Category: The Catholic Weekly

Helpless

The other day, I had some time in between dropping off a kid and picking up a used refrigerator. I bought some lunch and ate it, and I still had time. So, with great reluctance, I slogged into the chapel.  

I appreciate chapel time, but I don’t enjoy it. It doesn’t feel spiritually magnificent when I’m actually there, but I believe it keeps me going through the rest of the week.  It’s a discipline, not a delight, and I’m okay with that. But it’s pretty rare that I go unless I “have” to – unless it’s my assigned hour. 

I did go, and I made a prayer that may be familiar to you. Something like: “Hello. I know you know what’s going on. I don’t know what to do. I’m sure you do. So, I’m asking. Please do something, I don’t know what. To refresh your memory: Here is the thing, which SUCKS. Here you go. I am helpless. Amen.” 

The specifics don’t matter. It’s a prayer that so many of us can and should pray as often as we need to.  

Technically, it’s called “offering it up,” and it’s what Catholics do when. . .well, when  anything. When they’re suffering, when they’re in pain, when they’re stuck. We should also offer things up when we’re rejoicing, or when we’re grateful.  

We’re supposed to invite God into our lives at every moment we realise we’re alive, starting with the moment we wake up. It doesn’t have to be a fancy, memorised prayer. 

Sometimes I will be outside and see something nice, like a graceful tree or an especially good cloud, and I will just mentally raise my glass to God. Cheers! Nice one! Just acknowledging I’m not alone; I’m with him. He’s with me. 

Or, of course, we offer up the opposite of “cheers.” I went to the chapel with a heavy load that I indisputably did not want, did not need, did not know what to do with.  

He promised he would help us carry our burdens. So I went in to hand this one over to him, because I could not carry it, but I knew he could.   

I went in, kneeled down, bowed my head, said my piece, and then looked up.  

Guess what? He was helpless, too. 

Maybe you’ve seen a crucifix. That’s kind of a central feature: The hands don’t work. They are stuck. They are nailed into place. He is helpless.  

A fine how-do-you-do, isn’t it? I, a professional Catholic, will be the first to admit to you that this is a system I do not understand. …

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

Image: Crucifixion, School of Rembrandt, 1657, public domain via Picryl

Free will and wobble

There’s a minor memory from my early days as a mother that I always recall with shame. It was just a little thing. My toddler ran out ahead of me and went through a set of automatic doors, but stumbled, and ended up standing in the way of the doors as they closed.  

In disproportionate terror (because all of my emotions were outsized at the time), I thrust my hand into the doorway to make the doors open. Then I snatched it away. Then I stuck my hand out again, and then I snatched it away.  

I did this, rapid-fire, several times while the door opened and closed and opened and closed and my child cried in bewilderment. Finally, some saner person stepped in, body-blocked the door, and we all emerged on the other side.  

Nobody was hurt but I was ashamed and disgusted with myself. I contrasted myself, savagely, with people who run into burning buildings to rescue children, or who dive into frigid water to save a drowning stranger. 

“I didn’t even think about it,” they tell the reporter covering the scene. “I’m no hero; I just did what I had to do.”  

Whereas I, a mother who allegedly loved her children, couldn’t even get myself to stick my hand in a door to save my baby from being crushed. SOME MOTHER. That’s what the reporter would say about me. SOME MOTHER SHE TURNED OUT TO BE. 

But over the next 25 years or so, I have learned something about heroism, and choices, and free will.  

We tend think of free will as the less emotional, more muscularly logical part of us that objectively assesses our choices and consciously selects good or evil.  

Free will is, we imagine, when we find ourselves suspended in a sort of temporal vacuum, evaluating facts, desires, and fears, and make a calculated choice to do whatever it is we want to do.  

And that’s probably why people who’ve done clearly heroic things feel uncomfortable with praise. They didn’t evaluate the risk, recall that God told us to love our fellow man, and deliberately choose to charge into the inferno. They just acted, and it didn’t feel like a choice at all.  

But free will is both more complicated and more basic than that. 

Sometimes I do use my free will with calculation and deliberation. I realise I’m being tempted to do wrong or prompted to do good, and maybe I struggle, and then I make a choice. But sometimes I do just act. I do just do the right thing, or the wrong thing, without thinking. 

This, too, is a variety of the exercise of free will, because it comes from the kind of person I have previously decided, over and over again, to become throughout my life.  

That’s probably what we see when someone acts heroically without thinking. He has primed himself, through a lifetime of little choices, to be the kind of person who will do the right thing without deliberation. He is acting out of the centre of who he has chosen to become.  

So the person who leaps without thinking is, indeed, a hero, and he did, indeed, use his free will.  

So, then, what about the weird “should I or should I not save my kid” thing I did all those years ago? 

Did I hesitate because, deep down, I only sort of cared about her?  

I’ve learned to look more gently on my past self. Of course I loved my child. Of course I wasn’t really torn about whether or not to let her be squashed before my eyes.  

I hesitated, and chopped my arm in lieu of anything useful, because I was incredibly sleep-deprived, and mentally, physically, and emotionally overwhelmed all the time, and perpetually hollowed out with self-doubt, and that’s what lead to my irrational behavior.  

I wanted with all my heart to do the right thing, but I literally didn’t know what was the right thing to do. I never knew what was the right thing to do. So I chopped my arms up and down like a weirdo, and didn’t achieve anything. But we came out OK.  

Just as a thousand acts of generosity and unselfishness train you to do the right thing without hesitation, a thousand little cuts that weaken your psychological and physical sense of self can impede you from it.  

We’re trainable, but we’re not machines that can be programmed with precision. It’s complicated.  

Anyway, I remembered this moment as I gazed, the other week, at the giant, slightly kitschy mural over the altar at our church. … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

What Christmas isn’t

There are ten million essays out there helping us understand what Christmas is (and I’ve written about three million of them myself). And it’s no wonder: The event of Christmas is something so huge and so profound, not even the most open mind can fully comprehend it. There’s always something more to say.  

Nevertheless, this year I’d like to go in a different direction and talk, instead, about what Christmas isn’t.  

It’s not a stick to beat pagans and atheists over the head with. Here in the states, we love to grumble about the “war on Christmas.”  

Occasionally this means some local ordinance bans setting up a nativity scene on the town commons; but more often it means you go out to buy some batteries and ornament hooks, and the cashier said “Happy holidays” when they gave you your receipt, so you thundered back, “Merry CHRISTMAS” using your special scary St. Boniface voice. 

Don’t do that. You’ll wake up baby Jesus, and he just barely went down for his nap. If Christmas is as great as we say it is, then surely it gives us the room to be decent to each other in its name.  

It isn’t the time to be on your high horse in general. … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

Omniscient, omnipotent, and a little bit gauche

The wonderful musical Fiddler on the Roof famously begins with the song “Tradition.” Each group in the shtetl – the papas, the mamas, the daughters, the sons – sings a chorus describing their lives. 

“Because of our traditions,” Tevye explains beneficently, “everyone knows who he is, and what God expects him to do.” 

We listened to this soundtrack a lot when I was little, and I never liked the “sons” part. They sing: “At three I started Hebrew school. At ten I learned a trade. I hear they picked a bride for me. I hope… she’s pretty.”  

I asked my mother, “Isn’t that kind of shallow? They shouldn’t be so worried about what their wives look like, should they?” I was a pretty self-righteous kid. I was heavily into stories of the saints at the time, and had heard over and over that beauty is fleeting and God sees the heart, and that’s what really matters.  

My mother, probably hiding a smile, said, “Well. . . it’s true that other things besides beauty matter, but it’s also normal for a young man to want his wife to be pretty, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” I did not like that! I wanted her to say that I was absolutely right, and incredibly spiritually mature for my age. 

I also wanted her to say I was pretty, and I wanted to be pretty, and I wanted to meet a boy who thought I was so pretty, he would ask me to be his wife, and we could be like Tevye and Golde, except I would be pretty. Give me a break, I was like eight. Plus, it was the early 80s, and we were all very dumb.  

My mother was right, though, of course. It’s great to have the highest of high standards, and to strive to dwell in a realm where body and soul are both exclusively and harmoniously ordered toward the good and toward service of God and each other. That’s how it’s supposed to be.  

It’s also great to recognize that most of us simply don’t live in that realm. We have our moments, but there’s nothing especially holy about sneering at normal human desires and impulses, and there’s definitely nothing holy about pretending you’re holy. I eventually figured that out.  

I am now 50, and to be honest, I thought I had gotten over this kind of spiritual snobbery. But a few weeks ago at Mass, I discovered I have not, because both the first reading and the Gospel bothered me a little bit. … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Photo: Otterbein University Theatre & Dance from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons)

Relics are friends

Do you have trouble focusing at Mass? Does your attention wander, and do you find yourself forgetting why you’re there and what you’re doing?  

May I recommend worshipping with 18 saints? That’s what has helped me.  

Here’s how that came about. As I describe in Our Sunday Visitor, I found a first-class relic of St Helen and a second-class relic of St Peter’s own altar at a second-hand store.  

I paid six dollars to rescue them, got them restored and authenticated, and then set about learning why these little bits and pieces of bodies and cloth are so central to our faith.  

I ultimately turned the relics I found over to my pastor, who put them together with 16 other relics another parishioner had donated, and now all of them are in two glass cases at the altar. And we all go to Mass together: St Helen and St Peter, Sts Bridget, Bernadette, Peregrine, Anthony, Maria Goretti, Mary Magdalen, Monica, Augustine and Cecilia, Therese of Lisieux, and the apostles Phillip, Thomas, James, Bartholomew, Andrew and John, and me.  

I did not anticipate how moving it would be to see them all there, and to be there with them, with the Lord. 

I grew up in a Catholic home and had some exposure to relics, but I never really understood why the heck the church was so involved with them. I knew we were supposed to avoid treating them like magic talismans, and I understood that they were holy, but it always felt a little bit embarrassing – the kind of thing you have always done in your family but you gradually realize nobody else does; and when you ask your parents why you do it, they don’t have a good explanation.  

It felt like something that wasn’t sacred, because it was clearly a scrap of something with a little glue; but it also wasn’t profane (in the sense of ordinary and everyday), because it was a saint. It felt like something that should be hidden away, something that I would simply rather not deal with.  

It feels very different now.  

One of the things I learned, as I researched this piece, is that Catholics (and before that, ancient Jews) have always cherished and venerated physical relics of their holy dead, even – or especially – when the rest of the world found that practice creepy or dangerous or just kind of gross.  

We just really like our saints, and we like being with them, and ever since God came to earth and took on a body like ours, it just makes sense for a people who believe in the Incarnation to worship God together with bodies of the saints – not only after they die, but especially after they die.  

Because they are dead, we know they are on to something better, something we can anticipate if we stick close to them. It’s a whole group effort: Some of us are in heaven, some of us still on earth; some of us have passed into eternity, and some of us are just making our way through the 9:30am Mass on a Sunday in October; but we are all still doing the same thing, visibly together, before God. 

Seeing the relics displayed on the altar helps me tap into the mysterious gravity of what we are doing when we assemble in the church.  

When I start to feel that vague, rambling, everyday sensation, I try to remember to glance up at the altar and see the relics of the saints who are enjoying the Beatific Vision RIGHT NOW, silently but unmistakably joining in to our imperfect human form of worship here in my little New England parish. I feel, for the first time, like this august collection of saints are my friends.  

Me from 20 years ago would have rolled my eyes at this. … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Poetry for your walls, Vol. 3!

Several years ago, I suggested printing out good but accessible poems and hanging them on the walls of your house. I listed 50 poems, mostly short enough to fit on one page. 

The good thing about having a poem not just tucked away in a book, but hanging on the wall of your home – especially on a wall that you’re likely to spend time staring at anyway, like one next to the toilet, or on the cabinet by the sink when you’re washing the dishes – is that you are likely to read it over and over again, and let it really sink into your imagination.  (The mark of a good poem is that it can be read over and over again, at different stages of your life, and it won’t go stale.) 

Of course the downside to having poems in all the places where people naturally hang out is that they may be literarily inexhaustible, but they do get beat up physically.  

Of course you could do it right and print them out on good paper and frame them, but it is too late for me to turn into that kind of person. As Chesterton said, if a thing is worth doing, then it’s worth doing badly. Anyway, the first batch of wall poems inevitably got stained and torn and crumpled; so I made a second list and printed out more poems.  

I’ve kept it up over the years, on and off, whenever we manage to have both ink and paper in the printer.  Whenever I come across something that sounds good, and like something I would like my kids to see, I print it out right then and there and stick it to the wall.  

Some of the kids don’t care at all, and just ignore them; but some of them like the poems, and memorize them, and seek out more poetry now that they’re adults. What a delight! 

I’m here today with a new list with another 15 worthwhile poems (or excerpts), short enough to fit on one page:  

  • “No Time” by Billy Collins 
  • “California Hills In August” by Dana Goia 
  • “Praise in Summer” by Richard Wilbur 
  • “Saint Judas by” James Wright 
  • “Antiphon for the Holy Spirit” by Hildegarde of Bingen  
  • “Holy Week” by Sally Thomas …. Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Don’t quit; rest

Today I did my normal 20-minute workout routine, and, having some energy left over, I decided to shake things up by trying a new dumbbell workout, which was also only 20 minutes. 

Or, as I did it, five minutes, and then four minutes, and then four minutes, and then four minutes, and then three minutes, with panting, sweating, and mild cussing in between. It was harder than I was expecting! It turns out routines specifically designed for middle-aged women are easier than routines that are not. Guess which kind this one was! 

But I did it. Eventually. With lots of rests.  

My ten-year-old gets some perverse pleasure out of watching me struggle, so as she lounged on the couch, I took the opportunity to give her one of my favorite mini TED talks: Don’t quit; rest.  

I told here there will be lots of times in life when things get really hard, and you’re going to want to give up. You will feel like you just can’t go on anymore, and you just want to stop. And that will be okay! You can stop.  

But don’t quit; just rest, and then see if you can start up again. I told her that getting in the habit of taking a break, rather than giving up entirely, will serve her through every aspect of her life. (I waved my arms around a bit, at this point. EVERY ASPECT.) 

I wish somebody had told me that when I was ten, because it’s taken me 50 years to figure it out. There are very few things in life that absolutely have to be a full-bore, all-out, no breaks, start-to-finish push. But there are quite a lot of things that you really must not quit altogether, but which have room for some rest, so you can get yourself together and then keep going.  

This rhythm of work and rest and work again is really baked into how we’re designed. It’s how we give birth, with the contractions coming in waves, with rest in between. It’s how we get through the week, with five or six days or work, and then a sabbath – not so we can quit, but so we can rest. It’s how our bodies and minds are made. If we do not ever sleep, we really will quit: We will die.  

“Rest” doesn’t always mean stopping completely. Sometimes it means lowering your standards. 

Now here’s the important part….

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: Siesta By Vincent van Gogh – Musée d’Orsay, Public Domain

Finally! Religious liberty for (white) Americans

American Catholics were jubilant recently over a new religious freedom guidance issued by the Trump administration.

Some of it is fine, as far as I can see. I can think of instances where people were bullied or harassed for openly expressing their faith in the workplace, and where they were made to feel inferior for being religious.

Some people have taken the Establishment Clause of the Constitution to mean that to mean that religious expression is sort of vaguely illegal, and should be quashed. So this new guidance says federal employees are allowed to have Bibles and crosses and so on in the workplace. (It’s notable that all the examples it gives are either Christian or Jewish, explicitly mentioning tefillin and rosary beads, for example, but it avoids any mention of Islamic, Buddhist, or Hindu practices of faith. Which is a clear violation of the Establishment clause. Note this. Note. This.)

Some of the guidance makes me extremely nervous. You can click through and read it for yourself if you don’t trust me to summarize—it’s just five pages—but it essentially says that federal employers and employees can display signs of their religious faith, pray and organise prayer groups in the workplace, and talk about and argue for their faith with others in the workplace, as long as they’re not aggressive about it and respect requests to stop.

Here is what I promise will happen: Decent people will adhere to the guidelines, and indecent people will not. People who are good Christians will quietly wear a cross and pray sincerely at lunch and be welcoming and inviting to others; and people who are bad Christians will bully and harass and intimidate people they don’t approve of, and they will point to these guidelines and say they’re entitled to do it.

This is not just a Christian thing; it’s a human nature thing. If people think they can get away with bullying other people, they’ll do it.

I just wanted to establish that the guidelines are absolutely guaranteed to be abused. They were deliberately written to give cover to people who will abuse them. That is how this administration functions, on every level, and it is what we have come to expect from them.

But let’s assume for a minute that it’s all been done in good faith. Let’s pretend that all they want is for Christians and a few docile Jews to be able to keep worshipping God all day long, and not have the government forcibly stripping away their religious convictions and expression.

It sure sounds like that’s what they’re calling for. The first paragraph says:

“The Founders established a Nation in which people were free to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or retaliation by their government.” President Trump is committed to reaffirming “America’s unique and beautiful tradition of religious liberty,” including by directing “the executive branch to vigorously enforce the historic and robust protections for religious liberty enshrined in Federal law.”

And the fourth paragraph says:

“The First Amendment to the US Constitution robustly protects expressions of religious faith by all Americans—including Federal employees. The US Supreme Court has clarified that the Free Exercise Clause “protects not only the right to harbor religious beliefs inwardly and secretly,” but also “protect[s] the ability of those who hold religious beliefs of all kinds to live out their faiths in daily life.” Indeed, “[r]espect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic[.]”

That’s what they say.

What are they actually doing? … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Raising teens? Raising ducks? Here’s what you need to know

We have four adolescent ducks who have grown out of their brooder box and it’s warm enough outside that they can play in the yard during the day.  

They’re getting along well with the older ducks, and it’s great to see them having a bit more freedom, growing bolder, and discovering the wonders of the wider world.  

Also, last night my husband ended up wading through the still-frigid stream to rescue these same imbeciles, who somehow managed to cross to the other shore by themselves but couldn’t cross back.  

They got back indoors, wet, upset, and decidedly lacking in affectionate feelings. Back in the box they went, with fresh cedar shavings and a nice heat lamp to take the chill off, a bowl of their special food, and a little tub of water, which they immediately stomped through and pooped in. 

I don’t know if we would have been better parents if we had tried to raise ducks first, but I do know we’re better duck handlers because we’ve raised so many kids. Here are a few of the things we’ve learned, that could apply to raising young’un in both the family anatidae or the family hominidae.  

Don’t go it alone. Ask for help from people with more experience, or at least listen in while they talk to each other. There’s no reason to assume you just naturally know how to do this. Why would you?  

But also, there’s no reason to feel bad for not knowing how to do this. There definitely some wrong ways to do this, but there are lots and lots of different kind of right ways. …. Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

Before the world ends, plant a tree

What would you do if you knew the world would end tomorrow?  

Some people would probably go the “orgy of worldly pleasures” route. Loot the stores, max out all the credit cards, drink yourself blind, and bed anyone you can, because tomorrow we die. I hope nobody reading this finds that even vaguely appealing.

Some people would probably say it’s best to head to the church, go to confession, receive Communion, and then spend your final hours in penance and fasting, using up your last chance to stave off God’s just punishments. I can’t really argue with this, but I also can’t claim this is what I would do (except for the confession part. Always go to confession!).

So what would I do?

The other day I read a post on social media that said: “If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree today.” This is a paraphrase of a quote often attributed to Martin Luther, but there’s not really any evidence he said it, and it doesn’t really sound like him to me.

What it did sound like is the kind of whimsical, glitter-tossing sentiment that generally makes me roll my eyes. Something along the lines of “Dance like nobody’s watching” or “Angels are just teddy bears with wings” (an actual bumper sticker I saw one time, which still haunts and baffles me).

But the more I thought about it, the better I think it is. Possibly the best possible answer to the question, “What would you do?”

Don’t think of it as a statement of brainless optimism, sassily tra-la-laing in the face of reality because you are a magical being that dances like nobody’s watching and then posts about it on Instagram before everything goes black, and we are supposed to find this in some way beautiful.

Don’t take it that way. Think of it instead as doing your Father’s work.

I actually have planted a lot of trees in my life, and there is something about planting a tree, and always has been….Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: Detail of  “Christ Appears to Mary Magdalen as a Gardener (‘Noli Me Tangere’),” ca. 1603 National Library of Wales via Wikimedia Commons