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Work Keeps Society From Falling Apart

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Between 1958 and 1962, ethologist John B. Calhoun (a scientist who studies animal behaviour) conducted a series of experiments on population growth and behavioural patterns. He created a number of “rat utopias”: enclosed spaces in which rats were given unlimited access to food and water, a constant ideal temperature of 20 C, no predators, and a sterile environment to prevent diseases.

At first, unsurprisingly, the rats would just eat and have sex. With time, however, a phenomenon he called “behavioral sink” developed: male rats would become homosexual and constantly rape both sexes, female rats would no longer take care of their young and just let them die to the point of having 96% infant mortality, cannibalism ensued to the point almost no rat had still a complete tail. And the rats that could somehow survive into adulthood would show no interest in mating and would prefer to live by themselves, eating and drinking only when the rest were asleep. Interestingly, some rats Calhoun called “the beautiful ones” (as they did not have tails eaten, were groomed, etc) showed patterns of utter selfishness: only caring about themselves and showing no interest in interaction with others.

Now, it is common and rather simpleminded to think the reason for this social chaos was overpopulation, but that goes against the fact that the population did not spread evenly among the cages and it peaked at 2200 rats, well below the environment’s total capacity of 3000 rats.

So, to me, the reason was the lack of work which means boredom. Rats did not have anything to do and utter boredom would drive them mad. This theory seems to be proven by the words of Jesus in Maria Valtorta

He (God) has put the work as a punishment, but also as a distraction for the guilty man. Woe to you if you had to live in idleness! Since centuries the Earth would be a huge madhouse of angry people and they would tear each other to pieces. You already do, because you are still too idle. the honest weariness calms and gives joy and serene rest.

Now, another part of this essay comes from a series of experiments done in the 1950s by Dr. Curt Richter: a well-known Harvard graduate and scientist with Johns Hopkins University. In the paper, he explains he wanted to study what another scientist called Walter Cannon had called “Voodoo Death”: the sudden and unexplainable death after being in a situation of utter hopelessness.

For that, he put rats (which are widely known to be excellent swimmers) in large buckets of water to test how long it’d take for them to drown. For that, he started with twelve domesticated rats. Out of these, three only lasted a couple of minutes, but the other nine lasted from 40 to 60 hours: 240 times longer. He then took thirty-four wild rats and thought that they would last longer due to them being naturally trained by their harsh lives. To his surprise, they all died after just one to fifteen minutes.

At first, he thought the reason could be because he had removed the whiskers of all rats, which maybe could be more important to wild rats. However, he then noticed that wild rats that were removed from the water and held outside for a few minutes before being put back in the water again would last as long as the domesticated rats. He thus concluded the reason rats, regardless of whether they were wild or domesticated, lasted more was when they had hoped they would eventually be rescued. Domesticated rats knew that there was someone who kept them fed, their cages clean, etc, and that person should surely at one point get them out of the bucket, and wild rats had learned that they could be rescued at some point, albeit put back in the water again.

Now, as we march towards a society in which robots, computers, machines, etc do the work for us, a 4-day a week work system, an increasingly cheap food system to the point of up to 40% of our food ending in the garbage, lack of diseases, etc we see parallels of our current society to one of the rats of the 1st experiment. Here, while some believe work is just punishment, we Christians see it as a tool, a way to grow, a tool given by a loving father to keep us busy in a world which we always forget we will all inevitably have to leave at our deaths. Just like the rats at the 2nd experiment, who had hopes that their work in not drowning would pay off, the Christian is always sure that whatever work he does, no matter how this world sees it as pointless, underpaid, etc, will succeed and be somehow useful.

A musician who does not play constantly will find their music to become uglier and uglier. A painter who does not constantly paint will see their paintings become uglier and uglier. A muscle that is not used will atrophy and become ugly. And the opposite is also true: excessive work turns things ugly: in the photo the legs of polish cyclist Pawel Poljansk are striking, to say the least. The same should happen with the soul: it becomes uglier when not worked. A society of ugly souls is an ugly society.

As such, we should see work not only as a source of income, a punishment but as a required exercise for the soul given by a father in heaven who knows what’s best for us: a tool to keep us entertained and our soul pretty. In this, Saint Joseph is a model of work: we can’t imagine him saying “I will not do this because it is useless, boring, poorly paid”. Instead, we would think of him taking any work regardless of how stupid, useless, pointless, unpaid…and so many reasons we find to not do work. That’s what kept his soul pretty.

In conclusion: our society is becoming uglier in good part simply because of the lack of work. Let’s look at work with hope and use it to beautify our inner selves.

 

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Faith: How to Keep It

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Jesus Is Taken Down From the Cross

My hour of prayer begins as I approach the thirteenth Station. The focus of this station is the removal of Jesus’ body from the cross, so I find myself looking at an empty cross signifying the death of Christ. At the foot of the cross carrying his body, I see only three people. My best guess is that they are the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen, and John, the apostle. I also see in the background a clear blue sky approaching dusk, and even though Christianity will emerge, our Lord is honoring and respecting the Hebrew Sabbath completing his burial before sunset. The Sabbath will be honored.

The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen, and John, the apostle, are handling the body of our Lord with great care in preparation for burial. A very important person has died and who is there to attend his funeral?

And where are the multitudes who greeted our Lord when he entered Jerusalem in preparation for the Passover?

when the great crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, they took palm branches and went out to meet him and, cried out: ‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, (even) the King of Israel (John 12:12-13).

Several hours later during the trial of Jesus how many of that same group were shouting “Crucify him! Crucify him!”  (Luke 23: 21 NAB).  The Faith of the crowd was like the seed that fell on rocky soil in the parable of the Sower: “it sprang up at once because the soil was not deep, and when the sun rose it was scorched, and it withered for lack of roots.” (Matthew 13:5-6).

The seed on rocky ground is the one who hears the word and receives it at once with joy. But he has no root and lasts only for a time. When some tribulation or persecution comes because of the word, he immediately falls away (Matthew 13:20, 21).

During the trial, crucifixion, and death of Jesus, the Faith of the Apostles was also tested and found wanting, weakened by fear and doubt.  When Jesus was arrested, three times Peter denied knowing Jesus

Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard. One of the maids came over to him and said, ‘You too were with Jesus the Galilean.’ But he denied it in front of everyone, saying ‘I do not know what you are talking about!’ As he went out to the gate, another girl saw him and said to those who were there, ‘This man was with Jesus the Nazorean.’ Again he denied it with an oath, ‘I do not know the man!’ A little later the bystanders came over and said to Peter, ‘Surely you too are one of them; even your speech gives you away.’ At that he began to curse and swear, ‘I do not know the man.” …He went out and began to weep bitterly (Matthew 26:69-75). 

The faith of the apostles was tested to its limits with the death of our Lord, but as a group, they never “lost” their faith because their faith was like the man who built his house on rock and when the storm came the house was able to withstand the storm (Luke 6:48). The apostles had that special privilege of staying close to our Lord during his ministry. They stood at his side when he gave sight to the blind, healing to the sick, they witnessed the expulsion of demons and the resurrection of the dead.  Without a doubt, their Faith was strengthened and protected by this close and personal bond with Christ.

What happens to our faith when it is pushed to the limit when tragedy strikes when the unexpected traumatizes us? When it seems that there is no Jesus to turn to, what happens to our Faith then? If our Faith is tested too much will we lose it? If Christ is absent, or seems to be, when we need him the most, will our Faith stand firm, or will we deny Christ and allow this divine gift to die?

As I continue my meditation, my thoughts turn towards the present and issues of faith that we encounter today; they are many, varied, and dangerous. Unless we keep our faith strong every day and not only believe in Jesus but also obey him- through his Church, his teachings, and his sacraments -we may also find ourselves lost in fear and doubt, and if that happens will hope survive?

Jesus came back to the Apostles; he knew what they suffered, why and to what extent. He knew that he would “be absent” for a short time but he had prayed for them to God the Father so that they could endure their trial: And Jesus began his prayer to God the father as follows:

I revealed your name to those whom you gave me out of the world. They belonged to you, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you gave me is from you, because the words you gave to me I have given to them, and they accepted them and truly understood that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent me, I pray for them (John 17:6-9).

Conclusion

When we are at our lowest, our worse hour. When Christ is absent or seems absent, when trauma strikes us unexpectedly and swiftly, we must stand firm in our Faith and never lose hope. The Apostles, though they huddled in fear and doubt for a short time, did not lose their faith and Jesus returned to them to walk with them for the rest of their lives through the holy spirit-even granting them enough strength in their faith to face martyrdom and sacrifice their lives for what they believed.  Jesus also prayed for us, to God the Father he said, “I pray not only for them (the apostles), but also for those who will believe in me through their word.” (John 17:20).

We must keep our faith and in order to do that we must adhere to the teachings of the Holy Catholic  Church, teachings that have been handed down to us first from Jesus to the Apostles and then from the Apostles to us, and we must partake of the sacraments- given to us by Christ-in a state of grace so that we and those we love can merit grace and be guided by the holy spirit in all we do for the rest of our lives.

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Reason to Rejoice

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I don’t mean to be a curmudgeon, but oftentimes, I don’t feel like rejoicing when I enter the House of the Lord. God knows we have plenty of troubles. Do we really have reason to rejoice?

Yes, we have reason to rejoice! The season of Advent is the perfect time to contemplate why—even if we don’t feel like it. The reason lies in the faith, hope and love given to us by God.

Therefore, let’s energize our faith with the Good News that comes from Heaven! As Pope Francis said: Advent helps us transform hope into the certainty that the one we await “loves us and will never abandon us.” We see this faith, hope, and love in the gift of the Holy Eucharist.

Eucharistic Faith

During Advent, we contemplate the first coming of Christ for our salvation. Imagine the Blessed Virgin Mary saying yes to God’s will at the Annunciation, accepting Jesus within her. Our Lady lived her Eucharistic faith even before the Eucharist was instituted.

When we partake in the Eucharistic celebration, we are called to live our Eucharistic faith. At Mass, the altar is prepared to receive our offerings of bread and wine to become the Body and Blood of Jesus. The Church’s intention is that we learn to offer our very selves faithfully to our Lord.

Each time we accept the Eucharist, we say yes to carry Christ in our body, mind, heart, and soul. Our Savior is within us! Truly that is reason to rejoice!

Hope and Joy

Christ within her, Mary proclaimed the greatness of the Lord in her Magnificat during her visit with her cousin Elizabeth. Like Mary, let us “sing a new song to the Lord, for he has done marvelous deeds” [Psalm 98:1]. The Holy Spirit came upon Mary at the Annunciation and the Spirit of the Lord shone through Mary at the Visitation.

As we participate in the Eucharistic celebration, do we feel hope and joy when the celebrant invokes the Holy Spirit upon our offerings of bread and wine? With the Transubstantiation—changing our gifts into the Body and Blood of Christ—we have heaven on earth! We are witnesses to the greatest miracle!

Gaze upon the Eucharist. Think of the hope and joy Mary and Joseph shared when Christ was born and with those who witnessed Jesus’ first coming. After seeing the infant Jesus, the shepherds glorified and praised God. Mary and Joseph later presented baby Jesus at the Temple. There, Simeon recognized his Savior and blessed God. Truly we have reason to rejoice!

Greatest Love

Simeon also foretold Mary of the great sacrifice to come. Jesus came into the world to offer up his body, blood, soul, and divinity for our salvation. This sacrifice is re-presented to us in the Eucharistic celebration. We are then led into Communion with our Lord.

Through the Eucharist, Christ feeds our faith, hope and especially love. Christ comes to us to become one with us. Therefore, on the days of great anxiety when we cannot find Jesus in our lives, turn to Mary and Joseph for guidance. After three days of searching, they found young Jesus in his Father’s House.

We find the Holy Eucharist in the House of our Lord. What great joy there is in receiving Jesus in the Eucharist! Emmanuel…God is with us—as a newborn baby in a manger two millennia ago, and as our Savior in the Eucharist today. Let us rejoice!

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Hope and the Hell of Hopelessness

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“Abandon every hope, all you who enter!
— The Inferno by Dante Alighieri, Canto III, Line 9 (Mark Musa translation)

Even people who have never cracked the spine of The Divine Comedy know this quote. It is one of those common bits of lore that form the foundation of Western Culture.

It does, however, take some time and maturity to really understand the hell of hopelessness.  I say this because I did not understand the reality of hopelessness until later in my life. This is when I first encountered severe clinical depression.

Now, at age 70, I have experienced it and encountered it in myself and others all too often.  One of the most debilitating symptoms of clinical depression is just that: hopelessness.

It is important to realize that “Abandon every hope, all you who enter” is not advice or a warning. It is a curse. Hope is stripped from those entering hell as the first punishment.

The Malebolge

The episode in which this broke through to me was in Dante’s description of the Malebolge.  The Malebolge are ten evil ditches in the eighth circle of hell.

The fifth ditch in the Malebolge is guarded by the Malebranche, demons who torment corrupt politicians submerged in a river of boiling pitch. Two of these demons collide over the pitch and become bogged down and ensnared themselves.  This led me to wonder why the sinners didn’t arise and pull down their tormentors and inhabit the banks of the ditch themselves.

The short answer is that while these sinners were more than vicious, corrupt, and scheming enough to imagine such a feat while alive, they cannot now do so.  This is because the inhabitants of the hell have no hope.  Hope is the element that brings efforts from concept to attempt to execution. While they can still lie and attempt petty schemes, actually bettering their condition in any way is beyond their power even to imagine.

Hopelessness in the Here and Now

The twentieth century featured more than a few events that looked calculated to extinguish hope.  There was, for instance, trench warfare, concentration camps for mass extermination, and the Gulag Archipelago.  Any number of institutions were also seemingly constructed to snuff out hope and creativity in those subject to their authority.   Some of these horrors still persist today – the Laogai, the prisons of Iran and Venezuela, and the entire nation of North Korea.

Even with all the force and concentrated effort of modern technology, psychological insight, and the power of the State, such efforts have failed to kill off all hope. Some survives in samizdat communications, in escape plans and attempts, or in the sheer determination to survive and bear witness to what was done.

Hope does, apparently, spring eternal in the human breast, even under the most unlikely circumstances.

People appear to be built to resist external influences.  This is a propensity that may appear to peak in adolescence but which crops up in people at any time of their lives.  Put people in an environment designed to create hopelessness and some percentage of the people will resist it to their fullest, sometimes succeeding.

Hopelessness from the Inside

But the greatest scourge of hope in our modern nation is probably from the inside. Depression is epidemic among Americans.  It hits as many as 10 to 18 percent of people in any given 2-week period (reporting seems to be inconsistent between different health organizations and news agencies).

Fortunately the studies reporting the highest rates of depression also report the shortest average duration of the episodes. Less than three percent of people reporting symptoms of depression characterize it as severe.  Most people characterize their experience as mild to moderate.

Severe, lasting depression from a person’s internal makeup (composed of biological or environmental factors, or a combination of both) may be the biggest opponent of hope in our country today. Americans have been seen as the most optimistic people in the world since the time of Alexis de Tocqueville.  This is because Americans generally expect good outcomes over time no matter what their current situation.

Optimism and hope also go hand in hand. Pessimism (the opposite of hope) is founded on the sense that things will go wrong. While measures of American optimism have slipped in recent years, our optimism is still high.

In recent years, measurements of our national hopefulness have fallen in concert with measurements of our religious devotion.  This does not seem to me to be coincidental. The hope of heaven is the mother of all hopes, just as the source of all goodness is God.  If we abandon these anchors, we abandon what they hold . . . hence the curse at the gates of Dante’s hell.

Hope in the Outside

Our neglect of goodness leads us to hell.  Upon our arrival the last of our true hope is drained away as well, revealing the falsity of what some treated as hope in their mortal lives.

In the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” (CCC 1817) “Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.”

Ecclesiastes warns us from the very first verse and throughout the text against substitutes for our true hope: “Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).

“Everything in this life passes away – only God remains…” wrote Fr. Seraphim Rose, the Russian Orthodox monk and mystic.

And over and over Psalms advises us to put our hope in the Lord alone, and that Jesus Himself is our Hope of Salvation. No wonder Hope is put aside at the gates of hell.

If we are to have hope in the outside world, it must be based on a foundation of hope in Heaven. Nothing else can withstand the storms of life and the human fondness for strife. We must remember that Jesus is the Light of the world.  It is his guiding Light that leads to all things in which we can anchor a firm and solid hope.

The Anchor of Hope

St. John writes, “My children, I am writing this to you so that you may not commit sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one” (1 John 2:1).

Jesus Christ is our anchor, our hope, and the rock of our salvation. Against Him, the gates of hell truly cannot prevail.

A Prayer for Hope (Against Depression)

Oh Resurrected Lord
Shining with the Glory of the Father
And seated at the Right Hand of God
Please hear me as I call to you from the depths of my sorrow.
You who bore all the pain and shame of the world in death
Hear me as I call to you from own pain and shame
I have lost sight of Your light
My eyes are overwhelmed by darkness
And my heart is heavy with dread
The taste of life is ashes in my mouth
And death opens its arms in greeting
Deliver me from my extremity, Oh Lord
And restore to me Hope
Open my eyes to see again your light
Fill my heart with gratitude for your blessings
And my soul with the sweetness of Grace
Remind me of your Love
and give me the strength to return to the world you have made
Rejoicing in your mercy
Fill my mouth with praises to Your name
And my days with works of Your will
So raised with You, I may never return
To the emptiness and despair of self alone.
Amen

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The Higher Gifts- Why These Virtues Are Theological

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How often it is that teachers learn as much from the lesson as the students do? Preparing for RCIA class last month, I read over the section on virtue in the students’ textbook. There they were, the theological and the cardinal virtues. I recalled those terms from my Catholic school religion classes. The theological virtues are faith, hope, and charity, and the cardinal virtues, are prudence, justice, courage, and temperance.

But wait, why are they identified as such? I’m unsure if I never learned the reasons for the titles “theological” and “cardinal”, or if I simply forgot over the years. But it was worth an investigation.

Cardinal vs. Theological Virtues

The cardinal virtues are admirable human tendencies, inclinations, or habits. People can grow in these virtues through their own efforts. Virtues help people to live good lives, to be content, and to get along with others. Certainly, prayer can help individuals grow in virtue. The Holy Spirit brings virtue to a higher level so that the virtues help people spiritually, as well as in worldly, practical matters.

On the other hand, the theological virtues are gifts of God. Without God’s grace, we would not have faith, we would have no hope for salvation, and we would have no real charity. More importantly, I read that without the theological virtues, we would not be able to have a relationship with God.

Theological Virtues and Our Relationship with God

I had to think that through. By definition, faith is essential in order to know God. It stands to reason, also, that hope is a necessary component for a relationship with God. If we merely believed but had no hope in his promises, what kind of a relationship would that be? Finally, charity moves us to adore God, seek intimacy with him, and obey his commands. The theological virtues, then, are like a cornerstone in the believer’s life. The world may identify other values such as kindness, justice, courage, and perseverance as more practical and necessary than believing and hoping in God. Christians realize, though, that those cornerstone, theological virtues enhance, or even make possible all of the other virtues.

I’ve long been convinced that humans have an innate need to believe in God. Like so many of our needs, people often do not realize the need for faith, any more than they realize the need for sleep or vegetables or to change a toxic relationship. But the need remains, nonetheless.

Faith as Justice Toward God

Scott Hahn defines this human need for God as the virtue of religion, which is related to justice. This concept was new to me. In his book, It Is Right and Just, Hahn explains that faith is actually justice toward God. The very idea of God being the recipient of justice opens a new door for me. We tend to think of God as the judge, not one to whom we owe justice. And yet it makes sense: justice is so closely related to truth, and God is truth. Hahn points out that at every Mass we say aloud that “It is right and just” to lift up our hearts to the Lord. These are words from ancient times, and the human need to be right and just in our relationship with God has not changed.

While humans desperately need faith, it is only available by the grace of God. Truths that God gives us through revelation are not those which we can know by reason. Without Scripture, Tradition, and Church teaching, we would not automatically know about God’s word to the ancient prophets, or about our Savior, his death and resurrection. These facts of our salvation history we know only through faith in the messengers God sends us, the apostles, the evangelists, and the Church (Groeschel 94).

Faith is different from reason. With reason, we figure out what is so. We determine how a flower grows, calculate electric bills, and create rules to manage traffic. With faith, we accept that God exists, that he loves us, that he commands us to act morally. Cardinal John Henry Newman explains that reason can bring us to the conclusion that there are sufficient grounds for believing, but our actual belief is the gift of grace (Groeschel 99). At some point, with God’s grace, we consent to believe the truths God reveals to us (Groeschel 95). Faith is a gift. Our acceptance of this gift is us doing our duty to God.

Regarding Non-believers

It is perplexing when we know of people who have no faith, or who have lost their faith. Those with loved ones in this situation may take comfort as they pray for their loved ones. In Lumen Gentium, the Vatican Council fathers acknowledge the possibility of salvation for those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ. For people may do God’s will by following the dictates of conscience (Groeschel, LG 16). If the opportunity arises to discuss faith with a non-believer, we may always suggest that they pray for faith, just in case there really is a God. As a grammar teacher, I may call this praying in the subjunctive case (Groeschel 100).

The Helmet of Hope

By the virtue of hope, we rely on Christ’s promises, rather than on our own strength (CCC 1817). Closely related to faith, hope inspires and gives courage. The basis for Christians’ hope is Christ’s death and resurrection, which have restored our relationship with the Father (Groeschel 123).

The Catechism offers an interesting image of hope. Quoting the New Testament, the Catechism calls hope a “helmet”, while faith and charity are the “breastplate” (CCC 1820). Think of that. Hope is so important that it protects the head, the mind, which carries the knowledge of Jesus, our reason for hope.

True Charity Gives Freedom

Charity may be one of the most misunderstood virtues in contemporary society. The theological virtue of charity differs from natural human sentiments of affection or sympathy. Christian charity is a gift from God that enables us to love our enemies, to go out of our way, even to suffer, for others. More than a vague benevolence, charity puts the other first and enables one to go against his selfish inclinations and to sacrifice for the good of others and out of love for Christ.

Charity gives Christians a kind of spiritual freedom, that belongs to the children of God (CCC 1828). Without charity, good deeds can actually be self-serving. Avoiding evil out of fear of punishment makes a person a slave while doing so for the love of God makes an acceptable sacrifice. St. Basil noted that pursuing goodness solely for the benefits one will receive in this life or the next is simply like workers seeking a wage (CCC 1828). Only when charity accompanies the good works and avoidance of evil does the person act freely, out of love rather than self-ism.

We should always seek to increase our faith, hope, and charity. We succeed in this not by our own striving, but by prayer. The theological virtues are gifts God will give to greater degrees when we humbly ask for them.

 

Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Print.

Groeschel, Benedict. The Virtue Driven Life. Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 2006.

Hahn, Scott and McGinley, Brandon. It Is Right and Just. Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2020.

Newman, John Henry. Discourses to Mixed Congregations. “Faith and Private Judgment.”

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Hope: The Virtue of Not Yet

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Hope That Doesn’t Disappoint

This discussion about the virtue of hope is not about hope expressed in statements like, “I hope Coach Payton can work a miracle with the Denver Broncos next season.” Or, “I hope the homily  doesn’t bore me to death!”

No, the hope to which this article refers is, according to the Catechism, the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit. (cf. CCC 1817)

The virtue of hope responds to that hankering for happiness that God has placed in each of our hearts. And it opens up our hearts in expectation of our final, eternal union with Him. (cf. CCC 1818) Through the merits of Jesus and His Passion, God keeps us in the “hope that does not disappoint,” and protects us in the spiritual battle for our salvation.

Hope—the Virtue of the “Not Yet”

“For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come.” (Heb 13:14)

In his book, Faith, Hope, Love, the Catholic German philosopher, Josef Pieper, tells us that, “The virtue of hope is preeminently the virtue …of the ‘not yet.’” It’s the virtue whereby we look to our future—the “not yet”—“the city that is to come.” And we’re looking to that future, with confidence in God. We’re on the way to a future of union with God.

In hope, Pieper tells us, we are reaching “‘with restless heart’, with confidence and patient expectation, toward the …arduous ‘not yet’ of fulfillment…”—the fulfillment of all our desires—total union with God Himself.

The Arduous “Not Yet”

Consider a couple of key points Pieper makes. First, note well his characterization of this journey as “arduous”.

To that point, Cardinal Robert Sarah, in The Day Is Now Far Spent, tells us,

“Hope is a constant combat. In this combat, the only weapons we wield are prayer, silence, the Word of God, and faith…This virtue strengthens our trust. We have no doubt—Jesus told us: ‘I have conquered the world.’ He is the victor.”

Our Lord said that in this world we’d have difficulties. Life is a battle; hope is a battle, we must fight continually with prayer, solitude, the Word and faith. Yet, in this combat, we can have confidence in Christ.

Hoping for Fulfillment of All Our Desires

Second, Pieper speaks of fulfillment at the end of our “not yet”, referring to the fulfillment of all our desires—which is union with God. On this subject, Cardinal Sarah encourages us:

“The object of our desire is God himself! Our heart is too large for this limited world! We must adopt as our own the exclamation of St. Augustine: ‘You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you’ (Confessions, I, i).”

Let that sink in— “Our heart is too large for this limited world!” Do we realize that? Do we really understand that in our intellect, in our heart and soul—do we embrace it as “heart knowledge?”

Presumption and Despair Block Prayer

As is the case with any other virtue, hope can continually increase. And we’ll address that in a moment. To begin, though, consider what we need to avoid—a couple of obstacles to hope—presumption and despair. Be aware that both of these can block your approach to prayer, inasmuch as, Pieper tells us, a prayer of petition is itself the voicing of hope.

Presumption

Presumption comes in a couple of broad forms:

  1. We might presume upon our own capabilities, hoping to save ourselves without God’s help; or
  2. We might presume upon God’s power and mercy, hoping to receive His forgiveness without repentance and conversion (cf. CCC 2092).

Fr. Jordan Aumann suggests that to avoid presumption of the first type, we should consider that, without God’s grace, we can do absolutely nothing. Jesus tells us as much when He reminds us that He is the vine and we are the branches, doesn’t He? (cf. Jn 15:5)

To counter the second type of presumption, we need to remember that God is infinitely merciful, and infinitely just. There’s no mercy without justice; we need to cooperate with His grace. (cf. Gal 6:7 and 1 Cor 15:10)

Despair and Discouragement

Despair in the sense used here is not a mood. Nor is it the negative movement of the heart that St. Ignatius of Loyola describes in his rules for discernment. Much has occurred, and is occurring, that can lead us to feel discouraged about what’s going on in the Church, in our country, our families—you name it.

For persons trying to live a life of sanctification and to grow in relationship with the Lord, that discouragement or feeling of despair is from the devil. The enemy is trying to distract us from staying focused on God, and from the unique, unrepeatable mission God has for us. We need to reject, rebuke and renounce these spirits of despair, discouragement and anxiety when they try to divert us from God’s path for us.

Despair and Its Roots

The despair we refer to here as an obstacle to the virtue of hope is not a mood or one of those movements of the heart. It’s a decision of the will—a decision against Christ and His redemption of us. St. John Chrysostom went so far as to say that it’s not so much sin that casts us into hell as it is despair. It closes the door to grace, denying the way to forgiveness of sin.

To avoid despair and discouragement, Fr. Aumann points out that we need to realize that God’s mercy, “…is untiring in pardoning the repentant sinner; and if it is certain that of ourselves, we can do nothing, it is likewise certain that with God’s grace, we can do all things” (Phil. 4:13).

Discontent is Not the Same as Discouragement

A word of caution, though: discontent with one’s self is not the same as discouragement. Fr. James McElhone, explains, in Rooting Out Hidden Faults, “Discontent with self and discouragement are not the same. To be dissatisfied with self is a grace that is part of sorrow; it makes us want to do better, urging us to serve God more faithfully…Onward and upward…goodness more attractive, new hopes and new ideas…blessed fruits of discontent with self.”

Don’t Give Up Hope

At times, we might struggle with myriad issues related to hope. Maybe, for example, there’s a pattern of sin in our life that just seems unbeatable. “Will I ever achieve sanctification? Can I make it to and through the pearly gates?”

Or, it could be that the sufferings of this life—ageing, infirmity, illness, losses of loved ones, and more, seem to be a heavier and heavier burden to bear. The Lord allows these in our life, and at the same time, allows the grace sufficient for us to deal with them, if we but lean on Him. (cf. 2 Cor 12:9) Jesus exhorts us to give Him our burden, for His yoke is easy and His burden is light (cf. Mt. 11:28-30). St. Peter tells us to cast our anxieties on Him, for He cares about us (cf. 1 Peter 5:7) Are we listening?

And, recall that Jesus told us, in this life we’ll face tribulation, but we need to be of good cheer—He’s already won the battle for us. (cf. Jn 16:33). So never, never, never, never give up. And do consider taking action. With His grace, there are some specific things we can do to foster hope in our lives.

Fr. Aumann’s Tips to Foster Hope
  • Raise your thoughts to heavenly matters–do this to develop a dislike for earthly things; to be encouraged to be good in trials, and consoled in suffering.
  • Never become anxious about tomorrow. Ponder Our Lord’s advice in Matt 6:26-30.
  • Grow in detachment from all earthly things; fight the triple concupiscence of 1 Jn 2:16.
  • Move with confidence toward union with God. “With good reason did St. John of the Cross say that hope is that which especially makes the soul pleasing to the beloved, and that by it the soul will attain all that it desires.”

As well, the Catechism tells us that hope is expressed and nourished in prayer, especially in the Our Father, the summary of everything that hope leads us to desire. (Cf. CCC 1820) Thus, praying the Lord’s Prayer thoughtfully, meditating on it, and contemplating its meaning for your life, can be helpful in building up your hope.

The Gift of Fear of the Lord

The undergirding gift of the Holy Spirit for the virtue of hope is fear of the Lord. Presumption, with its false certainty of salvation, will tend to extinguish the gift of fear of the Lord. Because we need this gift to perfect our practice of the virtue of hope, then, we need to avoid the presumption that will diminish it.

Fr. Aumann tells us that, the gift of fear is a supernatural habit by which the soul, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, acquires a special docility for subjecting itself completely to the divine will out of reverence for the excellency and majesty of God. According to Fr. Aumann, “St. Thomas harmonizes fear and hope by saying that in God there are justice and mercy, the first of which arouses fear in us, the second, hope.” This gift not only supports the virtue of hope in us, but it also perfects the virtue of humility, which we need to be able to see how much we depend on God and acknowledge the punishment we deserve for offending God’s infinite majesty.

Nourish Fear of the Lord

Father Aumann suggests that, to nourish the gift of the fear of the Lord, we:

  • Meditate frequently on the infinite grandeur and majesty of God
  • Get into a habit of talking with God with filial confidence, filled with reverence
  • Meditate frequently on the infinite malice of sin to arouse a great horror of sin.
  • Practice meekness and humility with others
  • Beg the Holy Spirit frequently for a reverential fear of God

Four of his five recommendations directly involve prayer. Spending time, talking with, listening to, Our Lord can be such a great aid. How can we ever expect to grow in our virtues and gifts without it?

Cooperate with God’s Grace

The gifts of the Holy Spirit help us overcome the limitations in our human nature and reason. In so doing, they help us to grow in the infused supernatural virtues. The gift of fear undergirds and perfects the virtue of hope in us. Although God created us without us, he wants us to cooperate with Him in our sanctification and salvation.

That includes our daily efforts to grow in the virtues and gifts, including hope and fear of the Lord. Consider how following Fr. Aumann’s tips and your spiritual director’s guidance might help you grow spiritually. There’s no time like the present to get started.

“Pray, hope and don’t worry. Worry is useless. God is merciful and will hear your prayer.”  – St. Padre Pio

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Light of Hope

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With all the confusion and uncertainties of today, how do we keep the light of hope burning bright for all to see? When hope dims, seeing the purpose of living becomes more difficult. Do we lose sight of hope when we lose touch with God?

By adhering to God’s will, participating in Jesus’ redemptive work, and following the promptings of the Holy Spirit, our life’s purpose is clear. “For I know well the plans I have in mind for you—oracle of the LORD—plans for your welfare and not for woe, so as to give you a future of hope” [Jeremiah 29:11]. The virtue of hope brightens our world.

Hope gives us more than an optimistic outlook on life. Remember, this hope “does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” [Romans 5:5]. The light of hope keeps us steady. It protects us, along with the virtues of faith and love, so we do not fall into the darkness of despair, particularly in times of trial and tribulation.

Hope Springs Eternal

We need hope’s light in a constantly changing world—what is good today is bad tomorrow. What is loved today is rejected tomorrow. Consider Mary, mother of Jesus Christ our Savior. At his crucifixion, as Mary stood at the foot of her Son’s cross, Our Lady did not lose hope. We know that because Mary opened her heart wide for all people. Our Blessed Mother is the Mother of Hope.

Our Lady brings our Lord’s hope to all who pray to her, calling on us to trust in her Son. Christ leads us to salvation by his life, Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection from the dead. We have the hope of eternal life when we live in unity with our Lord. The stronger our union, the greater our participation in our Lord’s mission.

“Rejoice in hope, endure in affliction, persevere in prayer,” wrote St. Paul [Romans 12:12]. How else can we live? Having the light of hope our Lord provides permeates all that we do. We realize our purpose in life and living is greater than what our world has to offer. We are called to do the right and to love goodness and to walk humbly with our God [Micah 6:8].

Hope to the Hopeless

Hope keeps us from discouragement; it sustains us during times of abandonment; and it opens our heart in expectation of eternal beatitude [CCC 1818]. This hope we share through our daily living. “Buoyed up by hope,” we are “preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity” [CCC 1818].

Therefore, let us keep our light of hope burning bright by remaining true to the Holy Trinity. With God’s graces and blessings, we see that our Savior never abandons us especially when we feel forsaken. “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” [Romans 15:13].

In other words, by our faith, we partake in the divine love from Heaven, sharing the light of hope within a darkening world. Through a simple smile, a helping hand, an attentive ear, and an open heart, our mission is clear. “Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life.” Amen.

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Perhaps There’s Hope         

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The events of the last two years have brought many challenges and hardships to the people in our country. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the turmoil, hate, and violence that seems to fill the air like a dense fog. What I see around me is reminiscent of Saint Paul’s words in 2 Timothy, where he warns us of what we may see in the ‘last days’. 

 In the last days, people will be self-centered, lovers of money, irreligious, and disobedient (2 Timothy 1-3).

Until recently I’ve wondered if our country is not spiraling toward that end but perhaps there’s hope amid the chaos.

In a confused world where people seek pleasure in all things, the world offers except God. In an environment where children are ruthlessly slain in cold blood by the evil that is allowed to thrive in another human being. In an age when being politically sensitive is more important than the truth, I see a tiny flicker of light!

In a recent ruling, the highest court in the land acknowledged a Washington high school coach’s right to kneel and pray after football games. This comes after years of suppressing prayer and the ‘God’ word from our schools. I rejoice at the courage of our justices and pray that this is the first of many steps to legitimize the One who created us.

Of even more importance and subsequent controversy, the Supreme Court overturned the longstanding Roe vs Wade ruling reversing the court’s previous judgment to permit abortions in our country. This specific action has catapulted our country into even deeper dissension. It opens wounds already sensitive from the battle lines drawn between black and white, red states and blue states, and liberal vs conservative.

While I am definitively pro-life, I haven’t always borne that philosophy. This ruling is especially poignant for me considering I couldn’t have been more pro-choice at one point in my life. I believed women should have total autonomy over decisions made about their bodies. I knew little of Scripture then, and God was not part of my life. This gave me a distorted, and limited view of what was right and wrong.

Over 40 years ago, I impregnated a girl. I was just nineteen then. When she told me she was pregnant, I was indignant that she could have allowed this to happen. I wasn’t in love with this girl, and I doubt she loved me. We would get an abortion and my life would go forward as planned, I told her. There was little to discuss. It was as simple as that.

The girl ultimately found a place where the procedure could be done, and on a cold January day, I drove her to the address she gave me and watched her enter the doors of the facility. It never occurred to me that an hour later they would end the life of my child.

For decades, that moment was no more than a forgotten footnote in my life. It wasn’t until years later that the egregiousness of my act became clear, and I began to accept responsibility for what happened. I turned my back on my child, and on God that day. But like the Prodigal Son in Luke’s gospel, He forgave me. Seven years ago, the Lord led me to the Catholic church, where I was baptized and confirmed, culminating the end of a long, meandering journey.

I sometimes wonder what my son or daughter would have been like if the mother and I had allowed it to survive. Would they grow up to be creative and smart? Would they be athletic and disciplined? Could they have even achieved greatness in the world? I’ll have to live with the fact I never gave them the chance.

Abortion, and this recent Supreme Court decision, is a lightning rod for controversy and dissension in America, like a knife turned in an opened wound. Given my past, I clearly see the other side’s point of view. I was once one of them. But I am grateful now that my eyes have been opened.

I know we have not heard the last of this volatile issue. Where the law goes from this point forward, only God knows. If the ban on abortion remains, I rejoice that almost a million children will be spared in our country each year.

In Psalms 24:1, it’s written, ‘The earth is the Lord’s and all it holds, the world and those who dwell in it.’  We should be thankful for the actions of our Supreme Court judges who remembered those words and had the courage and integrity to act judiciously.

Yes. Perhaps there is hope for us.

 

 

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Some Thoughts on Where ‘Not Bad’ People Might End Up

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We often hear people comforting a grieving friend or loved one at a wake or funeral say, “He (or she) is in heaven with Jesus now.”  While this is a comforting thought, I wonder how often this is really the case.

The recent death of a cousin I was close to while growing up got me thinking about the four last things: death, judgement, heaven and hell.

It would be a big consolation to know that my cousin is in heaven.  I tend to think, however, that she fell somewhat short of sainthood, much like most people who leave this world for the next.

Now, the old adage, or perhaps it’s a taboo, comes into play here: ‘Do not speak ill of the dead.’  It is not my intent here to speak ill of anyone who has passed away.

My cousin was a good person, but I can’t say she was a saint.  Her good qualities certainly exceeded her not so good qualities.  Unfortunately, and this is kind of a biggie, she was also a lapsed Catholic who hadn’t been to Mass in decades.

I don’t know if her conscience was bothered by this or if she perhaps allowed herself to be convinced that going to Mass was just not necessary.  Sadly, there are many lapsed Catholics today much like my cousin.  Instead of continuing to grow in holiness they hit a plateau and maybe convince themselves that where they are spiritually is good enough.

Keep Holy the Lord’s Day

One common reason (or more appropriately maybe, excuse) I’ve heard from lapsed Catholics who no longer go to Mass on Sunday is that going to Mass on Sunday is a man-made law, it’s not God’s law.  God said to keep His day holy; it’s the Church that says we do that by going to Mass.

I’ve even heard scripture quoted in defense of not going to Mass.  In Mark 2:27 Jesus says “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.”  So, if the sabbath was made for man, it should be up to man to decide how to keep holy the sabbath.  And this statement inevitably ends with “I don’t have to go Mass to keep holy His day.”

This way of thinking ignores, however, something else our Lord said.  In Matthew 16:18-19 He gave Peter and His Church the keys to the kingdom of heaven.  “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”  And since the Church says we keep holy the Lord’s Day by going to Mass, heaven certainly must recognize disobedience to this precept as a sin.

But there is another aspect of the sabbath being made for man that the ‘I don’t have to go to Mass’ thinking overlooks. We need the Mass to refresh our souls and to help us to remember to keep God first in everything we do throughout the coming week.  It is at Mass that we enter into full communion with Jesus by receiving Him into our own bodies.  How great is that!

Of course, Jesus probably knew this since He is omniscient.  And He most certainly knew His Church would institute Mass attendance on Sunday as a precept.

God is Our Judge

For the most part, just about all the lapsed Catholics I know are pretty ordinary people, who live fairly ordinary lives.  I don’t think any of them could be considered “bad” people, but I also can’t say any of them are saints.  My cousin was certainly not a bad person. But while she did believe in God and that Jesus died for us, her life was not God centered.

When our lives are not God centered it’s difficult, if not impossible, to continue to grow in holiness.  If we are not growing, we are stagnating.  We become only ‘not bad.’  This is a far cry from being holy.

Of course, only God knows what is in our hearts, and His judgement on us when we die (our particular judgement) will be perfect.  And it’s possible that we actually judge ourselves, as Bishop Fulton Sheen suggests (as Richard Auciello notes in the opening paragraph of his recent CS article “Who Goes To Heaven?”).

Still, I wonder how all the ‘not bad’ people – like my cousin and many others – who do not go to Mass on Sunday – will be judged.  Are they in hell because they chose not to go to Mass on Sunday?

12 Years of Sacrifice

I wrote a little bit about my cousin and her husband a few years ago in an article entitled “The Solution To All Your Problems.”  They had a son who was born with severe birth defects.  He was not able to walk, move his arms, or even hold his head up.  He was also deaf, dumb, and blind.

The doctors said their son should be institutionalized and that he probably would not live past two or three years old.  My cousin and her husband chose instead to take him home and care for him.  Under their gentle and loving care, their son lived to be 12 years old.

The 12 years of their little boy’s life were sacrificial years for my cousin and her husband.  Their lives revolved around caring for their son.  Going out to eat, to the movies, vacationing, and a lot of other normal activities were pretty much out of the question.  During those 12 years they pretty much stayed home and took care of their son.

One would think they earned a lot of graces during those 12 years.  But God was not really part of their lives during those years or even throughout their marriage.  And I know that my cousin did not receive the last rites before she passed away.  So, I am left to wonder, where is my cousin’s soul now?

Purgatory Maybe?

According to Catholic teaching, if my cousin died unrepentant, with unconfessed mortal sins on her soul, she is in hell.  So, I pray that even though she did not receive the Last Rites, that she was sorry for her sins.  Maybe she was somehow able to ask God for forgiveness and mercy before she died.  If so, her soul just might be in purgatory.

My cousin certainly cared for her son in a saintly way, but I don’t think she was justified when she died.  Her life was not lived in a right relationship with God.  And I think this is probably true of many who have died and who will die as well.

Many people today seem to think just being a nice person and loving your neighbor will get you into heaven when you die. They forget the first and greatest commandment.  But Jesus tells us that the gate to eternal life is narrow and those who find it are few (Matthew 7:14). Those are sobering words and they come to us directly from God Himself.

Today, however, far too many people seem to tend toward an Inclusivist view of salvation – that most people end up in Heaven – or even a Universalist view – the thinking that everyone will be saved.

So where do all those people who believe in God, and who keep most of the commandments, end up when they die?  Does a person who believes in God and that Jesus died for us, but who does not go to Mass on Sunday, go hell?  Many Protestants seem to think so.

Conscience

Some 60 years ago, the answer to these questions would have been ‘definitely hell.’  Today, however, some think this may not be the case.  With the development of Catholic teaching from Vatican II on “The Judgment of Conscience,” there are many who think that not bad people may not be in hell, providing they lived according to the dictates of their consciences.

So, what of a conscience that says going to Mass on Sunday is not necessary to keep the Lord’s Day holy?

Pope Paul VI wrote in Gaudium et Spes (16), “In the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience. Always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience when necessary speaks to his heart: do this, shun that. For man has in his heart a law written by God; to obey it is the very dignity of man; according to it he will be judged.”

And even the Catechism of the Catholic Church says (quoting Dignitatis Humanae), “1782 Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions.”

So, what if someone thinks going to Mass is not necessary to keep the Lord’s Day holy?  Is that individual committing a mortal sin – grave matter, committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent?  Or is the sin lessoned because the person’s conscience says it’s not that big a deal?

A Well-formed Conscience is Needed

On the surface it sounds like an individual’s conscience trumps Catholic teaching.  But that would be an incorrect interpretation.  As the Catechism goes on to say:

1783 Conscience must be informed and moral judgment enlightened. A well-formed conscience is upright and truthful. It formulates its judgments according to reason, in conformity with the true good willed by the wisdom of the Creator. The education of conscience is indispensable for human beings who are subjected to negative influences and tempted by sin to prefer their own judgment and to reject authoritative teachings.” [Emphasis added.]

1784 The education of the conscience is a lifelong task. From the earliest years, it awakens the child to the knowledge and practice of the interior law recognized by conscience. Prudent education teaches virtue; it prevents or cures fear, selfishness and pride, resentment arising from guilt, and feelings of complacency, born of human weakness and faults. The education of the conscience guarantees freedom and engenders peace of heart.”

In other words, if our intellects and wills are not properly developed, our incorrect thoughts and passions will rule our consciences.  Or, to say it yet another way, because concupiscence is a burden we all carry it’s easy to fall prey to the wickedness and snares of the devil while thinking we are listening to the Holy Spirit.  When we allow the devil’s lies to enter our thoughts and form our consciences, we risk putting ourselves on the wide road to perdition instead of the narrow path to salvation.

The question is, then, does God factor a poorly formed conscience into His judgement of us?  Does He take our concupiscence into consideration when He judges us?  I certainly hope so.

The Golden Prison

Many people  these days think that when we die we will go to either heaven or hell, with a large majority of souls proceeding directly to heaven.  I’m not sure why this is, but one reason could be because Catholic dogma on purgatory is missing from some/many Faith Formation programs in use in parishes today.

Why Catholic teaching on purgatory is not taught much today is a mystery.  It’s also a bit sad because Catholic teaching on Purgatory is a de fide truth, which means it is “infallible dogma” or “definitive dogma.”  The magisterium has affirmed de fide truths as divinely revealed by God.  Denying or doubting such truths is either material heresy or formal heresy.

As I stated in an article “A Reasonable Argument for the Existence of Purgatory”, “Catholic doctrine does not offer a lot of detail on purgatory other than teaching that purgatory does exist.”  And we know the souls in purgatory do suffer.

Over and above this, however, purgatory, as Hunter Leonard wrote recently in an article entitled “Purgatory – The Golden Prison” is “a blessed extension of the mercy and love of God, it is the application of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross on the soul after death. Purgatory is the fiery embrace of the Lord in which all that is not of him is burned away so that we might fully and totally embrace him in perfect love for all eternity.”

Hope

I hope that God, in His perfect mercy and justice, consigns all those ‘not bad’ people who die, who believe in Him and believe that Jesus died to save us – and who’s only sin may be that they have not been to Mass in many years – to purgatory instead of to hell.  It’s not as consoling as thinking they are in heaven with Jesus, but it’s certainly more consoling than thinking they are in that other place.

At the same time, I’ll continue to pray for all the lapsed Catholics in the world.  I can’t know how they will be judged, but I do know God’s judgement on them will be perfect.

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Memento Mori

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“Remember, Oh man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.”

This phrase from the Ash Wednesday liturgy – the Consolatio – may be the most durable memento mori still in common use. Latin for “remember you must die,” it dates back to Imperial Rome, when a slave traditionally followed a triumph procession whispering this warning to the successful general or Caesar being celebrated.

The concept goes back even further – to the ancient Greeks and especially the Stoic philosophers. It has waxed and waned over the years, but is still powerfully present today in the many ways of celebrating All Souls, and All Saints days, from the Mexican Day of the Dead (Dia De Los Muertos) to the increasingly secular (even pagan) Halloween.

Reminders

As we age, our bodies begin to provide their own memento mori. Past a certain age, children (especially boys of boisterous temperament) seem to bounce rather than fall. Years later we begin to fall rather than bounce, and eventually, falls become serious enough in potential for questions about falling to become a routine part of a visit to the doctor.

Ironically, I recently had a check-up with my doctor and cheerfully answered the “Do you fall” question with a “Nope!” Three hours later I tripped on a porch step and smashed my knee into a concrete driveway.  This led to an appointment with the orthopedist several days later where the accumulated fluid was drained from my knee and I was given an injection of cortisone.

Memento mori. I definitely no longer bounce; I splat.

Memento mori is a feature in art, the character changing over the centuries but the symbols recognizable – from clocks to skulls to dirges and elegies.

Even the most modern of music, such as Carbon Leaf’s Reunion Monticello continue the use of memento mori:

And bones are everywhere, aren’t they? What do you think they’d see through those trees? ‘Resurrected Spirits Dancing,’ you don’t say!? (The minstrel’s new arrangement of History)

We danced and drank the sun! It overflowed and washed the past away. We roamed! Echo! Laughter! Spirits danced a jig around their graves . . .”

. . . Then came the rain.”

Hope

For the devout, however, the memory of death can always be transformed through the hope of the Resurrection:

We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, about those who have fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.

For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep.

Indeed, we tell you this, on the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will surely not precede those who have fallen asleep.

For the Lord himself, with a word of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God, will come down from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. Thus we shall always be with the Lord.

Therefore, console one another with these words [1 Thessalonians 4:13-18].

Do not confuse the theological virtue of Hope with emotional hope.  Emotional hope is a wishful desire, such as the child’s “I hope I get a new bicycle for Christmas.” The theological virtue of hope is described in the Catechism of the Catholic Church in sections 1817-1821. It involves an effort of will, “placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.”

Life Eternal

This is the transforming power of theological Hope, which meets memento mori and springboards us through the valley of death and into the uplands of Heaven. When we encounter death at any remove we can be gripped with fear or melancholy or despair. But the Hope of the Resurrection can transform all these sorrowful feelings into a confident calm based on the firm foundation of what we have received from the Gospels and from the accumulated teachings of the Church.

Shakespeare projected this confidence from his Christian world into the mouth of Caesar in his play “Julius Caesar” (Act 2, Scene 2):

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

When it does come, we are forced to say goodbye to this life, but then we enter life eternal, a state of existence that scripture, poetry, art and prose have striven to capture but failed, only managing a mere reflection of the splendor and glory of  what we are promised through the Resurrection.

For a prayer this time I include one of John Donne’s poetic prayers, Bring Us O Lord God

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity:  in the  habitations of thy majesty and glory, world without end. Amen.

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Unleashing the Virtue of Hope

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The unleashing of the theological virtue of hope, with deep roots in Jesus Christ, holds the true promise of the new year. No one weeps at the passing of 2020, and the turning of the calendar can be an opportunity for a fresh start. At least some think so. For me, 2020 was only last week, and the difference is quantitative, not quantitative. Our lives are no different: lockdowns still reign and throttle the economy. Fear governs governments, wages war against dissenting views, and cripples individual lives. So no, I do not believe the “normal” that we all yearn for will come back in 2021, regardless of a vaccine. Happy new year!

Can hope exist with such a prognosis? Unfortunately, hope unleased often calls up images of a bubbly disposition or a relentless optimism. While not bad in themselves, those are personality traits rather than virtues. I’m thankful that the virtue of hope is more than those things; if it was not, I would not have a chance. The Catholic Church counts hope among the theological virtues. Thus, their foundation is in God; any discussion of the virtue has to begin there.

Foundation in God

We hope for all sorts of things that may or may not come to pass, but the theological virtue of hope has to start with God. St. Thomas Aquinas notes that “hope denotes a movement or a stretching forth of the appetite towards an arduous good” (Summa Theologiae II-IIae, q. 17, a. 3). We stretch toward that which we do not possess; for Christians, “we should hope from Him for nothing less than Himself” (Summa Theologiae II-IIae, q. 17, a. 2). The Catechism of the Catholic Church expounds more on St. Thomas’ definition:

Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit CCC 1817)

The perspective that we have to start with is eternal. St. Paul assures us of the reason for that starting point: “hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23, RSVCE). While God is eternal and unchanging, the world is quite the opposite. It constantly changes and inevitably passes away. This is not a theological statement as much as it is simply common sense. And yet how often do we put our hope in things of this world!

Mary and Joseph

One of the ways back to a true Christian hope is to look at the examples of the saints. At the beginning of the year, we have two titans of virtue to celebrate: Mary and Joseph. With the recent feast of Mary, Mother of God on January 1, and Pope Francis’ proclamation of the Year of St. Joseph, God has given us His very own mother and father to usher us through the next year. They are perfect companions for us as society languishes under division, COVID, and lockdowns. Why? Mary and Joseph had tremendous trust in God to see through whatever they encountered. With them as guides, we have an illustration of what true hope looks like in the will, action, and perseverance.

The Will

If possible, I think we sometimes underestimate Our Blessed Mother. Being immaculately conceived meant life was easy, right? No human’s life is easy. Suffering comes for every one of us, often when we least expect it. A great illustration of this is the Presentation of the baby Jesus in the temple. Mary and Joseph took Jesus there to be dedicated to the Lord, according to the law of Moses (Leviticus 12:3).

Their news was not something that could be made public. False messiahs had arisen even in the time of Jesus; Gamaliel testified to two false messiahs while discerning the matter of Peter and John’s preaching (Acts 5:33-39, RSVCE). Keeping their news to themselves, Mary and Joseph must have been surprised when Simeon came up to them and praised God, saying that he could now die a happy man. And then the stunner: not only would Jesus be the rise and the fall of many, but “a sword will pierce through your own soul also” (Luke 2:34-35, RSVCE).

Hope allowed Mary to keep those things in her heart instead of a spiral into panic, anger, or fear. It took a great act of the will to cling to the hope of the messiah. If I heard words like Simeon’s, I would have been filled with fear, anxiety, and doubt in God’s promise. How could all of the angel Gabriel’s promises at the Annunciation go with the grim fate foretold by Simeon? Yet Mary withstood the news of the Passion. When it came time for Jesus to fulfill His mission, she did not run and hide. Mary’s fidelity remained even at its worst moment on Calvary, when the sword destined for her heart finally arrived.

Even if we do not have the emotion of hope, exercising our will toward that end brings us closer to the virtue. Our Blessed Mother shows us this is a small sample at the Presentation.

Action

Hope is an act of the will, but it is external as well as internal. We nourish hope through action. Pope Benedict XVI says that “it is the great hope based upon God’s promises that give us the courage and directs our action in good times and bad” (Spe Salvi #35). This is a hidden aspect of hope that St. Joseph displays for us very well. I attended a men’s conference last month, and Fr. Stephen Runyon gave a great talk on this.

Fr. Runyon drew a comparison from Joseph to Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Zechariah. When the latter group had a revelation from God or a visit from an angel, they questioned. Even asked to get out of their vocation! St. Joseph heard from an angel in a dream to not be afraid of taking Mary as his wife. What did he do next? “When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him” (Matthew 1:24, RSVCE). He acted, plain and simple. In his next recorded dream, the angel asked something even greater: flee immediately into Egypt with Mary and the infant Jesus. Joseph was taking them “to a country with a different language, culture, religion, and currency” (Fr. Don Calloway, Consecration to St. Joseph, pg. 55). Joseph rose immediately, gathered his family, and left. This happened twice more before the Holy Family settled in Nazareth.

Hope needs action to survive. Fear is a paralyzing force, and its companion, anxiety, can snuff out hope with alarming swiftness. If it feels impossible to gain a foothold against fear, we can look to St. Joseph. Act on the hope that is within.

Perseverance

Trials and difficult times are a matter of when not if. It’s a fact of life. Here I think it’s important to turn back to the beginning: without God as the ultimate goal of our hope, we are lost. With the promise of God’s grace, we can hope to overcome sin and weakness in our lives. On some days, it may be more of an act of the will than an emotional movement. It is in those times that virtue is forged. St. Josemaria Escriva wrote that “all your defects unless you fight against them, will produce bad works as a natural consequence. And your will, untampered by a persevering fight, will be of no use to you when a difficult occasion arises” (The Furrow #776).

Hope in the ways of the Lord, that trials and difficulties have reasons behind them. Like a coach putting players through drills, God tries to prepare us for the narrow road through trials.

St. Paul gives us God’s playbook in Romans: “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:3-5, RSVCE). 

Hope

Hope is more intricate than it seems. After a rough year, unleash the power of hope in the coming year. Where the virtue looks daunting, take small steps with the will, move to act, and persevere in all things. Mary and Joseph intercede for us in heaven. May the Lord pour His love into our hearts now and always!

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Sometimes Our Prayers Are Answered Quickly

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One morning, walking from the parking garage to the office, I voiced in prayer an all-to-familiar complaint: “Why am I hanging around here when I seem to have done everything I was put on Earth to do? What use is a grumpy old fat man anyhow?”

I was pretty much wallowing in full blown, middle-aged petulant self-pity.  But the air was hot and humid already, and the day stretched ahead with little to recommend it.  My antihistamine had not yet started to work, and an old injury was acting up.  And, of course, I already knew the generic answer to my question.  There was obviously more for me to do on this earth.

Some 10 minutes after arriving at my desk I found myself talking to a young man who needed encouragement.  He needed a witness to the reality and value of trust in God, and some perspective on how God answers prayers over time, not in an instant.  This, paradoxically, was a strong, rapid, and complete answer to my own plaintive prayer not 20 minutes earlier.

Sometimes, God answers our prayers quickly. Other times, not so much. You don’t have to be a grumpy old man on a hot and humid morning to experience of that.

No, Not Now, Be patient

One problem is that “no” is an answer, as are “not now” and “be patient.”  Unfortunately, more often than not these are not fast answers – they often take time to reveal themselves.

Sometimes those answers are definite and relatively quick.  A hoped and prayed for job goes to someone else.  The relationship falls apart.  A loved one is not restored to health.

But other times the answer is not quick in coming.   A lifelong ambition stays just out of reach.  Or we struggle to move forward while wondering if we are chasing an illusion.

I think the most poignant (and frequent) example of these long term answers that are hard to hear comes from people who express their uncertainty by saying “If God would just give me an idea of what I’m supposed to do…”

Obedience Or Self-Will?

For some people this question is less about a genuine desire for God to give them concrete direction than it is a desire for God to ratify a decision they are uncertain about.  They are simply looking for some guarantee of success. They want confidence that any obstacles they encounter will be overcome because they are following God’s will.

If only it were that simple!  Such confidence may be way overblown as a quick perusal of the Book of Job shows. Walking in God’s will does not guarantee that adversities and obstacles will melt away. They may be, but it is not guaranteed.

Just as often, though, people are really unsure about how to proceed. They want to do something meaningful with their lives that will be a blessing to the world. Many people believe God has a plan for each of our lives, and they want to cooperate with that plan.  They do not want to struggle with anxiety that they are somehow working against God’s will. (How detailed that plan might be and how much micro-management God does in support of it is a matter of no small debate.)

Persistent Devotion and Intransigent Self-Will

The classic parable about persistence in prayer is the story of the widow and the unjust judge in Luke 18:1-8.  In this parable Jesus promises speedy answers to persistent and fervent prayer.  But there is always a risk that we cannot hear an answer of “no,” or “not now,” or “be patient,” because we are confusing persistent devotion with intransigent self-will.

How can we tell the difference?

Sometimes a wise friend, a priest, or a spiritual director can help us sort this out. But sometimes the difference between what God may call us to and what we just want for ourselves can be difficult to discern.  This is especially true when we want something that is a good thing.  But perhaps God wants something better from or for us.

Which brings us back to prayer, and the need at times to reset our focus in praying.

Change the Prayer

If our prayers have become obsessed with something because we do not feel we are getting an answer, it may be a sign we need to change our prayers.

For instance, I might begin by admitting to God that I have been focusing on this thing for some time. I would then admit that what I have been praying about is important to me.  And I would then confess that I may be having trouble trusting Him in this matter.  I would then ask the Holy Spirit to enter my prayer life more directly and help me focus my prayers properly, or increase my discernment in the matter in question.

If I am still strongly called to pray, then I will trust that my call is a call to persistence. If I continue to doubt the propriety of my focus, or find my focus changing, I have to try to accept this as an answer.

No Short Cuts

There is another category of prayer that is hard to hear “no” to – a prayer of apparent surrender that is actually a refusal to take responsibility.  This is related to prayers in which we ask God to ratify a decision we may be uncertain about. Instead of praying in hopes of having our desires ratified, however, in this instance we pray for God to take our responsibility to wrestle with our callings out of our hands.  We ask for a revelation to relieve us of the pain and doubt of searching our own souls.

A friend of mine used to refer to this as a “road to Damascus hope” – a yearning to have a clear and definite experience of God’s will come to us in a flash. Her usual advice to people expressing this hope was to remark that “God doesn’t use cannonballs on sparrows.”

Paul tells us to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” [Philippians 2: 12-16]. This includes living with the reality that while some prayers are easily seen to be answered, many are answered in ways that are hard to feel confident about.

When we feel frustrated by prayers that do not seem to have been answered, we must turn to humility and patience.  We must consider that, being sparrows, we cannot expect unambiguous clarity in how God answers our prayers.

Focus On Being The Answer

Returning to the story I began with, one way to increase our confidence that God is answering prayers is to pray for him to help us be the answer to someone else’s prayers. There is always time and room to become a witness, to help, to give love, to show compassion, and to comfort. In doing so we can be the answer to someone else’s prayer.

Saint Francis reminds us that “it is in giving that we receive.” Becoming the answer to someone else’s prayer is a magnificent way to build our confidence that our own prayers are heard and being answered.

Lord, please grant us patience and diligence in prayer, and confidence that you hear us and answer us more completely than we may understand in this life.  Amen.

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Whiskey, Oreos, and the Absurdity of Hope

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Well, 2021 has started out as roughly as 2020 ended. The rain that poured down around my little house on Christmas day seemed to promise such a shaky start to the new year. The old traditions are full of ways to know what will come in the new year. Weather, calling birds, restless animals, clean houses – everything means something if you know where to look. In the past few weeks, I’ve talked to so many older friends and family who are starting this longed-for year in a continuation of uncertainty and fear. Some of them are fearful because of the Christmas storms, others because of the recent protests. Still others are devastatingly lonely and worry that 2021 will just continue with more of the same.

Tonight, after a long day of listening to people talk about protests, impeachments, masks, and vaccines, I’m dunking a few Oreos into my little glass of whiskey and turning my mind toward Christ. I’ve been praying the rosary often, and the Hope bead always catches my attention. If you don’t know, the three Hail Marys at the beginning of the rosary are prayed specifically for the Theological virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity. Whenever I pray those beads, I think of those uncertain friends and wrap the prayers around them.

The Hope bead has been standing out to me more and more. I seek it out, I go back to it occasionally in the middle of my rosary, turn it over in my fingers, and pray to the Mother of All Hope for support and consistency during this uncertain time.

I’m hoping for so many things, of course; but Hope itself is a virtue that isn’t wasted on Oreos and whiskey. I don’t Hope the store will have a box of organic, sustainably-made chocolate sandwich cookies to dip in my cheap, unsustainable whiskey tonight as I de-stress after a long day of homeschooling and Too Much News. I don’t Hope that the fox who’s been pestering my ducks will come into shooting range this evening. Hope – the true virtue – belongs to higher things.

The Virtue of Hope

So, if my little “h” hopes: for all-natural Oreos and safe, happy ducks aren’t a part of the beauty of true Hope, what is? Eternity and the Kingdom of Heaven.

Hope is the virtue that inspires us to long for the Kingdom of Heaven. It’s one of the three Theological virtues that we pray for on those first three Ave beads of the rosary. These virtues are “the foundation of Christian moral activity” and are “infused by God into the souls of the faithful to make them capable of acting as his children and of meriting eternal life” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1813).

The theological virtue of Hope therefore, goes much deeper than our basic dreams, desires, and ambitions. Hope teaches us to trust God utterly, “relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 1817). That Hope, unlike the more mundane varieties, “keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude” (CCC 1818).

Even though we might consistently say “I hope you get the job” or “I hope you find that great, cheap whiskey,” those small, temporal hopes are far from the Hope that inspires “men’s activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven” (CCC 1818).

New Year, New Hope

So, when I’m praying for Hope on the second Ave bead of my rosary, I’m praying for something bigger than even the hope that 2021 will be a better year than the last. I’m not just praying that mask mandates, violent protests, and unemployment will pass away. I’m praying in expectation of Heaven. Those prayers remind me that, no matter what is happening here, eternity is waiting. In so many ways, those prayers turn my mind to the martyrs of Hope in the English persecution: Eustace White, Edmund Campion, Thomas More, and so many others. The English martyrs who went sneaking off to say or hear Mass weren’t doing so in hope that their devotions would become easier. They were Hoping for something deeper, something more lasting and real: Eternity.

Eustace White, who prayed “Lord, more pain if Thou pleases, and more patience” as he was being tortured didn’t hope for earthly consolations. He Hoped to make his suffering more like Christ’s. That’s all any of us can hope for, no matter what the suffering.

Life isn’t all suffering though, and sometimes it’s the suffering-free times that make it hard to Hope for heaven. When the world around us is beautiful; when our gardens are in bloom; when there are few worldly hardships – that’s when we forget to Hope and fall into presumption. We start to think that God must be happy with us, because we are so very happy with ourselves.

One of the blessings offered to us this past year is the opportunity to see and choose a path that is not based around public approval and self-contentedness, but instead rooted in Hope. That choice is hard, and often painful. But it isn’t yet painful in the way Eustace White’s choice was painful. We are still novices “concerning pain” as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes; but we are learning. The best way to learn is through practice, and through Hope.

Oreos in Whiskey

A month ago, a friend of mine asked me how I was holding up at the end of 2020. I laughed, we all have our ways of coping. For me, it’s often lots of quiet time, bread baking, good books, and early bedtimes. For her, it’s Oreos dunked in Irish coffee or straight whiskey and cigarettes on the porch.

For both of us, it’s Hope that Christ is near. That always and forever He is close to us, sharing His Presence with us in the Eucharist, and teaching us to Hope for things beyond this world. Tonight, I’ve passed my favorite books on to my friend and she’s shared her sustainably-made, sandwich cookies and whiskey with me. We’re both welcoming Christ in this new year. We’re both hoping for a time, soon, when He will make all things new.

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A Letter to a Tired Friend

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I am tired of praying.

This is what I heard my friend whisper tiredly, almost unwillingly. The words hung in the air, lingering as if they were just getting used to being outside rather than bumping into each other in my friend’s mind and heart. Her shoulders drooped listlessly. One look at her and I could feel her exhaustion and dispiritedness.

I love my friend and I knew that it was not a question of faith on her part. Everybody gets tired of something at some point in their lives. It moved me to hear her say what she did because I too have said the same thing more than once: “I am tired of praying”. Once the words are out of our mouths, they become real and this is a good thing, for it is far easier to deal with the truth when we accept it rather than when choose to deny or ignore it. What follows is an open letter to someone who is loved tremendously and may just need to be reminded of such.

My Dearest Friend,

How much time has passed since we last had a heart-to-heart! Did you ever think, in your wildest dreams when we were much younger, that we would be as we are right now – wives, mothers, and women of the world? (That last one makes me laugh – sounds much more exciting than it really is, although the reality is much more meaningful, of course.) I write to you now with a bit of urgency and a great deal of compassion. When you told me the other day that you are tired of praying, you sounded….old.

There, I said it! I cannot take it back and I do not regret it, because you really did sound tired and old, in spite of the promise we made years and years ago that we would never be “old”. We could be “mature”, “of age”, “advanced in years”, but never “old”. My friend, do you not remember how we said that no matter the years that pass, we must and will always be young at heart and child-like in joy? For we both know the trials and tribulations of our time in this world, but for the children of God, as St. Teresa of Avila said, “In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.

Do Not Forget to Smile and Laugh

Are you thinking of that “family hotel” with the super noisy kids running around the hallway we stayed at years ago? That would certainly qualify as an inconvenient hotel, would it not? I remember you had to restrain yourself then from telling off boisterously loud children who were not yours or mine. Are you smiling yet? I can imagine you trying to stifle a giggle. Let it out! Your sense of humour is ever so important, and these days practically impossible to live without. If we take ourselves too seriously, how could we possibly get through the days and nights, the weeks and months, the years?

Remember how we used to imagine Joseph and a very pregnant Mary as they made their way to Bethlehem? Of course, that was no laughing matter, but they must have packed a lot of humour with them, along with bread and other provisions for that journey in order to make it as far as they did. I really cannot imagine the Holy Family as dour and sombre-looking, resigned to a life on the run from before Jesus was born until even years after. A great deal of faith in divine providence, coupled with a good sense of humour, would have allowed them to deal with everything one thing at a time. Your ability to smile and laugh is a vote of confidence in our Father God. Use is wisely and frequently.

An Obligation to Rest

I have to ask, but I am pretty sure I know the answer to this: are you getting enough sleep? You and I both know how undeniably crabby we are when we do not get enough rest, especially at night. If the emotional temperature our homes are dependent on whether we have a sleep deficit or not – my dear friend, it is our obligation and responsibility to get enough rest and sleep. Yes, there are times when it is not possible and we just have to go without enough sleep, but we have to make sure that apart from what is unavoidable, we are not making excuses just to get away with certain worldly distractions…such as your phone.

An Unnecessary Distraction

Oh dear, I acutely felt that dirty look you just gave me, even if I am not physically with you. Listen, if I cannot tell you these things, then who will? Your husband is a good man and loves you ever so much – without a doubt – but perhaps you do not listen to him? (I know, it’s inconceivable, right?) In any case, I can tell you that I have struggled with this myself.

I have set a time at night by which I aim to have set aside my phone and do not touch it until the next morning. Do you know how difficult it has been? The first few times I did it, I kept on imagining hoards of people sending me urgent text messages and terribly important emails that needed replies ASAP in those hours! I would wake up the next morning only to find that I had not received anything remotely important.

Even Jesus told his disciples, “Come away by yourselves to a lonely place, and rest awhile.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.” (Mk 6:31) He did not say to come away and get on your phone until you cannot stay awake – granted there were no phones then. Come on – you know what I mean. Our phones can serve a good purpose – and they can also get in the way of many good things. If being on it is keeping you from getting the proper rest and sleep you need, make time to physically set it aside. This allows you to rest your mind, and it will be worth it.

“Bosom Buddies”

Please do not think that I am minimizing your tiredness. On the contrary, I think getting to the bottom of this to better understand the “why” will help you a lot in your prayer life, which I know is extremely crucial to you. You see, tiredness and frustration are pretty good friends – just like us, only we actually love and help each other be better. Those two just lead to exasperation and hopelessness. We are so used to running around like mad women trying to save the world, we sometimes forget to make time to save the best time for really important things – like prayer.

I am guilty of this. In my own daily schedule, I have set aside time to simply be with God. You know this – we have talked about it before and I know you do it as well. It is such a big help to be able to take 15 minutes – or even half an hour! – to just be still and be with Him in prayer. Yet, I find myself putting the time off and simply moving it further and further down the day’s schedule, sometimes squeezing it in between busy and busier, or maybe not keeping that appointed time at all.

When I look back, I realize that I set myself up for failure this way, because I have basically made everything else more important than God. I know, of course, that this cannot be true. So, I have to really make that effort to set aside the best times of the day when I know I can focus best and just make time for my prayer. I know I need it far more than even I realize. After all, I am in conversation with my Father.

Just Talk to Him

I feel your pain and your tiredness, my dearest friend. So many people and things to pray for – a never-ending litany of petitions, requests, and “please, please, please”, it seems. And when you are most tired and feeling the most frustration, please know that at that moment, it is our Lord Himself Who bears you in His arms, carrying you through the most difficult moments and most trying times. You and I are closest to Him when we suffer, not nearly as much as He did, but He knows our pain. He knows how much we want to love Him and that when we say we are tired of praying, it is not because we are tired of Him.

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Mt 11:28-30)

Tell Him your sorrows and do not tire of doing so. Even if your lips do not move and your body is heavy, your heart and mind simply need to think of Him. Choose to be with Him. He has never forsaken either one of us; He will never do so. He is the ultimate Friend – better than Him, you will never find. But do not stop talking to Him and listening to Him because this is your act of faith in God. This is your act of hope in God. This is your act of love for God.

The Answer to Beat All Answers

Finally, if the answer to your questions and prayers still does not seem as clear cut as a definitive “yes” or a resounding “no”, remember that God Himself said, “See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me.” (Is 49:16) That is His reverberating assurance of the one thing we can be sure of and depend on: His Love.

I have you and your intentions in my heart and fervent prayers. I pray that you struggle against any fear and put all your trust in our Heavenly Father, knowing that nothing is impossible with God.

In true friendship, with great love and a ridiculous amount of affection,

Barbara

PS: Looking forward to being reminded of the same things when I too stumble into tiredness.

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A Lesson from Easter

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In the world’s broad field of battle, in the bivouac of life, be not like dumb driven cattle! Be a hero in the strife! Trust no future, however pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act, – act in the living present! Heart within, and God overhead!

These are a couple of lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem, A Psalm of Life. I think these lines capture well what our attitude towards the world and life ought to be in light of Easter. We ought to be hopeful, but not pollyannish. Easter is an immeasurable source of hope, but we must remember that it was not possible without Good Friday. And, therefore, while hope must always remain in our hearts, we must steel ourselves for the struggles to come in this “bivouac of life.”

Suffering is not Gone, but Bearable

For the love of God is this, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whoever is begotten by God conquers the world” (1 Jn 5:1-6). We must be careful here to not take the wrong message from this passage from the Second Sunday of Easter. It may be very natural to read “And his commandments are not burdensome” as saying that it is easy to follow God’s commandments. One only needs to read about Christ’s suffering in the agony of the garden to be disabused of that notion. I don’t think someone who is sweating blood and praying for “this chalice” to be passed from him is someone who is having an easy go of things.

Rather, what this passage means, I argue, is that you will not find yourself being swayed by the transient, popular notions of the day. You will not be driven like cattle, as Longfellow puts it. Your actions and thoughts will be anchored in what you believe is good and true and in accord with God’s commandments. You will not force this conviction on anyone, but you will not allow yourself to be unmoored merely because the world thinks it would be better if you were.

Just as Christ told His disciples that they must “take up your cross (Mat 16:24)” to follow Him. It is not easy to carry the cross, but it is not burdensome because we will not be overcome by it or succumb to its weight. The death on the cross while difficult and gruesome does not have the final word.

Act in the Living Present

The commission we receive from Easter then is not merely a celebration of the resurrection. Though it certainly does involve that. However, we do not properly celebrate the resurrection unless we are living out its call. Our action plan should be more or less known from our Lenten preparation. As I said previously, Lent should serve as a Damascus experience for us. Just as St. Paul knew what he needed to do after that encounter, so too should we after Lent.

The point is not to then give up on our strictures or disciplines as a reward for engaging in them in the first place. They are there to remind us that the joy of Easter does not mean we now get to have it easy. It means that now pain and suffering will not stop us nor have the final word. We will have the strength to help each other through this “broad field of battle” and in so doing be “heroes in the strife.”

If, perhaps, we did not have quite as reflective, penitential, fruitful a Lent as we might have hoped. There is always today, tomorrow, and all of the other days to engage in the necessary self-reflection and discipline to find out where we can improve ourselves and where we are being called to work in this life. I would like to close then with the final stanza from Wadsworth’s poem:

“Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.”

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Missals, Mistakes, and the Mission for Souls

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Here in Italy we recently changed our edition of the Roman Missal, the book that guides the priest through the celebration of the Mass. Priests were given the option to start using it in November of 2020, but on Easter Sunday of 2021 its use became obligatory. While the changes were perhaps less dramatic than those presented by the new English-language missal some ten years ago (for instance, who can forget when “And also with you” became “And with your spirit”?), both then and now the use of the new missals brought an unintended consequence: after the changes, it is easy to tell when someone has been away from the Church.

This is particularly the case in Italy, where the majority of the population was raised Catholic. Before the change, during baptisms, weddings, and funerals, most people could follow along and pretend reasonably well that they knew what was going on. After the change, and in particular with the switch in the words of the Our Father, it is no longer as easy to fake.

The Larger Problem

Such mishaps reveal an underlying phenomenon: many people don’t go to church. Perhaps more disconcerting is that the vast majority seem to pay no mind to the Church at all; they are indifferent to the lack of religion. Here lies the real problem: God has become an accessory to life, like a purse, a backpack, or Tylenol. If you need it (in a moment of crisis or because it’s convenient) then you spend time with it; if it’s not useful, then it can be cast aside.

All of us should be affected by our non-practicing brothers and sisters. After all, if the Church is a family and is the Body of Christ, then what happens to one affects us all, just as a headache or a stubbed toe makes the whole body miserable. However, this problem affects parents and grandparents in a particular way since they are “the first teachers of their child in the ways of faith,” as the Rite of Baptism puts it.

Recently a Catholic writer posted some suggestions for parents whose children do not practice the faith. As I understood it, one counsel was to admit that they had probably fallen short in their own practice of the faith, had made mistakes in raising their children, and that they should try to learn from those errors. On the one hand, this is most certainly true: everyone makes mistakes and, if there are still children at home, prayerful reflection could provide some insights as to how to go about passing on the faith.

On the other hand, in my experience, the ones most affected by the lack of faith of their children are the parents and grandparents of grown children. In such cases, it doesn’t seem that reflecting on past mistakes makes much sense. Instead, the real issue seems to be that of human freedom: we are free to choose.

So, what is a parent to do? I think there are three truths worth considering, and one concrete thing to be done.

The First Truth

The great Spanish bishop and educator, St. Manuel González, certainly had his fair share of difficulties and troublesome pupils. Of his many maxims and suggestions, two are particularly pertinent for us. First, the seeds of faith we sow in souls always bear fruit: we hope for a harvest of virtues but, if not, then at least there will be a harvest of remorse of conscience. In other words, when we try to teach children (our own or others) right from wrong, good from evil, and the truths of the faith, what seeps into their souls with God’s grace always produces something. We hope that this fruit takes the form of virtues and holiness but, if not, at least it will take the form of repentance.

Along those lines, my community’s first oratory was frequented by the meanest and most challenging children in the neighborhood. Even with the care and attention of priests, seminarians, and sisters, the lessons regarding God’s goodness and love, many ended up making a living out of their criminal activities. Yet, one day the prison chaplain came for a visit, and he remarked that he could always tell which of his prisoners had spent time in our oratory. When asked why, he replied, “Because your children are the only ones who will ask for a priest when they are dying.” Now, I don’t believe anyone would hold up such children as models at the oratory . . . but if there’s a hall of fame, such ones might make it on the list, and perhaps more of them than we realize.

The Second Truth

The same saint points out another truth: even if all we see is how bad our children are, even if we see only the ways they offend or ignore Him, even then, they are not as bad as they would have been without our examples or teachings. When a child receives the sacraments, sanctifying grace, and what we teach them, the impact on their souls is priceless. One of the tasks of grace is to heal the wounds of Original Sin, and even if a child should have the misfortune to fall into mortal sin, the time they spent in God’s grace has done wonders for their souls.

The Third and Greatest Truth

However, we also have another great truth, one that is inescapably and inevitably true. It is this: sin never makes anyone happy for very long. It simply can’t. When St. Thomas Aquinas and many philosophers spoke of sin, they described it not as something substantial in itself but rather as a lack or an absence of the good. Things are only complete and perfect when ordered to God; outside of that order, they are missing something. If true happiness is only found in God, then it follows that sin cannot fill anyone up for very long, no more than a leak in a boat can be solved by adding more holes.

What is a Parent, a Friend, a Catholic to Do?

What has been said is true enough, but such thoughts perhaps serve to console us rather than give us a plan of work. There is much work to be done. What is this work? Suggestions range from inviting non-practicing members back to Church, arranging phone calls and conversations, and the like. These are good things, and we shouldn’t dismiss them.

However, there is something even more fundamental, and it follows from what we’re asking God. The conversion of a family member or friend is a grace, a miracle. In fact, if the resurrection of a person from the dead is a great and impressive matter, how much more is the return of supernatural life to a soul that was dead in sin! That is why the most important things we can do is to pray and offer spiritual sacrifices for those who are not practicing.

Daily Mass and Adoration

What is the best thing to do for these souls? The best thing is to spend time in Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. After all, there is re-presented Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, precisely where He died to give life to the world. St. Claude de la Colombière has written a beautiful passage on the Mass, and reminds us of its overwhelming power:

God is more honored by a single Mass than He could be by all the actions of angels and men together, however fervent and heroic they might be. How seldom do we thank Jesus Christ that, in doing away with all other sacrifices, He has left us a sacrifice that cannot fail to be pleasing to God, a victim capable of effacing the sins of the world. When I hear Mass, when I offer the Holy Sacrifice as priest or as a member of the Church, I can with full courage and confidence defy heaven to do anything that pleases God more. Whatever I hope for and desire I can pray for confidently. I can ask for great graces of every kind for myself, my friends, and my enemies, and far from being ashamed at asking for so much I shall know it is little in comparison with what I offer. My only fear is that I shall ask too little and not have a firm, unshakeable hope of obtaining not only what I ask but far more. If we only knew the treasure we hold in our hands! (Spiritual Direction, Ignatius Press, 3-4)

A Biblical Example

When we pray for the conversion of our family members and friends, we act like the four men who brought a paralytic to Christ. The event is found in all three synoptic Gospels (Matthew 9:1-8, Mark 2:1-12, and Luke 5:17-26). Our attention is almost instantly focused on the paralytic, but it’s worthwhile meditating on those mysterious men who brought him to Jesus.

All three Gospels are vague about who these figures are. Yet, all three insist that “Jesus saw their faith,” meaning the faith of those who carried the paralytic – not the paralytic’s faith. It’s quite likely that the paralytic was not only physically immobile but also spiritual paralyzed. Perhaps he didn’t even have enough faith to ask Jesus for healing. This scene plays itself out many times as we live out our faith: we bring others to Jesus so that He can heal them. On our own, we are incapable of healing anyone; only Jesus brings about conversion, but we bring these souls, mainly through prayer and penance, to Jesus Christ.

A Real-Life Example

It’s important to bear in mind that this work is often hidden, and we are left to trust that, in heaven, we will know the effects of our prayers. The story is told of a religious sister, a Poor Clare, who offered herself in prayer and sacrifice for her brother who, though superficially pious, was proud and obsessed with worldly success.

At a certain point, when she was the abbess of her community, God revealed to her that her life would end soon, and she offered to endure a great deal of suffering and torments during it. She suffered so much that it seemed that “every nerve was racked with pain” (Reville, Saint Francis Xavier, 17).

Having offered herself as a “holocaust of charity,” she remained cheerful throughout her illness and was able to convince her family to leave her brother at the university to study since she knew that it was there that he would reform his life (Bartoli & Maffei, The Life of St. Francis Xavier, 27).

Today, that sister is almost entirely forgotten. Very few books mention her role in her brother’s conversion, but we remember her brother. In fact, we remember him every year on December 3rd as St. Francis Xavier. Without his sister, who brought him to Christ’s feet, we might not have one of the greatest missionary saints in the Church.

Sometimes, it is tempting to give up, especially when we don’t see the effects of our prayers and sacrifices. However, this much is certain: God wants the salvation of our brothers and sisters or our children even more than we do. After all, they are His children too. All He asks is for us to cooperate with Him in this work.

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O Faithful Stewards!

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What is our reason for living? One of our duties on earth is to be faithful stewards of God’s creations. We live for a purpose greater than ourselves.

Therefore, what do we need to succeed in our faithful stewardship? We need to love God with all our strength, mind, heart, and soul, and love one another as God loves each of us. This love is our driving force. It is the inspiration that sets our priorities in life.

For Freedom’s Sake

For this love to flourish in our stewardship, we must fight off temptations of sin and protect our God-given freedom. “Sin is an abuse of the freedom that God gives to created persons so that they are capable of loving him and loving one another” [CCC 387]. Therefore, God gives us every opportunity to repent our sins.

Repentance is our shield that protects and preserves our freedom and love from irreparable harm in order to carry out our stewardship. Although Baptism washes away our original sin, that sin has weakened human nature. As a result, we are still prone to disobey our Lord, obscuring our purpose in life. By that first sin—“man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command” [CCC 397].

Indeed, repentance is a vital necessity. Disobedience prevents us from seeing and believing that we are truly redeemable in God’s eyes! In other words, God does not give up on us. That fact should be enough reason for living as God’s faithful stewards. Our repentance keeps our loving trust in God alive.

Look Forward with Hope

Because our lives and our world can be redeemed, we have reason for hope. As faithful stewards, we are called to pray for the conversion of sinners. We are called to make sacrifices for the salvation of souls. Do we think it is not worth the effort to offer up our time, talent, and treasure for God’s sake? We need only to look at Jesus Christ for the answer.

God-made-man came into the world. In his great love for humanity, he sacrificed himself for our salvation. His life, death, resurrection, and ascension into Heaven tell us it is worth the effort. If life in this world seems bleak right now, it is because so many have abandoned God in their hearts. They have forgotten their reason for living. They have given up their faith and their stewardship.

Remember, our faithful stewardship on earth, according to God’s plan, leads us to eternal life in Heaven. That can only happen with an open heart that does not harden. Mary, our Blessed Mother, is a beautiful model of opening her loving heart to all people. Throughout the centuries, the apparitions of the Mother of God remind us that with an open heart, we have Heaven on earth.

From Heaven, our Lord sends his loving graces and blessings into our hearts and souls to guide us in our thoughts, words, and deeds. With that daily guidance, by way of the Holy Spirit, we see that when we stop offending God, we stop offending one another. And when we stop offending one another, we stop offending God. As God’s stewards, loving and living faithfully, we keep hope alive, giving us peace on earth. Our reason for living is truly worth the effort. Amen!

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The Catholic and Gnostic Views of Material Reality

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Simply, the Catholic and Gnostic views of materiality are, respectively, Good and Evil, which engender hope and despair. It is paradoxical that the modern adoration of materiality in the form of technology should be concurrent and compatible with the Gnostic regard of materiality as evil. If we take the material and its pleasures as a god, we are quickly faced with the question of ennui and despair, ‘Is that all there is?’ However, the despair of Gnosticism is worse than that of mere idolatry. It is blasphemy. It sees created matter, not as the ultimate good as does idolatry. It sees created matter as evil. It is blasphemy to say what God has created is evil. Though a lesser evil, idolizing matter in its limited goodness can be a prelude to Gnosticism.

The Catholic View of Material Idolatry

We often think of the Catholic opposition to the world, the flesh, and the devil as opposition to and denigration of material reality. But, it is not so. The Catholic view recognizes the world and the flesh as good in themselves, but limited in beauty, goodness, truth, and existence. The Catholic opposition is not to such beauty, but to making it our end in its limited existence. It is opposition to our wanting solely something, which leads to despair, rather than our wanting All, who yields infinite beatitude.

A Portrayal of Idolatry

Artists help us to understand material reality more clearly, not by our direct contemplation of nature, but by our appreciation of nature in its portrayal through artistic emphasis. Eugene O’Neil’s play, The Iceman Cometh, portrays the despair of material idolatry in the middle of the twentieth century. Life’s promise of happiness is a fraud. Pleasure is transient. Our seeking of happiness is constantly frustrated. One escape from the bleakness of life is drunkenness, but it too, is transient. The only true escape from the idolatry of matter, is suicide. In his youth, O’Neil lived the life of the proverbial drunken sailor. He suffered from depression and alcoholism all his life.

Material Idolatry Yields to Gnosticism as the Culture of Death

In the last fifty years, the despair of material idolatry has been yielding to the despair of Gnosticism. Gnosticism identifies material reality not as the idolatrous source of human happiness, but rather as evil in itself. It is quite poignantly identified as the culture of death.

In the creation of material reality by God in the first chapter of Genesis, God calls material creation ‘good’ seven times.

In the perennial philosophy, it is evident that the existence of each human being depends upon matter as the source of his individual identity and thereby his very existence. God could not create a human being without matter. Each human is neither a body nor a soul, but a composite of body and soul. In Ephesians 5:29, St. Paul notes that “No one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it”. Each of us exists in our personal identity, via the identity of our matter.

Yet, the essential goodness of matter is compatible with our suffering through matter. In Adam and in our personal sins, we rebel against the love of God for us. Consequently, our emotions instead of prompting us solely to do good, are in revolt against us. Adam and we are no longer in sync with our environment, “Cursed be the ground because of you!” (Gen 3:17). God’s response is to redeem us through created flesh, through his own incarnation.

The crowning glory of matter is the Incarnation, “And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” (Jn. 1:14) It is matter, which makes possible God’s becoming man and redeeming us through his human flesh. We receive Divine Grace through matter in the Mass and the other sacraments. In the Eucharist, God shows that he cannot wait until our death to be intimately united with us. “Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you.” (Is 49:15)

The Modern View of Creation

The modern view is that we are creators of reality. “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” It is not that liberty is the right to freely discover the meaning of existence, the universe, and the mystery of life. The modern view of liberty is the right and the power to define and thereby create meaning in meaningless matter.

This is a task beyond human power. It is God that defines and identifies all material things in their very natures in the act of bringing them into existence.

A Tragic Instance of the Despair of Gnosticism

One aspect of the Gnostic foundation of the culture of death is the current belief that our bodies may not correspond to our personal identity, particularly in our biological sexuality. The evil of materiality is evidenced in this error, according to the Gnostic view.

Recently, a youth convinced of this particular error of materiality expressed his conviction in the words, “I feel like I’m in a box, I am in the wrong place.” Although he was encouraged by his parents and had initiated the process of being transgendered, he could not endure the oppression of his materiality. This feeling may have been even more acute due to his interest in the arts, which makes our view of life even more poignant. The evening before taking his own life, he said, “I feel trapped. This is not happening enough for me.” Gnosticism, in this instance, convinced its victim that he was a soul imprisoned in a body, that the only full escape from the evil of matter was suicide.

There is hope, not only that our culture should see the goodness and beauty of matter, but that this youth will be in the presence of the Beatific Vision and be graced with the resurrection of his body at the end of time. By grace, God may have presented to him Christ’s Incarnational beauty and love in all its materiality. Let us pray that this youth perceived and accepted the materiality of Christ and his own materiality with joy, just before his death. May he, thereby, rest in peace.

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Questions from Jesus, Then and Now

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Several years ago in one of his many talks, Bishop Robert Barron remarked that a great retreat could be written on the questions asked by Jesus in the gospels. He is right, there are ample questions for reflection in the gospels. Msgr. Charles Pope posted a full list of 100 questions from the gospels here, encouraging his readers to reflect. While there is no room for a full retreat in this, I want to offer some of the larger questions of Jesus as related to our time.

The gospels should spur us to spiritual reflection in any time of comfort or suffering. As the world has had a lot of suffering in the last two years, there is no better time than now to lean on Our Lord. If it helps, try engaging the imagination to sit in the audience. Every question, every teaching moment was for those people listening to Jesus, to us today, and to every generation in between. In each question asked, Jesus draws us to a particular teaching, toward virtue or against vice, and invites us to apply it to our lives.

Charity

For if you love those who love you, what reward have you?  Do not even the tax collectors do the same? (Matthew 5:46).

Jesus calls every Christian to a radical love of neighbor. This includes every person without exemption. In the fear that has throttled the world in the COVID crisis, battle lines have been drawn through friendships, families, societies, parishes, and entire nations. Fear has crippled our ability to love and treat each other in true Christian charity. Both sides of the aisle need to treat the other side as Christ would treat them. I indict myself–I have been on the receiving end of mistreatment, and I have been on the end that is angry and judgmental of others. Jesus wants us to love like Him, and no follower of His should be on either of those ends.

Anxiety

And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life? (Matthew 6:27).

Although the Beatitudes are the most well-known portion of the Sermon on the Mount, the entire sermon lasts three chapters (Matthew 5-7). Jesus covers a lot of ground. In this particular section (6:25-34), He exhorts us not to worry. He gives examples to drive the point home: consider that the Father feeds the birds of the air (6:26); look at the splendor of the lilies of the field (6:28-29). The Father does not give us every detail of His plan, but He promises to take care of us.

The audience that Jesus addressed faced far less of a secure life than us. Work was hard to come by, disease could quickly overtake a loved one, and human lives were not valued. There is no easy cure for anxiety. Thinking of times and places less fortunate than the United States actually makes the stakes even higher for what Jesus said. Even in times that had a fraction of the security of ours, Jesus repeats to those on the mount to not be anxious. He is specific: do not be anxious about what we eat, drink, and wear.

Jesus walked on earth and experienced all those needs and note that He does not say to have no emotional response to anxiety. A certain amount of that boils down to simply being human. Jesus counsels us to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (6:33).

Trust

What man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?  Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? (Matthew 7:9-10).

Jesus exhorts us to trust in this teaching. We are meant to trust the Father’s will whether in good times or in bad. I think few people have trouble with this verse in normal times—but what if the Father, in His divine plan, gives us the “bread” of suffering?

One weak analogy is trying to get my kids to eat things they do not like. If meals were up to my oldest child, he would have a steady diet of hamburgers and ice cream. With suffering, I often look at God the same way. Why can’t I pick my own cross? I want the hamburgers-and-ice-cream kind of “cross.”

Part of trust is an act of faith, that God will not abandon us. Sometimes I fear we perceive God to hand out suffering and run away, leaving us on our own. God does not leave us on our own. He gives us grace, the Holy Spirit, and the Eucharist–the true bread of suffering. We have recourse to Him in prayer. He gave us the Church to support each other.

Another part of trusting is remembering. Thinking back on certain times of suffering in my life, I grew in ways I never thought I would. In hindsight, I am thankful for the painful times in a way that I never could while I was undergoing them. Suffering exacts a toll on our spiritual, emotional, and often physical health. As hard as it is, what graces await down the road? What areas of personal growth?

Faith

Do you believe that I am able to do this? (Matthew 9:28)

So much has been stripped away from our regular lives since COVID. So many tragedies, social events, and the complete disruption of COVID have rocked the world over the last two years. We cannot say with full knowledge why God permits things like that to happen, but we can assert that the ultimate reason behind it is the salvation of souls. The Lord intends to do some good with these awful things.

I see this question from Our Lord in 2021 asking: do you believe that I am able to heal you? Do you believe that I am able to save you? That I am enough for you? At times in my life, the tallest hurdle in my spiritual life has been believing Jesus truly loves me. Once we have that question answered, look out world! It carries over into our friendships, marriages, work-life, and more. I encourage you to sit with the Lord in prayer and fill in your own ending to the question.

Alertness

Are you still sleeping? (Matthew 26:45)

After the Last Supper, Jesus and the apostles retired to the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus withdrew to pray and the apostles could not stay awake. This question in v. 45 is not the first time Jesus returned from prayer to find them sleeping. It was not the second time. It was the third time!

The agony in the garden was painful for Jesus. We know that we read it on paper, but Jesus opens His heart to Peter, James, and John. “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.” (Matthew 26:38). Even to death! And they fell asleep.

It happens to Christians in every age in one way or another. Are we any better than the slumbering apostles, leaving our spiritual lives behind for the comforts of the world? Or entertainment, or other selfish pursuits? The Church is being assailed from without and within, from top to the bottom. The Body of Christ is in agony. Just as Our Lord ultimately went to the cross, His bride will soon follow. The situation of the Church will get worse before it gets better. The best thing we can do is wake up and keep watch with Jesus.

Always End with Hope

It is so easy to feel powerless; the forces raging through the world are beyond our control. Let us use these questions of Jesus to focus on what we can do. Start with repentance. Work on virtues. Seek the Lord daily in prayer. In short, do as St. James commands: “be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (James 1:22, RSVCE).

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Faith Is Like a Marriage Which Makes Us Hope

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The person you love most can cut you the deepest. Anyone who has been married for a minute knows this.

As a spouse, you have literally mortgaged your entire life on this one person, this vow, this covenant, and on living and loving them until “death do you part.” When you’ve shared a bed with someone for a year, ten years, half a century, you get to know them pretty well, and vice versa. If you’re a spiteful person, you have plenty of ammunition you can use against them – and vice versa.

Though my wife and I have a good, healthy marriage, we are witnessing in friends the complete leveling of theirs. This is not the place to divulge details, of course, but I can say that their entire foundation has been called into question. For years they had been superficially coasting with minimal blood traveling through restricted veins, but recently an artery has ruptured in their marriage that has caused a proverbial aneurysm and brought it to the brink of collapse.

The issues are serious, and it will take an enormous amount of investment and re-commitment to bring it back from the ledge, not to mention the most important element of all, prayer.

Church as Spouse

I said when I was on The Journey Home that when I came into the Church at the age of eighteen, I knew it was for life. My First Holy Communion and Confirmation felt like I was literally “walking down the aisle on my wedding day.” So, I’ve always had this feeling that my relationship with the Church was not a fad or a passing commitment but in every way a covenant. And it is fitting that the Lord describes His relationship with His people throughout scripture in marital language. The Church is the spouse of Christ.

My wife and I are one hundred percent committed to one another, and one hundred percent committed to the Church as well. This is because one’s faith as a Catholic cannot exist in any real way outside of the Church. Many Protestant Christians have trouble understanding this reality. To Catholics, it is a foreign concept that one could “love Christ and not love the Church,” any more than one could be truthful in saying he loved God but hated his brother (1 John 4:20).

Ruptured Artery

Some people feel liberated by their recent throwing off of the shackles of the institutional Church – as in freedom from the gaslighting, the cognitive dissonance, the fear of the threat of eternal damnation, etc. They are making the claim that none of it is real, none of it true, and that the recent promulgation of the Vatican document, Traditiones custodies, proves that it’s nothing but nonsense.

Even worse, they are claiming that those who stay in the Church are fools suffering from a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, especially since it’s obvious at this point that the Vicar of Christ himself is acting like an abusive father giving out beatings. They feel vindicated by their escape. The “I told you sos” from these religious pundits feel like salt in the wound for the rest of us (who hold to the traditional faith and Mass) who now have to contend with the “What nows?”

For the first time in my history as a Catholic, the thought came to me: “What if they shut down the Latin Mass and we just…stopped going?” What if we just gave up and said, “You know, I don’t believe any of this anymore.”

Life as a traditional Catholic is hard at this moment because we are dealing with the uncertainty of the future of our worship and also with the existential questions and the pragmatic “where do we go on Sunday if this thing goes through” decisions that we will soon need to make. The existential situation may be like many of those spouses being crucified in their marriages who have the temptation planted in their mind during those moments of insurmountable agony and betrayal: “What if I leave the house for a pack of cigarettes and just don’t come back?”

Humiliation and Heroism

My friend Leila Miller wrote an incredible book: Primal Loss: The Adult Children of Divorce Speak. The book gave voice to those who had suffered from the trauma of divorce – namely, the children – but some readers expressed concern that that couldn’t be where the story ended.

So she wrote a follow up book called Impossible Marriages Redeemed to tell the story of marriages that had been put up on the cross to be picked apart by ravens and yet did not come down off of it. By God’s grace, many of these couples experienced a complete destruction and leveling of their marriage and yet refused to concede. They tied themselves to the mast of the ship, like Odysseus, and stuck to their vows by sheer force of will.

And because they did not give up but, rather, threw themselves on the mercy of God to save their marriages when they didn’t know what else to do, God heard their desperate prayer and slowly brought their marriages back from the dead. With man, this was impossible. But with God, all things are possible (Matthew 19:26).

The promulgation of Traditionis custodes feels like a similar kind of humiliation. All we want to do, as Catholics of the traditional persuasion, is to worship God in the fullest, most fitting way possible. Many of us can attest that our participation in the traditional Mass has borne good fruit in our lives and is not (despite the gaslighting) rooted in a spirit of disobedience. Were the CDF to say tomorrow, “You can no longer worship in this way,” many of us will be faced with the stark reality of asking: “Well, how are we to worship, then?”

I think about Padre Pio a lot when he was forbidden to offer Mass publicly and how difficult and painful that must have been for him. But he accepted it as a crucifixion in obedience. I don’t quite know if it’s an apt comparison because he was a Franciscan with a strict vow of religious obedience.

But I do wonder if many of us have been gliding along superficially in our faith and worship, ignoring the truth that if we are to follow Christ we are to be baptized into his death (Romans 6:3). What could be more painful than having the thing we care about the most ripped away from us, and even more painfully so, not by a Communist government or a leftist mob, but by the Church herself? I suppose it can be likened to the spiteful action of the spouse that knows us and our vulnerabilities well.

Christianity in the Desert

We may be on the eve of a period of uncertainty, liturgical wandering, and painful humiliation. And the threat of schism and defection to Orthodoxy and the SSPX may prove to be an extremely likely outcome. When it comes to the Vatican’s forecasting of who these traditionalists are, a friend aptly noted, “They are expecting college Republicans, and they’re getting the Maccabees.”

And yet, for myself as the spiritual head of my household, I believe the Lord is allowing this oppression. It is not an accident or something that falls outside of His will; nothing happens apart from His will! Should we be surprised that we are going through a crucifixion of sorts – as if this was not a part of our discipleship!

If the Lord is leveling His Church to the foundation the way He leveled the Temple, will He not rebuild it? Or do we not trust Him enough to guide us through this, but instead leave our marriage and forfeit the deepening of our faith and love in the Golden Years through the fiery trial (1 Peter 4:12)? We are people of the Resurrection, as St. Paul writes:

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then empty [too] is our preaching; empty, too, your faith. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all…. But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be firm, steadfast, always fully devoted to the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:13-14.19. 57-58)

Firm Hope in Christ

I have hope. I must have hope to survive. If we go through dark times, we must then lean more on Christ to guide us through the darkness. If we are stripped down liturgically, crowned with thorns, we are in good company.

To the extent that the wheat is separated and the faithful are not blown away like chaff, that we endure our suffering and do not defect, we will be resurrected. If you don’t believe that, then upon what is your faith in the crucified Christ founded?

I don’t know what God is doing, but I lament and assent with Job: “Though He slay me, yet I will trust in him!” (Job 13:15).

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And My Daughter Wept for Jerusalem

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When my daughter was younger, we had a ritual.  It started when I first began my theological journey. I had the privilege of studying Theology as a laywoman at a seminary run by the Benedictine monks of Mt. Angel Abbey. The campus is located on the abbey grounds and is beautiful, peaceful, and serene. One of the many benefits of studying there was access to the abbey church. The monks, of course, observe the Divine Office praying five times a day plus Mass. There was always a break in classes at noon and, if I was so inclined, I could go to noon prayer, which I did almost every day. It was a privilege to be able to participate. I had never heard of the Divine Office before, so this became my introduction.

I was already in the habit of getting up early to pray or read the Bible but became enthralled with the Office. I asked some of the seminarians about it and they explained that the Office is contained in a set of books. These books can be overwhelming and confusing for someone new to this type of prayer, so I did a search on an app store and came across an app called DivineOffice. There are other apps available now such as iBreviary, but DivineOffice is the one I began with. I really liked it because I could get up and pray with the lights off so as not to disturb anyone. I also enjoyed listening to the prayers, which is a nice feature of the app, and seeing that others around the world were praying too.

In the evening, when I put my daughter to bed, I would sing her a song that began with the opening line of the Divine Office: “Oh God, come to my assistance. Oh Lord, make haste to help me.” I like the line because it reminded her (and me) that we can call on God for assistance and that it’s okay to ask him to make haste. Although, in all honesty, it often seems to me that he does not do so. I’m impatient and want answers immediately. Instead, God allows me time to patiently wait to see the beauty of his plan unfold.  In the beginning, I would sing her the song the monks sing at noon prayer.  At one point we switched to singing, “O Christ Who Art the Light and Day,” which is a little longer song and can be found online. Eventually, we began to listen tonight prayer together.  We listened to the Divine Office lying in bed with the lights off praying the prayer of the Church.  It was very relaxing and nice for us both.

As time went on, she started joining me for morning prayer, lying quietly beside me listening, and spending time with me. Thus, my daughter’s introduction to prayer beyond a quick goodnight prayer to God. Through this introduction she became open to seeking answers to things she didn’t understand about what we heard at Church or something a friend, usually, a non-believer had said to her about religion.

One year she started noticing that the Christmas season was starting very early in the year, somewhere in the middle of October.  Everywhere we went my daughter would remark, “How can they have Christmas stuff out already?”  I’m not sure why this all surprised her but she did not like it.  We live in Poland, so we do not have the Black Friday demarcation date to officially begin decorating for Christmas.  Apparently, my daughter has an internal gage, which told her that clearly, it was too early.

However, soon she was influenced by all the marketing and wanted to start the holiday as soon as possible. The imaginary line had been adjusted. I could not figure out how but suddenly it was appropriate to play Christmas music and buy a tree in November.  Considering that Poland does not celebrate Thanksgiving I was having a hard time transitioning.  I just seemed to be unable to move to the holiday season without it. So, in an effort to stall the inevitable and with the serendipitous occurrence of Hanukkah on Thanksgiving that year, I decided we’d focus on that.  Krakow has a Jewish quarter so learning more about other traditions as well as our connection to Judaism seemed like a good idea.

“But what is Hanukkah?” she asked.

I said, “Well, don’t tell any of my Jewish friends but I’m not exactly sure… except for what I’ve learned from passing conversations with them but we can read about it in the Bible.”

My daughter was delighted.  I’m not sure if it was because she really liked to read the Bible or if she just liked to snuggle in bed and listen to a story, either reason was fine with me. So, we began to read Maccabees which contains the story of how the celebration of Hanukkah came about.

The Book of 1 Maccabees begins with the story of how Alexander the Great “… advanced to the ends of the earth, gathering plunder from many nations; the earth fell silent before him” (1 Maccabees 1:3). An ominous beginning. The book continues with an account of the rulers that followed him and their domination of the people of Israel. My daughter listened, pausing now and again to ask about a word or something she didn’t understand but soon she simply listened until I heard a sharp intake of breath from her and when I looked over she was rubbing the tears from her eyes.  “What’s wrong?” I asked but she couldn’t speak.  Quickly it occurred to me that she was crying because of what I had just read.

He insolently invaded the sanctuary and took away the golden altar, the lampstand for the light with all its fixtures, the offering table the cups and the bowls, the golden censers, the curtain, the crowns, and the golden ornament on the façade of the temple.  He stripped off everything, and took away the gold and silver and the precious vessels; he also took all the hidden treasures he could find (1 Maccabees 1:21-23).

I said: “Oh, don’t cry.  It’s okay.” And then I heard this come from my mouth, “It’s only a story.”  I must pause here. This is not “only a story.” This is a historical account of God’s people, an account which, when read in light of the New Testament, reveals God’s Divine Revelation. These are events that happened to real people. But given the severity of the reading I wanted to calm my child.

Trying to be brave, my daughter said weakly: “But they’re stealing from God’s house.”

“I know, honey,” I said, then paused and read on. “And there was great mourning in Israel…” (1 Maccabees 1:25).

As we read, I started to pay more attention to her reaction and she lay there quietly still trying to be brave, but it just got worse: “Women who had had their children circumcised were put to death, in keeping with the decree, with the babies hung from their necks; their families also and those who had circumcised them were killed” (1 Maccabees 1:60-61).

Then we paused.  She was crying and asking, “Why did they do that?”  I thought for a moment and told her that I did not know.  Then I told her it was okay to cry.  I wondered why I hadn’t because we should cry over things such as this.  We should cry over how we treat each other.  We should be sad when hearing about wars.  Not just angry, but sad.  We should cry.  We teach our children not to be so sensitive.  We let them watch stories filled with violence on television.  We let them see the news of the world and slowly desensitize them.

I thought about all of this and mostly that my small daughter cried because they stole from God’s house.  This should wound me to the core as it did her.  And so I paused and reflected feeling the grief of the words.  And we cried.  We both cried.  It was a time to be sad.

I could write much about this alone. I live in a city that holds a constant reminder of the atrocities that have taken place here; the entrance to the Ghetto, Schindler’s factory, and, a mere thirty miles away, Auschwitz, a place that all Polish high schoolers from Krakow are required to go. A reminder of a foreign invader who slaughtered Jews, Poles, intellectuals, handicapped, priests and religious or anyone who defied the regime or was deemed unacceptable.

Currently, Russia has amassed troops on the Ukraine border, the border between Poland and Bialystok is closed, the conflict has erupted in Kazakhstan, not to mention the continued wars that have been raging across the globe, some for more than seventy years. So yes, it is a time to cry and say to our God, “Oh God, come to my assistance!  O Lord, make haste to help me!”

But Christianity is a religion of hope. In such darkness how can we find peace? For me, the prayer of the Church is a good place to start. I also believe that regardless of the evil in the world, peace comes first through prayer and then by acts of charity. I am powerless over the violence in the streets and in the world, but I can help my neighbor. I can help those around me who need help. I am not always capable of helping in a profound way, but I can always smile at someone, hold the door for the next person, ask how a friend or acquaintance is doing. I believe the most precious thing I can give to another individual is my time and attention. As the tune from my childhood goes; “they will know we are Christians by our love…”

At times, however, I am not capable of even this. Blocked as I am, by my own self-centered fear or lack of time, I fall short. The way through this is to pray and seek the Peace of Christ above all else. Through daily prayer and participation in the Sacraments, the self-centeredness and fear begin to melt away. I am able to see beyond myself. When I am open, I see that God seeks contact with me through my own contact with others. We are the body of Christ.

Recently, I spoke with my spiritual advisor because I am very busy and many people were calling to ask me for spiritual help. I felt overwhelmed, that I didn’t have enough time to do my work. He told me simply to focus on what is in front of me, do what I can to help, and leave the rest to God. Very simply put, he said: “God makes time.” When I follow this advice there seems always to be enough time.

The other thing I can do to help change the world is to teach my daughter how to pray. To give her the shelter from the storm found within a simple conversation with God. And of course, the healing power of the Eucharist and the Sacraments. There are not always answers to the evil I often see. I do not understand the times when God is silent but when I continue to stay present, for God is in this moment, then I find that as Julian of Norwich writes in her work Revelations of Divine Love, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall well.”

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Living the Spiritual Seasons of Our Lives

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Two years ago, I wrote an article called “How to Stick with Lent During Coronavirus.” It was the first COVID-related article at CS, published on March 14, 2020. When it came out I believed, as probably did the rest of the world, that all the shocking government-mandated restrictions and changes to daily life would be temporary.

Now, we are days away from the start of another Lenten season. While restrictions on practicing the faith here in the US are, mercifully, mostly removed, we can recognize that things are still “different,” and probably will be for a long time.

Some Catholics are wondering what the point is of going through the work of observing and living a penitential holy season – or even of returning to Mass – when the world is already as difficult as it is. This year’s Lent can be a time to realize what has changed in your life, move forward with God’s help, and recognize the truth that He still finds us – no matter what season of life we are living.

Lent Offers Hope

Lent is a penitential season; a time for fasting and giving up pleasures. These practices are the pathway to a less cluttered interior life, making straight the path for the Lord to enter our hearts.

For that reason, Lent can also be seen as a mini-retreat. It is a time that calls us to live in the world, but to be not of the world (1 John 2:15).  It is the perfect time for reflection, to grieve what has been, and experience healing. We do this in particular as we experience and grieve the agony Our Lord endured in His passion and death.

So, through the difficulty of quiet prayer and penitence during Lent, we emerge more whole – closer to God. This is a hopeful thing, rather than something to be dreaded.

God’s unchanging desire to be with us

You may feel unequal to the task of fully living a penitential season, and returning to the commitment of a faith life, when all of the past two years felt like a penance. You may have experienced real physical and emotional losses.

Remember, the way you feel about God does not change how He feels about you. Your salvation, and His love, are not dependent on anything you do (thank goodness!). Similarly, the grace received in the sacraments is real, whether you feel it works or not.

So, we can begin this Lent with real humility, and the question: what do you desire for me, Lord? It will take some time in prayer to go deeper into this question with God, but a good place to start is to decide to simply be with Him. That will always be something he desires of us.

How will I spend Lent?

Reflecting on the past couple of years, you may find yourself in a completely different state of life than the last Lent, or one prior. Perhaps you were married when the pandemic began, or are now. Maybe you’ve had children, changed jobs, moved, lost a parent, or experienced a major financial change. Your spiritual practices will likely reflect these changes.  And that is all right!  What worked for you in a past Lenten season may be different now.

This could be a good year to consider spending Lent in a new way. You may decide to move beyond “giving up” some pleasure in life. As I have written before, there are many ways to observe Lent aside from just giving up chocolate, alcohol, or that second cup of coffee. Consider “adding” something – a prayer practice, work of mercy, or outreach to loved ones, for example. Let the way you observe Lent reflect the current season of your life.

Take courage

Choosing to commit to God and live the faith takes courage because being Catholic means living in opposition to the world. In the act of prayer, we often encounter parts of ourselves we do not like. We may find that over the past few years we have become distracted from the spiritual life and allowed our vices to flourish – too much time on social media, too much time seeking solace in food and drink, allowing oneself to indulge in a sense of hopelessness about the future.

Now is not the time to give up. Now is the time to persist and to approach the faith with an extra dose of hard-earned humility.  As always, the world needs Catholics fully committed to the faith, spiritually battle-hardened to be a light in the world. Lent is the perfect season to return to your faith, and find out how it has grown, as God works in every season of our lives.

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