Tag: grace

You, on a gondola

This is me, slowly unpacking from our recent trip to a little island off the coast of Maine.

This is me, sheepishly putting away the seven (seven!) books I hoped to read on the beach, and then barely touched all week.

This is me, dolefully discovering that the “all ages” board game I ordered specially for the trip is still in its shrink wrap, after we spent zero evenings moving little plastic pieces around the table in raucous and wholesome family togetherness.

This is me closing the tabs with recipes for seafood dinners that I convinced myself we would not only cook, but also possibly harvest ourselves from the sea; and this is also me, cleaning all the cheeseburger wrappers out of the car.

The kites I packed didn’t even make it out of the trunk.

This is not me complaining about having been on vacation! It was lovely, and we’re lucky we were able to make it happen. We did swim and wade, clamber around on rocks, and eat ice cream. We came home tired and more or less happy, with pink shoulders and sand in our shoes.

And yes, I came home a little bit disappointed. I can’t help it: I have insanely high hopes every time I plan anything at all. I am who I am, and I know this; but I’m also perpetually disappointed when I don’t turn into someone else.

Right before we left, I saw an old video from Saturday Night Live, where Adam Sandler plays Joe Romano of Romano Tours.

He tells the audience, “Here at Romano Tours, we always remind our customers: If you’re sad now, you might still feel sad there, okay?”

He warns us:

“We can take you on a hike. We cannot turn you into someone who likes hiking. We can take you to the Italian Riviera. We cannot make you feel comfortable in a bathing suit. We can provide the zip line. We cannot give you the ability to say, ‘Whee’ and mean it.”

I laughed at the video, and then I went right ahead and told myself that, when we got to the island, everything would be different. Through the sheer magic of dipping ourselves in salt water, we’d become joyful, energetic, screen-free types who love spending all our time together. And that did not happen. We had the week we had, because we are the people we are. And it was good! But it was not magically, instantaneously transformative. Of course, it wasn’t.

Like Joe Romano says, “[I]f you don’t like how you look back home, it’s not gonna get any better on a gondola.”

This is not only true for going on vacation: It’s true for everything.

Are you getting ready for a new year of school? Even if you’re enrolling somewhere different or trying a whole fresh program, you’re still going to be who you are as a parent, and your kids are still going to be who they are as kids.

Are you starting a new job? Even if it’s an entirely different situation, you’re still going to be you, doing that job.

Are you perhaps new to the Catholic faith? Welcome, and we’re so glad you’re here! Your life has a very good chance of being transformed, one way or another.

But not magically. Not instantaneously. And not without you deliberately, consciously deciding to make that happen, taking advantage of what the Church has to offer, and putting it into practice day by day, minute by minute.

And also, paradoxically, not without you letting go of control and letting grace work with who you are.

I watched the SNL skit again, and I laughed even harder. It’s not only brilliant and insightful, it’s hopeful, not discouraging…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

 

Superstitious practices tell God what he can and cannot do (and it’s not just for trads)

Last week we celebrated the feast of St. Joseph, and I found myself thinking about all the little resin St. Josephs scattered across this country. The poor guys are just hanging around upside down with a faceful of dirt, saying hello to passing worms, waiting to be remembered and dug up.

They are part of “home selling kits” that consist of a crudely crafted St. Joseph statue and a card with a specific prayer. Burying the statue upside down, some Catholics believe, will help them buy or sell their house.

This practice is a superstition, and superstition is explicitly named as a sin by the Catholic Church. Yes, even if you do it gently and don’t scowl and shake a fist at the statue before you bury him, and even if you pray to God to get you a good deal on your home. You can pray to God through the intercession of St. Joseph for a speedy sale; just keep his statue on the mantel.

Superstitious practices are prohibited, in part, because they “attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand,” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The church today is rife with superstitious thinking. I didn’t grow up with the St. Joseph statue tradition, but I certainly read stories about great sinners who wore a brown scapular because they believed it would save them from hell no matter what they did.

I was at a baptism last Sunday. I heard only bits and pieces of the rite of baptism, but I was still suddenly gripped by a tremendous thrill, realizing I was present to witness a real, powerful, ineradicable change taking place in the soul of the little one whose tiny bald head I could barely see. I wanted to get up and cheer, but instead, I thanked God for doing what he does.

Then some sullen shadow passed a wing over my thoughts, and I recalled how many times I’ve heard the complaint that the “novus ordo” baptism just doesn’t have the same oomph as the extraordinary form. The older form has more references to exorcising the devil and sometimes involves blessed salt, and it is therefore allegedly more powerful.

How could it be more powerful than what just happened, I wondered? This little baby just went from death to life, from dark to light, from drowning to rescue, from burial to resurrection. I believe this. This is our faith. What more could there possibly be?

I want to return to that question, but not before I say two things.

One is that superstition is something more than overtly pagan practices like putting your faith in a lucky rabbit’s foot or doing some quasi-religious ceremony like burying a statue. And it’s more than treating a scapular like a magic charm. Superstition can happen even in outwardly liturgically sound sacramental practices like baptism. Asserting that one rite of baptism is more powerful than another is claiming that we can lure or manipulate God into doing things he wouldn’t otherwise do…Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.

Image: Detail of St. Joseph statue via Wikimedia commons

Frog and Toad at Cana

Not long before he died, I was complaining to my father I couldn’t persuade any of my kids to go to a Catholic college. I said I knew they were getting decent educations at the places they chose, but still, I was sure my plan was better than theirs. Half jokingly, half dead serious, I groaned,  “How will they ever find a nice Catholic to marry?”

My father said, “Well, I found one at Brooklyn Public College!” He was half joking, half serious, too: the joke being that, when he met my mother, they were both about as far from Catholic as anyone could be.

They had both been raised as non-practicing Jews, met at college when they were both cutting class, got married in secret in a hurry, had a second public ceremony to appease the parents, dabbled in Buddhism, moved to a kibbutz in Israel, came home, briefly joined a cult, found the Lord, and then eventually became Catholic — my mother and older sister first, and my father and the rest of us a year later, when they had already been married for about 20 years. They ended up as a happy old married Catholic couple, but they certainly didn’t start that way.

I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage and God’s will and who belongs together and how and why marriages work. It is very true that it’s smart to do a thorough investigation of your own understanding of marriage and of your spouse’s expectations before you take the leap. But it really is a leap. You can’t guarantee that doing everything the smart way will result in a strong or happy marriage, and you can’t guarantee that a strong and happy marriage will stay that way. Sacramental grace is mysterious and unpredictable, and so is human nature. It’s a leap.

My parents made each other truly miserable sometimes. We kids saw a lot of that. You probably could have made the case that they didn’t belong together.  But by the end of my parents’ lives, I could think of all sorts of ways that God’s will had indisputably been carried out in their marriage.

Even my mother’s dementia seems to have worked some kind of transformation on my father, and the last years of their lives together did something mysterious but important to him. They weren’t even really together; he just visited her in the nursing home every day, fed her, prayed with her, and was delighted when she would occasionally mumble “amen.” By the time he died, he was a happy man; happier than I ever remember seeing him. And then, her final work done, my mother died too.

Does this mean they were made for each other? Yes and no. They eventually became made for each other, I know that. I know couples who seem so incredibly well suited for each other, it’s hard to imagine them living any other life other than with each other. And I know couples who are monstrously incompatible, and seem to belong with each other even if they don’t make each other very happy. There are all kinds of successful marriages. Marriage is strange. Life is strange.

The other day, we prayed the second luminous mystery of the rosary, which is the Wedding at Cana.

“When the wine failed, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you,’” we read.

Jesus hadn’t yet done any public miracles, and apparently didn’t think it was the right time to start yet; but Mary was apparently focused on saving a young couple just starting out from the embarrassment of not being able to serve their guests. We’re all familiar with the somewhat amusing account of mother and son having a little spat, and the mother confidently assuming he’ll do what she says. But it occurred to me for the first time: They are both sinless. This means that neither one of them could have wanted to do something that was against God’s will. And yet they disagreed about what was best to do! What does this mean?

I think it speaks to the notion that God’s will is hardly ever one specific action or decision. Sometimes it is certainly clear: Don’t murder, for instance. Don’t do evil. But it’s much more common, when we’re faced with choices, to be torn between a few different possibilities which might be good, but we’re not sure yet how they will turn out. It’s pretty rare that we can just “do whatever he tells us” and know for sure that we’re doing the right thing. Even when one choice seems like the natural, godly, wholesome choice, and the other seems more murky and less desirable, we really can rarely say, “This one is definitely God’s will, and that one is definitely not”.

We have to take a leap, and the leap is important, but even more so is what comes next. It’s rarely the leap that puts us either in or out of God’s will; it’s what we make of where we landed, and what we do with the grace we find there.

I was mulling all this over when a quote popped up in my Twitter feed. It was a line from one of my favorite “Frog and Toad” stories by Arnold Lobel. Toad, after admiring his friend’s garden, wants to start one of his own. So he plants the seeds, but they don’t immediately sprout. Fretting, and increasingly frantic, he spends the next few days exhausting himself with trying to make it happen: He plays music for them, he reads poems to them, but nothing works. Then Frog gives him some advice:

“Leave them alone for a few days. Let the sun shine on them, let the rain fall on them. Then your seeds will start to grow.”

And this, of course, works. The seeds start to grow. Toad has done the work that’s indispensable: He has put the seeds in the ground. Then he wastes a lot of effort and anxiety trying to force things to work out well in the time he expects. Finally, he gives up and while he sleeps, the larger forces at work, the rain, the sun, and time work to achieve the thing he is longing for. The seeds sprout. He has his garden.

And . . . an angry boy in Brooklyn ends up married to a nice Catholic girl who brings him to Jesus and makes him very happy, eventually. A mother has done her best and then tries to sit back and let her adult-ish children make their choices about college and everything else, because they are adults, ish. Let the sun shine on them. Let the rain fall on them. Let people take their leaps, and let the Holy Spirit do what he does when they land. It really is the only way.

At least that’s what I’m telling myself. I have taken the leap. We’ll see.

***
A version of this essay first appeared in The Catholic Weekly in August of 2021.

We were all out of ideas, so we tried the rosary

My husband and I agreed: It’s not that it’s magic, or anything. It’s definitely not magic. But it’s unmistakable: Saying a decade of the rosary together every day is changing our lives. Not drastically. Just a little bit. But undeniably.

We are not the kind of couple you’d look at and say, “Oh yeah, they’re big into the rosary.”

I never liked the rosary. I was never sure if I was supposed to be focusing on the mystery, or the prayer, or my intentions, or some combination. It was what you did as a penance, or because your parents made you. I never knew if I was supposed to be coming up with some brilliant new insight into the life of Mary, or finding some kind of spiritual comfort in the familiarity of the *lack* of brilliant new insight, or what. And darn it, I always lose track and end up saying either nine or eleven Hail Marys.

But more and more often, dealing with the problems that naturally come with full lives, we found ourselves saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I just don’t know what to do.” And while there is some relief that comes with realizing your own limitations, sometimes we really did have to do something, and we were just at sea. We do both know how to work our way through a set of beads, though, so at very least it seemed like a rosary couldn’t hurt.

We already go running together most days, so we decided to make a decade of the rosary part of the routine. Since we’ve made it a daily practice, literally come rain or shine . . . well, things have been better.

Surely, part of the improvement is attributable to human psychology: When you decide to commit to doing something to make your life better, that in itself helps. By making an effort, you’re signaling to yourself that you’re worthy of effort and worth taking care of; and this is a thought that, repeated often enough, is very likely to improve your outlook on life. It’s a self-fulfilling self-help routine.

But that doesn’t explain everything.Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image via Maxpixel (Creative Commons)

 

Frog and Toad at Cana

Not long before he died, I was complaining to my father I couldn’t persuade any of my kids to go to a Catholic college. I said I knew they were getting decent educations at the places they chose, but still, I was sure my plan was better than theirs. Half jokingly, half dead serious, I groaned,  “How will they ever find a nice Catholic to marry?”

My father said, “Well, I found one at Brooklyn Public College!” He was half joking, half serious, too: the joke being that, when he met my mother, they were both about as far from Catholic as anyone could be.

They had both been raised as non-practicing Jews, met at college when they were both cutting class, got married in secret in a hurry, had a second public ceremony to appease the parents, dabbled in Buddhism, moved to a kibbutz in Israel, came home, briefly joined a cult, found the Lord, and then eventually became Catholic — my mother and older sister first, and my father and the rest of us a year later, when they had already been married for about 20 years. They ended up as a happy old married Catholic couple, but they certainly didn’t start that way.

I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage and God’s will and who belongs together and how and why marriages work… Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

 
Image by Darkmoon_Art from Pixabay

Napoleon at the baptismal font

There’s really no sense in saying, “I’m interested in Christ, but only a little bit, please.” You gotta go all in.

So where do Napoleon and his crown-grabbing ways fit it? Well, I have seen a good number of Catholics who strongly identify with Catholicism and are heavily involved with other Catholics. The drive and hunger is there. But as soon as it comes time to kneel and accept something good and meaningful from God, they don’t just gleefully, joyfully go for it. Instead, they grab it out of his hands and bestow it on themselves.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

Image: Marie-Victoire Jaquotot [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons)

When we’re mad at God because we’ve sinned

The other night, I was having a mild panic attack in the middle of the night, and I dealt with it this way: I breathed in while thinking, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” and then breathed out while thinking, “But I place my trust in Jesus.” I accepted my ignorance and my uncertainty, and I reclaimed my knowledge of the one true thing that will always be true, which is Jesus Himself.

It got me through that one bad night. But there has not been a single second in my life when that was not an appropriate prayer.

Read the rest of my latest from The Catholic Weekly.

Image via Max Pixel (Public Domain)

Thanks, Mom.

twopenny starvers

Does she cook and clean for us and do our laundry? Oh, yes, she does. She feeds us with grace, with the Word of God, and with Eucharist, and she invites us to throw our smelly old sins down the chute and — okay, here the analogy breaks down. I guess she washes, dries, and folds our consciences for us, and leaves them in a tidy stack on our bed? She bustles around, caring for our needs, even anticipating our needs, telling us what we need and making sure we have plenty of opportunities to take advantage of what she has to offer us, from birth to maturity to death.

She knows us intimately, cares for us personally, never stops thinking about us, never stops loving us, never stops desiring everything good for us. But the Church is about more than us — and she’s about more than giving us stuff, too. Mother Church isn’t just a sacrament dispenser, who fades into existence for an hour here and there, whenever we need something; and we should be careful not to treat her that way.

Read the rest at the Register.

***

image by Paul Townsend

(And I realize it’s some obscure Anglican tradition in the photo, but I found this image so charming, I couldn’t bring myself to find something else.)

A little fish can go a long way!

ICTHUS

He had to rethink his strategy. A good idea is only a good idea if people will actually use it. So instead of distributing the iron in formless lumps, he tried shaping the iron into a fish — specifically, one local to the communities he hoped to help.

Read the rest at the Register. 

***

At the Register: An Army that Intends to Win

The Bishop reminded the confirmandi that it wasn’t that long ago that they received a cross of ashes on their foreheads, signifying to them that this day is fleeting, this life is fleeting. We will all someday die. Then he reminded them to take note of the new cross that was on their foreheads as he spoke. This was cross made of sweet, spicy chrism, a shining cross which has something new to say: You were not made for death.

Oh, I had forgotten! Just because that is where we are headed, that doesn’t mean it was the original plan. And it doesn’t mean it’s the final word. Being confirmed means you are part of an army that intends to fight, an army that is ready to die if necessary — but you are part an army that intends to win.

Read the rest at the Register.

I can’t resist adding a picture of my lovely daughter with Bishop Libasci and my mother-in-law, who looks a lot more like my daughter’s mother than I do!