The Christian Life: April 2004 Archives

Remember that friendship post from a month or so ago? Father McCloskey is going to have an article on Christian friendship, with a special focus on men's friendships, in the May issue of Catholic World Report. If you can't get CWR on the newsstand, the article will probably be online in June.

UPDATE: This is what I get for multitasking -- I meant to include a link to Alicia's post "What We Have Lost", in which among other things she touches on how the sexualization of everything is wrecking same-sex friendship.

It seems like everything has been sexualized except sex.

Last night I was nosing around Lincoln's blog (Lincoln is Dinka's husband and Veronika's Daddy) and he has a permalink on the side labeled Haunting photographs and commentary of a motorcycle trip through Chernobyl. I decided to check it out. I think without even describing the site, one can say it is scary what happened there. It amazes me how people have the power to destroy not what we have now, but for generations to come.

When you enter a beautiful, traditional Church, the kind that has marble statues, a huge Suffering Christ behind the altar, the Stations of the Cross, the smell of incense and the Tabernacle obviously on the altar, very often you sense a strong presence of the Lord about you. Then we go home, and some of that diminishes just a little. Not totally, just not as strongly. After all, Jesus is Truly Present on the altar. Then I read about things like Chernobyl, or grosser things like how they found a lot of bodies under John Wayne Gacy's home, or the recent testimony in the partial birth abortion hearings and it almost seems some places or people or events seem to be almost void of God. Maybe not totally void, but how a lovely Church has a strong presence of God these places seem to be the opposite. It's like how could the God who created all of us and who has been so good to me have this happen if He was around? I know the answer is of course Original Sin, Free Will and all that, but these events just seem the opposite of God's beauty and love-like He was never there.

In my world these things do not happen, Deo Gratias. I place a lot of trust in God to keep us safe, keep us clothed, keep our bellies full etc. It may be naive, but I really believe He takes care of myself and my family. I often wonder by what events I have been so blessed to not be someone who lived around Chernobyl in the mid-80's, a child conceived to be aborted, someone born in Iraq or in a million other less than desirable circumstances. I wonder if my faith in God to take care of us is really God taking care of us, or simply just the luck of the draw that I was born in the time and place I was.

Sometimes I think that since I have it so good, I forget what effects my sins have on the world or just the people around me. Each week I go to confession and confess the same sins. Sometimes while I am on line I get very apprehensive because I went to the same priest last week, and confessed the same laundry list, and here I am again. I wonder if my life were not so good, and I had a true sense of what evil really is, would I not do better? Do not get me wrong, I am not looking for some evil thrill or some event to scare me straight. I am just thinking day in and day out, I make the same mistakes, and as I make them, I never have a sense of what I am really doing. Just going about my business. Many of us do not have actual visuals when we get lazy in our prayers of us insulting God at that moment, or if we get complacent about our housework for the day, we are teaching our children to be lazy in the long run.

Anyway, I would like to do better. I think I say that everyday, but it is true. I would like my home to be a place where God is more present than a God void.

I have blogged before about the almost cultish nature of some of the Catholic families around here. Right now I am so frustrated I can cry. Quite frankly, if a strange man knocked on my door and said "Hey, if you wanna move now, I got a truck ready, but you gotta go now!" I'd say "Yippee, let's go!"

There is a family (11 kids-about half range from age 21 to teens) that lives 5 minutes, if that, away from us, but do not associtae with us because my mantillas are too distracting and her sons might be looking at me. We are the cause of much scandal. They attend our TLM parish sometimes, sometimes they go to one 1.5 hours in the other direction. There is another family at our Church in which the woman was divorced (the story is her husband left her with 9 kids when she converted to Catholicism) and now she is remarried. Her children are almost all teenagers now. The wife of the first family took it upon herself to confront the husband of the second family that he should not have married his wife because she is not Holy and the children are bad blah, blah, blah. The first woman's daughter is also writing notes to other teenage girl's mothers saying that their daughters dress like sluts at Church (which the do not, they dress modestly, just not as extreme Puritans) and these girls should not be attending Church.

My family has been the receiving end of some of this gossip as well, but oddly it is never to my face like this. Even when we tried to confront someone, they had nothing to say, but of course turned around and told other people again, what is wrong with us.

Is this nonsense common in parish life? This is so unCatholic, in my opinion. People should be able to go to Church to worship without this sort of heartache. Did I miss the part when Jesus said our job was to go out and tell people not to get married or come to Church because they do not adhere to strange Puritan ideas not outlined in any Church teaching? But I think this is the story of this diocese. No leadership, no formation, so we make it up as we go along.

I went to the Easter Vigil Mass at my parents' Novus Ordo parish, and my feelings were I should have been shot before thinking yet one more time "oh maybe it won't be so bad." Do I have to go into how they turned the readings into a concert? Changed around the words to make them musical so they could be performed. Then the priest gave his homily about how this was the best Easter Vigil Mass ever, even compared to what they do in Rome, and we should appreciate the music ministry for their talent and creativity.

I am getting tired. There are things going on at home that are just really hard, and I go to Church to find solace in the Lord. I resent getting pushed around and finding out I caused some scandal this week because of some obscure point of my clothing after I already fretted over finding the most modest items in my wardrobe as to not cause scandal. Not one person will have a theological discussion with me, yet they all can tell I am a heretic because my necklace was too pretty or my top button was un buttoned.

But in regards to the the first story, I think these attitudes going unchecked can be very dangerous to our faith. Not that I can do much besides whine about it here to get it off my chest, and then pray very hard on it, but these things, besides being hurtful and annoying, scare me quite frankly.This type of thinking always seems to get a following. I also know the whole bit that the Church militant is not perfect because of Original Sin, and people will be people, all that stuff. But I am far from perfect, but I would not do this to people, and I think many normal people would not consider doing this.

There is so much I don't know. There is so much I don't know. I wish I could just pour it into my head or swallow it like a pill so I could absorb the knowledge quickly and move on, instead of having to go to the trouble of realizing what I don't know, finding out what I need to learn, finding the best book on the subject, and reading about it -- all of which provide ample opportunities for me to go off on tangents and forget about what I was originally trying to learn, or get bogged down in the learning and never get around to the doing.

I am speaking of the spiritual life: learning to pray, learning to recognize the snares and pitfalls that lie along the way, and above all cultivating the virtue of perseverance. When I read solid works on spiritual growth, so often I find myself without the background knowledge, so to speak, I need to fully grasp what the author is telling me: What is a spiritual bouquet? What exactly is meant by meditation, by mental prayer?

When we are told that we should not be sad, that sadness is a symptom of lukewarmness, what does that mean? Surely it does not mean that we will never experience the emotion of sadness for the rest of our lives -- or that we should deny that we feel this emotion when we feel it. Or does it? Or is there another, more restricted meaning of the word "sadness" in writing on the spiritual life? In that context, does it mean something more along the line of "cultivating self-pity" or something like that? Or are we being warned to take sadness seriously, as a warning?

Yesterday I was walking around in a pretty blue mood all day long. (I went through about two years of clinical depression and had a mild relapse a few years later, so I tend to pay attention when I feel the grey cloud settling around me.) Nothing serious, nothing weepy, but still a melancholy day -- a mood that seemed most inappropriate for Easter Monday. Part of it was just the natural result of too little sleep (I had not slept well) and too little breakfast. Part of it was the letdown from getting back to the routine after the stress of travel.

But a good bit was just plain old disappointment and sorrow. Sorrow for my friend who had received bad news on Thursday; sorrow for the bad news everywhere. Sorrow over some disappointments we've had at our own house recently. And then the disappointment: disappointment at my very sense of disappointment (God has been good to us, what possible right do we have to "want more"); disappointment at my lackluster Lent (my resolution was to make daily mental prayer a priority, with a 50% success rate at best.) Disappointment at my totally lame Holy Week. Disappointment with my laziness, my disorganization, my dirty kitchen floor.

I wish I weren't so ignorant.

I wish I weren't so weak.

I wish I would remember that part of the answer is to stop worrying about -- to accept and even rejoice in -- my weakness and ignorance. But then, I missed class when that topic was covered, too.

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