CatholicInside

Gentle Power

2008-06-07T12:44:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make.

I've always found Mary a bit intimidating.

Crazy, I know, but there's something about her being the only human who ever lived without sin that's always made me feel like she couldn't possibly help but frown on the rest of us. I've always marveled at those who were able to call on her for comfort, because it seemed to me that her glow of purity couldn't possibly function as anything but a glaring spotlight on how flawed the rest of us were.

My mind, I must confess, still rather sees it that way. But recently I had an encounter that reminded me that the highest knowledge doesn't come from my mind.

Back in May, the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe visited my midwestern church. The story of Juan Diego has always been a favorite of mine, and if I have thought vaguely of traveling to Mexico to see his miraculous cloak. If that's possible, it won't be for many years, so I was delighted to learn that the image was coming to me. I couldn't wait to see it, but I must admit that I was entirely unprepared for the actual experience of it.

Her gentleness was undeniable; I puzzled over how I might ever have seen her as aloof and intimidating. Her words to Juan Diego--"am I not your mother?"--suddenly rang true in a way that they never had before. I could have sat at her feet forever and simply absorbed the peace and gentleness that she radiated, and I know that I was not alone in that. Nearly everyone in the church was moved to tears at one time or another, or continuously.

It's really impossible for me to describe the way that the power of her gentle, loving spirit washed over everyone in her presence--it's certainly nothing I was prepared for in viewing an image, and I have delayed making this post for weeks in hopes that words would come to me that would allow me to share something of what I saw and felt in that church that day, but they have not come. I can only say that I cannot even begin to imagine the experience of someone like Juan Diego, or Bernadette, to feel the full force of her presence--it is on one hand difficult to imagine surviving such intensity and in another quite easy to understand how their lives were so completely transformed.

Perhaps, in the end, it is just as well that the experience defies description. It is one everyone should experience firsthand.

The Value of Punishment

2008-05-10T12:13:00.001-07:00

I wrote this post nearly a year ago and never posted it. I started out to say "I don't know why" at the end of that sentence, but I don't think that would be entirely accurate. I think that I never posted it because it was uncomfortable, because it was too personal, because it's something none of us like to think too much about as it applies to our own lives. It's fine in the theoretical, as we talk about raising children or reform in our criminal justice systems--two things that I, as a parent, former criminal defense lawyer, and legal writer think about a lot--but not so much when it comes closer to home. I ran across it again today and decided that I thought what I'd written was true, and important, even if it wasn't entirely comfortable...so here it is.

I had to be punished yesterday. In one sense, I think that self-imposed punishment is the least valuable. It requires discipline, certainly, and a deep level of acceptance, but it is still in some sense chosen, still within our control. Receiving punishment from some just authority—whether we want it or not, whether we agree with it or not—is beautifully humbling. Or it can be, if it is well conceived and well received.

Unfortunately, both of those conditions seem to be sadly lacking in society today. In our criminal justice system, punishment is imposed seemingly at random; some sentences seem outrageous in their lenience and others in their severity. Most sentences have nothing directly to do with the crime in question. It doesn’t seem to be intended to inspire reform, and where it is the inspiration seems to be expected to come from fear of future punishment, from having “learned your lesson” about what happens if you behave like that. True reform, as we well know, requires a change of heart, not simply an aversion to punishment.

And, in fact, the aversion to punishment itself can undermine its effectiveness. When punishment is accepted—and I mean accepted internally, not simply conceded to—it can open the door to wonderful growth in obedience and humility. Unfortunately, the flipside—and the much more common scenario today—is that resistance to punishment (though it might not be escaped) builds a fortress of pride and an illusion of being “in control of our own lives.” The “they can’t do that to me” attitude has become so instinctive that it is nearly impossible for the value of punishment to penetrate the rejection of obedience and humility.

One summer morning several years ago, I was lying on my bed reading with my daughter when the power went out. I got up and checked the breaker box and looked out the window to see whether the neighbors had power, and then, with a bit of a sinking feeling in my stomach, I went to check the front table where we kept the outgoing mail.

You see, I’d just returned from Las Vegas, and before I’d left I’d written out the utility check and put it in an envelope on the table where we put the outgoing mail…but I hadn’t actually mentioned to my husband that it was there and needed to be mailed.

At one time in my life I would have been angry: angry with my husband for not sending out any mail during the whole time I was gone, and angry with the utility company, because the bill couldn’t be more than ten days late and this seemed a bit hasty. I was just back from this long trip, and I was tired. We only had one car, and my husband had taken it to work. That meant a trek uptown—about a mile and a half—on foot, and it was in the nineties.

But I made a conscious decision that morning. I didn’t get angry. I took responsibility for not having either mailed the bill myself or explicitly pointed it out to my husband, and I recognized that three mile round-trip walk in muggy 90+ weather as the price I had to pay for that carelessness. My daughter, then five, wasn’t responsible, so when she began to complain of being hot and tired on the walk, I put her on my back and carried her. She shouldn’t have to suffer for my mistakes, after all, and if carrying her made the whole thing a little harder on me, so be it. Maybe next time I wouldn’t get so caught up in the excitement of my travel plans that I overlooked the obligations of everyday life.

By the time I arrived at the utility office, I was glad that we didn’t have a second car. It was clear to me that if this had been a minor inconvenience cleared up in five minutes in my air conditioned car, I wouldn’t really have taken time to give any thought to the way I’d just assumed someone else would take care of the details while I floated in the lazy river at the MGM Grand.

Although I was already in my thirties that day, it was the first time I’d thought to be grateful for consequences, to really open myself up to fully experiencing them instead of letting resentment interfere or trying to find ways to mitigate them.

There seems to be a “never give in” attitude in our society that makes it a point of pride to stand your ground even when you’re clearly wrong. “They can’t do that to me” extends so far that when it turns out that they can—when one finds himself in jail, for example, or without his driver’s license—“not letting it get to you” seems not only to be the norm, but viewed as somehow heroic.

I say, let it get to you. If you’re in jail for something you did, suffer. Don’t live inside your mind so that you can be “free” even behind bars—live behind bars and acknowledge your restrictions and the reasons for them every minute of every day. If you’ve lost your driver’s license, don’t drive. Accept the inconvenience of having to leave earlier and walk and take buses as part of the punishment you know you deserve, and give up places you don’t really need to go so that you don’t make someone else pay the price for your crime by requiring taxi service. And above all, be grateful. Realize you’ve been given an important opportunity to grow in virtues, to learn your place in the world and in God’s plan.

C.S. Lewis said once that every man we encounter will one day be a creature of such beauty that we should be tempted, if we saw it today, to worship it, or of such horror that we’ve never seen the like even in our nightmares. He pointed out that in every encounter, we help our fellow man along one path or the other. But there is perhaps no man-made circumstance in which that is so true as in punishment. It is never ignored, it is never without affect: it strengthens humility and obedience or it strengthens pride and rebellion.

Advice? Insights? Anyone?

2008-04-16T19:47:00.000-07:00

This evening, my daughter told me over dinner that she was worried about one of her friends. She's in middle school, so of course a lot of frightening possibilities sprang to mind at once, both about the kids and their families. She has a friend in foster care. She has a friend who is the victim of a "shared custody" arrangement that has her moving back and forth between her parents' homes every other day. She has a friend whose mother was recently deported. So I was prepared for the worst.

But not for what she said.

Her friend, she told me, wears a cross tucked inside her shirt, because her mother has forbidden her to have anything to do with "church stuff". Her mother found and threw away her Bible, and won't let her go to church with friends because she doesn't want her "learning about that religion crap".

I had no idea what to say.

I told her that we would pray for her friend and her mother, and that she should remind her friend that the most important thing was her relationship with God and that no one but her would know if she talked to God. And I felt two firmly held ethical beliefs crashing into one another hard enough to leave shattered glass on the ground around me. I'd be outraged if I felt like some other adult was feeding my daughter ideas that were contrary to our religion at her age. But the idea of a 12-year-old child trying to be a Christian alone and hide it from her parents is pretty painful, too.

I have no idea what the right thing to do might be, or even if doing anything (other than praying) is right. Any thoughts, experiences, prayers, insights, etc. will be greatly appreciated.

Hijacking Jesus

2008-03-06T12:57:00.000-08:00

I was always bothered, when I was working in the city, by the people on the street who held up pictures of Christ while they begged, who wrote Bible verses on their signs. It seemed exploitative to me; I was less likely to give them money than to those who simply claimed a need. Jesus, I said once to a co-worker, is not a marketing device.

What I meant, of course, was that I thought that Jesus SHOULDN'T be a marketing device. That's all I could mean, really, because there is no denying that in today's society, Christ is a marketing device every day, all around us. What began as something sincere in the days when we knew the members of our parishes has become the frequent tool of the unscrupulous. I'm not just talking about the credit repair people advertising on Relevant Radio, giving the impression that they're just there to help. I'm not just talking about people advertising on the back of the church bulletin and offering a 10% discount to parish members simply because it's a cheap way to draw in business. I'm talking about something much more sinister, and much more pervasive--something a single example should clearly put into perspective.

Google "Christian payday loans". No really. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Yes, there are more than 8,000 results.

I must admit that even cynic that I am, even with the experience I've had in researching and writing consumer protection information about payday loans and payday lenders, I held out a moment of hope. I just had to. I thought that maybe, just maybe, Christian payday loans were a moral alternative to the payday lenders who command fees equivalent to 400% interest or more in storefront offices and over the Internet.

So I clicked on a few links. I read some information. I filled out a few forms. And I learned that Christian payday loans are different from regular payday lenders are different from other payday lenders in one way: they write "Christian" on their websites and marketing literature.

What is Christian about charging 400% interest to working people in such dire straits that they can't afford to wait for their next paychecks to arrive? And what, exactly, is Christian about using the word "Christian" to sell something without letting Christian principles alter your business practices in any way? Jesus as a marketing device is bad enough, but Jesus as a marketing device for deceptive and destructive practices is more than we should tolerate.

Recently, in the name of Christianity, we've seen protesters disrupting the funerals of fallen soldiers and slain college students. Now, we see businesses that exist only as a means of taking advantage of the working poor selling their virtually unbreakable cycle of debt with Christ's name. This list could go on, and I'm sure that you don't need me to spell it all out. We see it all around us every day. But what are we going to do about it? How are we going to reclaim Christ's name and insist that it stand only for the principles HE taught and works truly done in his name?

"My Soul Has Adjusted"

2008-02-18T22:39:00.000-08:00

A colleague mentioned to me recently that he doesn't sleep much—never more than a few hours at a stretch. "That can't be healthy," I said, and he told me that his body had adjusted.

That happens. The human body is a remarkable thing; it's made to function one way, with a certain amount of sleep, within a certain temperature range, with a certain kind of fuel. And yet, if those things aren't available, it adapts. And we recognize that adaptation—we know that our bodies were meant to have nutritious food and a minimum amount of rest and all that, and that if they aren't getting it and they're still functioning, something fundamental has shifted in order to accommodate that, to keep operating as best it can in the absence of optimal conditions.

For better or worse, the human soul seems to work pretty much the same way. The dangerous difference is that we’re not so quick to recognize it. When the soul doesn’t get what it needs to thrive, when it doesn’t get the fuel it was meant to run on or the environment it was created to thrive in, it adjusts as well. It finds a way to get by in less than optimal circumstances, without the food and water and fresh air that it needs to be all that it was meant to be.

But just like the body, it has to change to do so. Just like the body, it doesn’t work as well without the conditions it was created for, doesn’t grow to its full strength, doesn’t become exactly what it was meant to be…what it could have been if only the sunlight hadn’t been obscured or the water hadn’t been polluted or any of a hundred other possible contaminations or missing pieces. And I think that for the most part, we don’t notice. It’s not so easy to see our souls shriveling as it is our bodies, not as easy to detect that something isn’t working quite right. Our souls adjust.

And unless we recognize that that’s what’s happening and find them the right food, the right sunlight, enough fresh air, they shrink into something very different from what they were designed to be.

But finding the right food and re-adjusting to it isn’t always easy. It seems, perhaps, that if it’s what we were made for, if it’s what was made for us, then it should fit, should feel right, should be as natural as breathing. And without those adjustments, that might well be true. But breathing fresh air is painful if we’ve become accustomed to a different atmosphere, and vegetables are hard to digest after a steady diet of processed foods. It stands to reason that if we’ve been feeding our souls a lot of junk and they’ve adapted, the good stuff isn’t going to go down easily—that’s going to take another round of adjustment.

The Spirit of Martyrdom

2008-02-03T20:53:00.001-08:00

Recently, I read Father David Knight's book, His Way. I've probably mentioned before how interesting and insightful I found Father Knight's Confession Can Change Your Life, and I'd been meaning for a long time to read more of his books. One of the things Knight talks about in His Way is the spirit of martyrdom in the modern world. Those of us who have always lived in the west have rather lost our sense of what that means. After all, we're rarely called upon to sacrifice our lives for our faith, and no one ever shows up and confiscates our land because we won't abdicate loyalty to Christ. It creates the impression that martyrdom is a concept of days gone by.

Really, though, Father Knight points out that it simply tends to manifest itself far less dramatically in our culture today. The point, he says, is that those early Christians knew that they risked everything every day simply by being Christian. They didn't remove themselves from everday life or avoid building homes and families and owning property and working at their trades--they simply did it all with the knowledge that the day might come when they had to choose, and that when that day came, they would choose Christ.

In some small way, we all face those decisions every day. We all live out that spirit when we decide to pass up on a profitable venture because it's not consistent with Christian values or to skip a social event because we can't condone the atmosphere or any of a hundred other things that we might not consciously connect to martyrdom--might not even consciously connect to our faith.

The whole idea that martyrdom was a necessary condition of any Christian life, but that it didn't mean quite what we associated it with from history and the idea that it wasn't about giving things up so much as a continual state of willingness to give them up if that's what Christianity required resonated with me. The apparent conflict between the focus on the value of relationships and the admonishment against attachments always created some dissonance for me, and this gave me a new perspective to consider.

But I must admit that even as I read those words and gained those insights, I was thinking that even the kind of choices Father Knight described didn't come up so often in modern life. Specifically, he pointed out that any friendship that wasn't founded in Christ was at risk, could always turn if you chose to stick to your principles and be true to Christ. And I didn't really get it. After all, I have many friends who disagree with me about many things. I think that most of us do.

But God has a way of clarifying these things for us, and just a few short days after I'd read those words and questioned their validity, a group of people I'd been associating with in an online forum took the surprising step of pulling away from the main forums and forming their own discussion group for the express purpose of limiting religious discussion.

The controversy that led up to their decision was, indeed, unpleasant, and on one level it might even have been understandable. But the options proposed frankly shocked me: come join our new group and agree to "leave God out of it" or don't come and talk to us at all. This wasn't, understand, and anti-religious or anti-Christian group. It was a group of people who was sick of listening to people proselytize and debate and squabble and so chose to create a safe haven where all discussion would be free from mention of God, positive or negative.

But is it really possible, if you're attempting to live a Christian life, if you're making decisions and analyzing situations in light of Biblical imperatives, to "leave God out of the discussion"? I determined that it was not, and off they drifted. But the controversy didn't end there. The backlash from the previous discussions continued to grow until there was more backlash than there was discussion. And the knee-jerk negative reaction to anything remotely related to religion became so extreme that I found that there were people I hardly dared respond to, because I was repeatedly faced with the choice of triggering that reaction, answering less than honestly so as not to reveal that God was part of my analysis, or simply not responding at all.

Of course, we all encounter people it's best to simply ignore, people best kept at a distance. But in this case, the people I found myself most reluctant to be honest with were the people I'd found most interesting, the people I'd believed to be most open-minded and capable of rational discussion that considered all viewpoints.

I don't fault the people involved; I can see how every new step along the path developed, and how each decision along the way seemed like a reasonable one in the moment, and how different the issue looks from "the other side". But it came as a startling revelation to me that I'd one day suddenly be asked by rational, thinking people to choose between talking to them and acknowledging the role that God plays in my life--and it gave a concrete context to what I'd been thinking just the week before "couldn't happen here".

Just Wanted to Share a Thought on Peace

2008-02-02T13:10:00.001-08:00

I ran across this story on another blog today, and while the idea it illustrates shouldn't be news to us, it's a good reminder, and well told, so I thought I'd share: The King's Prize

Grace is Like Sugar

2008-01-26T22:34:00.000-08:00

In my fledgling days of Christianity - and during dark days later and probably some still to come - the idea that God would grant one the grace to weather trials, to do the right thing when it was hard, to make sacrifices wasn't especially comforting. It didn't, frankly, sound like that much of a gift that I'd have the strength to do stuff I hated and give up stuff I liked.

And sometimes it's like that. If you absolutely have to take some awful-tasting medicine, sugar can make it possible to swallow it. Not pleasant, certainly, and probably still something you'd rather avoid, but possible. That's the picture of grace I always had when I read those words words about grace enabling you to do the right thing, as if it would give you the ability to stomach things - lots and lots of things - that you'd rather avoid.

But I'd forgotten about grapefruit. Or at least, I'd forgotten that there's a lot more grapefruit in the world than there is horrible tasting medicine, and that it comes into our lives much more regularly and naturally.

Grapefruit is sour. I actually happen to like grapefruit plain, but many people do not. It's too tart, too bitter, too acidic. Add a little sugar, though, and it's delicious. Not just something you can stomach, but something really good. Sugar doesn't mask the taste of grapefruit or cover it with something different and better or mitigate it so that you can take a deep breath and force yourself to swallow. No, it draws out the best of the natural flavor of the grapefruit, mingles with it, enhances it.

Without a pinch of sugar, it would be very easy to pass on grapefruit altogether, to decide on the first taste that it was a bit too tart and never really experience the texture and the hint of sweetness and the hundred and one health benefits. But with a little sugar, it's suddenly inviting. Not something to be stomached but something you might otherwise never have enjoyed. Something you might develop a taste for even without the sugar, once you've come to know it better.

It seems to me now that it's a little that way with grace, too. Sometimes there's awful medicine to be taken and it only takes the edge off enough that it's possible to swallow. But more often there are potentially delicious fruits, and grace draws out the flavor for us in something we might otherwise never have appreciated, gives us eyes to see the appeal in something masked by our worldly views, or sets up a stepladder to a place we didn't know enough to reach for.

Reclaiming Christmas - It's the Wrong Goal

2007-12-19T20:59:00.000-08:00

'Tis the season when Christians everywhere start forum threads and write articles and take surveys and talk over pumpkin-spiced coffee about how we can get the focus out of the department stores and back on Christ's birth.

We hear the same questions again and again: How can we keep our hearts in the right place, rise above the commercialism, and make sure that our children understand that the true meaning and importance of Christmas isn't how many gifts Santa brings?

I think it's the wrong question. In fact, I think it's so thoroughly, completely, RESOUNDINGLY the wrong question that so long as we keep asking it, we'll never find an answer.

The answer isn't in finding a way to take back Christmas. It isn't in refocusing our views of that day, or the season as a whole, on Christ. It's in living that--and teaching our children to live that--every day. If God is at the center of your family's life on a day-to-day basis, God will be at the center of your Christmas season. If He's not, then no amount of dramatic proclamations about what Christmas should be is going to change that--not in the short-term or the long-term.

Just as what your children (and you, and I) put into and get out of church depends upon the relationships we maintain with God and his son during the week, what we put into and get out of the Christmas season depends on the place God holds in our lives the rest of the year. Christmas isn't a time to change gears and suddenly pay more attention to God because it's the time we celebrate Christ's birthday--it's the time to commemorate the birth of someone who is already special and significant in our lives.

While the commercialism of Christmas may be something of a distraction, it's hard to imagine a child who lives every day with an awareness of God and a connection to Christ suddenly losing sight of those things because there are gifts on the horizon. It's equally hard to imagine one who hears (and thinks) about God only for 45 minutes on Sunday morning being truly prepared for Christmas just because we made loud noises about what the season is "really all about".

The issue isn't what Christmas is really all about, or what Easter is really all about, or Sunday is really all about...it's about what LIFE is really all about. If we get that right--if we even strive to get that right--our hearts and minds will be in the right place when the momentous occasions arise.

Silver or Gold I Do Not Have...

2007-11-30T00:05:00.000-08:00

My office held a Toys for Tots drive this week, and the response was overwhelming. All of those people who might have had the best of intentions but let time slip away, as so often happens, were saved from themselves by one young man in the office who took up a collection for Transformers--he even let the donor choose the particular Transformer he wanted to give, and then traveled to a number of stores in adjoining towns to make sure that all "orders" were filled. In the end, our company of just over 100 people ended up with a waist-high box brimming with toys.

Personally, I have a bit of silver and gold this year. After a dozen years of freelancing, I took a full-time job two years ago and regular, predictable income has been good to us. My 11-year-old daughter and I went out to buy a toy, but we ended up buying a few. We needed some pink things to balance out all those Transformers. She'd been sick and had just gone back to school that day, and I was worried about having her out running around, but she was enthusiastic about shopping. In fact, she insisted on carrying the gifts, saying, "I can take that" as I picked up each new item. I protested that I could carry some of them, but she insisted and so I let her take them, giving it no more thought until this evening, when I started to tell my mother about the success of the drive.

"Mommy bought a few toys," my daughter told her. My mother asked what I'd gotten and my daughter described the toys. And then she said, "I didn't have any money, but I carried them."

Catholic Carnival # 147

2007-11-27T05:55:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'll be honest: I've been working since 6:30 this morning and I haven't had a chance to follow a single link in the latest carnival yet, so I can't make any recommendations. I thought I'd go ahead and get the link up there, though, in case you have more time on your hands than I do...it's a very busy week, so maybe you can let ME know about those can't-miss posts in this round!

Catholic Carnival 147

The Map that God Made

2007-11-24T14:49:00.000-08:00

My search traffic intrigues me--so much so that I've started a separate blog just to answer the questions I find in my stats. One of the big questions in my mind is always what people were looking for when they typed in those words, and whether or not they found it on my blog.

On this blog, a large percentage of my search traffic comes from questions about Catholic marriage and divorce, and although I have a post called "Catholic Divorce" and another one called "The Truth about Catholic Marriage", I always suspect that those visitors don't find what they're looking for. The language in those search strings always seems to suggest that they're looking for a loophole. Somehow, for instance, I don't think the person searching for "when can Catholics get divorced" is really looking for guidance.

Far be it from me to sound critical. I'd be lying if I said that I'd never flipped open the Catechism in hopes of finding justification or permission for the choice I already wanted to make (and you wouldn't believe me anyway, would you?). But I think that when we do that, we're missing the point, that we've already skipped over an important step. After all, didn't God lay down the law for our benefit? And if so, then isn't "Are you going to let me do what I want to do?" the wrong question? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to consult God first, to find out what He thinks is going to work, than to figure out what we want, get poised on the edge of action, and then check to see whether or not it's okay? Wouldn't it make more sense, in short, to look at the directions before we got lost?

If we accept that God created us and knows us and wants what's best for us and knows what it is, then that means more than accepting that, however much we might not like it, we have to let go of some of our own goals--it means formulating those goals with the guidance we've been provided in mind. On the surface, it might sound like one of those "easier said than done" things, but in practice, I suspect that it would be easier than the way most of us live now, because we wouldn't get so far down those paths that are ultimately cut off.

It seems to me--and I certainly don't pretend to know another person's heart based on what he's typed into a search engine, so maybe I'm projecting my own weaknesses--that most of us tend to look on God's laws as lines at the boundaries of our lives: so long as we don't cross them, we can do whatever we want in that wide open field inside the lines. And maybe to some degree that's true, but I begin to suspect that we're cheating ourselves when we think that way, that God is offering us a detailed, brightly colored topographical map that shows us where all the good stuff is and how to get there--not just the most direct route, but how to find the peaceful valleys and the cool streams even when we've wandered off into the brambles and dark woods--and we can't get our focus off the one big danger sign at the edge of the cliff long enough to see it. Our eyes turn toward that heavy black line and we think, "As long as I don't go over there, I should be okay." And maybe we will. But shouldn't we be going for something a little more than "okay"?

So the Truth Is...I'm Martha

2007-11-24T10:58:00.000-08:00

This week, I started reading Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World, but it's tough going for me. The thing is, I think Martha was right.

One of my greatest blessings as a Christian has been clarity. In part, that's the gift of being Catholic--we're not left with much ambiguity. In part, I think, it's just a particular blessing I have: there are some things in life that just aren't gray, and the ones that are clearly spelled out in the Bible or the Catechism are clearly among them.

Perhaps that's why I'm so perplexed about what to do with this Mary/Martha thing. See, in my mind Martha is the kind of woman we should all aspire to be and Mary is a hanger-on who can only exist because people like Martha are doing the real work, and I'm not going to be swayed from that view...even by a little thing like the fact that Jesus himself said Mary had it right.
So there we have it. Am I wrong? Well, obviously.

One of those incontrovertible facts of which I just spoke is that when I disagree with GOD, I'm wrong. He's omniscient and I'm not. He created the world and I didn't. He gets to make the rules and I don't. It's a no-brainer. He's right.

But I still can't get my mind around it.

I can't help but notice that even though Jesus said that Mary had chosen what was better, He didn't say, "Martha, you sit down too. We don't need to eat. We don't need a place to sleep. Let's all just sit here and bask in one another's presence."

Of course, Jesus could have done that and then summoned food for all if He'd chosen, but the rest of us can't. And since He didn't make that choice, Martha couldn't, either. She could either "choose what was better" like Mary and let her guests starve or she could go right on doing what was "worse" and give them nourishment and clean bedding and all that. And Jesus, it seems, even while he was praising Mary, let Martha go right on slaving away. And there's no indication that He and his followers didn't happily partake of the food she prepared.

I don't know the answer. It seems to me that without the Marthas of the world we'd all be dead, and I can't conceive of the Lord wanting us to turn a blind eye to the sick and hungry in the street as we rush by to go and sit undisturbed at his feet. Maybe I'll find some clarity and reconciliation in this book--or maybe my frustration will continue to grow. I'm sure I'll be writing more about it. I hope anyone who has insights about this will share them here.

North of Hope

2007-11-17T09:53:00.000-08:00

It's been a busy couple of weeks and I haven't done much posting on any of my blogs, but I did manage to finish a good book during my commute. A couple of months ago, I posted about People of the Book and the Loyola Classics series I'd discovered there.

The first book I ordered was Jon Hassler's North of Hope, and I'm afraid it's derailed me. I planned to work my way through the Classics list, but that's going to have to wait until I've worked my way through Hassler's other novels.

I'm a lover of books and the written word in a way that transcends subject matter, and in this case it's just a bonus that Hassler's primary characters--or some of them--are Catholics making the hard decisions of life in the context of their faith. It's a novel as much about human nature and growth and the small steps that turn out to be huge crossroads as it is about faith, and I think that if you like books that reveal human truths in little ways on every page, you'll enjoy this one even if you're not Catholic.

Voting Your Faith - Is it Possible in 2008?

2007-11-08T21:29:00.001-08:00

A political discussion group on Blog Catalog has a great carnival going on all this month, looking for posts on "The Biggest Obstacle to Electing the Right President". I'm departing in a couple of ways--first, because I don't usually talk politics on this blog, and second because the issue I want to talk about isn't the universal answer to the question. It's only an answer that applies to people who are concerned with voting their faith, and who happen to be of the Christian faith.

"Vote your faith" has, unfortunately, become a sound bite like so many other political soundbites, full of emotion and imperative but without a lot of substantive meaning. It's easy to get swept away in the rhetoric, and to sincerely believe that one highly-publicized issue or another is decisive, but the truth is that like everything else in politics--like everything else in LIFE--voting your faith is rarely that simple. And it's become increasingly complicated as the world itself has become increasingly complicated and the issues to be determined by our elected officials have become increasingly varied and often technical.

In 2000 and 2004, many Christians supported President Bush because they were "pro-life" and Bush's opponents were in favor of keeping abortion legal. However, those same people overlooked the fact that President Bush, as Governor of Texas, had signed a futile care bill into law--a bill that allowed hospitals to withhold critical care from patients even over the objections of the patients themselves and/or their families. That, it seems to me, puts the Christian who wants to vote his faith in a bit of a bind: neither candidate respects the sanctity of human life in the way that most Christian religions--and certainly Catholicism--would require. I've often heard it said (in sound bites, of course, and on bumper stickers) that you can't be Catholic and support a candidate who doesn't oppose abortion. And yet, it seems equally clear to me that you can't be Catholic and support a candidate who advocates giving medical professionals the power to legally decide that some lives are not worth preserving.

The issues don't end there, either. As Catholics, we have very clear doctrine on what constitutes a just war...and on when war is absolutely unacceptable. And we're meant to support the concept of marriage as a God-given bond between one man and one woman for life.

But doesn't it always seem that the political candidates who oppose abortion also oppose protections that would keep large pharmaceutical companies from determining that it's acceptable to kill a certain number of people in the interests of profits? Doesn't it seem that those who oppose gay marriage are also fairly liberal about how they'll use military force? This list, I think, could go on indefinitely.

A woman in a Catholic discussion group once said (condescendingly) that it was a question of PRIORITIZING. She meant that abortion was the number one concern and we could overlook these other issues so long as the candidate had that one right. But I don't remember seeing anything about a question of priorities in my Bible. I can't find a place in the Catechism where it says it's perfectly acceptable (let alone righteous) to encourage one evil if it allows you to combat another. And it seems to me that the complexity and diversity of the issues at hand and the mixed bag of positions each candidate carries make it impossible to vote in good faith for any of them, if voting your Catholic faith is the goal.

Believe? What Does "Believe" Really Mean, Anyway?

2007-11-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

Her expression turned suspicious. "You believe in angels?"
"I do, Marcella. Don't you?"
She squinted, trying to see the invisible. "What's Rome saying these days?"
"About angels?"
She nodded.
"Same as always."
She shrugged. "Then I suppose I do." She scooped out a saucepanful of birdseed. "But it's one thing to believe in angels and another thing to actually see one. That's what separates Christians from loonies."

That conversation takes place in the excellent novel North of Hope by Jon Hassler. It reveals a lot about the character, but I think it reveals just as much about a lot of us. It's easy to believe in things like angels and miracles in the abstract, but have you ever heard a story of angelic intervention or a miraculous occurrence that you believed? I'm not talking about the ones in the Bible or that we read in histories of saints who have been dead for hundreds of years. I'm talking about stories related by people who were there, passed down through families--do you believe that angels appear to people you know (or might know), that miracles can happen on your block?

My aunt had scarlet fever as a young child, in the 1940s. Medicine, of course, was much more limited in those days, and the doctor had come and gone and said there was nothing to be done for her. My grandfather was a Chicago cop, working security at the airport, when a Cardinal happened to arrive on a flight. He broke away from his entourage, walked straight up to my grandfather, and said, "You have someone sick at home." My grandfather told him about my aunt, and the Cardinal gave him a medallion and told him to take it home and put it on her. He did. She recovered. And she carried that medallion every day of her life until she lost it to a mugger in her forties.

The funny thing is, it's the most religious people I know who don't believe that story--or rather, who believe the factual telling of it but are quite certain that her recovery was a coincidence. And maybe it was. Doctors have certainly been known to be wrong. There wasn't any flash of lightning or instantaneous healing or anything clear and dramatic to point to. Except, of course, that the Cardinal approached my grandfather, having no rational way of knowing the situation.

I strongly suspect that at one time, nearly every Catholic family had stories like that. When my mother was a child, there was a statue in her local parish that bled on Good Friday. Far beyond there being little DOUBT in any of the parishioners' minds, there was little intrigue, either. My mother, having grown up and attended mass in that parish, doesn't recall ever having seen it. When I point out that people travel across the country to see tortillas in the shape of the Blessed Virgin and such and inquire as to why she mightn't have thought it worth making the trip across the neighborhood to check this out, she's at a loss to provide the context to understand it. Everyone knew about it...and everyone took it in stride.

It seems our perspective has changed dramatically, but it's changed in two very different directions. Some of us are so desperate for a sign of the supernatural, for some "direct contact", for something tangible, that we'll make a pilgrimage to see a grilled cheese sandwich. And others are so jaded that we'll consider any possible alternative explanation for something that looks like a miracle. But what ever happened to those who quietly believed that angels and miracles were a part of life, a part they were grateful for but that didn't belong on the 10:00 news?

What about you? Do you believe in angels? And if you said yes, do you believe there's one in the room with you right now?

Catholic Carnival # 139

2007-10-03T19:49:00.002-07:00

Catholic Carnival # 139 went up yesterday, and although I haven't yet had the opportunity to follow all the links, I'm pleasantly surprised anew at how many different, interesting and thoughtful Catholic blogs are out there.

Take a moment to check it out if you're in the market for a wide variety of Catholic thoughts and perspectives. And while you're at it, check out Catholic Carnival # 138, too, since I neglected to point it out last week.

In Whose Name?

2007-10-01T19:40:00.000-07:00

In the final volume of the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan assures a Calormene that, although he has believed himself to be a follower of the evil Tash all his life, whatever good he has done has truly been done in Aslan's name.

His message is that wherever the unfortunate man has believed his loyalties to be, loyalty itself is not possible in the name of evil. The message echoes that of the church in explaining that, while the only path to salvation is through Christ, not all men have the opportunity to fully understand what lights their paths. Nonetheless, to follow the unknown light may be enough to lead them home.

There is another, darker message inherent in these words, though. For just as it is not possible to do good in the name of Tash (or of Satan), it is not possible to do evil in the name of God. And so, if the man who in ignorance does good though he knows not that it is God's path he follows may be saved, what of the man who does evil though he persuades himself that it is in the name of God?

Just as surely as one cannot love in the name of evil, he cannot hate in the name of good. Where, then, does that leave the Christian whose righteousness has hardened into pride, whose hatred of the sin has hardened into hatred of the sinner? What of the poor man who offers darkness up to God?

Great Resource for Catholic Readers and Writers

2007-09-30T12:18:00.001-07:00

A bit of a departure today, but I wanted to take a moment to point out a blog I recently discovered that, of course, captured my heart by being both Catholic and book-focused. People of the Book is a blog authored by Jim Manney of Loyola Press.

I've barely scratched the surface of this blog and my reading list is already growing faster than I can place orders. Among other things, Manney's blog introduced me to the Loyola Classics series, which surely has something for everyone with a taste for Catholic literature.

If you're looking for something to read, check out People of the Book--but make sure you have a little time to spare before you click that link.

Every Little Thing We Do

2007-09-29T15:24:00.000-07:00

I didn't link to another blog from my writing blog today. In fact, I didn't write the post that I'd been planning to write that had been triggered by the other blog. The post was about writers' block, and it was a good one. More to the point for me, it tied directly in with one of the most popular posts I've ever written, Writing is Easy.

Like most of my writing, the post I was going to write began unfurling in my mind, unbidden. But then I gave a moment's thought to the blog I was going to link to. It's primary purpose (self-confessed) is to put people down. Not all people, just those the author considers intellectually inferior.

I think there was a time when I would have thought, "Well, I'm just linking to this one post, and there's nothing wrong with this post." There was a time when I would have thought that someone who wouldn't link to a blog post about writing because it happened to reside on a blog about how stupid people are was going a little far, was being a little too judgmental, perhaps. I would, I expect, have rolled my eyes at the idea. It wouldn't be like endorsing her ideas, right?

Well, in a sense it wouldn't. I could even say that I didn't agree with the rest of the content of the blog or...whatever. Disclaim away: I'm a lawyer, after all. But I'm a lot more conscious these days of the way that every little action has effects we never see. It's easy enough to think, "It's not like I'm getting thousands of visitors a day", and that's true. It's entirely likely that only a handful of people would follow that link on my blog. That one link would only boost that blog's Technorati authority by one, and that one backlink from my blog (which has no page rank) would certainly have no effect on Google ranking.

So what's the harm?

The simple answer is that I don't know, but that I've come to realize that "I don't know" and "there is none" are not identical statements. Maybe just one person clicking that link would think the abuse was clever and slide a little further from compassion. Maybe one person would send the link to someone else, who would love it and post it in a group or forum where a dozen or a hundred others might click it. And, of course, maybe none of those things would happen. But comparing the upside (I felt like writing a blog post that would have tied in) with the downside (any possible appearance of endorsement or accidental boost to a blog that exists to advance a philosophy as inconsistent with Christian principles as any I've ever seen), it seemed pretty clear which way the scales tipped.

I've written before, on another blog, about the way the little decisions we make in everyday life effect the people around us. I guess this is just one more example, one more arena, in which I'm realizing we have to think through the ramifications of things that might not appear, at first glance, to have any.

Email Parables

2007-09-27T20:30:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, I ran across a post entitled "Another Inspiring Story" on a Catholic blog that was new to me.

My first thought was (as it usually is when I receive stories like this in email forwards or run across them on the web), "I wonder if that's true?" Of course, I suspected that it was not; the simple fact is that the vast majority of these stories circulating online turn out not to be, or at least to be heavily evolved from their original form. It was a touching story, but wasn't it likely that someone had just made it up?

I was somewhat startled to realize that it didn't matter in the least. There was truth in the story, whether or not the story was true. This particular group of boys might not have shown this particular kindness to this particular child, but so what? People do show one another such kindnesses from time to time (probably far too infrequently), and when they do, it makes a very significant difference to everyone involved.

The story touched my heart (and if you know me in real life, you know that I don't have a sentimental cell in my body), and it brought something to the front of my consciousness that should be there more often: a kind of tenderness for human beings in their capacity for tenderness. It reminded me that relatively small sacrifices can become relatively large gifts, and that sometimes it's the youngest and most innocent among us who are most likely to keep that in sight.

And that, I suspect, is exactly what it was meant to do. Does it matter whether it was a real-life example or simply a parable intended to illustrate a greater truth? I think that it does not. I got the message.

Deus et Caritas

2007-09-21T17:56:00.000-07:00

When Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical came out, many were surprised. This man the press had been calling "God's rottweiler" seemingly setting the tone for his pontificate with...love? But that perceived conflict overlooks something essential in the nature of faith. It is true that as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger developed a reputation as a doctrinal hardliner, but what is a doctrinal hardliner except one who believes completely?

If God is Love, then doesn't it make perfect sense for all of us to be "doctrinal hardliners", to embrace without reservation all of the teachings inspired by the Holy Spirit? Indeed, it seems that only one who truly and fully believed that God is Love could fully and truly advocate abandoning all stubbornness, all pride, all personal desire in favor of doing it God's way.

Perfect faith is hard to come by; it's hard to trust enough to sincerely say, "Not my will, but Yours." It's hard to hear God's will, sometimes, over the clashing din of society, practical demands and our own desires. That's where a "doctrinal hardliner" like the former Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, comes in handy: he helps maintain clarity. And clarity about God's will is critical, because God knows what He's doing. It seems unlikely that anyone with a sincere belief in God doubts that He knows what He's doing.

More often, the problem seems to arise when God's interests and ours conflict. The "rules" are tough; two equally dangerous responses emerge. The first is an outright rejection, a decision to go one's own way. The second, subtler, equally corrosive, is the rejection of the idea that God could disagree with us.

Few people who truly believe in God are willing to simply say, "No, I know you're there and I know the teachings you've sent, but I'm opting to ignore them. " Instead, our tendency is toward incredulity that God might have said those things, might have set up those limitations. The rejection of Christ's and the church's teachings is often prefaced by the phrase, "I think God wants us to be happy." The implicit statement is that God wouldn't have said no to something *I* think would make me happy.

And, of course, that entirely misses the point. It presumes a level of knowledge and understanding that we do not have. It makes, however unconsciously, the prideful statement, "God wouldn't require anything *I* don't agree with!"

But God knows more than we do. He designed us to work in a certain way, and he knows what it is. He has the big picture, whereas we're looking at only an infinitismal slice--no, grain--of infinity.

In the end, "God is Love" and "doctrinal hardliner" are not only logical companions but necessary ones. If we believe that God is Love and we believe He knows what He's doing, then nothing makes sense except to do exactly what He says in faith that it's the right thing for us--even if the reasons won't fit in our brains.

Catholic Carnival

2007-09-13T22:36:00.000-07:00

For several weeks, I've been meaning to participate in this Catholic blog carnival. I love the fact that the carnival exists and has been consistent for, if the numbering is accurate, more than two years. I never seem to have a post that feels appropriate, though, so I haven't actually taken the leap and submitted. I finally decided this evening that whether or not I was ever going to get around to participating, it was high time I shared the link. The carnival moves around, but if you visit the most recent collection of posts, you'll find instructions for submitting or subscribing. I've found some great Catholic blogs this way that I would probably never have stumbled upon otherwise, and there's quite a range, so I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Catholic Carnival 136

The Stations of the Cross: Veronica Wipes Jesus' Face (# 6)

2007-09-13T20:48:00.000-07:00

Wednesday evening I was sitting alone in the silent narthex of the closed church, waiting for my daughter to finish choir practice. Choir practice is only 45 minutes long and it's a 20 minute drive from home, so I wait for her, and I'm glad it works out that way, because it gives me an opportunity to take some quiet time that I'm inclined to neglect among the everyday details of work and parenting.

The Stations of the Cross on the walls are large and sculpted from white marble with small wooden crosses, and as I sat looking at the 6th station, I wrote this on the back of an outdated flyer:

Scripture tells us nothing about Veronica. It is only Tradition that tells us she existed at all, and the details are few. We do not even know whether Veronica was her name. Some have suggested that she was really Salome, some that she was Mary, sister of Martha, others that she was simply an unknown woman along the path whose identity is lost to us forever.

Still, this moment, blurred as it may be by two thousand years of repetition and translation, may be one of the most real for us as Catholics living in the modern world.

Veronica reached out a hand in love, in friendship, in compassion and support. It's that simple, and that bears some thought. She wiped Christ's face, and we talk about it still, 2000 years later.

Modern Christians are rarely asked to die for their faith. Many of the most significant stories in Christian history may seem inaccessible, their applications to everyday life abstract and uncertain. Simon of Cyrene helped to carry Christ's cross, and we have to figure out what that means in our lives, how we emulate that in a world of day jobs and trips to the grocery store. We have to draw analogies and listen hard to God and even then, we're often uncertain as to whether or not we have it right.

But Veronica reached out and wiped the face of someone who was suffering. No translation required--we all know how to do that. And if it might seem more significant that she did it for Jesus, then we've apparently forgotten the words of our Lord in Matthew 25:40...

And the king will say to them in reply, 'Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.'

If it seems more significant that she did it in such circumstances, under such pressure...well, yes it is. And doesn't that make it all the harder to understand how we might neglect to do the same thing in the relatively safe environments we encounter every day?

Banking on that "Outside of Time" Thing...

2007-08-20T19:56:00.000-07:00

This evening, my train was delayed by a pedestrian fatality. In the year and a half that I've been commuting to work, this is perhaps the fourth time I've been on a train that was delayed because someone was killed on the tracks. It's happened often enough, that is, that I'm not quite sure whether this is the fourth or the fifth.

Once, last summer, I was actually on a train that killed a man. Although I was fortunate enough not to actually see anything, it was a horrific experience. Word quickly spread through the train that it had been a suicide.

After a few initial moments of dismay, I took out my rosary and began to pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet. Jesus told St. Faustina "When they say this chaplet in the presence of the dying, I will stand between my Father and the dying person, not as the Just Judge but as the Merciful Savior", and I couldn't imagine many people who would need a merciful savior more than a guy who had just jumped in front of a moving train.

I'm not honestly sure how many times I went through the Chaplet--we sat there on that train for a long time, and then we sat on the grass next to the railroad tracks for a long time. But in the back of my mind, doubt was nagging. "Dying" and "dead", after all, are two very different things. I was pretty sure that death by train was instantaneous, and so I'd come along several minutes too late to comply with the strict letter of the promise. I worried about the possibility that there was nothing to be done for a guy who'd already been dead for eight or ten minutes when I'd thought to start praying.

I still don't know the answer to that, but the idea that it was too late by ten minutes seemed inconsistent with the whole idea of mercy, and when I tried to sort that out it occurred to me that this whole "time" thing is strictly an earthbound concept. God, not bound by time, had already known about this prayer eight or ten minutes earlier when the crucial moment came.

Am I rationalizing? I don't know. In fact, uncertainty on that very point has had this post sitting in "drafts" for a week. It's entirely possible that I'm simply looking for a way to say, "It's never too late", a way to believe that all prayers do some good, even if we don't always get the answer we're looking for...even if we don't get all the formalities quite right. Maybe that's rationalizing. Or maybe it's Hope.