10 years, a mother to 4 on earth and 1 little saint, and a Catholic convert, I’m so grateful for her transparency and her humility.

Because NFP? It ain’t no bed of roses. But the thorns can be wonderfully refining.

I’m 4 kids deep into this motherhood thing, 5 if you count our sweet guy in Heaven. We count him, and wish it was PC for the world to count him too.

I am open to life. Not because I always want to be. Not because I can handle it. Not because it’s the cool thing to do.

But because God calls me to be.

Now that doesn’t mean that I don’t come into it most days kicking and screaming. I mean yes, in theory I can list all the incredible, awesome, fantastic ways that being open to life is God’s plan and even the theology behind it, but putting it into practice is a totally different matter.

So here I am, ready to waive my white flag and say that sometimes I wish I didn’t have to be open to life.

Ouch.

It’s hard to say and even harder to admit the hardness of my heart that wishes sometimes that I could say that I am “done”.

But just like I know better then my six year old (even though he doesn’t think so), praise the Lord, God knows better for me, too.

But y’all, that does not mean that this is easy.

And it does not mean that just because God wants this for us that the world, our communities, our churches, our friends or even our own families will support us.

And that is tough. How are we to live this “call” out alone, with no one cheering us on?

Maybe I’m wishing for too much. But doesn’t it seem like this journey would be a heck of a lot easier if more of us shared the “hard”, the “it’s not easy”, the “I feel like I can’t do this” with each other? We need each other, y’all. We need others there to say “I understand”, “I’ve been there” instead of saying or thinking “well then why are you having more kids???”

Because to be honest, I could use some cheering on right now.

If I get asked one more time “are you done?” and I have to politely smile and say “probably not!” all the while secretly wishing sometimes that I could be, I’m not sure how I’ll handle it. It might come out more of a grimace.

Sometimes I don’t want to put on a fake smile and convince people that I’m not done and I am JUST TOTALLY HAPPY ABOUT IT. Because sometimes? I’m really not.

Because being open to life sometimes does. not. make. sense. I mean why in the world would I not be “done” if it is so hard? That’s what the rest of the world is doing, after all. And sometimes I want to have a temper tantrum and say “I want that too!”

And it feels like if I don’t put on a happy smile and say “probably not, we’ll see!” I’m some kind of a fraud. Or am at least setting myself up for more comment along the lines of “don’t you know what causes that?/why don’t you stop?/he should get “fixed.”

And deep down…I do know that God knows better. I really do trust Him. I really do know that his plans are perfect. I believe that. Well, I try.

And I also know that fertility is a gift. I know some of you reading this may have a pit in your stomachs and wishing you were on my end of the fertility spectrum, and would maybe give anything to be in my shoes. And for any pain reading these words causes you, I am truly sorry. It’s not far off from my memory when we lost our first little one and tried to get pregnant for what felt like a life time. It’s also not far from my memory having surgery for endometriosis and enduring HCG shots to regulate my hormones to help us get pregnant. Or having countless progesterone shots to help me keep my baby. So I understand, even as I sound I know I sound like an ungrateful you know what. This isn’t exactly my proudest moment.

But if I’m honest, I’m just here trying to live out the call to being open to life and it is hard.

Hard because I want to determine the number of kids I have. I want to have sex with my husband and not worry about getting pregnant. I want to not gain and then (have to try so hard!) to lose 50lbs (again!). And I know all of those are selfish reasons. (And listen, I know a thing or two about good reasons to avoid too…I have had my hands full of health problems, children with behavioral issues and really rocky times in our marriage).

But maybe we could all use a bigger dose of honesty with this open to life thing??

Maybe my words will make one of you not feel so crazy or alone. Sometimes I have the feeling like everyone else is doing this open to life/NFP thing with JOY and LOVE and a SMILE and I’m over here wondering if I missed something. Can we all take a deep breath and let it out? I mean, c’mon I’m not the only selfish, prideful sinner, right??

So here I am 33 years old and I’m staring down who knows how many *more* years (I know it’s a blessing!) of fertility and the possibility (again a blessing!) of a few more babies, but I’m lonely in a world where being “done” is the norm.

Don’t get me wrong… I ADORE my kids! And I look forward to a Thanksgiving table in 20 years that is bursting at the seams. But some days I need to let my guard down and admit that if I had it *my* way I would like to just throw myself on the floor like my 3 year old before God and scream “ I don’t want to”.

But here’s the thing. When I sift through all my sin and my pride in this area, I come upon a startling truth: I truly am grateful for the boundaries of the call of being open to life, because I have a God that knows me and desires what is best for me: To be with him for eternity.

And He knows in order to get there my soul needs (daily!) refining, and that my path that is most particularly refining is motherhood (and marriage, but that is another blog entirely 😉 ).

Thank God – He knows me better.

Thank God – He wants more for me.

Thank God – He gave me the boundaries of NFP and the call to openness to life that gives me the opportunity to practice examining my conscience and my heart daily – hourly – to root out selfishness and pride.

Because if I said I was “done,” I wouldn’t be giving Him room to stretch me.

And stretch me He will – and you too for that matter, if you let Him.

So here I am sitting here before you, waving my white flag. Wishing I was “done” but knowing that I’m not and grateful for a God who gives me the opportunity to wearily lay down my white flag and pick up my cross and follow Him.

benedict option, Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, Evangelization, Family Life, feast days, liturgical living

The Franciscan Option

May 8, 2017

(By Franciscan I’m referring to Franciscan University of Steubenville and not the venerable religious order, about which I know less.)

It looks a little like the Benedict Option, actually. Could also probably be called “The FOCUS option” or “The Christendom Option” or “The TAC option.”

But, in reading the endless criticisms and assessments of Rod Dreher’s book, I’ve had a nagging thought just at the back of my brain that only came to the forefront last night while reading Fr. Dwight Longnecker’s astute take on the matter.

And the thought suddenly crystalized in a laughably obvious realization: we’re already living this.

While I’m not participating in any kind of urban gardening or cow sharing scheme (though one can never predict the future. Okay yes, in this case, one can: I will never raise chickens.) we’ve already made a lot of the choices he outlines, very organically and with little fanfare.

We have a vibrant community of other Catholic families with whom we regularly celebrate the liturgical year, feasting and fasting as the season proscribes. We support each other spiritually, rejoicing over baptisms and new births, and we grieve over losses and illnesses. There is financial support when a job is lost or a medical bill is insurmountable. Childcare offered and received in times of need. There is fellowship and community united not by geographic proximity but by common love and shared belief. So we drive from all over the city and from our vastly different places of employment and we share our lives together, and it looks less like withdrawing form the world and more like building a solid, enduring edifice against worldliness and loneliness and faithlessness.

And it is not insular. This community, organic and widely spread as it is, is constantly welcoming in new members. New families moving in from out of state, singles and just marrieds and those with kids starting college. The common thread is a desire to grow in holiness, to present our children with an attractive and living Catholicism to fall in love with, and a desire to transform the culture from the inside out.

And the other common thread? Many of us, at least in this community of several dozens of families, went to FUS. Most of us are also tied into the life of a religious order founded there and now thriving here in Denver, and are able to partake in the beauty of the liturgical year as lived out by an active/contemplative religious community.

I know of many more communities like ours, sprinkled across the city and the state and around the country. Some are gathered in actual proximity to Catholic colleges; others are bulwarked by a strong alumni presence from one of those schools in cities nationwide. Some are centered around a thriving parish or school, and others are built around places of employment, whether a parish or an apostolate, where a healthy integration of work and faith are encouraged and nourished.

But what none of these communities have in common, at least in my experience, is withdrawal from society.

Not, at least, in the sense that most BenOp critics seem to mean. In our own community there are those of us who work for the Church or various Catholic apostolates, but there are probably 4 times as many who work in IT. Who are school teachers and physical therapists, nurses and physicians assistants, CPAs and engineers and stay at home moms and photographers and every other occupation in between.

In short, there are families who are living and making a living very much in the world, but who are striving to raise their families and foster their marriages in a way that is not of the world.

My husband and I are a hybrid product of FOCUS, FUS, and the Augustine Institute, a veritable trifecta of Catholic culture shapers in the New Evangelization. And our work and studies in all three cultures was shot through with a common thread: be salt and light. Carry this out into the world. Form and protect and inspire your families to become witnesses to the Gospel.

Be not afraid, but also be not stupid.

This means we don’t send our kids to schools where our values are going to be confounded or our parental authority dismantled by what they hear in the classroom. We don’t accept media carte blanche as a benign or neutral presence in our home. We don’t adhere to the broader culture’s standards for what constitutes appropriate technology use or sexual ethics.

And that’s where Fr. Longnecker’s assessment comes in. That the conversation has already ceased, to a certain extent, and that no further dialogue is possible in terms of changing minds with logic, reasoning, or sound arguments. The only compelling argument we have left is a lived example.

So in that sense there is a “withdrawal,” an opting out even while continuing to live in the midst of. There is no self sustaining monastery and WiFi free zone where we hoe rows of non GMO corn, but neither is there an unchallenged going with the flow of the larger culture of which we are a part.

And if that looks radical, it’s only because the larger culture is deteriorating at a rapid clip and too many parents are ceding their God-given responsibilities to be disciple makers and to become disciples themselves.

And I happen to think that discipleship is at the heart of the message of the Benedict Option.

A call for Christians to arise from our worldly slumber, take a look at the surrounding culture, and have a literal come to Jesus as we realize that we are living in a post Christian era and under an increasingly aggressive threat of secularization, and our response can only and always be love.

We can’t live out that love if we are not first being nourished by His love.

We can’t answer the culture’s questions about the meaning of life without discovering it first for ourselves, and deeply.

And we can’t hope to become effective witnesses for joy if we are not deeply rooted in a faith that is living and active and sustained and, yes, removed from the world around us.

But not for the sake of escape. For the sake of helping others escape.

Not for the sake of insular rejection, but for joyful inclusion.

Not for the sake of fear, but for the great hope we have in Christ.

As Christians we have always been asked by our God to be fools for His sake, to live in the world but not of it. And to let our lives – broken and complicated and imperfect as they are – reflect the beauty of His redemptive love to a broken and weary world.

We don’t reject the culture because it is broken, we beckon the culture into the effervescent freshness of the Gospel.

And we can’t live what we do not first posses.

That is the heart of the Benedict Option, from what I can tell. That the goodness and beauty of the faith is worth persevering precisely so that the doors can be flung open wide, so that something worth possessing can be offered to a world in desperate need.

Find your community. Build your community. And let’s help each other get to Heaven. It’s not enough to ride along on autopilot any more, hoping the ambient culture or the parochial school you’re shelling out for will do the trick. It won’t. It can’t.

We have to fight for our families, for our marriages, and for our own identities in Christ. We have to be willing to do radical, inconvenient and perhaps incomprehensible things, to the outside observer.

It’s time to stop criticizing and and intellectually dissecting the thing and to start living it. Call up a family you know and invite them over for a bbq this weekend. Pray a rosary after dinner and then let the kids play in the backyard while the grownups drink beer around the fire pit and talk theology and philosophy. Find a parent in your circle of friends with a background in sacred music and ask if they’d be willing to give an informal presentation or a performance at a party you organize for your kids and their group of friends. Find a few couples who you trust to discuss the finer points of living out the Church’s teachings on sex and marriage. Agree to meet every other month with wine and dessert, and split up by sexes once in a while to enable more frank discussion. Ask your priest to go hiking with you and group of kids this summer ala Karol Wojtyla, if he can spare a couple hours on a Tuesday. Ask a local seminarian if he can’t.

Do something.

The time is now. Whether or not the Lord returns during our lifetimes or a thousand years from now, we have one job as Christians, and it is to live out the gospel in the circumstances of our actual lives.

We have various options. Failure is not one of them.

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

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

April 7, 2017

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

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

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

But, no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abortion, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, Evangelization

Joining a chorus of voices

March 22, 2017

From an Endow press release this morning:

Today, we are announcing Endow Voices, an online platform connecting faith, culture and our everyday lives.

The goal is to engage our members with experts in various fields to answer questions from the philosophical to the practical to the mundane on how to be a Catholic woman in today’s crazy world. So far we have been amazingly blessed with the following women signed up as regular contributors, with more to come:

Alice Von Hildebrand: Philosophy and Womanhood
Marilyn Coors: Science, Medicine, Bioethics and Faith
Helen Alvare: Finding Truth in the Age of Relativism
Linda Grimm: Defending Dignity and our Legal System
Kathleen Domingo: Life Issues and the Public Square
Jenny Uebbing: Catholic Culture and the New Feminism
Michelle Chandler: Mom, Wife and the Interior Life
Jenna Guizar: Leadership and Ministry

Not exactly a shabby lineup, eh? Archbishop Jose Gomez of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has also agreed to contribute to this exciting new venture of Endow’s, which I’ve no doubt will do big things for the Church.

If you’re not already familiar with Endow, you need to be! They offer life-changing small group study experiences and have some of the best and deepest content out there, with studies covering everything from the encyclicals of St. John Paul II to Edith Stein and Thomas Aquinas. I have had the privilege to work behind the scenes with them on various projects over the years, and it is wonderful to see how God has called them to expand their physical community into the virtual sphere, the precise opposite trajectory of so many other ministries. It is truly an honor to be contributing to the mission of Endow in some small way, and I hope you’ll read along, and even better, join – or start! – an Endow group in your neighborhood or at your parish.

An excerpt from my contribution this month, Catholic Feminism:

“…I bother with the linguistic parsing because words mean something, and the proper use of language is critical to the building up – or tearing down – of culture. When I speak of Catholic feminism, what I mean is a total embrace of what it means to be a woman: self giving, creative, strong, and capable of profound sacrifice and leadership.

I think that modern feminism has become too conflated with Planned Parenthood’s agenda of sexual free for all and an angry, even violent rejection of motherhood and fertility. Feminism that calls a woman to reject and mutilate her body is only suppression and degradation by another name.”

Click here to read the rest.

Culture of Death, Evangelization, mental health

Walking each other home

March 14, 2017

This past week, my dad lost his best friend. Jim was 20 years his senior and could technically have been his father – my grandfather – but instead of assuming a parent/child interaction, a 23 year streak of baseball games, happy hours, cigars, Christmas toasts, rounds of golf and countless, countless political conversations around the firepit in the backyard ensued between two unlikely men’s men, guys who could each have run a small country on their own, and yet, still made time and recognized the value – in the most natural and unscripted manner – in cultivating a relationship spanning decades.

They didn’t do programs together. They didn’t meet for any kind of men’s group, nor would they ever have attended had they been invited. Some people, particularly in generations preceding my own, are not “program people,” and that’s just fine.

In fact? It might even be more fine, more natural.

Coming of age in the digital revolution, I observed the bizarre migration of the bulk of my relationships from the real world to the virtual world, and then, more recently, back again. By “back again” I don’t mean that I’ve jettisoned online finds, just that as the shine has worn off for all of us, I’ve started (and it’s really fits and starts in this season) to push myself to be more intentional about actual face time. Not the app. And I’ve observed a lot of other people doing it, too.

It’s a lonely world we’re living in. For all the blessings of technology and cheap energy, the cost ends up being perilously high in terms of overall social connectedness and health. We drive everywhere, spending literal hours “alone together” stuck on the freeway. It has become so easy to be absorbed in a screen at all times. So much less effort to pick up my phone and snap a video of what I’m currently doing and shoot it out to an audience of a thousand “friends” than use it to call one specific friend and connect with, directly. The connection costs something. Maybe I’m too tired. Maybe I’m not really looking for connection, but to scratch the itch of boredom. Maybe it’s too hard to sit with silence, too intimidating to cross the street and knock on the neighbor’s door.

We are a culture dying for a little love. Literally, figuratively, emotionally and spiritually.

Instead of meaningful, sacramental sex, we have porn. Instead of family meals, we have fast food and a screen for every nose to press against. Instead of a vibrant, dynamic parish where one can belong, be known, and be in relationship with others, we have a cold, disconnected group of strangers standing in line to receive their Sacraments, assembly line style, and filing out like a frantic fire drill before the closing hymn is announced, let alone sung.

We are so lonely. We have lost the ability to connect with one another. We say we’re more connected than ever, yet an article about people making eye contact or performing some basic act of human decency in public brings actual tears to our eyes when someone shares it on social media. My God, we think, can you imagine if everyone reacted with such kindness/bravery/compassion/honesty?

Well, what if we did?

What if instead of spending literally hours with our tiny screens opened in our laps, collecting comments and likes and mindlessly scrolling through other people’s daily lives (this is not an anti social media manifesto, said the blogger. Just, we do really have a problem here), we spend an hour or two every day drinking a beer with our next door neighbors. Playing soccer in the backyard with our kids. Invited our coworker to grab dinner as we each exit our soulless work stations for the night, each headed home to dark studio apartments. What if we took the moments at the stoplights to pray a silent Hail Mary for the person in the car next to us, asking the Lord to work in their hearts and meet whatever profound need they are currently struggling with?

Because we all are. We are all in this together, and we are all of us broken, struggling, and in need of saving.

When I think of my dad and the friendship he’ll lay to rest later this week, I think of it as being sacramental in a way that means incarnate. That it was real, that it was the product of years of interaction and communication and recreation and real fellowship.

They didn’t share all their beliefs, but they shared their lives together.

That is what we are called to do. To be in communion with one another. To love our neighbor. Not only the neighbor who looks, acts, thinks, and believes exactly as we do. But the neighbor who is vibrantly, unmistakably different. And who we love – and who loves us – anyway.

Real love doesn’t gloss over differences either, no more than it rejects them. Real love stays in the fight and wrestles, chews them over, discusses and debates and banters and walks away at the end of the night with a handshake, and means it.

When did we stop shaking hands? The self-selecting isolation we’ve chosen for ourselves is killing us, destroying our culture, and birthing a generation of profoundly lonely, alienated people who think that to be accepted demands a uniformity that isn’t possible, isn’t necessary, and isn’t in keeping with the profound dignity of the human person.

Never stop working for the conversion of your own heart, and for the heart of every single person you encounter. You never, never know how much work God can achieve within the sacred boundaries of true friendship which wills the good (the authentic good) of the other.

And never for a moment think that real conversion can happen apart from real, complicated, dynamic, sometimes messy relationships.

God can work with that. But He can’t work if we won’t go.

After all, we’re all just walking each other home.

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