Tag: love

Give your barely-things-at-all to Jesus

Toward the end of Lent, I wrote about offering up penances and sacrifices to God. I often forget, even after being a Catholic for most of my life, to take this final step.

I tend to get so hyper-focused on doing the thing I’ve decided (or am obligated) to do—abstaining from meat, fasting, leaving the radio off or leaving my phone in the other room, or maybe not salting my dinner, or not getting in line first for dessert—that I forget to offer these little sacrifices up to God, even though that’s allegedly why I’m doing it in the first place.

“It’s just the same as if you were buying a present for someone, and then left it in the car. What’s the use in that?” I wrote.

“It doesn’t matter how thoughtful or expensive or beautifully wrapped it is, if it never gets to them. You have to actually deliver it, put it in their hands and tell them it is for them, from you.”

This is how it is with spiritual sacrifices. We must remember to complete them by actually deliberately putting them in the hands of God, just as we would do with any gift.

Now that we’re solidly into ordinary time, let’s stay with that metaphor, but wake it up a little. Let’s imagine that you are giving someone a present, and this time you do wrap it, and you do give it to them, and you do let it know it’s from you.

You remember to do all the stuff I remind you to do, above. But what’s inside is almost nothing.

Good news! I have reason to believe the recipient (and we’re talking about Jesus, here, if I didn’t make that clear) will be delighted. Delighted! There’s even a parable about this: The widow’s mite. She brings her two little coins to the temple because that’s what she has, and the Lord is delighted with her gift.

All of scripture is pretty clear about this: The God who cares about the sparrow and about the number of hairs on your head is not going to be snooty about being offered a small gift. It is sincerity he cares about, not volume.

Ah, but the two coins was the best the widow could do. What if you make some kind of small, feeble offering to the Lord and you’re capable of so much more? What if you do have much and you only give a little, because you’re weak and a little selfish and lazy, and you kind of want to love God, but you only love him a little bit? What will he say to a paltry little gift like that?

I think something like: “Thank you, my lovely love, my dearest dear, my sweetest sweet. I love it. Please come back again soon so I can see you again, and we will see what we can do together.” I think making a small effort despite weakness and selfish and laziness is a kind of widow’s mite, as well, and it will be received as such. 

He’s not stupid and he’s not a sucker. But he knows love when he sees it.  He IS love, and when something is given, he is there, and he seems to find love irresistible, even in tiny little amounts.

This is what Jesus does when we offer something to him. Remember, he doesn’t need anything. He isn’t lacking in anything, in any way. The only reason he wants you to give him things is so he can grow them and give them back to you.

Not like an investment bank, where you put in a cold, hard coin and get back two cold, hard coins, but like a seed, a little dry speck that you give to the ground and somehow, unreasonably, it becomes a living, growing, thriving tree and all the birds of the air come and roost in its branches.

This is a real thing that happens. I’ve seen it. You give little things, dumb things, lazy things, half-selfish things, paltry things, barely-willing things, barely-things-at-all to Jesus, and he makes them huge and thriving and alive. Not always overnight! Not even necessarily in your lifetime. But you can be sure that anything you turn over to him will not languish there, because letting things languish is not what he does. It is not who he is. But he does wait for you to decide to do it, because that’s what makes it a gift.

What else is there to say? All we have to lose is our dry little specks. Praise Jesus, who makes all things live.

___

Photo credit: Chiara Palandrani (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu) (Creative Commons)
A version of this essay was originally published in The Catholic Weekly in April of 2023.

Lessons on love from the Great British Baking Show

My husband and I have been watching The Great British Baking Show on Netflix on Sunday evenings. I’m not sure which season we’re on, but it’s definitely not the current one.

That’s part of the beauty of the show, though: It really doesn’t matter. Time kind of stops, and life is self-contained within that steamy, fragrant tent, where 12 amateurs bake their hearts out for as many weeks as they can last, before they are gently eliminated from the competition one by one.

The show is fascinating because it’s so unlike American cooking competition shows, which tend to be so, well, competitive.

I know that British people are just as likely as people anywhere else in the world to be petty, mean, vindictive, and cutthroat; but while they’re on the show, everything is slanted in another direction, and even as the pressure mounts — and the pressure can be surprisingly intense, for a show that centers around cookies and cakes! — they’re all encouraged to put the best of humanity on display.

The show is, in many ways, about human relationships, and that (along with some clever editing, a lovely setting, and some gorgeous camera work) is what keeps us coming back every week.

Here is what the show teaches you, if you’re open to it:

Don’t just look, but listen. One of the bakers had a habit of judging whether or not his baked goods were done by not only looking at and touching them, but listening to them.

He would pull his cake out of the oven and hold it up to his ear to listen to the sounds it made, and only then decide if it was done or not. The various sounds of liquids and gasses moving and escaping the cake at various stages of doneness can tell you more about the insides of the cake than you can guess by looking at or prodding the surface — if you know what to listen for.

And this is true of human relationships, as well. There are the most commonplace, surface cues to be learned about other people, but it’s best to be ready to receive more subtle hints about what’s really going on inside each other. Sometimes just being quiet and listening to the small sounds that escape can be very telling.

It’s rarely misplaced to be gentle and encouraging with each other. Some contestants came across as more sincere than others, but it is evidently at least expected, on this show, that they will try to hearten and motivate each other, and even to help each other out a bit, even as the competition got more fierce week to week.

The older I get, the more I realize how desperately we all need gentleness and encouragement. Even people who ought to know how good they are really need to hear how good they are, and how important it is not to give up. It really is a beautiful and holy thing to pause in your own labors and say something kind to someone else who is struggling.

But there comes a point when you just have to tell it like it is. Not nastily, but clearly and accurately. The judges aren’t cruel or (generally) needlessly abrasive, as they often are on American shows; but they certainly know their stuff, and they don’t mince words.

Sometimes it can be crushing for a baker to hear that what they’ve made simply doesn’t taste good, or that it’s raw or burnt or just made wrong; but sometimes it’s just true, and has to be said. You can see that the judges don’t relish hurting the bakers, but they also don’t shy away from doing their job of naming the truth. There comes a point in every person’s life when they are called upon to simply name the truth.

The contestants get plenty of chances to redeem themselves. The show is set up so that each contestant has three challenges to tackle per episode: a signature bake, a technical challenge, and a show-stopper, and once they’ve completed all three, one contestant is named star baker, and one is sent home.

It’s a little nebulous how the actual judging is done, but it’s clear that the judges take into account all three offerings they come up with, which require them to show all different kinds of skills; so everyone can have a bad start and still pull themselves together and redeem themselves before it’s too late. As long as they’re still there, it means they still have a chance. 

Most worthwhile things in life are like this, or ought to be. There are very few things that we really must get perfectly right in every way the first time, or that we have to get right every single time. But we also ought to be learning all the time from our mistakes and failures, because time does run out eventually.

They are amateurs, and that literally means they do it out of love for baking. They’re in it because it’s something they want to do, and the goal in baking is not to get ahead or get rich (although that might result!).

It’s fascinating to watch these folks willingly subject themselves to such a grueling process where they sweat and cry and agonize over their challenges, and to know that, yes, sometimes this is what it looks like when you love.

But they also sometimes remind themselves, in so many words, that baking is something they enjoy, and that they can return to doing it for the sheer pleasure they find in the process. Even when it doesn’t turn out perfect and maybe never will, there’s still something there that keeps bringing them back. Maybe they edited it out, but I’ve never seen a contestant say it wasn’t worth the pain, or that it went so poorly, they’re going to give it up.

Oh, love. Oh, baking.

*

A version of this essay was originally published at The Catholic Weekly on October 25, 2022.

That time God sounded like Groucho Marx

There is a store downtown that we’ve asked our kids not to shop at. The window is full of a hodgepodge of goods: Sun catchers and hour glasses, crystals and oils, whimsical socks, tarot cards, and all kinds of items the modern shopper has classified as “metaphysical,” which includes anything having to do with Wiccans, native Americans, buddhists, or I guess mermaids.

When I saw a ouija board for sale, I told the kids it was probably just a stupid place, but it would be smarter just stay out, because we don’t need to even get close to that kind of nonsense.

It’s a fine line, because you don’t want to pique kids’ natural interest in the forbidden by making occult things sound tantalizingly fascinating, but you also don’t want them to make contact with anything dangerous. We draw a pretty bright line with ouija boards. Some things are designed to make something spiritual happen, whether the participants believes in them or not, and the purpose of a ouija board is to open a spiritual door.

We have found that the most effective strategy is to teach the kids to roll their eyes at the overwhelming lameness of the kind of store that blathers on about “magick” and darkness and light, and sells cheap sparkly jewelry from China and tries to pass that off as mystical. Snark is a powerful tool. 

But recently one of my younger daughters came to me pretty steamed, because in among the singing bowls and skeleton goblets and fairy wind chimes, they were selling a statue of Mary.

“I don’t want to buy it and give those people money, but I want to get Mary out of there!” she said.

I reassured her that it wasn’t hurting Mary at all to have her statue in such a foolish clutter. It’s just a statue, which isn’t her; and anyway, you really can’t hurt Mary. She’s too strong. But I understood the indignation she was feeling. You don’t put our mother in with all that trivia, like she’s just another pretty good luck charm that might send positive vibes your way.

I told her that you never know; someone might choose the Mary statue and bring it home because it was pretty, and it might lead them down a path of finding out more about who this lady is, and it might bring them into the arms of the Church where Jesus is. That is what Mary tends to do: She leads people to Jesus. You never know.

My daughter was fairly skeptical. She is ten, and like many kids her age, quite a traditionalist. She likes things to stay in their lane. So I told her that the Holy Spirit definitely uses the normal channels to reach people, but also speaks to people through whatever is around them. A statue, a song, a movie, anything.

She was intrigued, so I told her about a thought process that went through my head one time, and just about knocked me off my feet.

I had just finished an essay about the faith, and I liked it pretty well, but as often happens, I immediately started fretting that people wouldn’t understand what I was trying to say. Then I started fretting that maybe I wasn’t really clear, myself, on what I was trying to say. Then I thought maybe, in that uncertainty, I was missing out on something that God was trying to say to me.

And then, clear as a bell, I heard in my mind the voice of Rufus T. Firefly in Duck Soup saying, Can’t you see that I’m trying to tell you I love you?

And that . . . was God. Speaking in the voice of Groucho Marx, talking to Margaret Dumont as Mrs. Teasdale, whom he assuredly did not really love, but whom he was trying to woo, in between insults, because he wanted her money. But the point was, the line made me laugh, and it came to me out of nowhere because that is what God is trying to tell me, all the time. He loves me.

He does know me, and he knows what’s in my head, and what will make me laugh. I don’t know if I’m conveying just how sweet and perfect and strangely intimate this moment was, but there is no earthly reason this line should have popped into my head at all, but it perfectly put to rest all the fretting and questioning that I was chasing myself around with. And you would have to know me really well to know what a good line this is to use on me. 

It was a blessed reassurance that I had done my best with my work and that God would do with it what he wanted to, and I could relax, because he loves me.  All was well.

It wasn’t just a random thing, just a personal quirky story. It tells me that doors are always opening.  We can forget this, sometimes, as we fret over the many threats and tantalizing temptations our kids are subject to. Sometimes, as parents, we can focus overly on the many ways that evil can creep in and reach our children.

The enticements are cramming all the storefronts, reaching out and trying to get our kids to partake. The dangers are real. But so is Christ. So is Mary; so is the Holy Spirit. So much realer than evil! So much more authentic. So much more gratifying. So much more intimate.

Jesus is always looking for ways to reach us and to reach our children. He is so humble, he doesn’t wait for a formal, dignified, church-sanctioned invitation to swoop in and make a proposition. Just a little crack in the door will do. A joke, a song, a statue in a window. A line from a movie from short little Jew with wiggling eyebrows.

Can’t you see he’s trying to say he loves you? Don’t be afraid to see it, because it’s everywhere. Be watchful, be listening, but don’t be afraid.

A version of this essay was originally published at The Catholic Weekly on July 7, 2022.

Image is still from Duck Soup:

 

Mandatory Lent Film Party 2022: THE JEWELLER’S SHOP

Last Friday we watched The Jeweller’s Shop, a movie about married love based on a play written by John Paul II while he was extremely high. This is the fourth movie we’ve watched this year for our Mandatory Lent Film Party series. Still haven’t gotten around to reviewing The Secret of Kells yet, but my watch list and mini-reviews of Fiddler on the Roof and The Scarlet and the Black are here. 

We watched The Jeweler’s Shop on the Formed app, which we paid a fee to access for a month. 

Rather than attempt to write a review, I will simply recreate the experience for you as best I can, hitting the highlights.

The movie opens with some music that can best be described as “ready to autoplay in midi form when someone opens your Blogspot blog called ‘Marian Musings’ with the purple rosary wallpaper.” The man who wrote it also wrote “The Windmills of Your Mind” and “Brian’s Song” which my sister’s ballet class danced to in sixth grade in Mrs. Jenkins’ ballet class, and that is exactly what it sound like. 

As the story begins, a group of extremely sweatered young people are hiking in the mountains with a priest. The scenery is beautiful, the banter is top notch, the careless gestures between male and female are meaningful but not too meaningful, and the guitar part doesn’t last too long. But, then, THERE IS AN EXTREMELY ALARMING HOWLING ANGUISHED YETI(?) SOUND.  The group scatters, some in fear, some to help. It is clearly very significant, and you will think to yourself, “Whoa, what was that about? I can’t wait to find out!” 

Just you wait.

Later, one of the couples goes for a walk at night and has an awkward conversation about love, and the dude asks the girl to marry him. She darts away and buys a pair of white, high-heeled shoes, and then comes back to him wearing them, explaining that she can’t have the conversation unless she’s as tall as he is.

Now, by this point in the movie, we have already stopped it and had the “Okay, look, clearly this is not a normal movie, but we’re going to try to meet it on its own terms and see what we can make of it, so everybody be cool, okay?” conversation. So we were trying.

So we start the movie again, and watch them having this conversation about love in the middle of the night in the middle of the street, and he doesn’t think it’s strange that she ran off and bought shoes to talk to him. And I can live with this, because it’s a different kind of movie, as we discussed.

But the fact remains that, even with the shoes, he’s still a good eight inches taller than she is. So even if you suspend your disbelief that it means something for her to be as tall as him, she isn’t as tall as him! It just don’t add up! I found myself not only listening to the dialogue very carefully, but watching everybody’s mouths, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that the movie was dubbed from Turkish or something. It is not. It just feels very much like a movie that can’t possibly be what was originally intended by its maker.

You guys, I wanted so badly to like this movie, and to be moved by it, and to hear something that would strike me to the core and make me see my life in a new light. But I had no idea what the hell was going on.

The story itself was easy enough to follow. Synopsis: There are two couples in Poland. One couple is good, but the guy dies in the war, and then the wife has a baby, who grows up to be a hockey player. The other couple is bad, and they go to Canada and have a baby who grows up to be Jan from The Office. The hockey player falls in love with Jan, and she loves him, too, but she’s afraid of marriage because her parents are terrible. The hockey players asks his widowed mother for advice, and she responds, “Even your father would be doing better than you right now, and he’s DEAD! Well, bye!” and flies off to Poland.

Then I forget what happens, but the bad couple realizes they need to get it together, so they do, and the young couple decides that they’re going to run away to Poland to get married, as one does. And guess who’s there? The jeweler!

Simcha, you forgot to tell us about the jeweller! No, I didn’t. I just don’t know what to say. There is this jeweller, Burt Lancaster, who spends most of the movie aging unconvincingly and coming out with uncalled-for metaphysical pronouncements. He’s some kind of omniscient pre-Cana guy, and is also sometimes in Canada, in a slightly different format. Toward the end, the young couple turn up in his shop, and they’re like, “Hello! Our parents both bought rings from you, and apparently you have a scale that can read human hearts, so we would like to buy our wedding rings from you, and also we have heard that you have a lot to say about love. So, could you say something about love?”

That last part is almost a direct quote. But apparently they front loaded all the good jeweller love quotes in the first part of the movie, because the one time someone actually requests a fraught aphorism about love, and he just stands there, grinning at them.

Possibly he is thinking about washing his hair. Possibly he is thinking about that screaming sound they heard in the mountain, and thinking about how insane it is that it’s almost the end of the movie, and apparently this is all we’re going to get on that topic. (Earlier, one of the characters mentions that hearing a yeti(?) scream in the mountain was some kind of existential crossroads for her. Who was howling? We don’t know. Why was it important? Also extremely unclear. This is sort of like Chekhov’s rule, except instead of someone firing the gun that’s been hanging the wall, someone takes the gun down, sucks apple juice out of it, and then declares this is why they never liked bowling.)

Olivia Hussey is the prettiest lady I have ever seen, and it was okay to just watch her for an hour and a half. Very pretty lady. But the rest of this movie was not okay. Very little happens, but it also skips abruptly from scene to scene, making it hard to understand what is happening. Some of the dialogue is extremely mannered, and some of the characters deliver their lines in a formal, stage-like manner, but some of them try to toss them off like they’re in an after-school TV special, so the viewer can never settle in to a mode of viewing. Sometimes it tries to be very accessible and naturalistic, and then sometimes you have a scene where the priest comes to tell a young woman that her husband is dead, and when she tells him she’s pregnant and asks, weeping, why she feels so alone, he says we’re all empty, waiting to be filled up by God. And I do realize times have changed, but there has never been a time when that was a normal or helpful thing to say to a weeping pregnant new widow. 

So you think, “Okay, we’ll just settle into viewing this movie as some kind of highly poeticized formal drama, rather than a standard human narrative.” And that should work, because much of the dialogue is extremely meaningful, and it’s delivered with full gravity. The problem is, it’s not . . . very good. I’m someone who thinks about love and marriage and the meaning of human relationships constantly, and I don’t know what this is supposed to mean:

The Jeweller : The weight of these gold rings is not the weight of metal, but the proper weight of man. Man’s own weight. Yes, the proper weight of man. It’s the weight of constant gravity, riveted to a short flight. Freedom and frenzy trapped in a tangle. And in that tangle, in that weight which at the same time is heavy and intangible, there is love – love which springs from freedom, like water from a rift in the earth. So tell me, my young friend, what is the proper weight of man?

André : I don’t know.

The Jeweller : Man is not transparent. He’s not monumental. He’s certainly not simple. As a matter of fact, he’s rather poor. Now, that’s all right for one man, maybe two. But what about four or six, or a hundred or a million? If we took everyone on Earth and multiplied their weakness by their greatness, we’d have the product of humanity, of human life.

I will admit, I found myself profoundly moved by a passage which came somewhat later in the film, as follows: 

The jungle is every place for bitterness. It sows and reaps it like so much cane sugar. The jungle gets into your blood and builds tiny little houses of pain and you don’t wanna be there when the rent’s due because the anaconda, funny thing, they don’t know how to read a lease.

[chuckles]

Seems they’ve never learned! But the only thing longer than a croc’s mouth is the time it takes to swallow you whole. So next time you talk to me about jungles and bitterness, next time you’re trying to find your eyes with both hands, just keep that in mind… that is, if you still have a mind.

Jungle Brad: The jungle is a dangerous place, that’s true, but anyone who has ever seen two monkeys give each other things knows, that it’s a happy place, too. So let’s remember that and keep in mind you can eat pretty much anything you see, so have fun.

Oh sorry, that’s actually from The Lost Skeleton Returns Again, a sequel to The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. But go ahead, make the argument that it’s significantly worse writing than the Jeweller stuff. 

I’m sorry, I love John Paul II. We named one of our kids after him.  Maybe in some other lifetime I would watch the play he wrote, but this movie was completely opaque to me. I sat down to watch it with an open mind and an open heart, and I like all kinds of movies, and I feel like I’m ready to work with just about anything, as long as it works in some way. I tried really hard to figure out how to watch this movie, and it didn’t work. It wasn’t profound or personalist or metaphysical. It was just silly and confusing and amateurish, and I’ll stand by that. I’ll go up in the mountains and scream it if I have to. Apparently sometimes that means a lot to some people!

Next up, we want to watch that Philip Neri movie, I Prefer Heaven. That was the reason we got the Formed app in the first place, but we couldn’t get the Neri movie to play, for some reason. Wish us luck, because we’ve had a lot of misses this Lent, and we really need a win.

Does God really expect us to be perfect? (subscriber content)

If you like a good insult, you’ll love today’s readings.

First, Moses tells the people to keep God’s commandments perfectly, and God will reward them. It is the kind of reading that might drift along unheard right over our heads because we’ve heard this message so very often in Scripture. But the fact that we’re hearing it in Lent makes it a bit more uncomfortable. The entire context of Lent is: This is what happened because people didn’t keep the commandments.

The Old Testament is the story of people who got very clear directions about how to behave. Like us, they heard it over and over again, and they just couldn’t hack it. So God had to turn up in person.

And when he was there, he made things crystal clear, telling the disciples directly:

You have heard that it was said,
You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies,
and pray for those who persecute you.

And then he gives one of those rare and uncomfortable flashes of insight into his actual personality…Read the rest of my Lenten reflection for today’s reading at America. 

Image via pxfuel.com 

 

Weeding codependency out of Christian love

It’s a strange and beautiful thing, becoming one flesh. When two people marry, they begin the lifelong process of intertwining their hearts, growing into each other’s lives, sharing joys, sharing sorrows, finding self-worth through assuming responsibility for each other’s emotions and behaviors…

Hold up. That last part doesn’t belong. That last part describes something we call “codependence,” and it has no place in a loving relationship. It’s very common to find it there, though, because it’s great at mimicking sacrificial love. 

What is codependence? In its basic form, it’s a habit of taking on responsibility for someone else’s actions, emotions, responses, thoughts, and obligations.  

It’s a maladaptive coping mechanism many people develop in response to trauma. If we’re told as children that it’s our fault dad drinks or mom is always yelling, or if our spouses blame us for their irresponsibility at work or their bad temper at home, we may internalize that blame – and then spend the rest of our lives scurrying around, doing and saying anything that seems like it will stave off more conflict. 

Codependence isn’t simply a habit of trying to be helpful; it’s a heartfelt belief that another person’s entire experience of life depends on our behavior – that the sins and failings other people freely choose are somehow our fault, because we haven’t worked hard enough to keep them from happening. 

In truth, an adult with free will is the only one who can control how much he drinks, how much she yells, how they behave at work or at home. But abusive people are all too willing to let someone else take on that blame, and then blame them again when they can’t do the impossible and make everything better. 

Codependent behavior often feels like love, especially like the radically self-sacrificial, noble love that Christians are enjoined to cultivate. Codependency can look and feel like the great love of giving one’s life over for a friend. It can look like a form of holy martyrdom, mild or violent: “Look how selfless I am! I take onto my own person the suffering I do not deserve, just like Jesus!”

But there are crucial differences.

In authentic love, we are willing to help and be generous, but we do not pretend to have control over other people’s thoughts, actions, or emotions. Sometimes this real love might even look selfish, but in fact it shows respect for the other person’s autonomy, because it gives them credit for having free will and a unique, personal relationship with God. 

Codependency, on the other hand, may look generous, but is actually limiting, because it presupposes that the other person isn’t truly in control of his own behavior. It believes that other people can be manipulated into acting, saying, or feeling the right things.

Another difference: authentic love is rooted in healthy love of self, which recognizes that we are made in the image of God. Only trees with deep roots can bear generous fruit, and only firmly-rooted self-love can bear the fruit of unselfish love for others. In authentic love, we firmly believe we have something good to offer, and we’re even willing to suffer through offering it; but we don’t believe our own worthiness comes from our success at changing someone else.

Codependent behavior, though, is rooted in insecurity, fear, guilt, and shame, and a desperate desire to prove that we’re worthy of love. The drive to solve other people’s problems often comes from a deep terror that we may not be useful or necessary.

Sacrificial love brings joy and peace; codependent behavior brings bitterness and resentment.

And codependent behavior is reactive. We respond in the way we feel we must. We believe we’re forced into our actions by the behavior of others.

But loving actions are radically free. They come from a place of acknowledging and deliberately using our free will to imitate Christ, even though we have the choice not to do so. 

Christ knew who he was, and that’s how he had the strength to make the unthinkable sacrifice he made of his own life, for our sakes. But first, in the desert, he resisted the devil’s temptation to make him believe he needed to prove his worth; and throughout his life, passion, and death, he acknowledged that not everyone would follow him. He did not set about to change people who did not want to change. He would willingly take on their suffering and the sorrow, but he would not try to supplant their free will.

That is our model of authentic love.

It takes practice to break the habits of codependency. In some marriages, it can be done with attention and a firm, calm resolution to stop participating in an unhealthy habit. In others, where the origins of codependency are old and deep, it may take help from a therapist or a marriage counsellor, and it may take a long time. 

In either case, the upheaval that comes with untangling codependence from love can be unsettling, even terrifying. But it is worth rooting out. Like an invasive weed, codependency is not content to live side by side with love, but tends to crowd it out, strangle it, rob the healthy vine of nourishment, and eventually take its place entirely. Freeing a loving relationship from codependence means freeing love to flourish and bear good fruit. 

 

 ***

A version of this essay was originally published in Parable Magazine in 2019. Reprinted with permission. 

Thanks to Anna O’Neill and Kate Cousino for their help with this essay. Further reading: “Boundaries, Blaming, and Enabling in Codependent Relationships”  by Sharon Martin, LCSW; “Codependency, Trauma and the Fawn Response” by Pete Walker, M.A., MFT; and “Learning to distinguish codependency from love” by Anna O’Neill 

 
Image by simonwhitebeard from Pixabay

Trinity Sunday: I have much more to tell you

So, how was Heresy Sunday at your parish? Maybe you know it better as “Trinity Sunday,” but, well, you know. One minute, you’re standing there sweating behind the pulpit, trying to give your flock something solid to chew on, and then next minute, you’re a modalist. Or an arian, or a partialist. (If you’ve somehow never watched St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies, take a few minutes! It’s funny and good.)
 
On the other hand, you also have people complaining on Twitter that they’re pretty tired of hearing from their pastors that they’re just too dumb to understand the trinity, so he won’t even try. 
 
On the other hand . . . wait, that’s three hands now, and we’re about to veer into heresy again. What I’m trying to say is that the theology of the Trinity is pretty intense, and I have a lot of sympathy for homilists who are trying to steer a way in between teaching something false, and just performing some vague hand-waving about the mysterious mystery of it all.
 
However, the theology of the trinity is a lot more knowable than I was led to believe as a child. I had the impression that it was simply so far beyond our human experience, it would break my brain if I even tried to figure it out. This is false. If you want to know more about the Trinity — and you should! It’s VERY COOL — I most ardently recommend Frank Sheed’s Theology for Beginners. I intend to read it again this summer with my teenagers. It’s very lucid and exciting, and, surprise surprise, it leads to a better understanding of, well, everything. Because it’s about who and what God is.
 
However however, it would be hard to get into it in a single sermon. Some of the best sermons I’ve heard are less about defining doctrine and more about helping us understand why it’s important, and what it has to do with us. As Chris Damian says in another context, 
 
We tend to think of arriving at belief as a straightforward process. We think of belief as something that exists on the level of syllogism, where my rational assent is always the result of a clear logic unfolding from the circuitry of my mind. But coming into deep belief does not involve a mere continuation of syllogistic progression. Rather, it involves the mysterious integration of a complex constellation of experience, context, affection, habit, longing, rationale, and choice. Often the assertion of belief is a last step, the articulation of something which already exists within the person but which has taken time to develop into words.
So a few years ago, on Trinity Sunday, we heard a sermon with less doctrine but plenty of the rest of that complex constellation, and I appreciated it. The pastor at this church tended to deliver shaggy dog sermons, and sometimes you never do arrive at the punchline. But when you do, it’s always about the immensity of God’s love, and how personal it all is. Which is why we kept going back to this church, even though it’s forty minutes away! Here’s how I remember it:

He described how his grandmother and grandfather met at a town dance in 1922. They spotted each other across the room, and she thought he looked like a troublemaker and he thought she looked stuck up. But somehow they got together anyway, fell in love, got married, and came to know each other as they learned how to love each other. They had children, and those children had children, including the pastor himself; and by the time they had been married for several decades, they could complete each other’s thoughts. Gradually, over the years, they revealed themselves to each other more and more.
 
We sometimes think God has changed since the Old Testament. It seems like God used to be so harsh and angry, always smiting and getting vengeance; but then Jesus came, and taught us about love, even loving your enemy — and this seemed like something so new and different. But that year, we heard in the first reading how God has always been:
 
from of old I was poured forth,
at the first, before the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no fountains or springs of water;
before the mountains were settled into place,
before the hills, I was brought forth. . . 
There are some intimations of the Trinity here, of a God who isn’t lonely and solitary, but is in a fruitful relationship. And it was a relationship not only of love between the persons of the Trinity, but between God and us:
 
then was I beside him as his craftsman,
and I was his delight day by day,
playing before him all the while,
playing on the surface of his earth;
and I found delight in the human race.
 
The pastor reminded us that God was perfectly content in himself, perfectly complete. He didn’t need anything, certainly not human beings. But because of his overflowing love, he did want something . . . and so he made us. The responsorial psalm that year said:
 
What is man that you should be mindful of him,
or the son of man that you should care for him?
R. O Lord, our God, how wonderful your name in all the earth!
 
God made us to love us — and, as you do when you are in love, to reveal himself to us.  That that is what you do when you love someone: You open yourself, you reveal yourself to them, just as the priest’s grandparents did with each other over the course of many, many years of fruitful marriage. And that is what God has done for us (although of course we are the ones, not He, who had to learn and change and grow).  He is fruitful, and he reveals himself because He loves us. 
 
The Gospel reading from John that year was very short, and quite Greek:
Jesus said to his disciples:
“I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.
But when he comes, the Spirit of truth,
he will guide you to all truth.
He will not speak on his own,
but he will speak what he hears,
and will declare to you the things that are coming.
He will glorify me,
because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.
Everything that the Father has is mine;
for this reason I told you that he will take from what is mine
and declare it to you.”
 

To me, this speaks of the hope we can have of coming to know God more and more, as we become more and more confident in his love for us. And we can also hear a certain longing and eagerness by Jesus to reveal himself to his beloved, to us.  It’s a real relationship — or at least, he wants it to be. 

Knowing God better is . . . well, it’s not always a delight. Sometimes it’s terrible, for a while, just like marriage can be, as you come to know each other better and better. But unlike in a human marriage, we can know  with complete certainty that there is always delight on the other side, if we keep pushing through. Or at least we can hope, until we know.

So we should not be afraid of trying to understand mysteries. God wants to reveal himself to us. But we have to start by consenting to be in a relationship with him — and sometimes, just as in any relationship, that means taking a leap, and giving the assent of your will to something that you don’t yet fully comprehend. True for the mystery of the Trinity, true for the mystery of love. 
 
***
 
Image: Creation of Man, by Ceschiatti, 1945; photo by Dennis Jarvis via Flickr (Creative Commons)

It’s not too late to cancel your wedding

Jennifer’s wedding dress hangs in the closet of her guest bedroom. It’s never been worn. Jennifer (not her real name) called off her wedding two months before the date, and she says it was the hardest thing she’s ever done. Her friends were shocked; her parents were distraught. Her maid of honor stopped speaking to her. Jennifer had made non-refundable deposits, was was surrounded by gifts from her bridal shower when she announced the wedding was off. 

It was very late in the game to change her mind. But it wasn’t too late.  

“I think the hardest part was being honest with myself,” Jennifer said. 

She and her fiancé had been together for six years, engaged for nine months; but it wasn’t until the last minute that she finally acknowledged their relationship just wasn’t healthy. 

She’s not alone. By some estimate, 15 percent or more of engagements don’t end in marriage. But a couples who’s been together for a long time — or a couple who’s blundered quickly toward marriage, without taking time to discern the wisdom of their plans — can feel like they’re locked in one they’ve announced their plans to wed. 

“It’s a difficult situation when there’s the romantic delusion that somehow this marriage is going to beat the odds,” said Father Joe Tonos, pastor of St. John the Evangelist Church in Oxford, Miss. 

“It’s like the Percy Sledge principle: ‘When a man loves a woman, she can do no wrong,’ or vice versa,”  he said. And so they forge ahead, despite all the warning signs. 

Or sometimes, as in the case of Melissa (not her real name), they know very well that something is wrong, but they don’t know how to extricate themselves from what feels like a trap. 

Melissa broke of her engagement to her abusive fiancé well after their wedding plans were underway. 

“If you’ve announced the engagement, the pressure is on to live up to the expectations by following through with the marriage. But the people who might be surprised by the news of the broken engagement do not have to live with a broken relationship, or suffer through a future divorce,” Melissa said. 

With the help of a counselor, she found the courage to call the wedding off, and she was amazed to discover how supportive and gracious her friends and family were. 

Nevertheless, Melissa said her experience was humiliating. “I felt like a failure,” she said. 

“It was also empowering, though, in an odd way. I knew the decision was the right one, and despite the pain of it all, I felt a great deal more peace once I’d called the engagement off than I did while we were still planning to marry,” she said. 

For a Catholic marriage to be valid, the spouses must be free to marry; they must freely consent to the marriage; they must intend to marry for life, to be faithful, and to be open to children; and they must (with some exceptions) marry in front of two witnesses and a priest. 

But this is the bare minimum. A couple looking forward to their wedding day should also be joyfully looking forward to spending a life together. They should experience some peace together. They shouldn’t be working hard to ignore red flag about each other or about their relationship. 

Most of all, they should never feel obligated or trapped by the wedding plans themselves, no matter how much money and time have been poured into crafting the perfect celebration. A wedding is just one day, and it’s possible to recover from cancelling it. It’s much harder to recover from a wedding that goes off perfectly, but which is the first day of years of misery and disaster. 

Father Tonos recalls counseling a friend to break up with his girlfriend who constantly made him unhappy. The friend protested: “What? And throw away the past two years?”

“Don’t count the past investment,” Father Tonos said. Instead, think of the future, and of how it will be to spend the rest of your life with this person. 

Melissa wishes she could tell her former self, “I know that right now, it feels like you’re trapped, like you can’t live without your partner in your life, but you also can’t imagine living with them. Marriage will not make those feelings of doubt and pain go away. By continuing a relationship that is mutually exclusive with your happiness, you might also miss other connections and opportunities that are where you’re meant to be, and who you’re meant to be with.” 

Melissa has since become engaged to another man, and she has “zero doubts.”

“Taking control of my life after this broken engagement was very hard, but it empowered me to really get to know what I needed to be happy in a relationship that would last,” she said.

Jennifer, too, is grateful for her experience, agonizing though it was. 

“I’ve learned so much. I’ve learned that wedding bells do not define my worth. My vocation is no less because I didn’t go through with this,” she said. 

Jennifer and her ex-fiancé are still friends. He even thanked her, shortly after the cancelled wedding, for being strong enough to do what needed to be done. 

“Running to escape my problems would never have worked,” she said. “Facing them head on has done wonders for my life. I believed in ‘us,’ but now I get to believe in myself. I also know now that the Lord will never abandon me.” 

 

 

***

This article was originally published in Parable magazine in spring of 2020. Reprinted with permission. 

Photo by Marko Milivojevic on Pixnio

 

You can get a dolphin picture anywhere

Back in the days where cameras used film and you only had so many shots to take, my father took us kids to the aquarium.

We had a wonderful time, but when we got our photos developed, I was disappointed to see nothing but . . . us. “Why didn’t you take any pictures of the dolphin show?” I asked my father.

“I can get a dolphin picture anywhere,” he said. And he was right. The gift shop was full of sharp, professional photos of the animals. But there were no postcards with our faces on them — no tourist brochures featuring me, specifically, gasping with amazement, or my little brother, in particular, laughing in delight as he caught the dolphin’s spray.

And that was what my father wanted: Our happiness, our wonder and delight as we watched the dolphins leaping around and splashing us. That was why he had brought us there: So we would be delighted. And there was something in it for him, too. He enjoyed watching us enjoy ourselves. The one thing better than being happy yourself is seeing the joy of someone you love.

I think of this day when fretting over God’s sometimes baffling inefficiency. God is no businessman. If He wanted to maximize the number of souls saved, there are thousands of ways He could have made it happen: By taking away free will, for instance. By making virtuous behavior irresistible. By writing letters on the wall with a giant hand, rather than hinting with parables, whispering with grace, scattering clues of goodness, truth, and beauty all throughout the natural world.

He could have been more direct. He could have skipped all the strangeness, sorrow, and pain we feel as we blunder our way through life, toward Him. He could have been more efficient.

Instead, he chose the promise of delight. Instead, He gives us free will. He gives us the time and ability and desire to decide what to do with it. He wants us to come to Him not because we’re forced to, but because we have discovered Him, because we have found our own way toward Him, because we have realized organically, from the inside out, that we need and want what only He has to offer. He wants us to delight in Him. Not to find ourselves deposited briskly at the porch of Heaven, but to let ourselves be found.

It’s not a business transaction. It’s love. And there’s something in it for Him, too. He delights in our delight when we find Him.

Do we realize this? We may find ourselves miserably struggling to appease God, or anxiously, resentfully trying to avoid offending Him. But do we understand how He delights in us? He enjoys us. He likes us, and that is the only reason He made us in the first place. God is not deficient in anything. He didn’t need to make us at all. 

But He did. He did, because it’s not about the perfect dolphin picture. It’s not about efficiency. It’s about Him and us, us in particular. It’s about love and delight.

So there are two lessons here. One is more practical and immediate, and is mainly for parents:

Just as God loves us intensely now, for who we are, then we, as parents, must keep on reminding ourselves to enjoy, appreciate, and respond to our children now, as they are.

It is terribly easy to get distracted from this purpose — to pursue the “perfect dolphin picture,” and to forget why we came in the first place.  When we’re planning birthday parties, are we trying to please our actual kid, or to impress a thousand anonymous moms on Pinterest? When our older kids are choosing a college, do we nudge them toward the one that will help them be what they were meant to be, or toward the one with the name that strokes our own egos? When our children declare themselves for who they are — through their interests, their dress, their strengths, their humor, their voices, their hearts — do we remember to stop and delight in them, as specific, irreplaceable children? 

Do we let them know we see and delight in them as they are, for who they are? Or do we hustle past their actual selves in favor of a generic family photo op?  God gave us specific children for a reason. One of our primary jobs as parents is to identify and encourage what is good in them — not what we wish they were like, but what is good in them right now. Our job is to find something delightful in them. 

The second lesson is more universal, and it is this:

This intensely personal, specific love and delight that parents should cultivate toward their kids is the same personal, specific love and delight that God feels toward us. Toward you. Remember this.

The Father made you, specifically, on purpose. Christ came to save you, individually, intentionally. He delights in you for who you are. He wants to forgive your sins “more quickly than a mother would snatch her child out of the fire” (St. John Vianney). He wants to save you because He knows you, and delights in you. 

God is no businessman. He is bogglingly inefficient. Christ said to St. Teresa of Avila, “I would create the world again just to hear you say you love me.”  Oh, it’s personal. He could get a perfect dolphin picture anywhere. But he’d rather have you.

 

***
This essay was originally published in Parable magazine in 2018. Republished with permission. 

Image by HAMID ELBAZ via Pexels (Creative Commons)

Undeserving, unremarkable, unreliable, beloved

My social media feed is well-stocked with babies. I have my favorites: That one little girl with the amazing dark eyes and bounteous curly hair; that extra squashy toddler whose face is so ridiculously expressive; and of course my own children, who are sweeter, cuter, and more delicious to look upon then all the rest of humankind put together and then tripled.

What I really enjoy, though, is boring pictures of boring kids. I like seeing that one kid (or forty-six kids, for all I know. I can’t tell them apart, because there’s nothing remarkable about them) with the light brown hair and the kind of dull expression, doing things like sitting at a table with a plastic plate of eggs, propped up in a swing his eyes half-closed, or maybe holding a toy truck in one hand and another toy truck in the other hand.

“Little man really loves his eggs!” the proud mom will gush, adding a couple of smiling emoticons with hearts instead of eyeballs. “Connor is crazy about playing trucks! Love him so much [heart heart heart heart heart].”

These really are some of my favorite posts, because it makes me happy to remember that there are so many ordinary, unremarkable children in the world who are cherished, doted on, lavished with affection just because they exist. They are not adored because they learned to speak at an early age or because they smell better than most children. They haven’t earned their parents’ love because they are especially clever or easy to care for, or because they show early promise for a lucrative career in show business. They are beloved simply because they are children; and, when all is well, parents love their own children better than they love anyone else. They are beloved simply because they exist.

In an increasingly utilitarian society, where we are told to value people who are useful and kill people who are not, it is refreshing down to my very soul to see so much love lavished on such ordinary children.

I thought of this during the Mass of the Epiphany, as our pastor reminded us that the magi prostrated themselves before the infant Jesus. The typical nativity scene shows the wise men visiting the Holy Family in the stable where Jesus was born. More likely, Joseph had found more comfortable housing by the time the magi turned up; but either way, whether it was the foul, smelly hay of the stable or the undoubtedly rough and rustic floor of the house of a poor carpenter, those stately, high-born international guests, who had been welcomed by Herod himself, prostrated themselves on it – abased themselves – lay themselves down in utter, abandoned adoration before the child who was anything but ordinary.

“And then,” our pastor reminded us, “Jesus did the same for us.” First by making Himself an infinitesimal one-celled human in one of Mary’s fallopian tubes; by being born into that dark, smelly stable (and the dark, smelly, finite, fallen world of humans in general); by allowing Himself to be publicly executed like a criminal; by allowing Himself to be present in that flat, white, unremarkable consecrated host.

Odd for the magi to know enough to prostrate themselves, in their jewels and flowing robes, before the seemingly unremarkable but truly extraordinary son of Mary; odder still, odd times a billion, for that Son to prostrate Himself for us, who are truly unremarkable.

Why? Why would He do this?

Because, to Him, every last one of us is that child who is unlike any other child. Each one of us is cherished like the “little man” who is adorable just because he enjoys eating eggs, or sweet beyond compare just because he has learned to blow kisses, like billions of other babies. To Christ, each of us is that special one, that cherished child, that singularly beloved one who makes his parent’s heart swell with affection.

He dotes on us just because we exist.  We are not beloved of God because we learn quickly or because we perform better than, for instance, the angels. We haven’t earned our Father’s love because we are especially clever or easy to care for, or because we can ever possibly do anything for God.

We are beloved simply because we are His children; and God loves each of His children as if they were His only child. He would have gone to these mind-bogglingly extraordinary lengths for any single one of us, even if we were the only person in the universe.

If you don’t believe me, then ask yourself this: Does the alternative make any more sense? Does it seem more true to say, “God would have been willing to undergo the immense weirdness of the Incarnation, and the profound suffering and agony of the crucifixion, but only if it was for a whole lot of people. He would only do it for billions of people. Not millions. Or maybe he would do it for millions, but not thousands, or hundreds. Well, maybe he would do it for a hundred people, but never for just one.

“Never just for me.”

Oh, really? Let me tell you, it doesn’t make any sense for Him to do it in the first place, not even for quadrillions or quintillions of unremarkable human souls. There would be no reason for God to go that trouble, no matter how many souls there were. So long as we’re willing to believe He’s going to behave so strangely, and subsume His infinite glory into some “itty bitty living space” for a world full of souls, then why not go whole hog and make no sense at all? Why not go ahead and do that for one, single, stinking person, like me?

It doesn’t make sense. It’s not efficient. It’s not rational. The only reason you’d do it is for love; and love only means anything if it’s between two people.

And who are those two people? Him and me. And Him and you, and you, and you, and every single last stinking, undeserving, inadequate, unreliable, unremarkable one of us, one by one, with His whole heart. I am ordinary, and so are you. I am unremarkable, and so are you. We like scrambled eggs, and we enjoy playing with our trucks. There is nothing special about us – nothing, except that we are beloved of God, individually, distinctly, intentionally, profoundly.

***
This essay was first published in The Catholic Weekly in 2017.