Quiet
Summer vacation is finally here, and the kids are off with their grandparents for two weeks. Alison and I drove home yesterday and, for the first time in nearly three years, are home alone.
Although we slept in this morning, and were slow to start our day, we were unbelievably productive before lunch. I made it through my whole list for the day, and the house feels clean and refreshed.
Life with small children is never easy, but it’s always full of great meaning and beauty. I’ll enjoy the quiet time ahead, focusing on what needs to be done. But I’ll look forward to when my children return, and things are less quiet.
New Beginnings
Growing up in a military family, moving was always a fact of life. Now with a family of my own, we’ve certainly moved a few times, but never like before.
A new beginning is just around the corner. After six years of life, and conquering Alison and I’s number one goal, it’s time to move on to new opportunities, and new right steps for her career and our family.
We’re starting to take things off the wall, preparing for painting and putting the house on the market. As I took that first hook out of the wall, I felt that moving feeling that filled my childhood. As the fresh paint dried, my nose picked up on that familiar scent that always signaled something new.
Our adventure continues, hopefully opening up broader horizons and brighter futures.
Garage Doors
In my ideal world, our house would be clean all the time. Things pulled out for play would be put away, and I’d stay on top of the dishes in the kitchen and the bits of paper that always seem to float around.
Late last month, our garage door gave up on life and broke on a Friday morning. About to run errands, I was unable to get the car out. Some crafty strategy and I got Alison’s car home, so we were at least able to get moving.
Late last week, the repairman came and fixed the current door, with the caveat that we should just leave it open since it’s likely to break again. So, for two weeks now, our garage door has been open at all times.
Normally, I strive to keep the garage tidy, and most days I’m successful. Lately, though, I’ve just let it go. The weather is nice, and the kids are playing outside more during the day, including with toys that are stored in the garage.
The pile continues to grow, but instead of trying to fix the problem, I’m just letting it be. It’s an exercise in patience, especially since it’ll be another two weeks before the door is fixed. But for now, things are broken, and accepting the chaos is an okay thing to do.
Checkpoints
The cold days of winter are behind us as the days grow warmer and spring fills all of us with a sense of newness. As we near the end of the school year, in the midst of this newness, my thoughts are turning back to my family’s daily rhythm.
At the beginning of the school year, we were very dedicated to our routine. Although it was familiar each day, we checked things off our list in the same order each morning. Among those routines were clear opening and closings for our school day. As the year dragged on, and the workload increased, those routines faded away.
I’ve built a new routine, to carry us through the upcoming months, and I’ve designed it towards a rhythm of prayer. Not a burdensome schedule, but a monastic one adapted for our domestic life. I want to have checkpoints sprinkled throughout our day, with short opportunities for prayer. In a way, it’s like water stations along a race route. I never wanted us to be too far from prayer.
Real life is very normal, routine, and frankly boring. The same is true for the lives of the saints, including St. Joseph. He was an anonymous tradesman in a village of 200 people. But out of that ordinariness, something beautiful bloomed. I hope that our rhythm of prayer does the same for us.
Fruits of Labor
The feast of St. Joseph the Worker is an important reminder in our modern era of the holiness of work. As the pendulum swings back from the worship of workaholics, we’re in danger of losing sight of the fruits of labor.
In the past few decades, as the Internet changed the workplace, the lines between life and work became blurred, almost to the point of extinction. The pandemic of 2020 ushered in not only remote work, but a faux focus on mental wellness that looked a lot like laziness.
It’s true that working to excess, harming your other responsibilities, is bad, but so is idleness. As we try to reclaim balance, we can look to St. Joseph as our model.
St. Joseph was a tradesman who had a very hard life. He’d walk miles each way to job sites, work in the hot and dusty climate of the Middle Easy, and carefully craft raw wood into finished products using simple tools. He labored during the day, and rested on the Sabbath. Not only that, but he brought his son into his work, teaching him the trade. We can only imagine the conversations that they had. On the holiest day of the week, he prayed and rested as God desires.
Joseph’s example demonstrates the value of work. We fill our time creating products, experiences, and value for others. We then use our compensation to support our family and lifestyle. The virtuous cycle of the economy rewards us for work done well, and we can find a degree of satisfaction in days well spent.
Work is a good and virtuous thing, but we should be ever mindful of how too much of a good thing can have unintended consequences. When it’s time to work, do great work. When it’s time to rest, delight in rest. When it’s time to play, play with your family. When it’s time to pray, pray with your whole heart. In this way, we’ll follow in the footsteps of St. Joseph, who will always lead us to his son.
The Idea
Jesus is most commonly thought of as a religious figure, but in reality, his core message a fundamental change in human thinking. Jesus’ contribution to philosophy is the single most important idea in history.
The ancient world was a difficult place. Tribalism ruled the day, an understandable coping mechanism for the chaos of lawlessness. Societies formed around common ancestry or geolocation and fought viciously to subjugate neighbors and members of opposing groups.
There were a few good leaders, sparks of an idea that life is about more than absolute power. Cyrus, for example, rode in from Persia to destroy Babylon and freed the Jewish people to return to their homeland. Hammurabi established a legal code granting rights to common citizens. In spite of these outliers, across nations and societies, there was an embedded caste system that could not be dismantled.
Jesus presented a philosophical revolution that has changed the baseline of human thinking. It was a single, simple idea that in the millennia since he presented it, his followers have spread throughout the entire world. It has crossed borders, cultures, and even religions.
All people have inherent dignity and worth.
The Greeks are lauded for their wisdom, but in their ideal world the family unit had to be destroyed for the good of the state. Romans could take unwanted newborns outside of town and dispose of them, leaving them to die of exposure in the elements. Even those societies that treated people with dignity and respect often only afforded that privilege to members of their own nations and tribes.
From the first twelve apostles, Jesus’ idea has slowly spread throughout the world, carried by the Catholic Church. Imperfectly, we have convinced the world of this dignity of the human person through our words and actions. It’s the core idea that caused us to open the first university in 1188 and bring public education to all people. It’s the core idea that caused us to develop public healthcare to extend the healing ministry of Jesus to all people.
Children are no longer viewed as disposable, but are wrapped in society’s tightest legal protections. A multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural nation, the United States of America, built the world’s most durable and long-lasting democracy. Righteous outrage bubbles up in the global community when nations and leaders commit crimes against humanity.
This sea change was all possible because of Jesus’ simple philosophical idea that changed everything. It’s the idea that built the modern world.
Transform
It can be hard, intellectually, to grasp the transformative power of Jesus. We all know the personal failure that often comes when we try to implement immediate radical change in our lives, even change for the better.
There may be no better illustration of Jesus’ transformative nature than St. Peter. When he met Jesus, he was an illiterate fisherman. He stumbled and bumbled through Jesus’ public ministry, culminating in his epic abandonment during the Passion.
Through grace, he wept and repented, and shortly thereafter was giving charismatic public speeches that converted 2,000 people at a time.
Like a skilled gardener, he preened the early church, swatting down heresy and shaping the contours of the community that remain until now.
In the end, Peter accepted not only the torture of crucifixion, but inverted crucifixion.
If God can work all of that good through a random anonymous fisherman, what good can he accomplish through my participation in his Divine Plan?
Summits
Many years ago, shortly after turning 18 , I went on a church field trip with our young, and very athletic, priest. We set off early in the day to climb a mountain, on a trail not quite built for beginners. As the hours wore on, the younger kids kept asking, “Are we almost to the top?” Every time, our priest would reply, “Keep going, we’re almost there.”
Each crest seemed like the peak, but instead was just one more scenic overlook along the way. Although they were not the ultimate summit, they were stopping points where we could see how far we’d come, and gaze at what lay before us.
The trip ended in a massive thunderstorm and a multi-jurisdictional rescue by federal, state, and local agencies when one member of our group suffered from heat exhaustion near the summit.
Though this story happened over sixteen years ago, I can still remember the struggle of the ascent. The false hopes of false summits, and the exhilaration of finally reaching the true summit.
In every journey, and along every path, we find waypoints as we struggle to reach our ultimate destination. Then, when we’ve reached the summit and accomplished our mission, we look out to see God’s creation from a whole new vantage point, and the new challenges that lay before us.
Reaching the summit is a moment to savor, but like those false summits before it, it’s just a stopping point. There is so much journey and adventure still to conquer.
Homeostasis
It’s in our nature to seek to control those things around us. We want to control our time, our schedule, our health, and our destiny. The opposing truth to this desire for control is the reality of impermanence. Things, elements, and life are constantly changing.
We’re a quarter of the way through 2023, and perhaps you, like me, are starting to pause and reflect on our lack of progress on maintaining physical health. A year of work has distracted me from my once solid routine of morning walks. Work has been a wonderful thing, but by losing focus, I’ve lost progress.
There’s a powerful force in our biology called homeostasis. Our bodies can be willful and fight back even our modest efforts to maintain our health. We use physical exercise to improve efficiencies and increase health, while our bodies struggle to pull us back to idleness.
Homeostasis is the resistance we experience to our good work. Why do we not do the things that we ought to do? Why do I hit snooze for 45 minutes extra sleep when I know a morning workout will set my day up for success? Why do I scroll YouTube when reading a book is far more relaxing? It’s the resistance that homeostasis brings that causes me to tend towards idleness.
This natural tension is as old as humanity itself. We even find it in the Bible and in the writings of the early Church fathers. Sin is easy, sainthood is not. If we don’t give into the myth of sudden, radical conversion, but instead accept the daily work as St. Francis did, we can train our bodies. We can orient our minutes and days to the good work of health, peace, work, and prayer. Homeostasis will sink even the best laid plans if we let it; choose to do the work.
The Simple Path to Holiness
When I wrote my first book, I didn’t take a month off work and rent a cabin in the woods. That may have been a nice setting, but I wrote in the early morning hours before work and the late evening hours when work was over. The same is true for writing my second book, and my third.
Giving into fantasies, or believing myths, is easy when we have big goals. If only we could just quit this one thing, or wake up an hour earlier, then we could get it all done. If only we had no distractions and total silence and focus, everything would be possible. If only I went on this one retreat, took this one course, or found the perfect prayer, I’d become the person that I want to be.
The truth is, as many of the modern saints have shared, the path to holiness in our daily lives. Making breakfast for the children, helping with math homework, and even doing the laundry is how we become holy.
I’m not making a second piece of toast, I’m ensuring my children have a full breakfast. I’m not trying to remember how to solve equations with fractions, I’m helping my child prepare for their future. I’m not getting mustard stains out of shirts, I’m serving my family.
In these mundane, rote, and mediocre tasks, I’m giving of myself. While I make the breakfast, the children laugh. When I help with homework, their minds unlock. When I’m doing the laundry, they’re free to run and play.
God has trusted us to care for our families and to share his title. Like the cave in Bethlehem, it’s in the simple, the humble, even the dirt, that we find Christ and the simple path to holiness.