It’s fairly easy to get carried away by whatever kind of flow our life is busy with. The agitated flow of busyness, the aimless flow of boredom, the flooding flow of panic, the swirling flow of temptation. But Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and that unmoving God has planted the rock of his Church, creed and all, for the express purpose of disrupting that flow.
Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
Image by David Dixon (detail) (Creative Commons)
Even in the very silliest of silly seasons in the seminaries, it seems likely that someone, somewhere would have caught the detail that this legendary fake priest had been baptized with milk, and the process would have come to a screeching halt long before the putative ordination.
But if it were true, I can’t see a way around the horrible consequences, because the sacraments are real. Something real happens when they are performed, and if they’re not really performed, then nothing real happens.
Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
Photo via Flickr via Navy (license: U.S. Government Works)
Readers may not be aware of how heavily writers rely upon reference books, such as encyclopedias, thesauruses, Wikipedia, Dickeypedia, and of course a rhyming dictionary, which often reveals hidden truths about language through a kind of mystical game of word association which posits that synonyms come in triads, or what Carl Jung used to call “threeness envy.” Nobody knew what he meant by that. He has a really weird accent.
Read the rest of my latest for the long-suffering Catholic Weekly.
Image: Luigi Cherubini and the Muse of Lyric Poetry by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (Creative Commons)
Sometimes what I want most of all is just to have a clean kitchen. Sometimes I feel very strongly that the kids should learn how to clean properly. Sometimes I simply ardently want to lie down, and the hell with the house. But I probably can’t have all three things I want: A well-cleaned house, kids that work hard, and a restful evening for myself. I have to pick one or two. When I ask myself what I truly want, then I usually know pretty clearly how I can achieve that one thing. But the answer is almost never, “I myself have no responsibility here.”
Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
Image: Lady Elizabeht Paget, by Rex Whistler [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
People can be savage to each other, hiding behind the security of the keyboard. They lash out for no reason at all, other than that they can get away with it. I’ve seen that happen. And people can be breathtakingly open and generous with each other, because when there are two more more people gathered together, even if it’s online, Jesus is there. I’ve seen that happen, too.
Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
The books we read as young kids stay with us for a lifetime, so I’m always on the lookout for books that not only have attractive and engaging illustrations, but convey powerful and lasting truths.
I’m especially careful when those books are explicitly about our Faith. Here are a few of my current favorites in that category. They not only tell my kids things I want them to know about God, but I’ve found them moving and engaging myself.
If we think back on our own childhoods, we can probably remember bad parenting that hurt us, but also good parenting that stayed with us and continues to strengthen and comfort us even as a memory. This shows that good parenting is real parenting, and it is powerful. So it’s good practice to remind yourself of what you’re doing right. There is probably more than you think, and it probably means more than you realize. Go ahead and list it off for yourself, the slight and the huge, the occasional and the constant. Most parents are doing so much better than they think they are.
I’m not saying we should hold out for the perfect spouse; and I’m not saying you should flee from a relationship the first time conflict crops up. It’s very good to test how well the two of you can work through problems together. And every human being brings a certain amount of imperfection into a relationship: Bad habits, personality flaws, unsavory pasts, immaturity, selfishness, and so on. Everyone’s got something — probably several things — wrong with them; and every good relationship will have conflict at some point.
But there are some flaws that should make us pause, think hard, and possibly back away before we make any vows.
Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
Image: Skedonk [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]
The thesaurus is a book made not only for utility, but for delight, and that’s surely part of why it’s fallen out of favor. Delight is an imprecise business, and it has its perils.
Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
Image: Iron age coins from Beverly – Portable Antiquities Scheme from London, England [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]
Probably I will never know what became of that offering I made. It’s not really my business, any more than it’s my business what a beggar does with my donation or a bride does with the toaster I give her on her wedding day. A gift is a gift! All I know is I gave what I have, and I will forever be glad that I made that gift. Once you put something in God’s hands with sincerity and trust, you are praising God. That is never a waste.
Read the rest of my latest at The Catholic Weekly.
Image via MaxPixel (Public Domain)
