At Your Altar
Parenting is a regimented and structured adventure, with known milestones sprinkled throughout the growth and development of your children. Although I know these milestones, and can see them coming, they always seem to catch me by surprise.
Over the weekend, Benedict and Felicity both participated liturgically in the Mass. For Benedict, it was his first time serving at the Altar. It had been two months since his training, and I started to sweat a little as I saw him process in with one of the candles, but he did an outstanding job. He was focused, still, and showing signs of spiritual maturity. Being around the other servers gave him permission to elevate his participation. It was also great to see the more experienced servers guide and mentor him.
Felicity, after months of weekly choir practice, sang with her choir-mates at a different Mass. They sang at Christmas, so this wasn’t her first time, but right from the front row, with only her curly haired head peaking over the front pew, she sang the parts of the Mass.
Benedict and Felicity have attended Mass weekly and, to varying degrees, participated. But there’s nothing like serving at the Altar and seeing the liturgy up-close, physically participating, to make it all possible. Together, in their ways, using their gifts and talents, they served at the Altar, elevating the solemnity of the Mass.
Renew, Refresh
About this time, every year, Alison and I are bitten by the spring projects bug. There’s something elemental about it; I never see it coming, and it always just bubbles into my consciousness.
Right on schedule, this week was the week. While last year we focused on an outside cleanup and overhaul, this year we’re totally focused on the inside. Not only is it time to refresh the wardrobe and make sure the kids have clothes that fit, we’re getting ready for students moving swiftly through their schoolwork.
Life with young children is always messy, but no matter how bad things get, I always yearn for the rejuvenation that a clean home provides. There are always different and better ways to organize and optimize. Though it’s difficult to stay on top of these things, having the right tools and plan makes all the difference.
This sense of renewal is precisely what Lent is, for our souls. We are material beings, but we’re also spiritual beings. As the house needs cleaning and refreshing, so too does the soul. As the weather changes, the buds bloom, and our bodies sense the newness of spring all around us, now is the perfect time to take care of spring-cleaning for your home and your soul.
Frozen
In vitro fertilization is back in the news. The Alabama Supreme Court in recent weeks issued a ruling that recognized frozen embryos stored for use in IVF were accorded the rights of personhood under the law. Politicians on both sides of the aisle latched onto this political football, with everyone praising what they consider to be the essential good of IVF as an answer to a couple’s desire to have a child. Regrettably, they’re still wrong on the ethics and on the facts.
No one has a right to another person. This is a foundational principle that we wield to battle, in law and life, the evils of slavery, racism, sex trafficking, torture, and kidnapping. Every person is worthy of dignity and protection simply because they exist as a human person. The human body is a complex organism, a delicate machine with millions of parts, intricately functioning to maintain life. Human reproduction requires not one, but two people to achieve success. There’s dysfunction in every body, and some couples may not be able to have children due to these dysfunctions.
Thankfully, there are ethical medical solutions to these dysfunctions, but far too many are counseled that their solution and savior is IVF. The strong emotional response to the loss of fertility drives these couples to make the emotional, and destructively wrong, decision to use IVF.
IVF is morally wrong because, in every step of the process, it violates the basic dignity of the human person. It first promotes the philosophy that one person has a right to another. It intentionally creates multiple children through fertilization, with full knowledge that most of those embryos will be discarded. These fertilized eggs have a complete, unique DNA sequence. They have the essential blueprint that, given adequate hydration, nutrition, and shelter, would develop through all stages of life. They are human persons, like you or me, simply at a different stage of development.
IVF wrongfully deprives the child of the inherent right to be created through an act of mutual love by one’s parents. Instead, they are crafted in a sterile lab by an anonymous technician they will never meet. Once created, the embryos, a scientific term that simply refers to the earliest stage of human development, are frozen. Held in suspense, not permitted to die a natural death, they remain in this metaphysical hell until a scientist deigns to implant them in their mother’s womb.
Many embryos are implanted during the procedure with the hopes that just one of them will result in pregnancy. IVF has a dreadful success rate, meaning that even if a pregnancy is achieved, some number greater than one of these embryos dies in the process. One life created, built on the destruction of untold others.
Emotions are an important part of the human psyche, but they’re also deeply flawed and often wrong. Turning the desire of wanting to have a family into a scorched earth quest to achieve pregnancy at any cost distorts the “essential good” that IVF feigns to offer. It’s akin to a loving father wanting to keep his children safe, so he never lets them leave the house. That’s not love; that’s prison.
We have so much work to do in order to build a culture of life. That’s especially true in these days when it’s a true challenge to convince most of the electorate that there should be some, any limits to abortion. Many of the referendums passed in the days since Dobbs have resulted in even fewer restrictions on abortion than Roe. Parental consent, alternate counseling, doors wide enough for emergency medical equipment to pass through, and physician credentialing are all barriers to abortion too high under the law. If a physician in any other discipline practiced medicine without these basic safeguards, they’d lose their license, be the piñata of the trial bar, and likely jailed.
Despite this challenging work, we can never equivocate because that is the nature of ethics; they are unchanging. No one has a right to possess another person, and no one has the right to kill another person.
Talent
Every priest has a unique gift that he offers the Church. Young men who go straight from high school to seminary offer their youth, extending their priestly ministry by years. Men who enter in middle age or even later in life bring their lived experience to inform their ministry. Some are great preachers, others stunning academics, and still others are driven to give a profound witness through audacious outreach.
Recently, one of our diocese’s scholarly priests celebrated a daily Mass that I attended. Daily Mass is known to be short, mostly owing to the truncated homily. This Mass, however, was different. The readings were on the servant for who his master forgave his “great” debt. The forgiven servant immediately goes out, finds someone who owes him a tiny amount, and throws him into debtors prison. The master finds out and has the wicked servants “handed over to the torturers” until the full debt is repaid.
The homily first took aim at the translation, a “great” or “huge” debt. Going back to ancient translations, he discovered that the debt was originally described in Talents, an ancient denomination. One Talent was equal to 20-30 years wages. Essentially, a laborer, through their whole working life, would earn the equivalent of one Talent. The wicked servant owed his master 10,000 Talents. Not great, not huge, but impossible!
The wicked servant’s debtor, however, owed him 100 Denarii, about 100 days wages.
The entire lifetime of wages for 10,000 laborers vs. 100 days wages for 1 worker.
This somewhat painful parable immediately highlights two things. First, we are indebted to God’s mercy for a debt that we could never hope to repay. Even though we frequent the Sacrament of Reconciliation and experience the wonderment of being in a State of Grace, we keep falling into the same trap. The Passion and death of Jesus, which we’ll soon celebrate, is the payment for the debt of sin that is impossible for us to repay of our accord.
Second, these parables put on full display the genius of Jesus that can only be attributable to the omniscience of God Himself. In a backwater, dusty, hot town 2,000 years ago, Jesus crafted a parable that was readily understood by his illiterate followers and is equally understandable by me, in the most technologically advanced society in the history of the world. They built buildings with simple tools and fished with literal rope. I wrote this blog on a computer only slightly larger than a magazine, using a keyboard that has no physical connections. Yet, the parable still fits exactly to my life.
The parable is reinforced through the Lord’s Prayer, the perfect prayer, “…forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
More Important Things
Friday was a good day. Although it started straightforward enough, my plans were busier than usual. Not only did we have schoolwork to accomplish and work to do, it was also laundry day and I wanted to vote early.
After breakfast, the kids sorted laundry while I prepared for a teleconference. With that call over, we loaded up in the car, got coffee, and drove to the library to vote. We had plenty of work to be done back at the house, but I asked Benedict to take a few extra minutes to show me the robotics lab that he always raved about.
Arriving back at the house, it was nearly 10:30am. Still plenty of time left to get good work done before lunch, but we were having mild weather, so instead I sent the four kids into the backyard for recess while I worked at my desk.
At noon, the first load of laundry was done, so I made lunch and folded clothes while they ate. Usually after lunch comes more work and nap time, but instead we went for a 20-minute walk around the trails in our neighborhood.
Back at the house, it was 1:30pm, the littlest went down for her nap, school assignments were handed out, and I logged back into my computer. We worked for almost three hours before family reading time, a quiet cap to our busy day. With that done, I sent the children downstairs to watch their new Rocky and Bullwinkle DVD while I finished my work for the afternoon.
After dinner, the sun still hadn’t set, so we walked to the playground for a few more minutes of play, another lap on the trails and back to the house for bedtime.
Every day is not like this. Our school assignments and my workload ebbs and flows, but Friday was a good reminder for me that there are more important things. My children need to complete their school assignments, but they don’t have to do them between set hours or certain days. School is essential; so is being outside, imaginative play, and family exercise.
Every day won’t be like last Friday, but perhaps more should be.
6,750
Parenting young children is exhausting, and although I know my aunt is being truthful when she wholeheartedly recommends retirement to me, I’m able to recognize that every season has its challenges and its rewards.
I have 18 years to build a relationship with my children that will need to last us a lifetime. It’s a unique one, as I journey with them from total dependence to total independence. They reach milestones and forget to mention it to me. I’m approaching them assuming yesterday’s dependence while they’re trying to flex today’s independence.
It’s easy to get bogged down in the daily repetition, but when I take the view that I have 6,570 days to build our relationship, and tomorrow it’ll be 6,569, perspective shifts my decisions. Grace becomes easier, new adventure becomes more alluring, connection becomes more important than rest.
Contend
The nature of the human condition is that we each bear an overriding character flaw. This is colloquially referred to as our crosses to bear, but what it really means is that we will have a singular struggle with sin and failure throughout our lives. It’ll look different from everyone else’s, but it’s our pathway to sainthood.
The problem with habitual sin is the temptation to despair. Almost every time we approach the Sacrament of Reconciliation, it tops our list of failings. Year in and year out, we accuse ourselves, seeking God’s forgiveness once again. In our limited minds, we can understand if God were to grow frustrated with us, but it’s not our place to project onto God our limitations. It’s God’s place to reward our struggle with grace, patience, and ultimately, victory.
In this struggle, as we contend with ourselves and our failures. We’re back to our annual check-in, Lent, where we journey up to Calvary with Jesus, hoping to leave the tomb with Him on Easter morning. If you find yourself in line for Confession this Lent, lamenting your usual roster of sins, remember the line that you’re in. You haven’t given up; you’re still in the fight. God doesn’t want us to surrender to our failures, and He doesn’t want us to be perfect. He wants us to fight, to keep fighting, to keep showing that His love is all that we desire and nothing, not even our own stupid failures, will keep us from Him.
Start Now
Tomorrow is the perfect time to start anything. With the whole day ahead of us, no interruptions, it’ll be just right. I’ll do everything that I’ve been meaning to do for the last six months but haven’t quite gotten around to getting done.
First thing in the morning, tomorrow will be waiting with its pristine beauty, like a fresh driven and completely untouched snow, the exact right jumping off point to live the life I want to live and be the man I would like to be.
But when that doesn’t quite work out because I wake up still myself, and a new tomorrow full to the brim with promise and hope is just over the horizon.
Whatever it is, whomever you wish to be, don’t wait for tomorrow. There are a million tomorrows and only one today.
Platitudes
A frequent criticism of Christians is that, in times of great sorrow or difficulty, we fall back on platitudes rather than meaningful action. It’s true that we quote Scripture as a form of consolation and encouragement, but it should hardly be regarded as a platitude.
The Bible, and the ancient prayers of the Church, find their roots in very human expressions. Many books of the Old Testament, for example, were written while the Jewish people were in exile, longing for their homeland. Many were born and died in exile, never seeing the land promised to them. These authors wrote down their experiences, their hopes, and their dreams to encourage their nation and its decedents. They didn’t want them to forget God’s promise, and all the good things He had done for them.
The books of the Bible in the Canon of Scripture were written in adverse conditions, persecutions, war, violence, abject poverty, and even scandal. But the hope that they convey, encourages us to rise above the current circumstance and see God’s plan coming together. So when we are challenged, when we are tested, we do not fall into despair but see the small part that we play in salvation history.
These words were intended, from their authoring, to encourage, to give hope, and to strengthen. They were written to remind us of who we are, whose we are, our heritage, and our inheritance.
Daily Burn
Each time a pilot prepares to fly an aircraft, he does a fuel calculation. Based on the current weather data and flight plan, he’ll calculate fuel burn and determine exactly how much fuel will be required to safely conduct the flight. Once that calculation is complete, he’ll add in a fixed amount of reserves to ensure that, regardless of what happens once aloft, he’ll make it to his destination.
Fuel planning for a pilot is an operational necessity, as is daily prayer planning for each of us. Fuel powers the plane; prayer powers us.
Each new day greets us with a set of tasks and obligations that must be completed, along with stressors sprinkled in throughout the day. It requires fortitude and discipline to work through your responsibilities and to not give in to the siren song of laziness.
A critical component of our day is prayer. It helps us resist temptation, build love, and act with grace. We need to build a daily routine that will power us to our destination with some room to spare.
Although it does require commitment and discipline, two words which usually are adjacent to something unpleasant, the paradox is that prayer is a respite in our day. It de-stresses us, desensitizes our amped up bodies, and allows the mind the space that it needs. This is the genius of God at work; time reserved for the Creator rejuvenates the entire self.
You will encounter stress and temptation every day. The only question is, will you have enough gas in the tank to fly right past it.