Faith
Shout
There’s a famous quote of St. Augustine in which he objectively observes God’s pursuit of him during his dissolute years. In this dispassionate experience, Augustine envisions God calling after him, and even shouting. This description shows how God would stop at nothing to possess Augustine’s heart, even if it meant resorting to yelling.
We live in a world filled with noise. Even as I write, ambient music plays in the background to keep my brain engaged in the work at hand. But how does God deliver His message to Elijah? Not in the earthquake, not in the flame, but in the quiet breeze.
Our Lenten journey is God shouting at us. Another year has slipped by; are we better today than we were last Lent? Are our confessions different, did we bleach the dirtiest spots on our baptismal garments, and now we’re working on the smaller spots? We have made it to the gift of another day, but tomorrow is not assured.
There’s something mystical and humbling to know that God, goodness itself, is so obsessed with us. Some colloquially describe it as jealousy, a consuming desire for us to return to Him freely the love which He gives. For any parent, this is a relatable thing; to receive back from a child the love they’ve been given is a transcendent experience.
The saints are people just like us, people who contended with their flaws and sins, and chose to overcome anyway. Their secret to holiness is no secret at all: when the author of life shouts at you, listen.
Seek
My young daughter was thumbing through her children’s Catechism last week, when she excitedly shared her discovery: it has all the answers! We live in a golden era of information, where everything we wish to know is easily within reach. More than that, we’re in a period of the New Evangelization where our message is being shared in high-value productions.
Use the Hallow app and you’ll see the acclaim is well-placed. It’s as premium of an experience as Headspace or Calm, only it aims to call us higher. Mindfulness spends its efforts making you stop and empty your mind; Hallow invites you to stop and fill your mind with the things of God.
The Bible is no longer designed to look good and gather dust on the bookshelf. Ascension Press, using the approved translation, put together an entire reading plan that ties the disparate books into a single cohesive narrative that anyone can follow. Then they backed it up with the Bible in a Year podcast where you not only hear the words, but then gain more profound insight, understanding, and historical context. Scott Hahn’s Ignatius Study Bible has footnotes explaining the passage and giving cross-references that are longer than the Scripture itself.
Catholicism is the result of nearly 2,000 years of exercise of rigorous academic inquiry. Its roots to ancient Judaism extend that timeline considerably. For any one of us, comprehending the sheer volume of truth, and its breadth, naturally leads to questions. Some questions go to the heart of faith and its system of logic, others to some nuanced part of it. No matter our question, there’s a resource at our fingertips to address our concerns, in an easy-to-understand format and with plenty of context.
Questions are good, and they can bring us deeper into the mystery of our faith and the source of truth. We can only know our faith, and the words to explain it, but understand it. There’s never been a better time to be a doubtful Catholic. The resources, books, podcasts, and YouTube videos grant us access to new perspectives and the collective wisdom of today’s brightest minds.
Doubt is a hallmark of the human intellect, and a mile marker on the journey of faith. We all have our doubts, but do we have the courage to seek the truth?
Slush
February is rapidly coming to a close, and the first signs of spring are starting to appear across the landscape. Warmer air moves in and the snow that’s been our constant companion since mid-November is disappearing. Left beneath this slushy mix is a solid sheet of ice.
Shoveling fresh snow, especially powder, is easy. It was my first season using a snow blower, and in just a few minutes I had a walkable path. Even cleaning up the walkway was easy. Today, after a full day of sun and above-freezing temperatures, the snow was wet and heavy. I spent half an hour clearing off my back patio, trying to take away the insulation preserving the ice below.
At the base now remains thick ice. It’s harder work to remove. First comes the aggressive chopping, followed by the heavy lifting of the broken ice. No snow blower can help me, and if I want the ice gone now, I have to do the hard work to break it, lift it, and chuck it.
So, too, our spiritual lives.
When we choose to tackle sin, we encounter the same layers. The top layer is the easy sins, those which we only commit out of convenience. We’re no gossip, but with that one friend, it just happens. That’s easy to address. As we move away the top layer of snow and see what lies beneath it, it becomes clear how much more work we have to do.
Next come the more difficult sins, those that have been with us for too long. They’ve burrowed in deep, but with focused attention and hard work, we can shovel them to the side. It’s a heavy lift and a hard shove, but they’ll yield to our work. Only then can we see the reality of what needs our attention next.
In the end, we reach our calcified character flaws; those sins to which we’re naturally disposed. We have to hack, attack, lift, and throw to get those out of our lives. It’s a task more easily done when the sunlight and warmth help us.
At the end of it all, we have a clean slate. Though it could be more perfect, the evidence of our good work is before us. This is the work that we undertake in Lent. It’s easy to clean out the cobwebs on the surface. How hard are we willing to work, how deep are we willing to clean, to let the sunlight shine in our lives?
Some Better Thing
We’re two weeks into the new year, and the grand designs that many of us made are at risk of faltering. One of the best ways that we can spend our time each day is in prayer. This tremendously important activity not only contributes to bringing God’s kingdom to earth, but it fortifies us for the struggles that we encounter in the ordinary life of our vocation.
There is no rule or formula that dictates how much we need to pray or ought to pray. It’s particular to our lives. Cloistered religious pray a vast majority of the day, but a parent has other holy obligations to attend to in the course of caring for their children.
The most common challenge we face in praying is just getting started. The time comes when we’ve decided to pray, but there always seems to be some better thing that we could be doing. I could pray now, but what about cleaning the kitchen? I could pray now, but what if I first just tidy my desk? I could pray now, but maybe it would be better if I work out first, and then I’ll be awake and alert.
We have precious few minutes and hours in our day. Our to-do list will never be complete, and there are many good and worthy things that we could do. But why not spend a few minutes in prayer, and then go do that other good thing?
Jubilee
It’s been 25 years since the Catholic Church last celebrated the Jubilee. I was in middle school in 2000, but I still remember the special events that occurred. Throughout the year, there will be many special opportunities to enrich our faith and draw from the treasury of graces.
In the Bible, the Jubilee was more than just a special year, spiritually. Debts would be forgiven, property rights restored, and slaves freed. It’s not difficult to imagine the joy that came with such liberation.
In the Catholic tradition, we’ve celebrated Jubilee’s for over 700 years, and these special years are meant to be equally liberating. There are opportunities for indulgences which erase the debt we owe to God’s mercy, and there will be many ways for us to participate in those opportunities.
In Rome, the Pope has opened the four Jubilee doors at the basilicas, and although most of us will be unable to walk through them this year, our participation in the Jubilee is not diminished. This is the year, our year, for us to finally lay down the sins that have been holding us back, and run through the wide open gates of God’s mercy.
Swept to Safety
In the entirely of salvation history, there are stories, major and minor, that all play their part. Every episode that made its way into the Bible contains enough truth and wisdom to fill a book of its own. This is especially true of the story of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt.
Although it takes up less than a quarter of one page of even a large print Bible, the story contains rich theological value. In it, we glean insights into the silent character of St. Joseph.
In his familial hometown, but away from his adult home, Joseph dutifully brings his young family to obey the order of Caesar. On the outskirts of town, in some empty cave or abandoned barn, the child who is entrusted to Joseph is born. While he sleeps, an angel again visits Joseph in his dream, this time with an urgent warning. The enemies of the child are gathering, seeking his life, and Joseph must spirit him away.
Quietly and in haste, Joseph loads up his family and journeys across the frontier to and into the relative safety and anonymity of Egypt.
As the dragnet was pulled across the whole kingdom of Israel, Joseph slipped through and frustrated the first challenge to Christ incarnate. This early attempt to end his life prefigures the future attempts, and effaces the threat to the global order that this infant presented.
Joseph is understood to be a deeply prayerful man. Angels visit him in his sleep, a sign that even in the quiet, idle moments of his day, he is disposed to prayer and receptive to the voice of God. He never speaks, and never questions these celestial messengers, but humbly obeys them to the letter.
King Herod, though subordinate to Caesar and his governor, still wielded immense and oppressive power over his subjects. The search must have been massive, as Herod reacted with wanton cruelty to the words of the magi. Despite the scale of the manhunt, Joseph, a simple carpenter, outwitted them all. He strongly and silently swept his family to safety.
The Great I Am
Born on Christmas Day is the King of Kings.
He arrived in a damp, cold, dark place, in some cave in the backwater of a once-great kingdom, to a people oppressed by their rulers, foreign and domestic. He chose to reset the global order not in a time of fast communication and stable democracies, but in a time of mass illiteracy, brutal tribalism, and gruesome cruelty.
In the midst of this chaos arrived the great I Am. The spark He struck has turned into the roaring flame that spread through the whole world. None of it was possible without a God whose love for His people could not be contained, or without the simple “yes” of a newlywed couple that brought the Christ-child into their home.
Arrival
With Thanksgiving behind us, we’ve entered into what feels like the busiest time of the year. In just four weeks, Christmas morning will be here, followed shortly thereafter by 2025.
This holiday season, Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year, is a stressful time, but there’s a certain peace that permeates the air. Maybe it’s the cold weather slowing us all down, or perhaps it’s the slowdown at work that gets us feeling this way. Though our to-do lists don’t get any shorter, it feels like we finally have permission to set aside some tasks and not be in such a hurry to get everything done.
Though that all may be true, there’s something else that causes us to pause; anticipation. We know of the impending arrival of Christmas, and the joy of the Christmas season. Everything around us reminds us of that fact, and it soaks up our attention. From the music on the radio in stores, to the sudden shift in liturgical decor, to the decorations across town, Christmas is top of mind. For one brief month, the whole world around us wants us to be distracted from our daily responsibilities and challenges and focus on Christmas.
The Messiah is on his way, and will arrive soon. What that means, a child born for sacrifice, connects us directly to the freedom of Easter. His arrival marks the beginning of a new chapter in civilization, where we can all see the great light and experience our hope, fulfilled.
Advent is a time of distraction, holy distraction. There’s plenty to do, and more that still needs to be done, but everywhere we look, everywhere we go, and everything we hear all calls our hearts back to the true joy of the season; the arrival.
Written for Me
Though I haven’t committed to routine self-improvement in the past two years, there was a recent time in my life where it was always top of mind. The last big undertaking was in 2022 when I completed Ascension Press’ Bible in a Year podcast. That was the first time in my life that I read the Bible and truly studied it as a comprehensive work, and the payoff has been huge.
Although the Bible was authored thousands of years ago and 5,000 miles away, it applies to my life today as it did to the authors then. It’s a book of human stories and experiences, that repeat throughout our lives. No matter the situation that I find myself in, I can almost always find a direct relationship to a story or character in the Bible. In those times, it feels as if it was all written only for me.
Filled with dark imagery, unimaginable suffering, and challenges that I hope to never confront, the thread of hope weaves throughout the chapters and verses. At the end of the story, no matter how dark things get, Light returns to assert dominion, the greatest triumph of all.
Overflowing
A good way to think about our lives, especially our spiritual lives, is as a cup. We can choose what we fill it up with. Things of beauty, prayer, the Sacraments, and acts of virtue fill up our cup to the point where it overflows.
When our cup is overflowing, it’s extraordinarily difficult for sin to enter into our lives. We are fulfilled, living life by God’s design, and there is simply no room for temptation to gain a foothold.
In the same way with time and our day, when we fill up our day with the things we must do, there is neither time nor opportunity for anything else. By filling up our spiritual life with these good things and heavenly delights, we can accomplish the same thing.
We carry the same habitual sins into the Confessional month after month, year after year. It can be easy to make small pivots and adjustments to increase our chances of overcoming this sin, but why not just completely snuff it out? Give it no quarter, no room, no attention. Even a giant log is no match for a river with a strong current.