Ask Sister Mary Martha

Pivot

2009-07-08T15:18:00.000-07:00

Yikes! Where have I been? Right here, trying to adjust to life without Sister St. Aloysius, who is off at her think tank as of last Monday. It already seems as though she has been gone for decades. Our replacement helper has not yet arrived and so the parish ladies that also work at the Catholic Charities are pitching in. Just after I finish adjusting to them, I will have to re adjust to whoever shows up to help next.

Sister St. Aloysius and I, although she is very....tightly wound....are a well oiled machine, particularly when it comes to the care and feeding of Sister Mary Fiacre. Her problem solving abilities have come in very handy. For example, she came up with the bread bag pivoter, in use several times each day.

Here's how it works! To get Sister Mary Fiacre, say, out of bed, we haul her to her feet. We have strategically placed the wheelchair at a slight angle by the bed and then we have to swing her around to land, PLOP! on her pile of pillows there in the chair. The problem was that while at some point she was able to shuffle her feet around for a step or two to turn around to sit in the chair, her feet now remain glued to the floor. So when we pivot her, she could snap an ankle.

What a mess that would be!

I had no idea what to do. We can't hold her in place while one of us picks her feet up for her. We can't simply leave her in one spot all day and night.

Sister St. Aloysius came up with the plan to put a bread bag (sans bread) under one foot and pivot her around on that. It works like a charm! The bread bag goes everywhere with us. Any plastic bag will do.

Paper or plastic? Plastic, please.

Try explaining this oddity to the new folks. "Bread bag!?!"

"Yes, it's right there by her shoes."

"Put it where?"

"Under her pivot foot. Let's see, we're going to swing her to the left, so put it on the left side."

"How?"

"You'll have to actually pick her foot up like you're shoeing a horse and put the bag down and put her foot back down on top of it."

"Oookaaayy...."

Everyone has been impressed with the results.

All of this has been compounded by the kitten.

I didn't mention this way back when because I didn't want to ruin everyone's Christmas, but our wonderful old cat, Teddy, expired in the middle of December. He suddenly got really thin and moved outside. We moved him back in, but he just wasted away. Poor old thing. We really missed him.

So back in April a neighbor found a little abandoned kitten. He was so little his ears were still round. He wasn't weaned. We had to give him a little bottle every two hours or so and set him on on a heating pad.

As a result, he is the dog of cats. With us every second, very involved and curious about every single thing we do. So now everything we do involves one extra step. Move the kitten out of the way. Ready to put Sister Mary Fiacre in the wheel chair? Move the kitten who is standing in there playing with the tassles on the pillow. Putting the laundry in the dryer? Remove the kitten several times while loading and double check before you shut the door. Trying to write a blog? Find someone to play with the kitten for an hour or so because it is not lost on him that you are playing with a mouse.

Of course, the kitten loves the bread bag. Happily, Sister Mary Fiacre is very amused by his attention to her feet. I guess she doesn't have much feeling there anymore.

At any rate, I haven't had a moment to visit with you. And I have a pile of questions to answer. I'll try to get to as many as I can before I have to readjust to the new new help.

The Decider

2009-06-29T18:11:00.000-07:00

I'm a little nervous. Sister St. Aloysius will soon be on her way to her summer think tank. Last year we had the help of Sister Nicholas. Lovable as she was, every day was rather like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. I'll be needing help, that is certain. And Sister Nicholas was a good cook. She made that pickle soup. I could go for some of that.

We shall see. Meanwhile, Sister St. Aloysius has immersed herself in information about the supercollider, which is supposed to find the "God particle" or some such nonsense. She has explained it to me several times and it gives me a physics haircut (as it zooms right over my head). She even gave me Stephen Hawkings' new book, "An Even Briefer History of Time", which is his own personal version of his other book "A Brief History of Time". This one is "A Brief History of Time" for dummies.

I'm extra dumb. I can't get my brain around that one either. I get the gist of it, barely, and then I get really tired.

Which brings me to today's question from a reader:

Hi Sister, I love your blog; its both informative and witty. I guess my question goes along with this theme of different sects... not quite sure. Anyways, I was wondering how the Catholic church feels about those who aren't IN the Catholic Church. I mean I really don't want to believe that some of my best friends who are Muslim, Jewish, and Methodist have to do "hard time" in the "furnace." I remember something like "baptism by acts" or something where they had a second chance. Do they just do more time in purgatory? Thanks

I don't know. Yes, I do.

Let's iron out a thing or two. No one does 'hard time' in the furnaces of Hell. "Hard Time" indicates that the time you spend in the pokey is really tough and long, but you'll be getting out. Once you end up in Hell, that's that. There is no "hard time", there is only "eternity". I only use quotation marks to be cute.

So the basic premise here is that only Catholics can go to heaven. That's because Jesus said you can only get to heaven through Him and the only True way to Him is through the Catholic church.

But there are loopholes. First of all, we don't know the mind of God. God might feel that your Baptist friend should be in heaven. We also don't know what any Jewish person, Muslim or Methodist may be thinking right before he or she kicks the bucket. They might think, "What was I thinking! I should have been Catholic!" As long as you're still able to think that, God will not turn His back on you.

So the answer to your question is: only Catholics can go to heaven, BUT we imagine God will let in whoever He wants, so we don't get to judge who got in and who didn't or who will or won't get there.

Does that help?

I know. It's as hard to understand as "An Even Briefer History of Time". Maybe that supercollider will work and we'll know the answer.

That was joke. The answer is not in the supercollider.

The other loophole, which I've touched on here, is the Baptism of Desire. That basically means that you really want to be Catholic, but you weren't able to actually be baptized. For example, you were on your way to be baptized when the Martians attacked, and you huddled together with the rest of your neighbors over at the Lutheran Church and then you were all vaporized. Or you were on a desert island or lost at sea or whatever.

There is also what is known as a Baptism of Blood. That means you died the death of a martyr for Christ. All martyrs for Christ go straight to Heaven, do not pass go, do not collect $200 even if they are from some lesser faith. Excuse me. I meant to say, even if they are separated brethren.

Which brings me to one final point in the 'be Catholic and at least you won't have to worry about it' discussion we've just had. Have you heard the story of St. Maximilian Kolbe. One of my favorite saints! Read about him here.

Why would he have done such a heroic thing for a bunch of guys who were just going to go burn in Hell for being the wrong religion? Of course, he would have been trying to administer the faith to them. I just really doubt that he had any takers. He understood that we simply don't decide. We're not the deciders here.

He did it because we must love everyone as Jesus did. What a guy!

2dz st

2009-06-25T11:45:00.000-07:00

Wasn't there a movie once called "If This is Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium"? It was somehow linked to the thought that life becomes so hectic that the markers of everyday living become increasingly backwards. For a Catholic it would go something like, "I'm at Mass, so it must be Sunday".

Or not. Because it might be a holy day of obligation, or Saturday evening. It could be somebody's wedding or funeral.

With this in mind, we turn to today's question from a reader:

who is ur patron Sister?

Seriously, we are not texting here, people. Are we so insanely busy we can't be bother to use our pinkies to hit the shift key to capitalize the beginning of a sentence. Can we not take the millisecond to type two more letters for the word "your"? We're not tweeting here. We have an unlimited space in which to express ourselves.

For a moment there, my patron was St. Leander, the overly picky slave driver older brother and teacher of St. Isidore. St. Leander drove his brother to become the most educated man on the planet and therefore the patron saint of the internet.

I mostly roll with St. Martha, as I have so much in common with her.

But on any given day I might call upon the intercession of St. Anthony to find things that Sister Mary Fiacre has hidden but doesn't remember, not that she would tell us if she did remember.

At which point I will have to call upon the intercession of St. Theresa the Little Flower, the patron saint of people who are annoyed by the annoying habits of others.

Sister St. Aloysius will leave again soon for her summer brain trust, leaving me to try to remember how to boil water. I will be speaking with St. Lawrence, the patron saint of cooks as he was roasted to death on a grill. We'll think of him on the upcoming July 4th holiday as well.

If things get too pathetic in the kitchen, I'll call upon St. Catherine of Sienna, the patron saint of dieters. She survived only on the Host. (But not for long, she died in her early thirties. Don't try this at home.)

I often discuss strategy with St. John of God, who ran a makeshift hospital all by himself, as we run a make shift nursing home on a wing and a prayer here at the house. We have wheelchair to chair, wheelchair to bed, down to a science.

Lately, we've been having what is known as "June Gloom". Every day starts out gray and cloudy until the marine layer burns off later in the day. I love it. I much prefer day after day of June gloom to what lies ahead: Africa Hot. It always looks like it will actually rain, which is crazy talk after February. But I do love it when it rains. So I consult St. Swithin, the patron saint of rain. He loved the rain, too. He made a big fuss that he be buried in the church yard where the rain would always fall on him, but his sainthood caused him to be moved inside the church. Ironic.

Every time we crawl into our couch on wheels that passes for a car, we say hello to St. Frances Cabrini, the patron saint of avoiding car trouble. "Mother Cabrini, put down your linguine, look down from heaven and fix my machini." A reader passed that prayer onto us. While we're on the road, we may have to call upon Our Lady of LaSalette, the patron saint of road rage.

The list is endless: when I stubbed by toe I turned to St. Bartholomew, who had his skin peeled off. Certainly, he understands pain. We steel ourselves with St. Joseph when we have to brave the Home Depot. St. Bernadine of Sienna (gamblers) is great on Bingo night. Our recent graffiti incident turned our prayers to St. Luke, the patron saint of artists. We figured if he could put paint on, he could help us get it off.

"ur" patron saint must be St. Sebastian, the patron saint of the extremely busy.

One Small Step for Man

2009-06-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

I think I mentioned the other day that I had an old neighbor, Bud, who did not believe in the moon landing. He was not alone in his insistence that the whole thing had been staged in a Hollywood studio. There are websites out there supporting this view.

Did we land on the moon?

Back during my Chicago days, I was visiting an office building for some fund raising. We know how much I love fundraising. I went to visit a man who was a big deal at Pullman Standard. As far as I know these are people that make cars on trains. I never bothered to learn a single thing about my contact there or the company. My spiel really doesn't change anyhow.

I was sitting in this man's office. He had a picture of the earth taken from space. On his desk, he had a little Apollo landing spaceship model. He had another picture of someone walking on the moon. "Hmph," I thought. "Great pictures. Guess he likes the space program." When suddenly I realized I had his name before: James McDivitt.

He was an Apollo astronaut! The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. An Apollo astronaut! I was thrilled to meet him. I asked him what it was like to walk on the moon. He said, "The moon is really boring. It's gray and brown and that's that. There is really not much to say about it." So I asked him about being an astronaut. He told me a few amusing things about that. For example, he said that every single person who ever went into space threw up at some point.

Who knew?

Did we go to the moon? I think we did. But I can't prove it.

Which brings me to today's question from a reader:

My sister is getting confirmed soon (~2 months time), but she's told me that she doesn't believe in God or anything. My parents want her to get confirmed, so she's just kinda going through the motions.. I don't think anything she's going to be taught in her preparation class is going to help change her mind/educate her about Catholicism, at least if they are still the same as when I did them, as I was literally taught nothing about the Catholic faith (not wishing to insult the lady running it, but I think that's true.. A lot of it was probably also down to my own immaturity though)... :/

Anyway - what can I do? Should she not get confirmed at all? Will the confirmation even be valid if she doesn't believe in God etc? My parents want her to be confirmed so that 'she'll have something to come back to when she's older.'

One other thing - can you think of a good patron saint for her? I've suggested loads of names (e.g. Monica, because she prayed for her son's conversion for years, so I reckon she's a dab hand, Mary, because you may as well go straight to the top, and so on and so on..), but she's rejected them all... Thank you sister! :)

Truthfully, she should not get Confirmed at all. But we both know that's not going to happen.

There are a few things you can do, but I think you could talk yourself blue in the face and not convince her of anything. You may as well go argue with Bud Gillman about the moon landing.

Here are things you can do:

Pray a lot. I'd suggest St. Paul, the patron saint of dramatic conversion. Or St. John the Baptist. He certainly shook people up. Or St. Ignatius of Antioch.

Get a green scapular.

Set a good example.

God is there, just like the moon. Confirmation is the point where you confirm your willingness to be a Catholic. So, even if she marches around in a pretty dress or a robe and gets a slap from the Bishop, she isn't going to be confirmed in anything. Sacraments are a two way street. If you go to confession and you're not sorry or you purposely lie or omit sins, your reconciliation does not take place. You haven't reconciled a thing.

The moon is there. You still have to fly over and land on it.

All is not lost. God's not going anywhere. He is going to be there for your sister no matter what. Who knows, maybe the instruction will take! Or maybe, on her way to the altar and the Bishop, she'll have an epiphany! Maybe after it is all over with and she'll realize that she really does want to be a part of this and then 'poof' she will be. Since God has been there waiting the whole time, her Confirmation will just be....retroactive.

As for the Confirmation name, since she doesn't really believe in any of this Bishop-y mumbo jumbo in the first place, I'll wager she's holding out for a cool sounding name, period. She doesn't care that the city of Santa Monica was named for St. Monica because when the Spanish conquistodors first arrived there, the first thing they saw was a rock that was burbling water non-stop and it reminded them of St. Monica, endlessly crying for her son.

I would suggest a very cool saint with a very cool sounding name. How about Maximillian Kolbe? There's a guy who took his Soldier of Christ status very seriously! And her confirmation name could be "Max".

It turns out, by the way, that Mr. McDivitt never actually went to the moon himself. He was the commander on Apollo 9, which orbited the earth and he was in charge of the the Apollo program from the ground. Perhaps that's why he didn't want to talk about the moon.

It Really Isn't Any Fuss

2009-06-19T10:06:00.000-07:00

Happy Father's Day all you dads! I always think of Groucho Marx's song on Father's day. Here are the lyrics, sans the tune:

Today, Father, is Father's Day
And we're buying you
a tie,
You say that it was nice of us to bother.
But it really wasn't any fuss,
for according to our mother, you're our Father, and that's good enough for us.
Yes, that's good enough for us.

Amusing. None of those Marx brothers were particularly good role models, though.

The ultimate role model, of course, was St. Joseph, who also had to take someone's word for it where paternity was concerned. The fact that he did is in no small part the reason for his sainthood.

Some scientists recently came out with more information on what happens to us when we dream. The basic premise of their findings was that dreams allow us to strip the emotion out of our daily drudgery, encounters and problems.

This sounds like a bad thing, but it isn't. It's a very good thing. According to these scientists, the process actually makes us more compassionate towards others by getting rid of some of our own emotional baggage. It's why conventional wisdom has always been to "sleep on it". It's why you often see things more clearly in the morning.

I have been saying this myself for years and years. Dreams are to the brain as de-fragmenting is to your computer at night.

Which brings us back to our Father's Day pal, St. Joseph, whose sainthood was brought to us by a couple of important and enlightening dreams. Let's not forget, however, that St. Joseph had the help of angels in his dreams.

But I can't help but think after a good night of REM sleep, how much easier it must have been for St. Joseph to get with the program. Sure the angel told him everything was okay with his situation with Mary, but hearing that and feeling good about it are two very different things. He still had to deal with the whispers of the nosy neighbors, no doubt. I'm sure he didn't really feel much like packing up the donkey and moving to Egypt in the middle of the night, either, but maybe his dreams helped him handle it all.

And of course, everything is harder to bear when you're tired.

Right, Moms?

May I propose this idea for the perfect Father's Day gift? In honor of Dad and St. Joseph, let Dad sleep in. Take the kids to Mass without him and let him go to the late Mass. Or send him off to 5 o'clock Mass tomorrow.

Then do all Dad's chores while he snoozes on the couch like Dagwood Bumstead. Speaking of Dagwood, feed Dad a turkey sandwich for lunch. The tryptophan in there will have him out like a light.

The Second Coming of Corn Flakes

2009-06-16T09:54:00.000-07:00

Remember not too long ago, when I was talking about the history of the Protestant churches and how it all started with Henry the VIII and Martin Luther and went downhill from there? I was admonished by some for being 'too simplistic', a criticism I fully embrace. My excuse? It's only a blog. Each denomination could take up several volumes. As time goes on, new denominations spring up like weeds in a vacant lot and their seeds blow in the wind and plant even more denominations. Today's answer to a question from a reader on a patron saint matching will take us on a whirlwind trip like weed seeds in the wind.

Sister, please give me some advice regarding a suggestion for a saint match up. I am sponsoring a young woman in RCIA, she is a former Seventh Day Adventist and was wondering if there are any saints that were former Adventists? I couldn't locate any, but I'm not as knowledgeable as you regarding these matters. Thank you for any help you can provide. ~Catherine

I don't know of any saints who were converts from the Seventh Day Adventist Church, or saints who specifically converted Seventh Day Adventists. Therefore we are going to have to find your friend a patron saint through extrapolation, and to do that, we're going to have to understand a little bit about being a Seventh Day Adventist.

I'm tired already.

A man named William Miller became obsessed with the Second Coming of Christ. Specifically, just when Christ would return. I believe Mr. Miller was a Baptist, but his obsession caused a new denomination to arise. Millerites were very plentiful in the year 1844. Mr. Miller (through his study of scripture) pinpointed the date of the return of Jesus to be sometime between March 1843 and March 1844. When Jesus failed to return by the end of that year, Mr. Miller's followers recalculated and came up with October 22, 1844.

The fiasco that ensued is known as The Great Disappointment.

An understatement, I'm sure.

The leftover Millerites fell into three (and if anyone's counting, so far, we've had the Baptists and the Millerites and now we'll move onto five denominations arising from this mess) groups who had three different interpretations of what went wrong. One of these groups was the Seventh Day Adventists, who believed that Jesus went somewhere on Oct. 22, 1844, it just wasn't here. I think Jesus entered His Heavenly Throne Room. Something along those lines.

At this point, a former Methodist (demonination #6 in our tale) who had become a Millerite and and then a Seventh Day Adventist, enters the picture. Meet Ellen G. White, a visionary (and by this I mean don't mean 'very forward thinking', although she was that, too....more on that later) started preaching about her visions, which I believe involved watching Jesus go into His Throne Room, but most certainly involved messages as to how the faithful should behave.

And on this count, I have to say, Ellen was a good egg. The basic tenets of her faith are not so different from the Catholic Church. The Holy Trinity, Jesus as Redeemer, the nature of God, really not so different. They do believe that when you die your soul sleeps until the Second Coming. Oops. I'm sure there are quite a few other such...misconceptions.

Although Mrs. White did not found the Seventh Day Adventists, she became the most influential person with that group, the de facto leader of the church. Her books, based on her visions, are the foundations of the church.

I should mention that Mrs. White got hit in the head with a rock at age nine. Her visions began at age 14. Is there a correlation? I wouldn't discount a rock to the head.

And one other thing: Mrs. White was a health nut. I say 'nut' in the kindest of tones. I am a fan of health nuts. She was such a health nut that her believers eventually got into the health care business. She influenced that super health nut, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who invented corn flakes. (Not to be confused with his brother who started the cereal company. He was the one that dumped all the sugar into those boxes.) Dr. Kellogg eventually had a falling out with the Adventists and left the denomination. Happily he did not form yet another religion.

Whew.

Anyhow, Mrs. White was a vegetarian. A vegetarian in the Midwest in the 1860's. The midwest, where to this day your plate of food will consist of a piece of meat, some version of a potato and something that passes as a vegetable. (For example, if you order a Whopper and fries, the lettuce and tomato on your Whopper are your vegetables. Am I exaggerating? Not even a little.) My hat's off to her on that count.

Now, to answer your question, we have several saints that fit the bill.

First, St. Paul, the patron saint of converts, knocked off his horse by Jesus Himself.

Second, St. Stephen, the first martyr, who well understands what it's like to get hit in the head with a rock.

Third, St. Martin de Porres, a great patron saint for those who adhere to holistic medicine and herbal treatments and that sort of thing. He was very much a believer in that stuff himself.

I'm also a fan of St. John of God, who ran all around not knowing what to believe for a very long time, until Jesus had a chat with him. He founded a hospital, too!

Holy Harry Potter

2009-06-10T11:56:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I am really not up to the task here on the old blog. Sometimes it's because people ask questions that would be irresponsible for me to answer.

Hello Sister Is there a saint for women in abusive marriages and what are your thoughts as to whether they should stay or leave?

I've talked why I can't just answer this is some Dr. Laura, blanket type statement.

The patrons saint of bad marriages is St. Rita. She had a hum dinger. Her husband was so rotten the mob bumped him off.

And no one should stay in a place where they are abused. What constitutes abuse is a whole other kettle of fish. I would go out on a limb here and say that if a person feels they are being abused, they are correct. Everyone deserves respect and children must always be protected.

Then there are questions that are so large in scope that I never feel I can adequately explain.

I am not sure where to put this, so I am going to try here. Can you please explain holy water to me? I know why it is used in baptism and in the church fonts, but why do Catholics bless objects with it? I would like to be able to properly defend the church and its use to people who say we use it like magic. Thanks.

My hat's off to you to try and explain this one to the separated brethren. And I really don't take my hat off, you know. Deep breath.

You might try this tactic. Rather than go into a whole long, falling on deaf ears explanation of sacramentals and blessed objects, maybe you should just explain the difference between God's grace and magic. I think they might actually understand that. Especially if they are of the 'if you read Harry Potter you'll go to Hell" stripe.

And the difference is really, really simple. There is no such thing as magic and there is such a thing as God's grace. No one can wave a wand and say abracadabra and change a toad to a ruben sandwich. But holy water can wash away sins.

It's not the water. It's God's grace.

Unfortunately, this is a very half baked explanation. The separated brethren don't seem to differentiate between mortal and venial sins. Holy water only washes away venial sins.

The separated brethren also seem to confuse 'magic' with devil worship, which is why Harry Potter scares them. It seems to scare some Catholics as well. I say, since there is no such thing as magic or Harry Potter, you might just as well fear Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. There are witches over there, too.

There are people who use incantations and 'prayers' to call upon the power of Satan. A powerful tool to keep them at bay: holy water.

I have a headache. I'll offer it up to the Poor Souls in Purgatory. The separated brethren aren't 'into' that either.

In order to understand why we bless objects with holy water, one has to first understand all about holy water, which is a giant topic reaching far back into the Old Testament and on into the Fulfillment of the New Testament and all the rituals of all of that time, from cleansing oneself to enter the Temple, to Jesus Himself being baptized, to Jesus using mud to heal blindness.

Mud. That would be water, blessed by Jesus, and dirt with water blessed by Jesus on it.

Holy water 101:

Water cleanses.
Water sustains life.

God cleanses.
God sustains life.

Holy water cleanses and sustains the life of the soul, as it is blessed with the Grace of God.

So we cleanse and bless objects that help us to sustain the lives of our souls by calling on the Grace of God.

Hey! My headache's better!

Pigs are Smarter than Horses

2009-06-08T11:24:00.001-07:00

I am always amazed at the wacky notions people have. Yesterday I met a woman who was talking about how much she loves her dog and in the same breath talked about how disgusting dogs are, smelly and all the garbage they chew on, and how she can't bear to have so much as one dog hair floating around the house, and then back to her desire to rescue two more dogs, one with no front leg and one who is blind. She wasn't able to do it because the new owner can't have stairs. No stairs for the blind or three legged dogs.

Fate steps in.

There is no dearth of crazy notions. My mother's old neighbor is one of those people who insisted that there was no moon landing and the whole event had been staged.

I have been entertained lately by those who try to disinfect themselves and everything around them all the time, a recipe for a weak immune system and really, really strong bacteria.

But this takes the cake:

"So you can be part of the One True Church founded by Jesus while he was alive on earth, or you can be a part of some church founded by some person who was mad an somebody, somewhere, sometime." Sister Mary Martha I've been thinking about the above line from Monday's blog and I have to ask: didn't Christianity come about because Jesus was "mad at" the Jewish leaders of his day?

Oh, sigh.

Yes, that's just what happened. Adam and Eve sinned in the garden and God promised to send a savior. Then He forgot all about that. That must be why it took so long.

Then one day God decided He'd like a Son, just, you know, 'cause', and since He can do anything, that happened. God's Son, Jesus, grew up and got mad at the Jewish leaders of His day for not paying enough attention to Him and started His Own religion based on Himself.

I'm not sure which is more upsetting, this notion, or that it was prefaced with "I've been thinking..."

Since Jesus' coming and mission on earth was talked about endlessly in the Old Testament, and the New Testament constantly references those predictions and prophecies so we'd all know who to look for when the day came, I'm not sure how you get that this all happened because Jesus was mad at anyone. Did the prophets say, "the Rose from root of Jesse, from tender branch will spring and get really mad at the Jewish leaders of His day and start a new religion"?

No, they didn't.

St. Peter and St. Paul did have a tiff about whether or not Gentiles even got to be a part of the 'new religion', so it would seem that no one was mad at any Jewish leaders or any Jews at all for that matter or it would have been the other way around, wouldn't it? They would have been arguing over whether or not those aggravating Jews could join up.

They would have had to found a new religion and thrown themselves out of it for being Jewish.

Jesus' trip to earth was not about being mad at anyone. It was about Fulfillment. Jesus did get a little miffed at some Jewish leaders, but all he did was admonish them every once in a while. They were plenty mad at Him. But He loved everybody.

Meanwhile virtually all of the offshoots of the Catholic Church were indeed founded because someone was mad. I was talking to a former preacher of some such denomination. He had been one of those traveling tent preachers. His sect started because they were mad at the sect they were in. It was something about how the communion got served or how the wine was passed or some niggling detail and they split off and added another word to their name. (They left the New Tree of the Spirit and became the New Branch of the Old Tree of the Spirit, or something along those lines.) One week while he was preaching in Florida the locals burned his tent down because he was preaching to black people. This was in the 1960's. He left preaching forever and became a vacuum cleaner salesman. He was very good at it, as he was good at selling people on something.

He had the skill set.

Go ahead and disinfect yourself if you must, insist that aliens killed Kennedy, argue whether horses are smarter than pigs until the cows come home. But know that Jesus showed up to let your soul into Heaven.

Thank God It's Saturday

2009-06-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

Vacations and weekends. Aren't those things supposed to be a time when people get to relax a little more. The opposite thing happens. Having any time off from work or the day to day drudgery means that we try to cram in the 'fun' (exhausting) or run all the errands we can't get in during the week because of the day to day drudgery work schedule.

I decided to tackle this question today, since we have all weekend to work on it.

I've got the "tortured by my imperfections" part down pretty good. It's the "life of heroic virtue" part that gives me trouble. Between sheer cowardice (go look for trouble? me?), a tendency toward bone-idleness (can I do that tomorrow), and frankly not facing many challenges in daily life, I feel totally inadequate to the challenge most of the time. I have a small icon of St. Maximilian Kolbe above my desk, and feel intimidated every time I look at him. Even St. Therese had chronic illness to contend with. I have a mortgage, a wife who loves me but who stopped going to church/confession/anything sacramental years ago, and two lapsed daughters. Most of my troubles in the life area are of my own making. Tiny, tiny, tiny little crosses, really. And an easy-to-manage problem with diabetes. I worry that having led "a life of somewhat mediocre virtue" isn't going to cut it.

I'm no slacker in my Catholicism, really, but I'm wondering what I've missed, and what I can do about it. All ideas not involving physical self-flagellation welcome.

I remember a priest in the local ghetto saying to me once that he resented the idea we seem to have in this country that anyone can be anything. The people who have this idea point to people who have someone managed to get from the ghetto to Yale or some other such symbol of success. The priest said, "Those people were extraordinary. Not every person is extraordinary."

I suppose the operative word here would be 'aspire'. In this country, any person can aspire to be anything, unless you are a woman who aspires to be a Catholic priest. Other than that, you are good to go.

I'm not sure you can be a woman baseball umpire either, now that I think about it. But I digress.

We can't all be saints either. Actually, I take that back. We can indeed all be saints. Not all of us can be canonized saints.

If you are dead and in heaven, you are a saint. The Church recognizes certain individuals, once they are dead, as being in heaven through the process of canonization. And the first thing you need to get the attention of the Church to be a canonized saint is that you have to have heroic virtue.

You have to have been extraordinary. So dear reader, you can let it go. That's not to say that you have the chance of a snowball in a blast furnace of ever becoming a canonized saint. You could make it. YOu never know.

Certainly, your safe, fearful, lazy life style is getting you nowhere on the road to a statue with a halo and a prayer card in the back of the church (or a medal in my shop!).

But don't beat yourself up for being normal.

Do beat yourself up for a lack of effort. "D" for effort, for you mister.

There are so many things you could be doing (on the weekend and your vacation time) it makes my head spin. You could visit the sick, head over to an old folks home, deliver meals on wheels, drive someone who can't drive, volunteer at a homeless shelter, gather and drop off clothes to the Catholic Charities, read to some children, rock sick babies, mow someone's lawn, wash someone's car, buy someone groceries, pay for somebody's lunch while they're not looking, mop the Church floor, make a cake for the bake sale, walk somebody's dog.

But you don't have to do that all tomorrow. It's like exercise. If you weigh 300 lbs. and you try to run a marathon, it's not going to end well. We have to get some of that fat off your soul.

So, pick one thing. Go over to old Mrs. Sanchez, who can barely walk and offer to sweep her driveway or whatever she needs over there. Something alone those lines. Go to the old folks home and sit in the day room and chat with a few people. That type of thing. And do that once a week.

Just one thing. Do just one thing.

And, as they say, one thing will lead to another. We already have made a to-do list. It is called the Corporal Works of Mercy. You can skip Bury the Dead. I don't think you're allowed to do that legally, unless that's your job.

Clearing the Calendar

2009-06-04T10:34:00.000-07:00

Talk about falling down on the job! I have been remiss in answering many questions. I'll catch up, I promise.

Let's start with these two, left over from our discussion about the patron saint for people who don't believe in saints. I had mentioned that St. Christopher and St. Philomena, among others, have been dropped from the list of saints due to the fact that they didn't exist in the first place, a memo that St. Expeditus failed to deliver to a few readers:

There is no St. Christopher?!

No, there isn't. Ironically, there is a Santa Claus.

Most people only know the tail end of the St. Christopher story, which is lovely. That's the part where St. Christopher has a job as a human ferry, carrying travelers across a river on his back. It seems St. Christopher was a large fellow.

So one day, while on the job, a small child asks to be carried across the river and as Christopher hauls the boy across on his shoulders, the child gets heavier and heavier with each step, until Christopher fears they will both drown. Crawling up to the far bank and gasping, Christopher says to the child, "What is your deal, kid?"

And the child serenely replies, "I am the Christ Child and I carry the weight of the world on My shoulders."

Indeed.

We love that story! But that's really only the third part of the actual story, which is a very silly "Three Billy Goats Gruff" type of "Three Little Pigs" type of thing.

First, Christopher is a soldier and he wants to serve the most powerful king only. So he joins the Devil's Army. Apparently the Devil had a recruitment table set up on the high school campus or something.

But then, while serving in the Devil's Army one day during a battle, Christopher sees the Devil bow down to the Cross of Christ. So Christopher wants to join that army.

This time he has more trouble finding the recruitment table. Some old hermit tells Christopher that he should just sit by this river and carry people across and that will be enough to serve Jesus.

Paul Harvey has passed away, so I will have to say, "....and now you know the REST of the story..."

Clearly, none of this ever happened and since there is absolutely no evidence that St. Christopher is anything but a story, he was dropped from the calendar of saints. It seems we miss him too much, because he is still a best seller at any Catholic store, dangling from rear view mirrors and key chains.

I have replaced him with Our Lady of LaSalette, the patroness of road rage, and St. Frances Cabrini, the patron saint of keeping your car from breaking down.

As a metaphor, I'd say St. Christopher still cuts it as a great story. The story of the Three Little Pigs has a great message, too.

If St. Philomena never existed, than whose intercession were St. Jean-Marie Vianney and Ven. Pauline-Marie Jaricot praying for?

Them, and a gazllion other people. St. Philomena has always had a huge cult following. That's how she became a saint. I'm sure other virgin martyrs picked up the slack.

And finally, speaking of saints:

I've got the "tortured by my imperfections" part down pretty good. It's the "life of heroic virtue" part that gives me trouble. Between sheer cowardice (go look for trouble? me?), a tendency toward bone-idleness (can I do that tomorrow), and frankly not facing many challenges in daily life, I feel totally inadequate to the challenge most of the time. I have a small ikon of St. Maximilian Kolbe above my desk, and feel intimidated every time I look at him. Even St. Therese had chronic illness to contend with. I have a mortgage, a wife who loves me but who stopped going to church/confession/anything sacramental years ago, and two lapsed daughters. Most of my troubles in the life area are of my own making. Tiny, tiny, tiny little crosses, really. And an easy-to-manage problem with diabetes. I worry that having led "a life of somewhat mediocre virtue" isn't going to cut it. I'm no slacker in my Catholicism, really, but I'm wondering what I've missed, and what I can do about it. All ideas not involving physical self-flagellation welcome.

We'll be back tomorrow to wade into this one!

And the horse she rode in on

2009-06-01T13:42:00.001-07:00

Since it's Monday, I've decided to tackle a particularly difficult question.

Sister, I have a question. One of my confirmation students chose St. Anne...who is the patron saint of equestrians! Why, oh why, would the mother of Mary be patron saint of people who ride horses?

I hope it's not too late for her to switch to St. Sebastian or St. Paul or St. George or St. Martin de Caballeros (crack our your Spanish I folks!) or St. Ignatius Loyola or St. Joan of Arc or somebody up there who actually had something to do with one horse, any horse, at any time.

I have looked high and low for an answer and I cannot find one sentence anywhere that contains the word "horse" where St. Anne is concerned, save to to say that she is that patron saint of equestrians.

Often saints are patron saints of something by some sort of extrapolation. St. Sebastian, for example, is the patron saint of pin makers because he was shot full of arrows. I'll admit it's a stretch, but pin makers need a patron saint. They'd be better off with Anne, since she was a seamstress. We should swap out Anne for Sebastian, since Sebastian was a soldier and probably was around a lot of horses all the time. I'm certain he has horses or equestrians on his official list. He has a long list.

I digress.

The truth is, we don't even know what St. Anne's name really was, or if she ever sewed a stitch or ever even touched a horse in her life. St. Anne is not mentioned at all in the revealed Word of God known as the New Testament.

Everything we think about St. Anne is found in the Gospel of St. James, which is not the revealed Word of God at all. It was, in fact, officially tossed out of consideration of any kind in the 4th century at the Council of Nicaea. (think Nicene Creed)

Here is what we actually know about St. Anne: Mary had a mother who had a name.

Here is what we don't know about St. Anne: anything.

I believe I've talked about this before. But there is more to the story. The legend continues that Lazarus (back from the dead) and his two sisters and Mary Magdelene rowed to France (like Charles Bronson at the end of The Great Escape). It seems they had the remains of St. Anne with them. The remains were put in a nice crypt and everything was just fine until barbarians came along. So the bishop there took the remains and buried them so thoroughly that no one could ever find them for years and years, try as they might.

Charlamange decided to make a real effort to fine them but failed, until a blind, deaf and dumb boy suddenly showed them the way. It is quite a dramatic story, the boy being so agitated with his staff and everyone following him and having to dig and find one door and dig some more and find another, until they found a long bured door with a beautiful crypt that says, "Here lies the body of St. Anne the mother of the Virgin Mary." Or something to that effect.

She's not there anymore, because in true Catholic fashion, she has been sent, in pieces, to quite a number of places. Several places, I believe, claim to have her head, and they are not even on the same continent.

I imagine Charlamange road in on a horse. There's your horse.

Or....at some point in time, as forgotten as the location of that crypt, St. Anne performed a miracle that involved a horse or horsemen or women.

Or...and I have a terrible feeling this is what actually happened: Lady Godiva rode her horse through St. Anne's Square.

Horsewoman.

Not good.

Seriously, St. Martin de Caballeros didn't make the top of the list for your Confirmation student? He's always on a horse. Hence the name. He is also known as St. Martin de Tours. Did no one point her towards Joan of Arc? I pretty sure she rode a bit.

Patron Saint of Turpentine

2009-05-29T11:17:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow is pew dusting day. Of course, we dust more than pews. We dust everything and vacuum. But first we have to make a pilgrimage to Home Depot. I've mentioned it's not my favorite place.

We have to buy some graffiti remover. Some of the windows on the rectory have been vandalized. Always so disappointing to see some incomprehensible gang symbols, the tags of taggers, the blight of the city. Sister St. Aloysius was nervous that it was there, as though any second we would be caught in the crossfire of some type of war. I explained to her that this is just a game, tagging. The game is to tag the most outrageous places you can. That's why you see graffiti on water towers and overpasses.

So, the rectory. Ridiculous. And a trip to Home Depot. I looked on the Google to find out what product to buy because, God love them, the people at Home Depot will just say anything to answer any question, seemingly so that you will just get away from them so they can go back to driving the fork lift around or sprint off to the break room. I'm still going to have to ask which aisle. I'm guessing the paint section.

I may take aspirin before I go in anticipation of the inevitable.

Sister, I love your blog. A question: A friend of mine was just ordained two days ago. We have always (for the 8 years we've known each other) been on a first-name basis. Should I now address him as Father? I'm pretty sure he doesn't expect me to, but I wonder. It's probably not relevant, but he's 20 years younger than I am.

Oh, for Pete's sake, call him Father. Let him tell you to stop if he wants. Ordination is a very big deal. If people who get a PhD can go around getting called doctor (which I think they deserve), then you can cough up a "Father" for your friend, who is now the representative of Christ on earth and who actually now has actual special powers. Like Superman, only more relevant.

Dear Sister, Do you have a prayer that I can say when I find something that offends me? Today my friend sent me a link on Twitter to a guy whose name is "god". I looked at the account and some of his tweets and quite frankly if he's trying to be funny, I thought he failed on several levels. Anyway, I couldn't think of a way to pray for him in a Christian manner. Suggestions?

Those AA people have a prayer for just this sort of thing:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

I think we've landed on the "wisdom to know the difference" part of "accept the things I cannot change." I guess you don't actually need to accept the things you cannot change. You just need to accept the fact that you cannot change them.

Twitter=let it go. The root would of Twitter is Twit. When you Twitter you "tweet". Like a little bird.

I'm not sure why it's so hard to pray for this fellow in a Christian manner. Let's take it step by step.
Step one: pick a saint to for a little heavenly intercession.
In this case, I'll go with St. Paul. He was a pretty arrogant fellow when he was suddenly knocked off his high horse, literally. He did a complete 180. He should understand the situation here very thoroughly.
Step two: compose a little rhyming prayer.
Keep is short. Rhymes help you remember the prayer.

We all know "Holy Tony, come on down, something's lost that must be found." or the prayer to St. Catherine of Alexandria: "Sweet Saint Catherine, send me a husband,
A good one, I pray;
But arn a one better than narn a one.
O Saint Catherine, give me your aid!
Grant that I may never die an old maid!"

Less well known, I'll admit.

That's it. So let's see....

St. Paul please help this clueless clown,
Before the devil brings him down.

Hmmm...maybe not Christian enough.

St. Paul would you please intervene
So I don't punch the desktop screen.
Help the twitters reel it in.
Stop the twits so they don't sin.

It needs work. But you get the idea.

I'd better get to work on my prayer for Home Depot.

Not Good in Theory

2009-05-28T11:12:00.001-07:00

Now that you mentioned Karma...I was wondering if it was alright to practice Om meditation because I like the theory behind it and not the religious part about it...I'm Roman Catholic..am I doing something bad?

What are you talking about? The theory behind it is the religious part. Clear your mind. Become one with the universe.

We can't just run off doing things because we like to. Next thing you know, we're all Father Cutie.

We can't have that.

I think I may understand what you mean to say...what I think you mean to say...that meditation is beneficial. It reduces stress, lowers blood pressure, helps you sleep better. It can even improve your memory. I don't think the Catholic church has a problem with that. You clear your mind and you focus on the sound of your own voice repeating a syllable or two. No problem.

It really depends on what your syllable or two might be. "Om", not a good choice for Catholics. That would be like choosing the word, "Oooooooh......phite".

Om is a religious belief.
"The goal which all the Vedas declare, which all austerities aim at, and which men desire when they lead the life of continence … is Om. This syllable Om is indeed Brahman. Whosoever knows this syllable obtains all that he desires. This is the best support; this is the highest support. Whosoever knows this support is adored in the world of Brahma."
~ Katha Upanishad I

Good old Katha Upanishad. Thanks for clearing that up!

Om is a sacred Hindu word for what is knowable and unknowable about God. It is the sound of God, so to speak, and therefore permeates everything, every breath you take. Which brings us back to meditation.

Catholics meditate, too, by the way. We do it in exactly the opposite way. Instead of trying to empty our minds, we try to fill them. So here you go.

Enjoy!

And there's always the Rosary. Always have one handy.

I just saw Father Cutie on the news, by the way. It seems he went off to be an Episcopal priest. That's why we call it "Catholic Lite".

And Thank You to Those Who Serve

2009-05-25T11:49:00.000-07:00

Happy Memorial Day! I'm not sure we're supposed to be happy today, remembering those who were lost while defending our country. I know a lot of people are happy for the day off, at least. We're all happy that there are people defending our country.

We put the trash out. Monday is trash day and we roll the big cans to the curb. It was crucial that we not miss the trash pick up because of the spring cleaning. We found the desk top and everything that used to cover it is in the giant blue recycling can. We were the only people on the block to put our cans out. Everyone else knew it was a holiday and there would be no trash pick up.

We debated. But there have been holidays where we did not put the trash out and the trash truck came and there we sat with our garbage piling up for another week. We decided we would rather look like crazy people with our trash sitting out than risk it, so out it went.

Sister St. Aloysius said, "We'll either look crazy, or crazy like a fox."

Speaking of crazy like a fox, here is today's question from a reader:

Sister,

I'm not going to leave a specific age, but let it be suffice to say that I am still in my parent's house hold. They are Protestant, and I have a desire to be Catholic. Indeed, a deep desire. I pray about it and have started asking the saints for their intersession, and researched the faith. I have yet to find anything against it, and everything for it. However, I sometimes have doubt... I feel like God is leading me. I pray about it and I let my feelings guide me, because I believe that they are coming from God. But can I be sure they are from God? I pray again and again and they never change, but I still worry that I might be being tricked... and also, can you give me any advice for my situation?

I love this type of question, especially on a holiday, when I don't have to tax my brain in the least to formulate an answer.

Of course God wants you to be Catholic. God wants everybody to be Catholic. That's why he sent Jesus to save us and to found the One True Church. Do you know what the word "Catholic" means? It means "universal". God wants everybody in the universe to be Catholic.

Here is the History of Christianity:

Jesus said to St. Peter, "Upon this rock I will build my Church." By "rock" he meant Peter. Peter was the first head of the Church founded by Jesus and there was no other Christian church until the 16th century. One thousand five hundred years went by with every Christian a Catholic.

Then there was a church accidentally founded by a man who was mad at the Catholic Church (Martin Luther, who wasn't trying to found another Church but ended up doing that anyhow) and then another church founded by a man who was mad because the Pope wouldn't let him get a divorce (the Anglican Church in England, which is the Episcopal Church in the United States).

After that, things went south altogether, as other people got mad at those people and founded their own churches because they thought the first guys got some stuff wrong and the next thing you know you've got Calvinists, Baptists, Anabaptists, First Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Puritans, Methodists.

So you can be part of the One True Church founded by Jesus while he was alive on earth, or you can be a part of some church founded by some person who was mad an somebody, somewhere, sometime.

Who is tricking whom, here? I'd like to know. Have you ever asked yourself what the Protestants were protesting?

I'm not sure how you should handle the situation at home in the meantime. Some Protestants (although I've only found one or two, but they're out there) think that Catholics are the devil with horns. I had a cab driver once who said those exact words to me. "My parents told me that Catholics were the devil with horns." I thought that was a fine explanation of the attitude of those handful of people I have encountered that are vehemently anti-Catholic. I hope that's not what you are up against.

I suggest you find a confessor, local priest who can council you. That will take a load off your mind.

Speaking of loads...Crazy like a fox. The trash truck did come today. Hallelujah!

Excedrin Headache #4

2009-05-22T11:38:00.000-07:00

Wasn't it just last Friday yesterday? Where does the time go? Our answer to the question of marrying a non-Catholic has elicited quite a great response. Be sure and check all the comments from yesterday's post for some great insights and stories.

One woman explained that her husband only knew enough about religion to fit in a thimble, which is why, I suppose, he wanted to know the answer to this question:
I actually have a saint-matching question for you. We were talking about patron saints and my husband wants to know if there is a patron saint of people who don't believe in saints. I told him I didn't know but I knew someone who could find out if there was one. :-)

Since it's Friday and we are cruising into a three day weekend, let's answer this light hearted, if not bone headed, question.

I think your husband does believe in saints. It's just that he doesn't really know what the word saint actually means, or what he really means is that he doesn't believe in is praying "to" saints.

Poor addled thing.

He might think that saints are people who are perfect and since there are no perfect people, there are no saints. And any actually saint would tell you that they were far from perfect and in fact were mentally tortured at their imperfections. No saints were perfect. They were virtuous on a heroic level, though.

Does he think saints are people here on earth (as in, "that woman is a saint!")? Then he is correct. There are no saints.

Saints are people who lived a life of heroic virtue and landed in heaven. Anyone who is dead and in Heaven is a saint.

Does he not believe in Heaven? Poor thing. A lot of people don't believe in Heaven. Are they in for an surprise!

I suspect that what he is trying to say in his impoverished, inarticulate way is that he doesn't believe in praying to saints. He is correct again! We don't believe in that either.

Here is where the rubber meets the road. Does he believe in prayer at all? Many people don't. But if he does and he asks people to pray for him then he's just being pig headed about the saints.

I can't tell you how many people I've met who are pig headed about the saints. I take some responsibility. We often tell people to, "Pray to St. Anthony" when they've lost something, or "Pray to St. Jude" when life becomes impossible. That confuses people, because we are not saying what we mean.

Nobody goes around saying, "Let me call you on my cellular phone." Few people ask for decaffeinated coffee. We call on our "cells" and we ask for "decaf".

When a Catholic person says "Pray to St. Anthony", it's 'decaf' for "Pray for the intercession of St. Anthony". Intercession means prayer. We are asking St. Anthony to pray for us.

It is no different that if I asked you to pray for me, as we believe that in Heaven, as most people who believe in Heaven at all believe, there are people who lived here on earth who are up there (or over there, wherever Heaven is).

So if I'm willing to ask you to pray for me, why in Heaven's name would I not want to ask someone who has achieved Heavenly perfection to pray for me? That's just....dumb.

There, I've said it.

I can't tell you how many times I've had some separated brethren inform me, nose in the air, that they only pray straight to Jesus. "Well, good for you, " I always say. "I pray to Jesus, too." And then I say, "Do you ask other people to pray for you? Do you say things like, 'keep me in your prayers" And they say, "Oh yes, of course." And then I patiently explain that we do not pray to the saints, we simply ask them to pray for us, too, that they are the Church Triumphant, that they are people who have achieved heavenly perfection and they are right there in Heaven next to the Holy Trinity and their prayers must be perfect (since they have achieved Heavenly perfection) and they must be so very good at praying and why wouldn't you ask them to pray for you, if you're going to ask me, or your cousin, or your mom to pray for you, you may as well ask the people in Heaven to pray for you, too.

At this point, without fail, the person to whom I am speaking curls their upper lip and tilts their head back just a little further and repeats, "Well, I only pray to Jesus."

I'd like to say, "Well, fine. But please keep in mind that while you are praying to Jesus, if you ask me to pray for you, I am going to pray to Jesus, too, and if you ask St. Anthony to pray for you, he is going to pray to Jesus as well. I don't know what you have against St. Anthony. You could have the army of Heaven praying to Jesus for you. WE ARE ALL PRAYING TO JESUS. "

But I never do. I just say, "That's very good."

So to answer his bone headed if not light hearted question about what patron saint would be good for people who do not believe in saints, I'm going to go with St. Paul.

St. Paul certainly did not believe in saints. He did not believe in praying to Jesus, either. Ironically, he created the very first saint. St. Paul was in the crowd that stoned St. Stephen, the very first martyr (and the patron saint of headaches, because he got hit in the head with rocks). Martyrs go straight to Heaven.

Of course, there are quite a number of people who used to be saints and then got, well, dumped off the saint list because they never existed in the first place. He could go with St. Philomena, St. Christopher, St. Expeditus, the Fourteen Holy Helpers.....then he wouldn't have to re-think anything.

Splitting the Atom

2009-05-20T09:49:00.001-07:00

Sorry about my absence. We've been spring cleaning.

I know. We were supposed to do that before Easter. It makes for a terrific Lenten sacrifice and all the more enjoyment of the Easter season.

We couldn't find the broom.

I'm joking. We have found the broom and Amelia Earhart. But not the top of the desk. Only parts of it are sticking out. It feels so good to get things cleaned out, and so sad the way things pile right back up again.

Here's an easy question to start our day:
Hello Sister, I really enjoy your blog and especially your quirky way of saint matching. My husband works in an international student's office at a university. (Making sure everything is in order for them to go to school in the USA, etc...) Who would be a good patron saint for him to call on to help with his day to day tasks? Thanks!

A breeze! A snap!

St. Raphael, the archangel, is the patron saint for young people leaving home for the first time. Done and done!

Not so fast, Sister Mary Martha. Not all questions are so easily answered.

Sister, I am having a bit of a problem. actually it's a big problem: the person that I am probably getting engaged to later this year is Lutheran- and has no plans to convert. Without a shadow of a doubt I know that I want to be with this person for the rest of my life- but I also know that I cannot marry a Lutheran in the eyes of the Catholic church and God. Do you have any advice for someone in this position? This is less a question and more of a cry for help!! :(

Where did you get the idea you can't marry a Lutheran? I won't pretend we would rather you didn't marry a Lutheran.

But you can.

But should you?

That's where the problem arises. Why? Because you still have to be Catholic around this Lutheran. You still have to go to Mass every Sunday and not 'compromise' by going to his services every other week. You'll need two cars, or a Catholic church within walking distance.

That's doable, right? Sure it is.

It's going to get more complicated, though, when you have kids, because you have to promise to raise the children as Catholics, and so does he. Is he down with that?

Isn't that the expression? "Down" with that? I believe it is. You'll take the minivan to Mass with the kids and he'll walk or drive by himself to his Lutheran Church every Sunday.

That's doable, but little lonely for him.

Here is the official word of the Catholic Church on the subject from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (so you don't have to take my official word on it):

1634 Difference of confession between the spouses does not constitute an insurmountable obstacle for marriage, when they succeed in placing in common what they have received from their respective communities, and learn from each other the way in which each lives in fidelity to Christ. But the difficulties of mixed marriages must not be underestimated. They arise from the fact that the separation of Christians has not yet been overcome. The spouses risk experiencing the tragedy of Christian disunity even in the heart of their own home. Disparity of cult can further aggravate these difficulties. Differences about faith and the very notion of marriage, but also different religious mentalities, can become sources of tension in marriage, especially as regards the education of children. The temptation to religious indifference can then arise.

Don't get confused that we are talking about 'cults'. We don't mean people who believe a giant asteroid is coming to take them to a new home in another galaxy. Seriously, don't even think about marrying those people, not because they are in a cult, but because they are crazy. Don't marry a crazy person. It won't work out.

By 'cult's we mean people who are Christian, but not Catholic. Those are all cults.

I'm especially enamored of this sentence:
The temptation to religious indifference can then arise.

Yeah, howdy. Everyone just gives up altogether so they don't have to fight about it. Or you end up being a Lutheran because it's easier and they serve cookies all the time.

I remember reading the famous Father Z's answer to this question once. He began with, "I won't sugar coat it..." and then when on and on about how dangerous and impossible it would be.

I won't sugar coat it either, but there is much evidence to the contrary that it's not impossible or even necessarily dangerous when two people love each other and they love Christ.

I hope some of my readers, who are in mixed marriages, will weigh in on the subject.

The men who split the atom were very happy they could do that, and very unhappy with the resulting bomb.

St. Therese Friday

2009-05-15T13:00:00.001-07:00

Thank God it's Friday! I thank God it's Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, too. But all day yesterday I thought it was Friday, even though I knew it was Thursday. I almost went for the wrong Sacred Mysteries.

Now it really is Friday and we have some fish to fry. The questions have piled up:

The title of the book pictured for this post is "How to Deal with Annoying People: What to Do When You Can't Avoid Them." When push comes to shove, I am always able to avoid annoying people. My problem is that my friends think it's not very Christian of me to do so. They tell me that avoiding them means I haven't forgiven the annoyance, even if I do. Is it really a sin against charity to avoid annoying people?

There is nothing wrong with avoiding annoying people, per se. For one thing, you might be side stepping a near occasion of sin. Or an actual occasion of sin if you end up popping someone in the snout.

The problem arises with your judgment of whom to avoid and why. If I'm working with the Ladies of the Catholic Charities sorting the socks and that poor smelly man comes in for a sandwich and I sprint to the back and let everyone else deal with him, that is as your friends say, not very Christian. If I'm at a party and the world's biggest bore corners me with a blow by blow description of her bus ride through Nebraska, and I call you over and introduce you and then I run for the beer cooler, that's not very Christian. If I see her coming and know she was just on a sixty day bus ride through Nebraska and she can't wait to tell me every detail and I give her one of those, "I'd love to talk, but see, I'm on my cell phone" waves, that's not so nice.

I have to see her humanity. I have to see God in her. Tall order.

God loves Nebraska.

Your best tactic is to steal yourself and deal with annoying people, to build up your ability to handle being annoyed. Offer it all up for the Poor Souls in Purgatory.

I have two further thoughts on this matter, thoughts that are in direct opposition to each other.

One: What is everyone so irritated about all the time? When I listen to the things people complain about, being lactose intolerant, or having their car air conditioning break down (both things can be very miserable, I understand), I can't help but think of all the people who have been attacked en masse and marched across great expanses or stuffed onto trains or locked into huts and cells. I hope none of these things ever happens to any of us. But at the rate we're going, if it does, we will be the first to keel over dead during the Baton Death March to whatever is in store for us.

Buck up.

Two: The first hermits were people who just could not maintain their relationship with God while hanging around with other people. They moved onto the desert and when their followers found them there, they moved even further. One moved on top of a tall pole and when that didn't work, he just kept getting a taller pole. These people are all saints.

Ironically, even though they couldn't stand other people, they couldn't stay sane alone. Eventually, these people of like mind formed the first monasteries and convents.

Sister, I am not sure if you have ever discussed 1 John 4:20 before, and if you have please just send me the link to when you did. But if you haven't, can you please help me understand it? I find it very difficult as it seems to me that it should be the complete opposite of what it says. Ie, easier to love God, who has no flaws, than to love people we know whose flaws we know oh too well!

I have not discussed it before. Oddly enough, I seem to have been discussing it today. It's not rocket science, this one. To begin with, let's not take this passage out of context. John has been going on and on about loving your neighbor and your neighbor being made in God's image. So when we get to John 4:20 we could also state it this way:

If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar. Yet no one can claim to love God who hates his brother. We cannot love the unseen God when we hate the brother who is in God's image.

No matter how annoying he is.

All Questions Great and Small

2009-05-14T12:06:00.000-07:00

I really thought we were going to get into our annual garden clean-up this week. It is its usually spring time disaster area. Maybe tomorrow. I'm thinking we'll finally find Amelia Earhart.

Remind me to write someday about my thoughts on Amelia Earhart. She is a lesson in taking the bad with the good.

At any rate, we are much closer to finding Amelia and her navigator George this year because--and this is how pathetically bad the garden looks--one of the eighth grade girls has taken it upon herself to try and sort the whole mess out. I think she started out dropping by because she has a crush on one of the eighth grade boys who fixes any computer glitches we have and sticks parts of old computers into our computer so that we have more computer bling.

Yes, I said bling. I'm sure it's not an appropriate word for computer upgrades. It seems to have more to do with teeth and hub cabs.

Anyhow, Sister St. Aloysius gave them some iced tea out on the little deck. Heaven knows why she thought that was a good idea. It's such a mess, you can't sit down. You can't tell which thing is a chair covered in morning glory and which thing is just a pile of morning glory. Pathetic.

So this girl seems to think we don't know the first thing about gardening. The truth is, I am quite a good gardener. I can actually do landscaping and keep things alive in pots for years and years. You just can't tell from my garden. She took pity sake on us and our neglected plants and dug in.

It's funny--funny ironic--that nuns spend all their time telling every one else to "mind your own garden" (which is excellent advice) and nuns really don't to that. We have to spend all our time fussing around about the souls of others. Not that we mind. It's just ironic.

Now this girl has come over several times and actually has the about half the garden squared away. The boy she has a crush on must like her, too, because he has dropped by in her absence to water for us (as though if they don't do it, no one will.....could be true.....).

I thought today I'd do a little blog clean up and get to some lingering questions:

Sister, is it alright to take Communion at a Lutheran Church? And is it really the Body and Blood of Christ?

The Lutherans are already not so happy with me. This isn't going to help.

No and no. Only a priest can transform the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ and since the Lutheran minister is not a priest, Transubstantiation (which is what this miracle is called) does not take place. We don't want any one to get confused, so we ask that you separate yourself from the separated brethren at the 'communion' rail....or line or whatever they do over there.

My question is about having a baby pool. We are being labeled as materialistic for having a baby pool so people can guess on the details of our baby's arrival. We are donating some of the proceeds, using some for items we need, and of course, awarding this winners. I merely thought of it as something fun and way to raise money for baby items and the local pregnancy resource center. But now our cafeteria catholic family members make it out to sound like we're immoral by doing this. Is there some reason to think it is wrong or is there a good response to give our family?

I don't see a problem. Gambling is not a sin in the Catholic Church. If you were a Baptist, there would be a problem.

I will say that I have never heard of someone having a baby pool for themselves. Every baby pool I've ever seen is everybody else putting in their chips for a prize, the end. The baby and the parents get nada. All nada, no bling. Maybe they're just mad because, since the prizes are spread out between you, the charity and them, they feel it's a chintzy pool.

I also detect a glimmer of 'we're more Catholic then them in the first place' here, as you go out of your way to mention they are 'cafeteria' Catholics. Just because someone picks and chooses which laws of the Church they will and will not follow, doesn't mean they are wrong about everything. George Bush wasn't Catholic at all and the whole nation followed him.

I'm sorry everyone has made you feel bad about the baby pool. I think it sounds like fun, too. A good response for your family? "Okay, you don't want to join the pool."

Sister, I'm originally from Chicago. May I vote more than once? Oh and is the log for that Blogger's CHoice awards the sames as my Blogger account?

If you are from Chicago you may, of course, vote more than once. You may also vote again after you are dead.

I think for the Blogger's Choice Awards you have to set up an account or whatever it's called, to log in and vote for people.

Thanks for your vote!

Votes....

Sister, Is it possible to be Catholic and still believe in karma? Or even be Christian and believe in karma?

It's possible that you could be a Catholic and still believe in karma. Your children, for example, believe in Santa Claus, and they are still Catholic, right?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that what you mean by karma and what karma actually entails are not the same thing at all. Most people think that karma simply means 'what goes around, comes around' in some sort of cosmic justice. You should already have a problem with this because it leaves God out of the picture. But I understand that we'd all like to believe that bad people have bad things happen to them and good people get rewarded. I'd like to believe in Santa Claus, too. The one that lives on the North Pole with his lovely wife and all those industrious elves. He's so sweet. And he has a flying sled!

It just doesn't work that way. If you think it does, I'm not sure on which planet you are currently residing. Bad people do bad things and skip along their merry way all the time, while good people toil and suffer and get Alzheimer's.

What karma actually means:
Karma is a belief that reincarnated souls work out their ego spirituality to be one with god consciousness--"nirvana." There is no Heaven or Hell.

You can't believe this and be Catholic, now can you.

Patron saint question: In this current economy, it seems like we could use some intercession in helping the unemployed. There is such a saint, Cajetan. Why is he the patron of job seekers, though? I didn't see anything in his bio to explain that. Do you know how that came about?

Yes, good luck with that. By the way, as a Catholic we don't believe in luck either.

Here's my best guess. St. Cajetan worked with the poor and the hopelessly ill (he also founded an order and fought the good fight to bring the Church back together he witnessed the same mess Martin Luther witnessed). He founded a bank (which eventually became the Bank of Naples) so that poor people could have a place to borrow money. Otherwise they would be at the mercy of loan sharks and those payday advance people.

So this is one of those patron saint by extrapolation deals. What did the poor people need to pay back their loans? Jobs.

I am of a mind to ask for the intercession of Pope John Paul II, who is most surely in heaven. There's a guy who found a great job that he loved and kept it for a very, very long time. Longer than anyone else in history with who held the same job.

We have more great questions to answer. More tomorrow.

Tough Luck

2009-05-12T00:10:00.000-07:00

Sister, my question is how does humility, as practiced by St. Joseph, measure up against "tough love"? In particular, I am trying to get through to a relative who continually twists situations around to make herself look innocent of any wrong doing while making me look the guilty party. My husband says you just have to let some things go, but I've had enough after 50 years and I don't think it is good for her to keep up this behavior either.

I'm so confused. What's the tough love part? Telling her off and never speaking to her again?

What terrible things is she making you look guilty of doing? Robbing the liquor store? Forgetting to put the salad forks on the table?

Maybe if you'd spoken to her 15 years ago, or 25 years ago, or 40 years ago or 49 years ago you could have gotten through to her.

But I'd say that after 50 years, absolutely nothing you say or do is going to cause any sort of epiphany here. She's keeping up this behavior whether it is good for her or not.

And you're not the boss of her.

I do have a patron saint for you. St. Maximillian Kolbe. Talk about suffering when you aren't guilty of anything! He didn't do anything wrong either, but he managed to die a horrible death just the same, by stepping in and taking someone else's place on death row. That guy wasn't guilty either.

St. Max didn't sit around whining about who done him wrong. He administered to the suffering around him.

If that's a bit too steep a climb, maybe you could just turn to St. Therese the Little Flower, the patron saint for people who are annoyed by the annoying habits of others.

I think you're going to have to do more than 'let some things go'. I'm assuming your husband means that you just have to overlook her behaviors. I think you're also going to have to let go of your anger and, like St. Therese, offer it up for the Poor Souls in Purgatory.

Suffering Succotash

2009-05-07T11:56:00.001-07:00

Happy Mother's Day!

I know it's over.

I hope after Mother's Day, if you are a mother, you are still happy. Mother's Day should last an entire week. It should be Mother's Week. That way, everyone would actually appreciate all that mom does every day instead of pretend they do, on a Sunday no less. Brunch and flowers really doesn't quite cut it, in my estimation. A family should take over all, and I do mean all, of mother's duties for one whole week, while mother writes poetry and makes collages, takes hot baths and long walks, comes and goes as she pleases and only gets kisses from clean faces and hands. Then you can talk about how great Mom is.

Just my opinion.

But now that I've missed the whole thing (easily done, with just the one day to think about it), here is today's question from a reader:

Is it possible to be too Catholic? Not like going to Mass too much, or praying too much, but by requiring that all you do and take joy in MUST be related to The Church and the afterlife in some way.

Lots of talk about suffering and mortification. What's your take on this? Is this a symptom of a depressive person, or a hallmark of a future saint?

Is it okay to skip through the tulips eating cupcakes and just praise God that life is just so beautiful? Or does that make me a flipant sinner (unless, of course, they are tulips planted by Carmelites and the cupcakes are assorted to look like a big rosary...and it's a feast day). Am I alone in this confusion?

I'm frustrated. Wouldn't Jesus want us to spread joy and ease other's pain instead of constantly fixating on our own suffering? I hope this makes sense.

This is quite a complex question, so let's break it down into it's parts.

Is it possible to be too Catholic?
No.

Yes. It's only yes if you find yourself forcing yourself to think about the afterlife every second and pretend to be joyful about it. The deeper your understanding of being Catholic, the less you have to force yourself to do anything.

For example, say you take joy in knitting a hat. Do you have to sit there and knit and think of Jesus the whole time you knit your hat? It would be nice. Jesus would appreciate it.

But you can just knit your hat and take joy it in. Somewhere in there, maybe, you might want to realize that the reason you take joy in it at all is that you have two good hands and a brain that functions together to make all those knots by using sticks and you can see what you're doing and you are a sane person whose house is not on fire and who actually lives in a house and has a roof over your head. If you didn't have those things, the knitting would be an exercise in frustration and misery as your brain told your hands to stab you in the eye with your sticks instead of making measured knots and your hair caught on fire. You may have some awareness of this and think, "Thanks, God, for this knitting."

It's not rocket science.

Lots of talk about suffering and mortification. Is this a symptom of a depressive person, or a hallmark of a future saint?

Yes. There is actually a mental illness that some people have that causes them to feel overwhelming guilt and constantly inflict pain on themselves.

And yes, there are saints who I'd rather not talk about what exactly they did to themselves, lest you are having a snack while you're reading.

Sometimes, to be perfectly honest, I can't tell the difference between some saints and the mentally ill in this respect. I let the Holy Father sort that out.

But for everyday, day in day out harmony with Jesus, I have this advice.

Is it okay to skip through the tulips eating cupcakes and just praise God that life is just so beautiful? Or does that make me a flippant sinner?

Yes. It makes you a flippant sinner.

No. It doesn't.

This is why it really pays to be Catholic. We have the map. You can look on the church calendar and see which days are set aside to focus on joy, or suffering. You can say the rosary and use the Joyful Mysteries or the Sorrowful ones, accordingly. (You''l be pleased to know that we are having a joyful period at the moment.)

And you can suffer and be joyful at the same time. Get your brain around that.

St. Bernadette did.

And it's not just suffering and joy, we have Ordinary days and days of preparation. We offer things to think about every day, ways to focus your mind.

And we have cupcakes! Because unlike the Pentagon, we have to have bake sales to stay afloat.

Wouldn't Jesus want us to spread joy and ease other's pain instead of constantly fixating on our own suffering?

You've missed the point of suffering. The whole idea is to not fixate on your own suffering, but to offer your suffering toward the suffering of others. You can choose who you would like your suffering to benefit, which includes people suffering on this earth and those Poor Souls in Purgatory. Offering your own suffering is one way to ease the suffering of others.

What exactly do you mean by 'spread joy'? That sounds nice. Is it a Hallmark card? A dinner party?

Because I think what you are actually talking about when you say 'spread joy and ease other's pain' is maybe something like what Mother Teresa did. She spread the joy of the Word of God and she eased the suffering of others.

But I don't think her work was a barrel of laughs. I don't think there were many tulips or cupcakes involved, except maybe ones she never saw, the ones other people sold to send her money.

I hope this helps with the confusion.

Since we're all about spreading the joy (according to our map) we found you a knitted cupcake.

Playoffs Come Home to Roost

2009-05-06T16:46:00.000-07:00

Oh my goodness! We're in a contest and we didn't even know! We love a good contest, especially during playoff season. Move over Lebron. Vote for us here!

Vocational Therapy

2009-05-06T11:23:00.000-07:00

Since I literally wear my Catholic faith on my sleeve, people often ask me about religious vocations. You'd think I'd know something about that, given that I have one and that everyone around me has one and I live within a larger community whose members all have one.

I always feel clueless.

To begin with, I didn't become a nun because I had some great mystical calling. Well, I guess I actually did do that, eventually. But I certainly didn't start out that way. I simply didn't know what else to do with myself. In my day, your choices were "married" or "nun". Girls simply did not run around doing things on their own. One or two did, but there are only so many jobs at the library.

And who knows what is in someone else's heart? One of the best nuns I ever met, who inspired everyone around her and lit the flame of vocations for many other people by her example, only lasted about five years after she took her 'final' vows. She's a happily married mother of five now.

So when people ask me about vocations, I'm tempted to stick my fingers in my ears and hum, or remember that I have something on the stove, or that my meter has expired and run away. What's black and white, black and white, black and white? A nun running from someone who has asked about vocations.

My answer, for the most part is twofold:

One: read about some orders and then go for a visit and see what you think. You know, you can be a 'virtual nun' by visiting some of the orders' websites. For some people, this is enough to wipe the mystical smile of joy right off their faces. Or put it on there.

Two: What makes you think that just because you think you should be a Carmelite or a Benedictine that they want you? They might tell you to take a hike. They don't take just anyone who strolls in feeling all close to Jesus you know.

Which brings me to today's question:

Sister, I am very intrigued by the religious life, and as a married woman and mother, I sometimes feel as if I missed my calling to join a religious order. I didn't revert back to Catholicism (from a life of darkness) until after I had a child and was married...in that order. Now that I feel so close to Christ, it is as if I had my path chosen for me and even though I absolutely love my husband and my child, I sometimes yearn for the ability to join in a community of religious sisters. I am wondering if there is something out there for me, a lay person, to join that would give the same sense of community and consecration to Christ, given that I am married and have a child.

La, la, la, la tra, la, la la.....oh..what?

I don't know you. It's irresponsible for me to guess what's what. But, I'm going out on a limb here to suggest that this is what has happened: For whatever reason, you did everything backwards. It should go "Catholic", "Married", "Child". And for you it was exactly the opposite order.

And now, having discovered at last how very fabulous it is to be Catholic you feel like you want to devote all your time to your new found passion. Which is admirable. But not necessarily a calling.

Or, it could just be a simple case of "the grass is always greener."

Some people would suggest that since you are already married and have a child, that you don't have a calling. I won't suggest that. Look at St. Rita. She really wanted to be a nun her whole life. She had to wait until her husband and children died and by then the convent didn't want her. She had to have heavenly intervention, and even then the nuns in her convent tested her every second. She got the last laugh, so to speak, by getting the stigmata and becoming a saint.

So, for all I know, you're the next St. Rita.

But maybe you're more like a lay version of St. Therese the Little Flower.

St. Therese the Little Flower: wanted to me a missionary but was too sickly for the rigors of travel and missionary work.
You: want to be a nun but you're married and have a child.
St. Therese the Little Flower: devoted the life she did have to Jesus, performing every task as though it was for Jesus, Personally.
You: could do the same.

As the Wizard of Oz says, "What have they got that you haven't got?"

The nun behind the curtain says, "A support group." Pitch in with the Third Order, join the Ladies of the Catholic Charity (how I love them!), start a rosary night with friends.

No Third Order or Ladies of Charity group near you? Then you're just going to have to go it alone. Many saints have done the same. St. John of God got out of the loony bin and gathered up all the sick people and beg and borrowed mattresses and bed pans and food and medicine and cared for them on his own.

You don't have to start your own hospital, but you can volunteer to read to children, help the poor, visit people in the old folks home, take meals to people who are stuck at home, or just sort the socks at the thrift store. There is no dirth of opportunity to help those in need. We have a name for all of this in the Catholic Church: the Spiritual and Corporal works of mercy. There are seven of each. If you only did one per day, it would take you two weeks. Then you have to start over.

I hope this helps. I have something on the stove.

Future Honey Tongues

2009-05-05T12:58:00.001-07:00

It has been two whole years since we had bees take over our worm farm while I was away in the Midwest.

Next, as far as I could tell, they took over the compost bin. Except they really hadn't. They had never been in the worm farm, they were only in the compost bin.

And then, just as suddenly as they arrived, they left. I had wished I had noticed their departure, because if I had only noticed, I would have had quite a nice stash of fresh honey. As it happened, by the time I noticed they were gone, the honey comb had started to turn itself to compost.

What a shame.

But God has smiled on us today. Out of the blue, the bees have returned, as though they had some sort of time share in the compost bin. They are summering in our driveway. They are having cocktails by the ocean.

Isn't that surprising? Why did they skip a year? How did they find the same compost bin in the same driveway two years later? They have to be different bees. Bees don't live for two years. Are they the descendants of the other set of bees who passed the lore of the compost bin of the nuns onto to their future generations?

I don't know the first thing about bees, but I'm half tempted to borrow a bee keeper suit from someone and see what's what in there.

Meanwhile we are peacefully co-existing. No one has buzzed into the car, or chased anyone, or bumbled into the house so far. The worms are thriving along side.

Sister St. Aloysius is not entirely happy about the bees, as she was chased by them once. But I have to admit that I'm very pleased they came back. I felt a little insulted when they left as suddenly has they had come. Now I feel like the charming hostess of a popular bee bed and breakfast.

I could call it St. Gobnait's Inn. Maybe that's not a good name. Who can pronounce it? St. Gobnait is a 5th century Irish saint who is the patron saint of bees. St. Ambrose is also the patron saint of bees. Both of the patron saints of bees for dubious reasons. St. Ambrose was known as the honey tongued preacher. That's it for an Ambrose+bee connection. St. Gobnait had her named changed to Abigail and also Deborah. The Hebrew meaning of "Deborah" is "bee". In a which came first, the chicken or the egg, type dilemma, one of the miracles attributed to Saint ( meaing that she was dead at the time) Gobnait aka Abigail, aka Deborah, was that she protected a parish by unleashing a swarm of bees.

Maybe St. Gobnait has unleashed a swarm of bees into our compost bin and that's how they got here. It's as good an explanation as any.

Lutheran Intervention

2009-04-29T12:09:00.001-07:00

Sister, I was hoping you could help me find a saint or two I can pray to for my Lutheran friends that believe that it's not important to have faith in Jesus, you'll end up in Heaven no matter what you believe in. I didn't realize that this is what they believe until today and it made me so sad. So I want to pray for them even more, and I could use some good friends to pray with :)

Well, I think I can help you with more than a patron saint here. Either you misunderstood your Lutheran friends about what they believe, or your Lutheran friends are very, very confused about their own faith.

So for you, and your separated brethren buddies, I'll go out on a limb here and try to explain what Lutherans believe. Good luck to all of us. (You realize that, as Catholics, we don't believe in luck.)

Martin Luther was mad at the Catholic clergy back in the 16th century. He was not wrong. He personally witnessed a lot of debauchery. His anger was personal on two levels: one, he was a Catholic priest himself, so all of that bad behavior reflected on him (ring a bell?), and two, he witnessed said debauchery on a trip to the Vatican. He had been dreaming of this trip his whole life, couldn't wait to go, was so, so excited to finally get there in an era where travel was not easy breezy lemon squeezy and then, BLAM, trip ruined. Like if you went to Kuai and the second you got there all your bags were stolen by the first person you met and no one there gave a fig about your troubles. You wouldn't be recommending Kuai to anyone.

On top of that, there was the indulgences issue. That's the straw that broke the Luther's back.

So basically, Martin Luther decided that since the representatives of Jesus on earth we not to be trusted, it should be every man for himself. There should be no person standing between you and the Word of God and everyone should just interpret the Bible for himself.

I have to stop here and say, that was a really, really stupid idea, because you and I are just not qualified to go digging around in the Bible on our own.

But Martin Luther did not throw out 1500 years of Catholic teaching when he posted his grievances on the church door. He believed that you need to believe in Jesus for Salvation. Even if you go digging around in the Bible on your own, you're not going to get around this fact of faith.

So on count one, you, or your friends are confused. Belief in Jesus is job one for every Christian. That's what it means to be Christian....hence the name CHRISTian.

Duh.

Even though Lutherans are called Lutherans, it only means they believe in the teachings of Martin Luther who began a Christian sect named after him. Lutherans are still Christians. They are wrong about a lot of things, but they are Christians.

Martin parted company with the Catholic Church in his belief that if you believed in Jesus you would automatically do everything Jesus said to do, which would mean behaving as a Christian at all times. So he preached that belief was all you needed, that good works were not important.

Sort of. Because truly, he believed that the good works were a given once you believe in Jesus.

The world in which we live proves otherwise.

So I have this to say to your friends (I'm quoting myself from previous posts here):

"I go about my merry life 'believing in Jesus" and walking by all the homeless people judging them as winos and stepping over them to get into Target to buy a new set of coffee mugs with chihuahuas on them and go home to watch "The Bachelor" and I'm still going straight to heaven? What a good deal!!!!!"

Meanwhile I have a recommendation for you. Not a patron saint, but the Green Scapular, which is a prayer just for this very problem.

Stealth Catholicism. My favorite kind.

Crazy Time

2009-04-28T10:58:00.001-07:00

I cannot imagine the whirlwind emotions the early disciples must have experienced in these heady days after Jesus rose from the dead. There wasn't much time left with Jesus on earth. They must have been filled with excitement and fear, anticipation and doubt. Each moment must have been so precious. So I read with great interest about the days that follow the Resurrection of Christ. And what do I find?

Hocktide. A little known festival that happens in only one place in the entire world, Hungerford, England, on the first Tuesday after Easter. It's a silly pointless festival, as far as I can tell. The men dress up, the women get a kiss, there is a pole and everyone gets an orange. Some people get a nail in their shoe.

The men call themselves "Tutti Men". Know one seems to know why. They carry Tutti Poles, which are wooden staffs with bunches of flowers and a cloved orange on top. The Tutti Men are led by the Orange Man (you know as much as I do), also known as the Orange Scrambler (breakfast anyone?) who carries a hat decorated with feathers. I don't know why he doesn't wear it. Crazy hats seem to be a big part of all kinds of festivals and rituals. The Pope never carries his hat.

Anyhow, he also carries a sack of oranges (another good reason to wear the hat) and he passes out oranges in return for pennies and kisses. They blow a horn at 8am to start this extravaganza. They visit 102 houses and demand a kiss from the lady of the house, who gets an orange for her trouble.

As if this isn't silly enough, after lunch all first time attendees are treated to the "shoeing of the colts" during which they get a nail driven through the sole of one shoe. What fun!

Which brings me to today's question:

Hello Sister, While you're Saint-matching...which Saint should I ask for help if I'm trying to start a romantic relationship with someone? Thanks!

Too bad you missed out on flinging yourself over to Hungerford today. You'd get a kiss and an orange.

The patron saint for young lovers is the Archangel Raphael. Here is the story: Sarah is a miserable young woman who is plagued by a demon who has killed everyone she has married. Tobit is a blind man who is miserable about being blind. Tobit sends his young son, Tobias, away on a business trip. Tobias meets Sarah.

Love at first sight.

Wait....I left out an important part of the story. God has sent his Archangel, Raphael, to Tobit already. Raphael is with Tobias on the business trip. That's why Raphael is also the patron of young people leaving home for the first time.

So Raphael tells Tobias to confront the demon, which he does, and the demon slinks off forever. Sarah and Tobias live happily ever after. And I do mean ever after. Tobias lived to see his great great great grandchildren. And Tobit lived to see his great great grandchildren, actually see them, because when Tobias and Sarah returned home with Raphael, Raphael took care of the blindness problem, too. Move over St. Lucy.

On another note:
In approaching the end of the school year, I am feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything that I must do. I really need to be able to get things done quickly and not waste time. Is there a patron saint I can pray to for better time management?

Off hand, I'd recommend St. Sebastian, the patron saint of multi-tasking. But I did a little digging and I came up with St. Benedict. Actually, I didn't come up with St. Benedict, someone wrote a whole book on the subject. Actually, there are quite a number of books on St. Benedict and business management. Who knew?

I realize you are asking about time management and not business management. But the reason St. Benedict has become the patron saint of business management is because of the Rule of Benedict, which is a blue print for business management.

And the reason St. Benedict wrote his rule is because the world had just gone to Hell in a handcart. The Roman Empire had fallen and with it the structure of society, like dominoes. With no security, anarchy gave way to disease and foreign invasion. In stepped Benedict and his Rule, allowing his monks not only to endure, but to flourish.

If Benedict could get his monks through the fall of the Roman Empire, I think he can get you through the end of the school year.

And finally:
One last question about novenas. I am currently doing two, at 11:30 a.m. I have been looking online, and I cannot find this anywhere: Do I have to say the novenas at the same time every day? I have a business presentation to give on Friday that might run long, and now I am wondering after Friday am I on day 5 or back at day 1?

Ask St. Benedict.

I'm joking.

It doesn't have to be at the same time every day. That would be a little silly, as though you're prayer would be rejected because you said it at 9:20 instead of 8:30. The whole purpose of a novena is to put you in touch with God for nine straight days focusing on a single petition. It makes a difference (to you, not to God) if you forget all about it. But as long as you get it in there, you're good to go. Saying it at the same time every day simply helps you to stay mindful and remember.

Novena tips.