I’ll be on Radio Maria’s “From the Rooftops” Wednesday morning

radio maria logo

 

Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers was tons of fun to talk to last time, when we discussed NFP and my book. Tomorrow at 11 Eastern, we’ll be discussing various issues that crop up in marriage and family life. Okay, fine, I don’t actually know what we’ll be talking about! Not vaccines, though!

You can listen online here.  Hope you can tune in!

Men, try whispering these seven simple words into your woman’s ear, and watch her melt.

“I did that insurance paperwork for you.”

PIC woman swooning

Why I don’t say “I’m so blessed.”

The other day, a woman lashed out at me for announcing my latest pregnancy online. This particular woman’s stock in trade is lashing out; and since I’m pretty sure I don’t (as she accused me of doing) parade my perfect children around like perfect trophies to prove that I’m a perfect Catholic mom, I didn’t give her anger much thought. Just another angry person on the internet.

Later, out of curiosity, I read more of her comments. And then my heart broke.

It was a lot of what I expected: You Catholic moms think you’re so great! You think I’m bitter, but I’m not! Who cares what you do with your stupid perfect lives! You think you’re happy, but you’re not!

You think that just because I don’t have any kids, God doesn’t love me!

Oh.

It was as transparent as a child who howls and screams that he is not tired, not tired at all. Only no one was going to come to this woman, pick her up, soothe her, and put her to bed. No one was going to say, “It’s all right, sweet one. I hear what you’re saying. Let me help you and give you what you need, so you will feel better.” She thinks that God doesn’t love her, because He didn’t give her any children.

It’s not true.  God loves you. But I don’t know how, just like I don’t know how or why or how much He loves me. He makes rain fall on the wicked and the just, and woe to the just who think that they deserve the rain.

This is not easy. When we love somebody and want to show them our love, we give them things – do nice things for them – make them feel our love in the way we know best. If I spent four months hunting for the perfect present for my husband, and he acted like it just randomly fell out of the sky because he’s a lucky fellow, I would be annoyed. No! I would think. I gave you that on purpose, to prove that I love you! This is personal!

And it is personal when God gives us good things.  But it’s not proof of His love, exactly. It’s not that simple. Yes, everything that is good comes from God, and He deserves our thanks and praise for the things He give us. But the problem comes when we look at His gifts and draw conclusions about ourselves.

This is why I rarely say, “God has blessed us” when I mean, “We have good things” — whether it’s things like the sunny little house where we live, or a car that keeps running one more year, or a happy weekend, or a living, breathing baby (or ten). I say, instead, “We’re so lucky.”

I mean that the good things that come to us are only the hem of the mystery of God’s goodness. They are only a rumblings in the outskirts of the real workings of the economy of grace. It is a very good thing to be grateful and to praise God for the things we receive. It is a monstrously bad thing to conclude that we got them as a reward for good behavior. And all too often, at least in the 21st century of the United States, that is how we use the word “blessing.”

Witness the blaspheming Osteens telling us,

To experience [God’s] immeasurable favor, you must rid yourself of that small-minded thinking and start expecting God’s blessings, start anticipating promotion and supernatural increase. You must conceive it in your heart before you can receive it. In other words, you must make increase in your own thinking, then God will bring those things to pass.

Tit for heavenly tat, in other words. Well, Jesus wasn’t small minded. Jesus’ Father loved Him, and look at Him. Look at Him:

PIC Grunewald cruxifix

 

 

This is why I do not say that I am blessed, even though I know that this is the word that is technically, theologically sound. I think it means something different to modern ears. I am afraid that it says something so loathsome that I don’t want to risk it.

If my happiness is a sign that God has blessed me, what does that equation say to people who aren’t experiencing “promotion and supernatural increase”? To the people whose house is washed away, whose husband is shot down, whose womb is barren? It says what my reader said, without knowing she was saying it:

God does not love me.

So I don’t say that I am blessed. Instead, I say that I am lucky to have all that I have, because it is closer to something that I cannot express:  in my best hours, my witless bafflement in the face of God’s mercy to me and my family. I am lucky, not because my good fortune has no meaning or no purpose or no design, but because I do not know why it happens. It happens because God loves me in this way at this time, when I am just and when I am unjust. I do not know why.

Why do I have, and why does she not have? I don’t know. It is easy for me to see that God loves me, because I am simple: I see that He has given me many things, and to my childish soul, that spells love. When I pray for other people, I often ask that He will bless them in obvious ways, that He will make it as clear as possible that they are loved. I suppose this shows some arrogance, telling God how to do His job. But really it’s fear.  I am afraid to learn more about the other kind of love.

What About Behavioral and Spiritual Arguments Against Vaccines?

PIC vaccine

As we can see from Tuesday’s post and the response to it, it’s not necessarily clear what we mean when we say “science” or “medicine.” So let’s put science and medicine aside entirely for a moment, and let’s focus on two arguments against vaccines that I keep hearing — arguments which don’t appeal to science at all, but which are spiritual and behavioral.

Read the rest at the Register.   Note: any snark, condescension, lack of charity, arrogance, self-pity, logical fallacies or otherwise insufferable behavior in this post is unintentional. If you think I’ve missed the mark, please pray for me and respond with as much kindness as you can, because I really am trying here.

How I feel at Patheos sometimes

Especially with all the hotshot upstarts amazing talent Elizabeth has been bringing on board lately, like Kyle Cupp, Artur Roseman at Cosmos the In Lost, Tom Zampino at Grace Pending, Ben Conroy at Shadows on the Road, and Rebecca Frech at Shoved to Them.

Gee . . .

 

 

That’s me, that third guy, looking more and more nervous. Luckily, they are more than willing to pass the bottle and share a manly hand clasp of solidarity. Do yourself a favor and see who has something to say about the moon at Patheos lately!

Science, Catholics, and Fear

PIC doctor pocking cash

More and more, religious people are pitching their tents in the vast, squashy wilderness that calls itself “natural living” or “alternative medicine,” and are rejecting science and modern medicine — not some of it, but all of it.  Their creed is this: drugs are evil, chemicals are evil, doctors are evil.You can cure most diseases, mental or physical, with a handful of seeds and a few essential oils squirted into the proper orifices. Above all, be afraid.e

Read the rest at the Register.

My dream self thinks the new evangelization is mainly about cookies.

One of the major perks of blogging at Patheos is that Elizabeth Scalia occasionally shares her dreams with us. As the lost sailor in the Dark Island says, “Not daydreams:dreams!”

As much as I loved the dream where I served canned beans in the can at the event that wasn’t no Edel Gathering, Elizabeth dream the other night gave me even more pleasure. I’ll tell Elizabeth tell it.  Oh, and for those of you  not familiar with Margaret Realy, blogger at Prayer Gardens and author of soon to be four books, most recently A Garden of Visible Prayer, I haven’t spoken with her face to face, but my general impression is that she is . . . not loud.

Oh — and I also appreciate how, even in her sleep, Elizabeth is plugging her writers!

***

I awoke from a dream in which Simcha Fisher, Margaret Rose Realy and I were all doing “home visits” as part of some parish evangelical outreach. We were supposed to go to a house, introduce ourselves, say we’d been trained by the parish and ask if they would like a blessing. That’s all. We were just offering blessings to people. This lady opens the door and steps out into the beautiful sunlight with her little dog and says she’d like a blessing for her dog.

I tell her we usually bless the animals ever October for Saint Francis Feast, and Simcha whispers to me, “let’s just bless the dog. It’s evangelization. And my feet hurt!” Margaret begins to bless the dog on her own, very loudly, and Simcha sits down on the woman’s front step, wondering if the woman has any cookies.

When Margaret is done, I ask the lady if she would now like to be blessed. She looks doubtfully at Margaret, and says, “Depends. Does it have to be loud, like that?”

“I can bless you very quietly,” I assure her.

“Can we do the part about rejecting Satan?” She asks.

“That’s the renewal of baptismal promises!” Simcha says. “I have bap-a-tized 15 children. Irene says ‘bap-a-tized.’”

“I don’t see why we can’t let her renew her baptismal promises if she wants to,” Margaret says. “In fact I think every blessing should require that. We should be eager to say ‘I reject Satan and all of his works…”

Margaret is getting loud again, so I tell the woman, “sure, you can renew baptismal promises”, and we lead her through it and when she’s done I pronounce, “this is our faith, the faith of the church; we are proud to profess it,” and then move into a standard blessing.

Suddenly Margaret falls to the ground as though slain in the spirit, and begins shouting about how Christianity is painful and not a warm blanket but the cross, but she is willing to bear the cross.

Simcha sits back down and starts looking at her swelling ankles. The woman lights a cigarette and, watching Margaret, asks “what is this? Is it something new?”

“It’s Flannery O’ Connor,” I tell her. “She must have read Tod Worner‘s latest piece.”

By now Margaret is shouting to the sky, “Take me now, Jesus! If you want me this instant, I am yours!”

The woman says “I guess she and Jesus are having a moment…”

Simcha says, “I think her blood sugar is low, are there any cookies?”

“I think everyone’s blood sugar is low. Margaret, get up. Let’s go have ice cream.”

“Oh, ice cream sounds nice,” the lady says as her dog starts licking Margaret’s face, and Margaret giggles.

“Ice cream!” shouts Simcha, launching herself off the stoop and running toward the car.

me get ice cream

What did the Pope mean by “sins against unity”?

PIC house with cracked foundation

Ideas are like houses, and other people are like . . . well, like people who live in those houses. If I lived next to a house with a huge, gaping crack in the foundation, and I discovered that a lovely young family was innocently planning to move into that house, what should I do? Should I keep quiet, in the name of peace and unity?

Read the rest at the Register.

Holiness is a numbers game, you filthy relativist!

You never know what the morning will bring. I just got into a weird little skirmish with a fellow who believes that there is only one kind of generosity, and that is having as many babies as possible. (He can correct me if I’m misrepresenting his point of view.)

It began when someone wrote a nice review of The Sinner’s Guide to NFP, and this fellow — not having read the book, of course — said:

 

generosity fb screenshot

 

Yeah, I played the grandmultipara pregnancy card. So sue me.

It didn’t stop Mr. NFP Denier, anyway. He let me know that his wife is expecting theireleventh baby (eleven being a higher number than ten, you’ll note), and that his family was fruitful and multiplied just like God commanded, and they were therefore obeying the doctrine of the Church in what was obviously the only possible way, unlike people who use NFP, who are clearly disobeying the doctrine of the Church.

I said that generosity sometimes looks different from having another baby. Generosity can even look like deciding not to have another baby right now, even if you really, really want to. It depends on your circumstances. It’s different for different people, according to what God is asking of their specific lives. The Church teaches that we can use our hearts and our brains while prayerfully discerning intensely individual questions like family size.  It’s not a numbers game, where God judges our holiness by using His fingers and toes to tally up our family size.

But maybe my reader-who-doesn’t-need-to-read-my-stupid-book is onto something, with his accusation of relativism. It occurs to me that the scourge of relativism is nothing new. One very early example of a selfish woman trying to excuse her own flaws and call them virtues? Check out this chick:

And He looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury, and He saw also a certain poor widow putting in two mites. So she said, “Truly I say to you, I, a poor widow, have put in more than all; for all these out of their abundance have put in offerings for God,[a] but I out of my poverty put in all the livelihood that I had.”

See there? Relativism! The nerve of that lady, thinking that the gift of her dumb little pennies made her even more generous than the big bucks those other guys were pouring into the chest! If there’s one thing that Jesus tries to pound into our heads over the course of the Gospel, it’s that holiness is a numbers game, period.

Pff, relativists. I suppose they think they’ll somehow find their way into heaven anyway.

Well, you never know. I’ve heard God is fairly generous, too.

I was late to listen to Sam Rocha’s “Late to Love.” My mistake!

late to love

 

If you’re even peripherally involved with Catholic media, you will know that peculiar dread that goes thrilling down your spine when you hear the words, “Can I send you a copy of my new Catholic [album, book, movie, interpretive dance instructional booklet, etc.].

Because you know, as surely as you know your own name, that it’s going to suck. It’s going to be Catholic, and it’s going to be well-intentioned, and it’s going to do its darndest to combat the darkness and evil that has such a firm foothold in popular entertainment  . . . and it’s going to suck. It will be poorly produced, and would never stand up on its own merits. But you’re supposed to “support” it, because it’s Catholic.

So, I put off listening to Sam Rocha’s Augustinian* soul album, Late to Love, which debuts today. I’ve been putting it off for months. But today I finally clicked on tracks that you can hear online here. And I am kicking myself for waiting.

Because it’s good. Really good. It’s clean, it’s tight, it’s professional.These are real musicians; he’s a real singer, with a supple, smoky voice. It’s original and soulful, the lyrics are smart, the sound is solid and occasionally unexpected, and it’s really, really Catholic. Give a listen!  Sam is smart and funny, educated to the gills, and kind of a smart ass.  And he totally gets that it’s not enough to be Catholic, you also have to be good at what you do.

Whew!

*Check out the background for the album cover, above. Recognize that color and texture? Hint: Augustine . . . fruit . . .