Author: Meg

I'm a Catholic, madly in love with the Lord, His Word, His Bride the Church, and especially His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in the Eucharist. I'm committed to the Church not because I was raised this way but because the Lord has drawn my heart and convicted my reason. After 2 degrees in theology and 5 years in the classroom, I quit my 9-5 to follow Christ more literally. Since May of 2012, I've been a hobo for Christ; I live out of my car and travel the country speaking to youth and adults, giving retreats, blogging, and trying to rock the world for Jesus.

How to Pay Attention at Mass

I didn’t really grow up praying. I mean, my parents prayed. And I’m sure I joined in. But all prayer was to me was reciting the words I’d memorized. There was no relationship there.

Really–what’s not to love?

Mass was worse. I hardly even tried there, stand/sit/kneeling along with the congregation with my mind on My Little Ponies instead of my Lord.

I remember, on the day I made my first communion, whispering to my mother during the Eucharistic prayer, “What do you do after you have communion?”

My poor mother had no idea that the answer was “pray,” that I could possibly not realize that the silent kneeling was supposed to give me the opportunity to speak with the God I’d just received. She thought I was asking for things to say in prayer, so she answered, “Sometimes I thank God for the stained glass windows.”1

From there on out, when I was at my most “pious,” I spent my meditation time repeating, “Thank you for the stained glass windows thank you for the stained glass windows thank you for the stained glass windows thank you for the stained glass windows” ad infinitum until I’m sure God himself was annoyed.

“Child dies in tragic ugly shoe incident. Story at 10.”

When I wasn’t feeling pious (the better part of 1991-1997), I spent communion evaluating the shoes of the people walking by.  When I saw shoes I liked, I’d hold my breath until I saw another pair I liked. It was the 90s–I almost passed out a few times.

So believe me when I say that I don’t go to Mass because it’s fun.  I didn’t have some incredible conversion that inspired in me a love of silence or liturgy or contemplation or–God help us–sitting still and being quiet.  Nope–3000+ daily Masses later, I’m still bored.

When I make this confession, people are often shocked that I’m a real person, not some plaster Saint. I think “normal” people assume that those of us who are trying to be holy really enjoy prayer. And while there are some who do, many of us struggle just as much with paying attention in prayer as your average Catholic.

The difference, for those who take this God thing seriously, is that we actually struggle with it. We don’t just succumb to boredom and take the Mass as an opportunity to check out the latest fashion trends in our corner of suburbia. We pull our attention back every time it drifts, we prepare for Mass, we fight to treat the Mass as though it were the most important thing on the planet. Which, of course, it is.

So I thought I’d give some pointers to those of you who (like me) are struggling to pay attention. Not every suggestion will work for everyone, so look through the list and see if there isn’t something that might help you. Ignore the rest.2

  • Choose wisely. We don’t all have the luxury of choosing which Mass we’re going to attend, but if you do, be intentional. Figure out which music draws you deeper into prayer, which preaching inspires you, and which congregation is focused (or energetic or traditional or family-oriented) enough to strengthen your prayer. There’s something to be said for persevering through distractions, but no sense borrowing trouble.3
    .
  • Although this window mostly got me wondering if the shepherd in green thought he was on Arsenio Hall….

    Pick your poison. If you’re anything like me, you’re going to be distracted no matter how hard you try. There’s a big difference, though, between being distracted by counting cinder blocks or trying to figure out where that stain in the carpet came from and being distracted by sacred art. So I tend to go to churches with lots of representational art. If my mind’s going to wander, better it wander to the Nativity than to the Colbert Report.

  • Seat yourself. Once you’ve chosen a Mass, don’t just slide into the most convenient pew to exit from. Pray over where in the sanctuary you focus best. I need to sit in the front or I’ll spend the whole Mass looking at the people around me and trying to figure out their ages and marital statuses and relationship to the kids sitting with them and on and on. If I sit in front, I only do this after communion, which is a much shorter time to try to discipline myself. Other people need to be in the back where it’s quieter or in a darker spot or whatever. As they say in real estate, location, location, location! It can really make a difference.
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  • Be prepared. Take some time with Sunday’s readings (or the daily readings) before you go to Mass. Maybe read the upcoming Sunday’s Gospel every day or just spend Sunday morning looking over the readings. You’ll be surprised at how much more you get out of Mass.4
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  • Dress the part. There are some obvious rules about what clothing is appropriate to wear to church; clean, modest, and in good repair come to mind. What I’m saying is, leave the torn jeggings at home. But stepping up your game a little for Sunday Mass might make it easier for you to focus (and those around you as well). Wearing a tie or a skirt might feel so foreign to you that you automatically sit up straighter and focus more. If nothing else, it’s a nice gesture when you man up and wear pants instead of shorts, not because shorts are bad but because it shows that you find the Mass important.
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  • Offer it up. Not to be a cliché, but prayer is powerful. Not only do the graces of your Mass get poured out on the person you pray for, but it also helps you to focus when you’re doing it for someone. If your Mass is for your sick granny, you’re less likely to space out.
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  • Tweet it. Let me be very clear: I am NOT suggesting that you live tweet the Mass. Put your stupid phone away for an hour a week! But if you challenge yourself to come up with a 140-character summary of the Mass’s theme and tweet it,5 you’ll have to pay attention to the readings, the prayers, and the homily. Did you know that Sunday’s prayers actually connect to Sunday’s readings? And that the first reading is chosen specifically to connect to the Gospel? Commit to tweeting about the Mass every week and you’ll have to start paying attention just to have something to say.

    See?? This lady’s already doing it! Now I’m following her, although most of her texts are in what looks to me like Tagalog.
  • Play guessing games. Let’s say you don’t read up ahead of time–see if you can guess the theme of the readings just by listening to the opening prayer. Then listen to the first reading and see if you can predict the Gospel. During the Gospel, try to guess what point the priest will make in his homily. If you’re as competitive as I am, this’ll keep you on the edge of your pew.
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  • Get real. I think what makes Mass hardest is that it doesn’t feel relevant to our lives. But it is! You just have to open your eyes to realize that every moment of the Mass is just begging you to give yourself to God. I find this most powerful during the offertory. When the bread and wine are brought forward, I (try to) do a little examen. I pray about what I’m most grateful for at the moment and offer that as a sacrifice of thanksgiving to God when the bread is offered. When the wine is offered, I consider what “cup of suffering” I’m being asked to drink and I offer that to God as well. In doing this, I surrender my tight grip on my blessings and thank him for my suffering. Then I go deeper and recognize the crushed wheat that’s gone into the bread–what past suffering has made this current joy possible? I meditate on the fact that this wine of suffering will become the blood of Christ–how can my suffering be transformed for the good of the kingdom? Most days, I space out, but when I’m focused enough to pull this off, it can be really incredible.
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  • It’s the little things. A priest once recommended to me that rather than getting frustrated when I realized I’ve been tuning out at Mass, I should pay attention to what I tuned back in for. “Maybe,” he suggested, “that’s the Holy Spirit trying to get your attention.” So instead of giving up because it’s the Creed and you haven’t noticed a word since the Confiteor, see if there’s something in that line of the Creed that speaks to your heart. The thing is that the Mass is so replete with meaning that whatever six words you manage to focus on are more meaningful than everything else you’ll say all week.

Odds are good you’ll fail again and again and again. One of the consequences of the Fall is that worship no longer comes naturally to us and spending a solid hour not obsessing over yourself can be a little bit like hell. Don’t get discouraged that the Mass is still boring after you’ve been trying so hard for six weeks–it takes a lifetime. Besides, sometimes boring prayer is just what we need. So try to pray and focus at Mass but recognize that whether or not your prayer is good is ultimately up to God, not you. All you can do is the best you can. He’ll do the rest.

 

All right, peanut gallery. I’d love to hear any tips or tricks you’ve got to offer–Lord knows I need them. What works for you?

  1. Small, awful, abstract things so high up as to be barely visible. Definitely not something I’d normally thank God for. [↩]
  2. Or, you know, spend 5 years wrangling babies at every single Mass, then go by yourself and have a blissful hour of peace. From what I’ve heard, it’s practically the beatific vision. [↩]
  3. Note: there are some exceptions, but in general, you are canonically obligated to attend the parish in whose boundaries you reside. I’m not so much advocating that you enroll at a different parish as that you move to the parish you want to enroll at. [↩]
  4. As an aside, the more you love Scripture, the more the Mass means to you. Get on that. [↩]
  5. Can we get #todaysMass trending on twitter? That would pretty much make my life. [↩]

In Defense of Notre Dame

Here’s what a Domer I am: I googled “Notre Dame” and was confused when the Parisian basilica popped up. “That’s not the Basilica….” (Props to Carroll Hall for the killer sign. Too bad nobody could see it way over on the other side of the lake.)

When I tell people I went to Notre Dame (or, you know, unintentionally scream “GO IRISH!” when someone mentions football or South Bend or politics or candy corn or…well, basically anything), I usually get one of two reactions:

  1. *awed* “Oh, wow. You must be really smart.”
  2. *skeptical* “Really? I thought you were so Catholic….”

It’s the second response I want to address here. The first is awkward, but not something I feel terribly compelled to contradict.

In honor of Saturday’s opening game (vs. Navy in Ireland–how cool is that??), I’m going to take a moment in defense of Notre Dame.

I know there’s been some shady business over the years and I know there are some heterodox professors on faculty and I know you’ll never get over the Obama debacle, but I think we have to remember something very important about Notre Dame: as far as I know, Notre Dame is the only university that’s really trying to be a top 20 research university and a school with a genuine, meaningful Catholic identity.

In fact, only Georgetown and Boston College manage to crack the top 50 colleges, according to U.S. News and World Report.1 So we’re already down to three on our list of top Catholic universities, and if you’ve spent any time at BC or Georgetown lately, I think it’s pretty easy to cross them off the list. Not that they’re not good schools, or even good places to be Catholic. I don’t know enough about the schools to deny them the title “Catholic,” but the difficulty I’ve had in finding a chapel on either campus combines with anecdotes about crucifixes removed from classrooms to leave me less than optimistic.

Now, I’m not saying that all Catholic colleges need to be nationally-ranked research universities. Our Church and our world need TAC and Franciscan and Benedictine. But I think we also need Notre Dame.

You see, not everyone’s going to fit in at Christendom. And Thomas More’s a great place, but what if you want to be an engineer? And as amazing as some of Dallas’s classes might be, there are those of us who really need to be at a school as challenging as Notre Dame.

But forget us good little Catholic kids for a minute; I think Notre Dame is uniquely able to evangelize the intellectual elite. You see, an atheist with a perfect SAT score just doesn’t go to Ave Maria. He might, however, go to Notre Dame. Because when Princeton Review asked parents their dream school for their kids, Notre Dame came in fourth. Because our undergrad business school’s been the best in the country for the past 3 years. That’s right, better than Wharton. Because our alums make bank–payscale.com rates ND 10th when it comes to a return on your investment. Because, whatever those numbers mean, rankings matter to people, and no other truly Catholic institution comes close.

And then one day he’s trying to get to lunch and there’s a Eucharistic procession in the way.

So our unchurched little brainiac (let’s call him Gus) finds himself walking across God Quad his freshman year, looking up at Mary on the top of the dome. He walks down the sidewalks that form a heart (the Sacred Heart) when his roommate asks him if he’s going to the JACC for Mass. Well, Gus sure wasn’t planning on it, but his roommate is a legacy and knows that everyone goes to the beginning of the school year Mass, so Gus goes to Mass for the first time. He takes a required theology class and goes on freshman retreat, because everybody goes on freshman retreat. He starts going to Mass in his dorm on Sunday nights because everybody else is there. He stops at the Grotto after running around the lakes; at first, it’s just because there’s a water fountain there, but eventually the aura of prayer starts to get to him. He tries to avoid religious debates, but he can’t help it–almost everyone, it seems, has a religion, and everyone has an opinion.

Gus has a good heart, so he wants to get involved in some kind of service. There’s a commissioning Mass for that. Turns out there’s a commissioning Mass for almost everything. He walks past a chapel on his way to his dorm room, his finance class, his advisor’s office, his calculus class, his service project seminar, and his philosophy class. Eventually, he starts to go in. A cute girl invites him to adoration and before he knows it, he’s stopping in before his run a few times a week.

Gus is so immersed in Catholicism–entirely by accident–that he begins to wonder. His wondering leads him to questioning. At first, his Catholic friends are enough, but eventually he starts meeting with theology professors and the ubiquitous Holy Cross priests. By the time he graduates, Gus is Catholic. Because of Notre Dame.

It’s not an unusual story, although most of my friends who converted because of Notre Dame started off as Protestants, not atheists. Most are “just” good Catholics now, although I also know a Franciscan friar, a theology professor, and, you know, Alasdair Macintyre and Knute Rockne, NBD. Not to mention the many, many lapsed Catholics I know who found the Church once more through their time at Notre Dame: priests and religion teachers and Sisters and mothers and missionaries and members of the body of Christ.

And maybe Gus would have converted eventually anyway; but there’s something about Notre Dame, something about the way Catholicism is a part of everything, that brings the Church before your eyes in a way that it wouldn’t be at Rice or Duke or Northwestern or other elite institutions. Somebody’s got to be reaching out to the brainy kids–Catholic or not–while they’re in college.

Beyond just evangelizing, Notre Dame’s status as a top 20 school gives it intellectual and even political clout, along with the ability to hire the best of the best. When Fr. Jenkins tries to walk the tightrope between Catholic identity and intellectual integrity, I don’t think he’s trying to compromise with the world–I think he’s trying to transform the world in a way that is uniquely possible at Notre Dame. Our high ranking is the very reason that this letter meant more to the media than all the others announcing lawsuits across the country. You can’t be as influential as Notre Dame is–on an individual level and a societal level–unless you can play ball academically.

In an effort to hang with the Ivies, I think Fr. Jenkins has perhaps swung too far in the direction of academic freedom a number of times. But I don’t think he has the luxury of requiring an oath of obedience to the Magisterium or inviting only speakers who uphold Catholic teaching or even banning anti-Catholic books or classes or plays. The administration of Our Lady’s University has to be in the world in a way that all the Catholic colleges mentioned above can reject. Those schools are ministering to the flock, but Notre Dame, I think, is ministering to the world.

“God, Country, Notre Dame” is one of our catch phrases. If I ever see this car, I will set up camp next to it until the owners come back. Then I will ask pathetically if they will be my friends. This license plate is awesome.

People say that Notre Dame is a microcosm of American Catholicism. You’ve got your Sunday Catholics, your social justice Catholics, your traddies, your lapsed Catholics, your charismatics, your hypocrites, your liberals, your conservatives–in the words of James Joyce, “Here comes everybody.” No, we’re not a beacon of holiness for all the world, but for all our faults, we are very, very Catholic.

And though the Irish may screw up in big and embarrassing ways, and though you may disagree with the administration’s decisions, and though there’s a lot going on at ND that isn’t very Catholic, let me leave you with this: according to my informal count, there are at least 161 Masses offered on Notre Dame’s campus every week; there are 168 hours in a week. Eucharistic adoration is available 40 hours a week. Want meat on a Friday in Lent? Better go to Burger King–there isn’t any in the dining hall. There’s a chapel in every dorm and most of the academic buildings. Confessions are scheduled at least 15 times a week and the line is usually around the corner. If you can’t make it any of those times, there are priests living in every men’s dorm and many of the women’s.2 Oh, and did I mention single sex dorms? We’re not barbarians, after all.3 At the end of the day, you can’t escape Catholicism at Notre Dame; over the years, many find that they don’t want to.

If my imaginary friend Gus had been a freshman with me, I can imagine he would have found himself swimming the Tiber a lot earlier. Less than a month into my career at Notre Dame, the Twin Towers fell. We cried and waited by phones and went to the Grotto, Catholics and non-Catholics alike. And that afternoon, 7,000 of us gathered for Mass on South Quad. On a campus of 8,000 undergrads, that speaks volumes. When tragedy struck, we ran together to God. We put our hands on the shoulders of strangers as they wept and we prayed the best way we knew how: the Catholic Mass.

Mass on September 11, 2001.

Is Notre Dame Catholic? Yes, in every sense of the word. She is flawed and blemished and made up of struggling sinners, and I love her despite–and because of–all those flaws. I pray for her and her administration and I trust that God will continue to bring good through Our Lady’s University.

Love thee, Notre Dame!

  1. Forbes–which lists Notre Dame at 12 rather than 19–includes Holy Cross as well, but they list Cornell as 51, so I’m not sure what their criteria are…. [↩]
  2. I graduated 6 years ago, but from what I can tell, this is still true. [↩]
  3. #sarcasm [↩]

It’s Okay to Laugh at the Apostles, Right?

Have you ever noticed what fools the Apostles are? I mean, they’re kind of the comic relief of the Gospels. Check them out:

“Loaves, fish, we get it! Can we maybe get some pizza?”

Jesus: *feeds 5000 people with 5 loaves and 2 fish*
Apostles: Oh, no! Now there are 4000 hungry people? What are we going to do??? (Mt 14-15)

Jesus: Beware the leaven of the Pharisees.
Apostles: Aw, shoot, he’s mad because we forgot to bring snacks!
Jesus: Seriously? Snacks? Remember yesterday when I fed the 4000? Seriously? Nobody gets what I’m going for here? (Mk 8)

Jesus: I’m going to die and rise again.
Peter: Nuh-uh, Jesus, no you’re not! (Mt 16–yes, right after Jesus made him pope.)

Jesus: I’m going to die and rise again.
Apostles: Okay, but really, who do you think is the best?  Me, or him? Because I think it’s me, but he thinks it’s him and…. (Mk 9)

“Seriously, Peter, PUT AWAY THE SWORD!”

Jesus: I’m going to die and rise again.
James and John: Yeah, cool, can we ride shotgun? Like, can we sit next to you? (Mk 10)

Jesus: One of you will betray me.
Apostles: I would never do that because I’m the best. No, I’m the best! No, I’m the best!
Jesus: Oh, let’s just go so I can be handed over.
Apostles: No, Jesus, it’s okay. See, we have two swords here!
Jesus: Oh my goodness I am SO DONE with you people!! (Lk 22)

Jesus: BAM! I totally rose from the dead!
Apostles: (once they’re done being terrified) Cool. We’re going fishing. (Jn 21)

Okay, so I’m paraphrasing here. But taken all together, this is some pretty damning evidence against their eligibility for Mensa. They’re not very bright, they’re not very holy, and they’re not very brave. Remember how 10 of the 11 (we’ll leave Judas out of all this) ran away when Jesus was taken? And remember how they kept hiding after he died? And remember how they were still hiding in the upper room 50 days after he rose? They weren’t exactly written as heroes.

But aside from the fact that ordinary Apostles teach us that God can use any one of us, flawed as we are, I think comparing the Apostles before Pentecost to the Apostles after Pentecost teaches us something dramatic.

The transformation of the apostles and the spread of Christianity throughout the known world not by violence but by preaching was impossible without the Holy Spirit.

The Apostles are uneducated, mostly fishermen, not philosophers and public speakers. Acts 4:13 makes this clear: “Observing the boldness of Peter and John and perceiving them to be uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and they recognized them as the companions of Jesus.”

There was nothing charismatic about these guys. They weren’t clever or persuasive or attractive. They were “ordinary and uneducated men.” They had no business changing the world.

And even if they had been little cult leaders in the making, they were too cowardly to do anything as risky as preaching Christ crucified. Before the resurrection, they were so scared, Peter ran from a serving woman. But on Pentecost, he preaches to thousands. What changed? If Jesus didn’t rise, what made these inept cowards into brave evangelists? How did men who could barely follow a conversation convert the brightest minds of the ancient world?

That’s yesterday’s Saint, Bartholomew, holding the flesh that was flayed from his body. Awesome.

Remember, if you will, that 10 of the 11 Apostles who walked with Christ and touched his resurrected body–risen with the wounds of his crucifixion–died to tell the story. And poor John didn’t survive to old age for lack of his enemies’ trying–they boiled him and poisoned him, he just wouldn’t die. The Apostles knew for sure and for certain that Jesus had risen from the dead and they gave their lives to spread the news.

They were convincing in ways they’d never been convincing, passionate and courageous and brilliant where before they’d been…well…ordinary at best. And what did they get out of it?

Well, first, they made themselves look like morons. Then they established insanely difficult standards of behavior. Finally, they were tortured and executed in excruciating ways–joyfully embracing shameful deaths for love of the Risen Christ.

Peter Kreeft exposes how ridiculous it is to credit anything but the resurrection with their transformation:

If the miracle of the Resurrection did not really happen, then an even more incredible miracle happened: twelve Jewish fishermen invented the world’s biggest lie for no reason at all and died for it with joy, as did millions of others. This myth, this lie, this elaborate practical joke transformed lives, gave despairing souls a reason to live and selfish souls a reason to die, gave cynics joy and libertines conscience, put martyrs in the hymns and hymns in the martyrs—all for no reason. A fantastic con job, a myth, a joke. (Fundamentals of the Faith)

Sure.

See, there’s just no other explanation I can come up with for the peaceable spreading of Christianity throughout its first three centuries. Say what you want about Christendom and the Crusades, that first century, when people still remembered having known Jesus of Nazareth, that was some serious Holy Spirit action.

Otherwise, you’re telling me that incompetent, timid, ill-educated Jews transformed the world so that they could make themselves look dumb and get tortured in new and exciting ways? That all eleven of them were so committed to this lie that not one broke despite ridicule and sleepless nights and failure and fear?

If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably attested by the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole the size and shape of the Resurrection, what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with? (C.F.D. Moule)

It just doesn’t make sense to me.

And look at the fact that the Roman Catholic Church, a bureaucracy as inept as any the world has ever seen, has lasted longer than the greatest empires of earth—if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, why do we still exist? If he didn’t rise, who inspired and strengthened the Apostles? If the resurrection isn’t true, why on earth did they all throw their lives away to say it is?

Shoot, friends, there’s just too much happy coincidence in this if there isn’t grace. I know I’m presupposing that the Gospels are fairly historically accurate (a post for another day), but I just can’t get past the Apostles. This is what made me a Christian all those years ago: the eyewitness testimony of eleven weak men with nothing to gain and everything to lose. I just can’t shake the feeling that there’s got to be something there.

So go ahead, laugh at the Apostles. I think God chose the foolish of this world to shame the wise for the very reason that their weakness and simplicity and lowliness makes his power that much more evident. Choosing Peter as the first pope may seem foolish, but the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom. Thank the Lord for our weak, scared, foolish Apostles and the way their poverty testifies to God’s power. Thank him, too, that our flaws frame his beauty just as theirs did.

 

I’ve got all this on my mind because of the Office of Readings from yesterday, the feast of St. Bartholomew. As usual, the Doctors of the Church say it better than I.

From a homily on the first letter to the Corinthians by Saint John Chrysostom

Paul had this in mind when he said: The weakness of God is stronger than men. That the preaching of these men was indeed divine is brought home to us in the same way. For how otherwise could twelve uneducated men, who lived on lakes and rivers and wastelands, get the idea for such an immense enterprise? How could men who perhaps had never been in a city or a public square think of setting out to do battle with the whole world? That they were fearful, timid men, the evangelist makes clear; he did not reject the fact or try to hide their weaknesses. Indeed he turned these into a proof of the truth. What did he say of them? That when Christ was arrested, the others fled, despite all the miracles they had seen, while he who was leader of the others denied him!

How then account for the fact that these men, who in Christ’s lifetime did not stand up to the attacks by the Jews, set forth to do battle with the whole world once Christ was dead—if, as you claim, Christ did not rise and speak to them and rouse their courage? Did they perhaps say to themselves: “What is this? He could not save himself but he will protect us? He did not help himself when he was alive, but now that he is dead he will extend a helping hand to us? In his lifetime he brought no nation under his banner, but by uttering his name we will win over the whole world?” Would it not be wholly irrational even to think such thoughts, much less to act upon them?

It is evident, then, that if they had not seen him risen and had proof of his power, they would not have risked so much.

Mary, Queen of the Universe

“The Shrine of Mary, Queen of the Universe docks each Sunday at 0800 and welcomes visitors of all planetary affiliations.”

As a Catholic, if you’ve gone to Disney World in the past 20 years, you’ve probably been to the nearby shrine that serves visitors to the theme park: the National Shrine of Mary, Queen of the Universe.

Is it bad that I laugh every time I hear that name?  It’s not that I disagree with the theology behind it, I just think it sounds a little bit ridiculous, like she won some intergalactic beauty contest or something.  If I were funnier, I could write an Onion piece on this….

But those who named the Shrine were right–as the mother of the King of the Universe, Mary is the Queen of the Universe.  It’s really that simple.

And yet this understanding of Mary as our mother and our queen is one of the issues that most deeply divides Christians.  As I pointed out before in my discussion of Mary as the new Ark of the Covenant, the Old Testament often has more to tell us about Mary than the New Testament does.1

As Christians, we know that the entirety of history built to the climax of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ.  Salvation history (the story of God’s redemptive work in the world) is directed towards Christ, which means that the people and events of the Old Testament have significance beyond themselves.  Throughout the Old Testament, we find “types” or foreshadowings of New Testament realities.  So the flood is a type of baptism, manna is a type of the Eucharist, and David is a type of Jesus.

He’s the king of the world!

Now every Christian knows that Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords.  So it stands to reason that the king of Israel is a type of Christ, just as Israel is a type of the Church, the people of God.  If the king is a type of Christ, then the king’s mother would be a type of Christ’s mother: Mary.  So we want to pay attention every time we see the mother of the king mentioned in the Old Testament–which, as it turns out, is quite frequently–to see what it tells us about the mother of our Lord.

As the mother of King Solomon, Bathsheba’s our best example of the queen mother in Israel (yes, she does more than bathe on the roof), particularly because we see her both as the king’s wife and as the queen mother, two very different roles.

You’d be amazed how hard it is to find a painting of Bathsheba with her clothes on. Here, she’s petitioning David to make her son Solomon king.

Let’s start with Bathsheba as wife of King David.  In 1 Kings 1:16 and 1:31, Bathsheba visits King David to ask a favor.  Twice she enters his presence and twice she pays homage to him.  The wife of the king in ancient Israel had no role at court for the simple reason that the king might have many wives.  So there was no real queen in Israel, only a queen mother.2  Despite her intimate relationship with David, Bathsheba approaches the king as his subject, not as his queen.

After David dies and Solomon takes the throne, however, everything’s different.  Adonijah, Solomon’s half brother, wants something from Solomon, so he asks Bathsheba to intercede on his behalf, saying, “Please ask King Solomon, who will not refuse you” (1 Kgs 2:17).

Then Bathsheba went to King Solomon to speak to him for Adonijah, and the king stood up to meet her and paid her homage. Then he sat down upon his throne, and a throne was provided for the king’s mother, who sat at his right.  She said, “There is one small favor I would ask of you. Do not refuse me.” The king said to her, “Ask it, my mother, for I will not refuse you.” (1 Kgs 2:19-20)

This is a totally different story.  Before, she paid the king homage.  Here, as the queen mother, the King pays her homage and then gives her a throne at his right hand.  The placement here is key: it tells us that she’s second in authority.  This isn’t just some honorary title–she plays a real role here.  And as his second-in-command, she has a particular privilege to intercede for others.  Adonijah pointed it out and Solomon confirms it when he tells her that he will not refuse her.

As it turns out, Adonijah’s asked for something that Solomon can’t grant.3  But I don’t think it hurts our case for the queen mother’s intercessory power that he refuses her.  The queen mother isn’t the ultimate authority, she just has some serious influence.  He won’t refuse her if he can help it, but it’s really his decision.

So we see from the beginning of the line of David that the queen mother is someone really special, just not as special as the king.  She’s honored by the king and by all the people and is given the power to intercede.  See where I’m going with this?

And it’s not just Bathsheba–throughout the books of Kings and Chronicles (the books that talk about the deeds of the kings of Israel and Judah), each time a new king takes office, his mother is named.  In 1 Kings 15:13, we see that the office is so official that a queen mother can even be deposed.  In 2 Kings 11, the queen mother kills off all her son’s descendants (she thinks).  When they’re all dead, she becomes the ruler of Judah automatically.  Since there is no heir, the crown seems to revert to the second-in-command: the queen mother.  This isn’t some ceremonial title, it’s something real.

And then there’s Jeremiah 13:18: “Say to the king and to the queen mother: come down from your throne; from your heads fall your magnificent crowns.”  Here the king and the queen both have authority, both have a throne, both have a crown.

Throughout the Old Testament, the mother of the king plays a very important role, one that must be honored by all the king’s subjects.  It stands to reason that this would extend to the queen mother of the New Testament as well, and the book of Revelation supports this.  In Revelation 12:1 we see Mary crowned with twelve stars, the number of completion.  This tells us that the mother of all believers (Rev 12:17) is the queen of everything.

Coronation of the Virgin by Fra Filippo Lippi–thanks for the help in figuring this out, friends!

So when Catholics talk about Mary, we’re not trying to give her a place above or equal to or even close to Christ’s.  Any good Catholic painting of the Blessed Mother in heaven shows her lower than Christ and off to the side.  We know better than to worship her; all we’re asking is to treat the mother of the King of kings the way we would treat any queen mother.  We want to honor her (Lk 1:48) and to ask for her intercession simply because she is particularly beloved by the Lord.  We revere her above any other creature but we know that she is just that: creature, not creator.

I’ll leave you with the inimitable words of the second Vatican Council:

“Mary’s function as mother of men in no way obscures or diminishes this unique mediation of Christ, but rather shows its power. But the Blessed Virgin’s salutary influence on men . . . flows forth from the superabundance of the merits of Christ, rests on his mediation, depends entirely on it, and draws all its power from it.” (Lumen Gentium 60)

Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth and all the Galaxies and the Whole Stinking Universe, pray for us!  Happy Coronation of Mary to you all.

  1. For much of this, as with most of my understanding of Marian theology, I am eternally indebted to Scott Hahn, particularly in his book Hail, Holy Queen. [↩]
  2. In fact, the word “queen” in the Old Testament always refers either to a pagan queen or to the queen mother. Jezebel isn’t even considered a queen, although she bosses people around like she is. [↩]
  3. He wants to be married to David’s concubine Abishag. Not only is this creepy, it would set him up as David’s successor and give him a claim as rival for the throne. Adonijah thought he was all clever–right till he got killed for it. [↩]

In Lieu of Fifty Shades

I know the other day I rained on some book-club-parades (do they have those?  Instead of candy, do they throw wine?) when I suggested that Fifty Shades of Grey might not be appropriate Christian reading.

Oh, wait, I called it porn.  I knew it was more forceful than that.

But I love reading so much and I don’t want anyone to quit reading just to avoid those books (although if my choices were 50 Shades of Grey and illiteracy, I’d choose illiteracy).  So I thought I’d give you some alternatives that are just as addictive and much better for your soul.

Try this edition–or plan to cover the other one with duct tape.

If you’re a sucker for a love story, you won’t do better than Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers.  The author was a romance novelist before she became a Christian, so she’s a good writer with a good message.  Redeeming Love modernizes the book of Hosea (okay, “modernizes”–it’s set in the gold rush), following Michael Hosea–who is hands down the holiest and most attractive male character I’ve ever read–as he marries a woman he knows is a prostitute.  She’s so broken but he’s so good.  Even on a shallow level, it’s a beautiful story; once you realize it’s about God’s love for you, it’ll break your heart.  After the Bible, it may be the most important book a woman can read.  Warning: if you buy it used, make sure it doesn’t have the ridiculous picture of a blonde woman in front of a sunset–you’ll be too embarrassed to read it in public.

If a perfect man doesn’t do it for you and you need more character development in your romantic interests, try Rivers’ Mark of the Lion series.  This series has some drawbacks (a really slow start, for one), but once you’re drawn in, you’ll be fascinated by the goodness of the Christian slave girl, the dramatic consequences of evil choices, and the desperate love that breaks down barriers.

Read them in order or you’ll be so sad and confused.

I think that what’s most touching in these books is the way that the love of good women inspires the heroes of the stories to become more fully themselves.  They don’t change for their women, they grow because they’re so well loved.  The series is set in the first century, so it gives you some insight into early Christian culture, as well as having one of the best Biblical defenses of Jesus as Messiah that I’ve ever read (book 2).  But more than anything, it’s a love story, and who doesn’t love that?

These books are so good I don’t want to reread them–I’m still emotionally exhausted from the first go-round.

If you have to be one of the crowd (which, in this instance, is just fine), why not try The Hunger Games?  Sometimes it’s fun to have the same experience half the country has had–and to know what they’re talking about when they go on and on about it.  I know people act like they’re just for 15-year-old girls, but these books are some of the most enjoyable books I’ve ever read.  Plus, Peeta is a close second to Michael Hosea as the most Christlike man in literature.  I won’t say any more for fear of giving anything away.  I assume you know the plot, so I’ll leave it at this: I LOVED these books and I honestly think they deepened my prayer life.

If you’re up for more of a challenge, try a novel about martyrdom.  Silence by Shusaku Endo and The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene are two of my favorite books of all time and they have the added bonus of being great literature.  Christian romance novels are all well and good, but there comes a time when you want to sound impressive when people ask you what you’ve been reading–or, you know, just to further your mind along with your soul.

                      

Endo’s book follows a Jesuit priest fleeing persecution in 17th century Japan.  As he runs from his pursuers, you honestly feel as though you’re walking up Calvary with him.  This one’s great during Lent or for meditating on the Passion any time and ends with a powerful ethical dilemma that will get you asking the question: how far am I willing to go for Christ?

Greene’s hero is much less heroic: a “whiskey priest” undercover during a time of persecution in Mexico, you hate him and yet you love him.  His complexity makes the book alternately inspiring and infuriating, as is most of Greene’s work.  The Power and the Glory will challenge your perceptions of holiness and push you to evaluate what parts of you are just as bad as the whiskey priest.

Any other suggestions?  Books that changed your life/were addictive/inspired great discussion/were just plain fun?  I’d love to hear your book recommendations!

 

 

Before you run off to buy every one of these books, let me recommend DealOz.  I don’t get any kickbacks, I just buy all my books through that site because it searches more than 200 sites to find the best price.  And when prices are close, I always go with BetterWorldBooks, an organization that donates a book to someone in need every time they sell a book.  Cheap books and increased international literacy?  Win-win-win.

Why I Won’t Read Fifty Shades of Grey

They look pretty innocent until the handcuffs….

If you haven’t yet heard of the Fifty Shades trilogy, you probably don’t spend much time on the internet.  The series is so popular that when I put the number 5 into Google, it autofilled “50 shades of grey.”  For those of you so fortunate as to have avoided the books so far, let me summarize the first for you in the words of noted news source Wikipedia:

Fifty Shades of Grey is a 2011 erotic novel by British author E. L. James. Set largely in Seattle, it is the first installment in a trilogy that traces the deepening relationship between a college graduate, Anastasia Steele, and a young business magnate, Christian Grey. It is notable for its explicitly erotic scenes featuring elements of sexual practices involving bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism (BDSM).

So let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: these books are not wholesome.  They are “explicitly erotic,” featuring all kinds of…sketchy practices.  And not just implied filth–graphically-described filth, stuff so bad I can barely google the novels without feeling the need to scrub my brain.  From a Christian perspective, I just don’t know how you can excuse that.

Now, I generally won’t take a stand against a book I haven’t read myself.  I wholeheartedly support Harry Potter as an innocent fantasy series because I’ve read every word.  I wasn’t even willing to condemn The Da Vinci Code until I read it–now I’m glad to warn people against it.1  So when a reader asked me to write about the book, warning Christian women away from it, I said no.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t tell people not to read a book that I haven’t read, and I can’t read that.”

But last week, I mentioned this exchange to one of my kids.  “You can’t hide from the truth,” he said.

“I’m not afraid that these books will expose some truth that threatens my nice little Catholic world,” I said.  “I’m afraid of what they’ll do to me.  I knew The Da Vinci Code wouldn’t destroy my faith, so I wasn’t worried about reading it.  I’m not as confident that these books won’t affect me.”

“Fifty Shades of Grey isn’t going to destroy your faith,” he said, giving me a kind vote of confidence.

“Alex, it’s not that I think I’m going to read these books and suddenly abandon my life of chastity for some wild S&M fantasy.  I just refuse to put myself in a situation where I’m walking up the aisle to receive communion and a graphic image of bondage sex presents itself to my imagination.  I’m not hiding from anything, I’m protecting myself.”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn’t enough just not to read the books.  I may not know everything about these books (thank God!), but I know enough to take a stand.  Since I haven’t read them, I guess I can’t exactly tell you what to do.  But I can say that I wouldn’t read them for ten thousand dollars and that I really, really hope no Christian women do.

In case you’re on the edge, here’s why I won’t read these books:

  1. They’re pornographic.  People who like them call them mommy porn.  These aren’t even the books’ detractors–these are their fans!  Men who watch porn think they’re porn.  The only people who seem to insist that the books aren’t porn are people who want to believe that reading these books isn’t unchaste.2
    .
    As these books prove, something can be pornographic without having images, and it makes total sense that women would be more drawn to words than images.  While many women claim that the books have revitalized their sex lives, marriage is about so much more than sex.  It’s about love and honor and chastity and seeking holiness together.  So I don’t care what Fifty Shades has done for your sex life, it is not great for your marriage.  This isn’t just harmless fun–pornography damages marriages as well as souls.  Someone’s getting hurt.
    .
  2. Good, because most women really need to lower their standards for men.

    They’re not just erotica, they’re bondage erotica.  If I can’t even handle good old Mr. Darcy, why on earth would I want to read about a wealthy, experienced, powerful man getting a young virgin to sign a contract consenting to God knows what?  Because yeah, love is all about escape–ha–clauses and signing on the dotted line.  I know from reading articles about the book that there are safe words, whips, straps, and a “red room of pain.”  I don’t even need to read the graphic lines to have a serious problem with the image of sex and “love” that the books present.

    And yet apparently Christian Grey is such an attractive character that women are falling head over heels for the sick man.  This kind of fiction skews our idea of love to be about pain and domination.  I don’t care what happens with the love story–I refuse to make that kind of man my standard, as so many women seem to have done

  3. It’s terrible writing.  From what I’ve heard, it’s not even very well-written.  I mean, it evolved from Twilight fanfic.  That’s right–an author so devoid of ideas she sponged off of Twilight.  The books, evidently, are so full of misused words, trite language, and broken record clichés (“my inner goddess) that even the most undiscerning readers can’t help but cringe.  Honestly, I wouldn’t be interested even if they weren’t porn.

So I’m not going to touch those things with a ten foot pole.  And I feel a lot more comfortable, after all the research I’ve been doing,3 in saying that they have no place on a Christian bookshelf. Even if they’re not smut, they’re too close for Christian comfort.

I’m not condemning you if you’ve read them.  Maybe my imagination is just more vivid than most, and that’s the problem.  Likely I’m much more of a prude than most.  But I’ve got to ask: would you blush if your pastor (or mother or Sunday School teacher or friend from church) saw you reading them?  Would you snatch them from your child if she flipped to a page at random?  Do you honestly feel that these books are good for your soul?

Maybe I’m missing the mark, but when St. Paul says “flee immorality,”4 I take him seriously.  So when I see those books, I’m happy to turn and run.  And I’m hoping you’ll join me.

  1. If you’re strong in your faith, read it if you must. It’s not filth, it’s just lies. I understand that it’s fiction, but the Church is my Mother, and when someone writes a book all about how your mother is a liar and a murderer, sticking it in the fiction section doesn’t make it more palatable. [↩]
  2. There are advocates of the book who reject the term “mommy porn” because they find the term condescending. “I’m a big girl and I read big girl porn, goshdarnit!” [↩]
  3. God help me, I had to close some of those websites really fast. [↩]
  4. 1 Cor 6:18 [↩]

An Ancient Assumption

On November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII made the second infallible statement ever made by a pope.1  Since this was only 60 years ago,2 it’s easy to assume that it’s an innovation, a made-up doctrine that has nothing to do with the faith of the Apostles.  But there was nothing new about the doctrine, just the way it was expressed.  With a shout and a bang, he declared to be infallible a teaching that everyone had pretty much been cool with forever: the Assumption of Mary.

From the Cathedral at Chartres–have you been there? If so, have you been back since they started cleaning the glass? It’s incredible.

What is it?

The official teaching is that at the end of her life, Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven.  Note that she didn’t ascend (by her own power, as Christ did), but was assumed by God’s power.  There is no official stance on whether she floated up kicking and somersaulting, fell asleep,3 appeared to die, or chose to die but was immediately reunited with her body when she was assumed.  What matters is that she lives bodily in heaven with Christ, taken there by God’s miraculous grace.

Why do we believe it?

First and foremost, we believe it because it’s been presented to us as revealed by God.  The Holy Father almost never makes infallible proclamations.  Here, he’s exercising his power of infallibility4 to tell us this is true, so we accept it on faith.

But while that might be admirable on a personal level, it’s certainly not convincing.  As always, I’m a big fan of Scripture, Tradition, and reason to help us through.

Scripture doesn’t give us anything explicit, as is the case with many issues, it being a finite book.  Today’s first reading is as close as we get, where it describes a woman (Rev 12:1) who is the Ark of the Covenenant (Rev 11:19), the mother of the Savior (Rev 12:5), and the mother of all believers (Rev 12:17).  Sure sounds like Mary to me.  Verse 6 tells us that she “fled into the desert where she had a place prepared by God.”  So the mother of the Savior, having finished her task, is taken up into a special place prepared for her.  Works for me.

Tradition on the matter isn’t quite as ancient as it is on many Catholic doctrines, but it dramatically predates the Reformation.  Apocryphal texts describe it as early as the 4th century, but I can see why we might not care about them.  Some of the heavy hitters pick it up pretty early, too, along with some more obscure theologians.

The Apostles took up her body on a bier and placed it in a tomb; and they guarded it, expecting the Lord to come. And behold, again the Lord stood by them; and the holy body having been received, He commanded that it be taken in a cloud into paradise: where now, rejoined to the soul, [Mary] rejoices with the Lord’s chosen ones. . . (St. Gregory of Tours, Eight Books of Miracles 1:4, A.D. 575).

It was fitting that the she, who had kept her virginity intact in childbirth, should keep her own body free from all corruption even after death. It was fitting that she, who had carried the Creator as a child at her breast, should dwell in the divine tabernacles. It was fitting that the spouse, whom the Father had taken to himself, should live in the divine mansions. It was fitting that she, who had seen her Son upon the cross and who had thereby received into her heart the sword of sorrow which she had escaped when giving birth to him, should look upon him as he sits with the Father, It was fitting that God’s Mother should possess what belongs to her Son, and that she should be honored by every creature as the Mother and as the handmaid of God (St. John Damascene, Dormition of Mary, A.D. 697)

By the end of the seventh century, Mary’s Assumption was so established as fact that it had its own feast day already, according to Pope St. Sergius.5

I think reason‘s strongest on this one.  We know that death (meaning the separation of body and soul) is a consequence of sin.  St. Paul tells us that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23).6  If Mary was without sin (which, I suppose, merits its own post, but just go with it for now), then she couldn’t have died.  Her time on earth came to an end, so God brought her to heaven body and soul (like Elijah and Enoch, so there’s a precedent).

Besides, not one church in the whole world claims to have Mary’s body.  In a world where a church, a museum, and a mosque all claim to have John the Baptist’s head (with three others apparently having been destroyed over the course of history), this silence on the location of Mary’s body is deafening.

I’m inclined to think it’s this one (Mary’s Tomb, an Orthodox church in the Kidron Valley of Jerusalem) simply because it looks older and cooler.

Two churches in Jerusalem claim to be the tomb of Mary, along with one in Ephesus, but nobody claims to have even a pinky toe of the world’s most important Saint.  For a Church that was grabbing at every body part imaginable to ascribe it to a Saint, this is pretty significant.  Not only was there no body, nobody even pretended that there was.  This only makes sense to me if the early Church understood that Mary had been assumed long before anyone bothered to write about it.

And then, of course, there’s the whole parallel between Mary and the Ark of the Covenant (linked above).  It’s unreasonable to assume7 that God would allow the vessel that contained his only-begotten Son to rot.  Her body had been made sacred and deserved to be treated with honor.  If he could preserve her from decay, why wouldn’t he?

Why did it happen?

Do you ever wonder, in the midst of scriptural acrobatics and wordy New Advent articles, why God did these things in the first place?  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that question–he’s always got a reason, and usually more than one.  There’s nothing unfaithful about trying to figure out why, and often it leads us to deeper faith.

Obviously, there are the theological explanations: that Mary’s immaculate nature could not suffer death, that God glorified Mary by giving her an end like that of his Son, or that our feminist God desired “that not only the soul and body of a man, but also the soul and body of a woman should have obtained heavenly glory.”8  Perhaps Mary was given a glorified body that she might teach us how to be fully human when we get our bodies back.9

Look how eager she is to touch him–she’s so cute!

Or maybe Jesus just loved his Momma so much that he wanted to be with her in heaven.  If you’ve got Spotify, do yourself a favor and listen to this song by Danielle Rose, a testimony to how beautiful the body of Mary is because of how it held and loved the body of Christ.  Maybe beneath all the theological significance is a sweet example of a son who just wanted to be with his Momma.  Maybe what we need to learn from it is to be homesick for heaven the way Mary was, to long to be in the presence of Christ so desperately that when our time comes we practically fly there.

There’s nothing innovative about the doctrine of the Assumption.  It’s an ancient doctrine whose beauty is ever-new, drawing us deeper into a love of Our Lady and a longing for heaven.  So praise God for the event and the Solemnity and the ex cathedra proclamation, and praise God especially for the gift of his mother as our mother, loving us from heaven and teaching us to follow Christ.

Mary Assumed into Heaven, pray for us!

 

  1. There are those who think that early popes made ex cathedra statements, but I haven’t seen any direct evidence of this. Certainly this was only the second of the modern era. [↩]
  2. I say things like “only 60 years ago” to teenagers and they look at me like I’m crazy, but in the grand scheme of the Church, 60 years ain’t much. [↩]
  3. Eastern Christians call this the Dormition, the falling asleep of Mary. [↩]
  4. I had almost finished a post on infallibility yesterday when WordPress ate it. Eventually, I’ll overcome my discouragement and rewrite it. Bear with me. [↩]
  5. No link on this one as nothing’s showing up in my feeble Google searches, but I have it on Pius XII’s authority, so we’ll go with it. [↩]
  6. Can I just tell you that I stumble over this every time I encounter it because I know the verb is supposed to be singular but the subject is clearly plural and WHAT is going on with THAT??? [↩]
  7. hah [↩]
  8. Munificentissimus Deus 33 [↩]
  9. You did know that we’re getting our bodies back, right? When we die, at best we become saints, but never angels. And at the end of the world, we’ll get our bodies back and I think we’ll be able to fly but there’s no official teaching on the matter 😛 [↩]

Voting with Your Checkbook

First, a few caveats:

  1. I know very little about government.
  2. I know even less about economics.
  3. It’s entirely possible that somebody else has had this idea and it’s been shot out of the water and I’m completely unaware that this has happened.
  4. I don’t really have any idea why I’m posting this except that it’s come up a few times recently so I figured why not?

That being said, let me make a suggestion:

Ugh. Wildflowers are literally the worst.

I’m always hearing people say, “I don’t want my taxes to fund war,” or “I don’t want my taxes to fund abortion,” or “I don’t want my taxes to fund wildflowers planted on the side of the road,” or whatever it is that you’re taking a stand against.  I’ve heard this frequently with the HHS debate: “Why bother fighting the mandate?  Your taxes already pay for contraceptive services.”

And while there is a distinct moral difference, I think it introduces a good question: is there a way that we can avoid funding immoral programs while still paying taxes?

What if it were possible for us to choose directly what our taxes fund (or don’t fund) as opposed to just electing people to office who make certain promises about policies that they’ll enact?  Let’s be honest, there are very, very few politicians that a Christian can support on every single issue.  I don’t actually know of any–not at the national level, anyway.  And even if I could find a politician who would always vote my way, the system isn’t really set up to allow one honest politician to accomplish much.

But what if instead of just voting we were able to choose to opt out of funding certain things with our taxes?  I’m not saying that anybody would get to choose to pay less in taxes.  I’m saying that when I sit down to pay my taxes, there’s a section on my federal income tax forms where I can choose to opt out of my tax money going to certain things, such as the development of nuclear weapons, embryonic stem cell research, abortion services, or anything related to the Patriot Act.  Whatever I opt out of, I still pay the full amount that I owe, I just have a little more control over my money.

Republicans don’t have a corner on pro-life issues.

These issues would be added to the income tax “opt-out” section based on a referendum.  So you get however many thousand signatures on your petition saying, “I think you ought to be able to opt out of funding schools.  [Everybody hates schools, right?]  I really, as a Libertarian,1 believe that government funding of schools is indoctrinating America’s children in the capitalist-democratic propaganda and that it does a disservice to America’s children and that is immoral for my tax dollars to go towards schools and also weed should be legal.”

Can’t you just smell the oppression?

So you go out and you find 10,000 of your closest Libertarian friends, they all sign this petition, and it’s introduced onto the ballot in the next general election.  Then the voters are able to vote for this to be an option for people to opt out of on their taxes.  And maybe there’s a threshold, say 50% of voters have to think it’s a reasonable thing for people to want to opt out of paying for schools.  They’re not saying that they don’t want to pay for schools, just that they believe that funding schools isn’t necessarily part of the social contract that we all enter into by being citizens.  If you reach that 50% threshold, then the next time tax forms come out, it will be added to the list.  Along with abortion funding and nuclear research, you’re able to opt out of your taxes going to fund schools.

Then you go to this form in your giant stack of tax paperwork, a form that the majority of Americans won’t even notice, and you as a Libertarian choose to opt out of funding schools.  So of the $3000 that you’re paying, maybe $90 was going to go to fund schools.  If you opt out of paying for schools, that $90 is then reallocated in the percentage that your taxes are normally distributed:

Why, no, I’m not a cynic. Why do you ask?

The 3% of your $3,000 that no longer goes to schools then gets split up along these lines (with the $2.70 that was supposed to go to schools being thrown into the non-controversial area of greatest need?).  You’ve paid the same amount of money, but because you find government funding of schools morally abhorrent, your money doesn’t go towards schools.

Let’s imagine (and, God help us, it doesn’t require much imagination) that the government decides to provide abortions free for all government employees.  We encourage our representatives to vote against this, but it passes anyway.  Now it seems to me that eventually, if enough people are opposed to this and enough people opt out of funding abortion services, there would no longer be enough money for the government to provide them.  The policy would have to be changed.

It’s very difficult to get policy changed by marching on Washington, writing to your senator, or voting for people who you think are going to do what they say they are going to do in their campaign promises.  So let’s put our money where our mouth is.  Let’s say, “Our money will not go to this” and see what happens to the policies.

We’re not going to see a time in our country where you just don’t pay taxes or where you get to choose exactly what the government is spending its money on, but if you are able to say “My money will not be used to fund these things,” if that becomes an option for us, then it seems to me that our “representative democracy” will become much more representative of the people’s actual desires.

In a country as ill-educated and self-serving as ours, maybe that’s not a great thing, but I think it’s an experiment worth trying.

 

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, but please be gentle–I’m not an economist, I’m not a political theorist.  Maybe I’m just an idiot, but I’d like to introduce the idea and let those better informed hash it out and run with it.  Is the whole thing ridiculous?  Would we need congressional restrictions on what could be opted out of (defense and education being off-limits, for example)?  Can you get more specific on number of signatures and percentage of the vote needed?  Should the opt-out issues have to be voted on annually–or maybe every four years?  Where should that awkward fraction left over go?  Is it impossible to have the kind of transparency it would take to break your tax dollars down into percents?  Would we have to deal in general categories (healthcare) as opposed to specific services (abortion)?  What else am I missing?

  1. not all Libertarians believe this [↩]

My Favorite Thing About NYC

There are churches everywhere!  And whether they look like this:

Granted, the lighting wasn’t great, but there’s not much you can do with seafoam carpeting and cinder block walls.
My friend Amanda likes this window. But what about those metallic squares to the right? Can you see those?  Nobody could like those.

or like this:

I love the altarpiece.

Check out the Joyful Mysteries in this window!

what matters is this:

15 years after my conversion, seeing this candle lit somewhere I wasn’t expecting it still gives me a thrill.

Because he was present among stalls and he’s present among cinder blocks.  What a blessing to step from the empty noise of the street into the eloquent silence of his presence.

 

1st church: Nativity in Manhattan; 2nd church: St. Thomas Aquinas in Brooklyn–just your generic NYC neighborhood church.  I swear, sometimes it’s like being in Rome!

How the Temperaments Are Making Me Holier

Until I was in my mid-twenties, I thought that every woman who wasn’t occasionally a quivering mass of emotions was repressing her feelings.  I tend to cry frequently and freak out even more often.  So I would sit down with my poor sister every few months and try to push all her buttons until she was sad enough to cry.

I really thought I was helping her.

When I finally found out that people are, in fact, different and not everybody needs to be such a basketcase as I am, life started to move more smoothly.  It goes along with what I was saying about not judging people–the more we can try to understand people, the better we can love them.  I think that learning about different personality types can really help with this.

Let me start by saying that I am in no way an expert on the temperaments.  In fact, most of what I write here I learned from some of my kids, two brilliant girls who explained the whole thing to me when they were in high school.1  So I might be off on some of this, but it doesn’t seem to be an exact science.  In any event, I’ve found this system very helpful (and I want to write a post about my struggles with humility which will make more sense if I can refer to my temperament in passing), so I’m going to sketch it out here.

The basic principle behind the temperaments is that there are four major categories that people’s personalities fall into: choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine.

Cholerics are passionate and intense.  They tend to be extreme in whatever they do and often elbow their way through the crowd to positions of leadership.  Bible verse: “Therefore be either cold or hot, for if you are lukewarm I will spit you from my mouth” (Revelation 3:16); The Office character2: terrifying Dwight Schrute, who is more intense about beets than most people are about their eternal salvation.

Phlegmatics are the opposite: more easygoing and relaxed.  They tend to be calm, steady, and rational, less driven by passion than their choleric counterparts.  Bible verse: “He is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream: it does not fear heat when it comes, its leaves stay green; in the year of drought it shows no distress, but still produces fruit” (Jeremiah 17:8); The Office character: chill Jim Halpert, who barely cracks a smile while encasing everything Dwight owns in jello.

Sanguines tend to be confident and emotionally stable.  They’re often characterized as “happy,” but what is most significant is that their emotions tend not to be extreme or to dominate them.  Bible verse: “Rejoice in the Lord always.  I shall say it again: rejoice!” (Philippians 4:4); The Office character: Michael Scott, who jokes around even when his heart is breaking and never stays sad for long.

Melancholics, on the other hand, are sensitive, feeling a wide range of emotions very deeply.  They are more introspective than sanguines and often have to work through some intense emotional reactions.  Bible verse: “Weeping may endure for a night but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:6); The Office character: Pam Halpert, who (especially when pregnant) alternates between grinning goofily at Jim and crying over commercials.

Traditionally, people say you have a dominant and a secondary temperament.  My girls look at it from a different angle, explaining it like a coordinate plane (ooh, check out my mathy words!  I must be so smart.) like so:

Most people just aren’t as monochromatic as a single temperament would suggest.  This model gives us the idea of a spectrum between two opposing temperaments and lets you be extreme in two temperaments, as some of us are.  Let’s use Winnie the Pooh to illustrate:

I’m not sure this is what A.A. Milne was going for….

So, to make sure we’re all following: Tigger is passionate but unemotional, chipper all the time; Rabbit is just as intense but much more sensitive and more easily upset; Pooh is hard to upset, happy to go with the flow; Eeyore is generally upset but unmotivated to fight anything.  Now these four are extremes, all in the corners of the graph.  You might be slightly choleric and extremely sanguine or just a little melancholic and a little choleric.  Not everybody’s personality is as extreme as mine.

Where do I fit, you ask?  Well, if you’ve read more than just this post, you’ve probably figured out that I’m crazy choleric.  Here’s how choleric: when I was first learning about all this, my kids told me I was the most choleric person they knew.  My response?

“No way!  I bet I could list at least 5 people more choleric than me!  And I don’t care about everything.  Like hockey!  I don’t care at all about hockey.  I bet I could come up with 20 things I don’t care at all about!”

They just stared at me.  “Seriously?  Are you trying to prove our point?”

What this means is that I care a lot about just about everything.  And learning that I’m the outlier here helped me to understand that when other people don’t care about something that matters to me, it’s not because they need to be inspired to care or they don’t understand how important this is or they’re bad people because THIS IS SO IMPORTANT AND THEY’RE NOT EVEN ANGRY ABOUT THIS TERRIBLE TERRIBLE INJUSTICE!!

See, some people are just phlegmatic.  And it’s natural to them, when they care about something, not to have a coronary about it.  And that’s good–God knows the world can’t handle many of me without a whole lot of phlegmatics to balance things out.  So when people are good Catholics but don’t go to daily Mass ever, it’s not because they love Jesus less than I.  It’s because their love of Jesus doesn’t naturally express itself in a commitment to going to daily Mass.  And, to be honest, I don’t go to daily Mass because I love Jesus so much.  I go because I’m an all-in kind of person.  I decided a decade ago that I’d go to Mass every day and it’ll take a lot to change that commitment not because I’m holy but because I’m stubborn and choleric.

There’s a thrill to being as passionate as I am, and I think it enables me to serve the Church in a very particular way, but it can also be exhausting.  Plus, when I care so much about everything, life is kind of a roller coaster ride.  Before I planted my feet on Christ, I was a hot mess.  Praise God for life on the Rock.

What about the x-axis?  Oh, so, so melancholic.  Those same kids who were explaining this to me were very confused on this one because they’d heard me talk about how a piece of music broke my heart or how peaceful prayer was, but they’d never seen me upset.

“Well, yeah,” I said.  “Because I don’t cry in front of my students.”

Practically, what this means is that I’m very, very easily hurt.  I read way too much into everything and have to spend time in prayer most days taking irrational suffering to Christ to be healed.  I’m very sarcastic (choleric) but also crushed–after the fact–by having hurt someone (melancholic).  But I’m also able to feel very deeply.  My constant and repeated heartbreak gives me a reference point when contemplating the Passion which opens me to contrition that most sanguines will never know.  And the deep suffering makes the joy that much more beautiful.

Understanding how melancholic I am has actually made it a lot easier for me to govern my emotions.  I thought all through high school that anyone who didn’t return my phone calls was passive-aggressively telling me she didn’t want to be my friend anymore.  I’ve realized since that sanguines just don’t generally have any idea that they’re hurting me.  I took being 10 minutes late as an intentional slight when really a sanguine might not notice that he was late.  He certainly wouldn’t expect anyone to take offense.

Now, sticking people in boxes is generally not helpful.  But it’s been my experience that understanding that other people might view the world in a completely different way from me helps me to love them better.  It goes back to walking a mile in another person’s shoes.  I can’t at all understand a sanguine phlegmatic (Pooh) until I realize that he doesn’t have to be like me.  If Pooh tried to be like Rabbit, the Hundred Acre Wood would be a very unpleasant place.3

The Saints are all over this graph.  Cranky St. Jerome was probably a Rabbit,4 but so was fiery St. Teresa of Avila.  St. Joseph of Cupertino was Pooh, as was Bl. John XXIII.  I’d think Philip Neri was a Tigger, along with St. Peter, and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross strikes me as an Eeyore.  The kingdom of heaven accepts all kinds, and the Church needs them.

I probably ought to have some great spiritual lesson to conclude, but all I’ve got is this: you don’t have to be like anyone else and they don’t have to be like you.  Figure out how you are called to be holy, be holy that way, and let other people follow their own path to holiness.

For Further Reading:

Since all I did was sketch out some very basic principles, here are some other sites that you might find helpful.  None of them seem to use the graph idea above, but they’ll help you flesh out what I said about the specific temperaments:

Ave Maria Singles explains how temperaments relate to marriage.

Fr. Antonio Royo Marin, O.P. connects the temperaments to spirituality.

Fisheaters is always good for those who want to know about the medieval roots of anything.

And of course, we can’t forget Wikipedia!

 

What do y’all think?  Does this help you understand yourself–and those you love–better?

  1. Maria Guzman and Elizabeth Hanna Pham, to whom I am extremely grateful. [↩]
  2. If The Office doesn’t do it for you, look here for some more comparisons. [↩]
  3. For the record, while I’m in the same quadrant as Rabbit, I don’t think we’re very much at all. My brand of melancholic is much more cheerful. We’re both borderline OCD, though. [↩]
  4. All of these are guesses–bear with me! [↩]