Simple thoughts on the Rosary

I prayed the rosary last night. I have not done so in awhile - maybe a month ago, maybe less, but in any case it hasn't been central in my prayer life lately. I always find that praying the rosary has the affect of making me feel grounded in my Catholicism, and such was the case last night. My spine actually tingled as I thought about how many others around the world were praying the rosary with me at that very moment, and how many people has stopped that day to pray through their own series of Hail Mary's. Usually I pray the rosary with a special intention in mind, and I wondered how many others had done the same, and what was on their heart. It is profoundly encouraging to me to know that we are allowed to ask the saints in heaven to pray for our broken world.

I find it surprising how blessed I find praying the rosary to be just due to my personality. For those acquainted with the Meyers-Briggs personality test, I am an INFP. The N stands for intuitive, which means I use my intuition to gather information rather than directly using my senses, and I am extremely strong on this. I despise precise things like measuring tapes, where there is an exact rule to follow. It's almost laughable to see me use a measuring tape - I tiled our bathroom floor earlier this year, and I much preferred to eyeball how much tile I needed to cut off, and some of my measurements? Well, they made me laugh. (But I did get it done!) Trusting my intuition to guess measurements more than the tape is so illogical, and I really need to gain some maturity with using measuring tapes, but still--I just don't like them, and I never will. I dislike set ways of doing things, I don't need specific instructions to get things done, and I get annoyed with people who do. Which is why is is so interesting that I feel eternally grateful for the depth the 'rote' prayers of Catholicism have added to my prayer life. Due to my personality, you would think I would prefer to come up with my own prayers, and while I haven't abandoned doing so, I love the set prayers of the faith. There is beauty in the unity of Catholics who pray them, there is a richness of thought that comes with repetition, and there is comfort and awe in the timelessness of the faith.

Quotable Monday

"There is, as we saw, one good reason for not believing in God: evil. And God himself has answered this objection not in words but in deeds and in tears. Jesus is the tears of God."

--Peter Kreeft, Catholic philosopher

Life: It's Not Complicated

I am feeling very Catholic today. This morning I visited the website of the "Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice", where I noticed the Presbyterian Church USA listed as a member, which piqued my interest because the last church I went to before I became Catholic was PC USA. So I clicked on the PC USA website and searched for "abortion".

Let me tell you!

I knew the denomination was liberal, but silly me, I thought that meant they ordained women and such, not that they supported abortion as a choice for those facing what they repeatedly term "problem pregnancies". I never looked into the denomination as a whole. What does your average Protestant care about church hierarchy crap? I didn't.

Here are a few disturbing excerpts from the PC USA position on abortion:

"Presbyterians have struggled with the issue of abortion for more than 30 years..."

“the artificial or induced termination of a pregnancy is a matter of careful ethical decision of the patient…and therefore should not be restricted by law…”
"We may not know exactly when human life begins..."

"to terminate a pregnancy can be a morally acceptable, though certainly not the only or required, decision. Possible justifying circumstances would include medical indications of severe physical or mental deformity"...

"Problem pregnancies are the result of, and influenced by, so many complicated and insolvable circumstances that we have neither the wisdom nor the authority to address or decide each situation."

This last one is the phrase that keeps reverberating in my head; individual women have the wisdom and authority to decide if they should or should not get an abortion, but the Church does not have the wisdom to be able to speak against abortion because it's complicated. How can the body of Christ not know if it is right or wrong to kill an innocent human being? Apparently because the PC USA body believes that what is right in one situation may not be right in another. The Holy spirit may indeed affirm that one women should have an abortion, and he may say "no" to another. In reality, Abortion is not a complicated issue, but calling it so makes people who like to avoid being judgemental feel better about giving up their moral voice. But wait, shouldn't a church, of all things, maintain a consistent moral voice? And how does a church descend to such unfamiliarity with what I will term the Christian tradition, which has always held that human life from conception forward is sacred?

The PC USA page states,"In the Reformed Tradition, we affirm that God is the only Lord of conscience-not the state or the church."

Now I certainly think the PC USA is twisting 'reformed tradition' here by using it as an excuse to bow out of advocating for the lives of the unborn, but it's revealing that they use this statement here. What is being said in this context is that the church doesn't have the authority to say what is right and wrong because only God can do that. But if God is the only 'Lord of conscience', then the Lord of conscience becomes whatever individuals decide God is, and predictably, everyone seems to get a different version of God.

This past week I've made many comments on a post my husband wrote on facebook about all things related to marriage and sexuality. I noticed that there was a common theme running through all the other (non-Catholic) commenter's thinking; that this was a matter of opinion and preference, whether or not the commenter had a loose or strict vision of where the line of sin should be drawn. I notice this all too often among secular and Protestant circles (and bad Catholic ones, too): dialogue is the highest appeal to determine truth. Nothing else can be trusted. Christians may trust God, but there is no authority of authorities to explain God, everything is a matter of personal interpretation.

I expect this in secular circles where oneself is the highest judge of morality, but I would hope better of Christians. We're supposed to have submitted our lives to Christ, and that means submitting to the Church, which is "the pillar and bulwark of the truth." (1 Tim. 3:15). (Unless, of course, you belong to a church like the PC USA, which seems a little iffy on the concept of truth).

Besides being so glad I can trust the unadulterated doctrine of the Catholic church, I've come to a conclusion through all this: I really, really don't like the way faith looks when it is disconnected from authority. Faith just lacks integrity without it. When there is no recognition that the Church has authority to interpret scripture consistent with the way it has always been interpreted and to pass on the historical faith, people seem to feel free to go around reinventing whatever facet of Christianity (or life) they see as needing improvement. That's just sad.

Quotable Monday

"No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to be done."

--Dorothy Day, journalist, social activist (1897-1980)

oooh, so maddening

Did you know our president just got done celebrating Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender month? (He declared June such himself, what a guy). On Monday, he hosted a LGBT reception at the White House. Read the transcript here.

Here's a nice excerpt of Obama speaking on the struggle to advance the LGBT agenda:

"Now this struggle, I don't need to tell you, is incredibly difficult, although I think it's important to consider the extraordinary progress that we have made. There are unjust laws to overturn and unfair practices to stop. And though we've made progress, there are still fellow citizens, perhaps neighbors or even family members and loved ones, who still hold fast to worn arguments and old attitudes; who fail to see your families like their families; and who would deny you the rights that most Americans take for granted."

So now myself, most of (all?) the Catholics I know personally, the Pope, my bishop, and untold millions who prefer to allow God, the Church, the wisdom of the ages, good psychology and reason to decide what it means to be whole have officially been declared backwards...intellectual neanderthals...something to be eradicated. Thanks, Mr. President.

Quotable Monday

"Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods"

--C.S. Lewis, Irish scholar and author (1898-1963)

Toys and play

I've been thinking about toys, play and imagination lately.

I read something in Whole Child/Whole Parent that I keep coming back to (paraphrased): A toy is just the means of discovery. Once a child has learned whatever he or she can from one particular toy, he will become uninterested in it. Toys and play give children opportunities to learn about the world.

This makes sense because I've seen it happen. If I take my three year old to a garage sale selling toys, he will be mesmerized and play with whatever they have for as long as I will let him. But if I were to buy every toy they had, he would be ignoring them in a day or two because the toys would offer him nothing new. The initial entertainment value of any toy fades really quickly--unless it is the kind that requires imagination to use.

Some time ago I read an article on play that I also keep returning to; it talked about how there has been a negative shift towards replacing play with educational activity. This is a mistake because children learn about the world through their play, and sad because children's imaginations are under-utilized when play gets pushed aside for 'more important' activities. What is a child if not a creature of imagination?

I try to stay away from feeding my kids tv and toys with batteries because (besides the jangling noises) I think of them as the junk food of play--they tend to be things that short-shrift imagination. Battery run toys do one thing, and one thing only. A talking toy piano will always be just a talking toy piano. But a bucket? A bucket can be a hat, a stool, a pot for cooking, a mold for sand--anything, really.

Naturally, I've been thinking back on what I liked playing with as a child, and I think I can pretty safely say that my favorite toy was my dollhouse. Yes, the dollhouse was always a dollhouse, but every new play session offered the potential for something new to be created in story. Even unused, the dollhouse sat waiting for someone to come and make up a new story to happen between the little walls. I still have the dollhouse in a crate in the basement, and all the tiny furniture I collected over the years tucked away in boxes, waiting for some other child to bring them back to life. I couldn't ever possibly feel the same way about an old video or remote controlled car I used to love as a kid.

Debating kid's shows/stories

I've been having a mental debate about the kind of stories I read to my three year old and the kind of DVDs I let him watch. I've been noticing that a lot of the shows and books that try to teach "moral lessons" go about it in a way that I'm not sure is such a great way to teach a three year old. Generally, it seems that the way these lessons are conveyed is a character acts in a way that is mean, or selfish, and then another character steps in and points out the error of their ways. Basic, and I'm not sure there is another way to do this, but my problem with this is that it nicely illustrates bad behavior to my three year old. Before it teaches him to be good, it teaches him to be bad. For instance, a character in a Sesame Street story calls someone stupid. Eventually, they learn the lesson that it's not kind to call anyone stupid. But I doubt my three year old has ever heard anyone be called stupid or called anyone stupid himself (outside of stories), and now Sesame Street has showed him how.

This mostly just applies to shows, because with books, so far I've only taken issue with the crappy ones - the ones that sell just because they have Elmo on the cover, you know the type. I haven't noticed this kind of writing in any of our favorite books, and besides, I can always change the words!

I might be making a mountain out of a molehill here, but I know my son is deeply affected by stories, whether written or watched. Every day he speaks 'in story' - combining phrases from different stories we've read into strange sentences that sometimes make sense and sometimes don't. Every day I hear him repeating something we've read, or saying a phrase from Thomas Train. He thinks 'in story', because he will apply phrases he's learned to what he is doing at any given moment.

I checked out the first movie he's ever watched, Cars, from the library this week. I wouldn't have even considered it, but an older boy that befriended my son in the children's room started pulling DVDs off the shelf for him and came to me, saying, 'please, please?' Then of course, booga really wanted to bring one home, and I gave in. Partly because every child seems to have seen this movie, and I was curious. And it turns out Lightning McQueen is a pretty distasteful character until he reforms in the end. He's the cool hero of the movie, and he's a jerk. I think my son is still too young to process that heroes who act like jerks are doing something they shouldn't. I'm pretty certain he is not watching Lightning McQueen thinking, 'boy, he sure is selfish' -- he's just absorbing what he sees.

Since I don't really want him to absorb bad behavior until he can identify it as bad behavior, I'm going to be careful about the stories that get brought into our house. I'm glad we don't watch any TV (I used to let booga watch Sesame Street, but we don't get the channel anymore), and I think I will try to hold off on movies for the most part for another year at least. I'm okay with Thomas Train and Elmo DVDs (although his one-dimensionality gets to me).There's just an intensity difference between the trains on Thomas being quarrelsome, and loud flashy movie characters being bad.

Quotable Monday

Tree House

A tree house, a free house,
A secret you and me house,
A high up in the leafy branches
Cozy as can be house.

A street house, a neat house,
Be sure and wipe your feet house
Is not my kind of house at all-
Let's go live in a tree house.

--Shel Silverstein, author, illustrator, poet, musician (1930-1999)

The wrong response to Dr. Tiller's death

I received a forwarded email written by Randall Terry,"The Right Response to Dr. Tiller's Death", which you can read here . Dr. George Tiller, late-term abortionist, was murdered on Sunday. I wrote the following response to the sender. (Randall Terry founded the anti-abortion activist group Operation Rescue, but is no longer affiliated; he left the group in 1991)

Hi,
I received this email this morning - and I strongly do not think this is a good response to Dr. Tiller's death, and I do not think it should be forwarded on to as many as possible. Why? Because Mr. Terry does not express ANY remorse over the fact that Dr. Tiller was murdered; he only expresses remorse over how the pro-life movement will be vilified as a result of the murder. Instead of lamenting yet another violent act, he turns the affair into a 'boo-hoo for us, now everyone will hate us' rant. I know it is hard to truly regret the death of a man who did so much destruction (and obviously Terry is having trouble with this) but we must do so because Dr. Tiller was unjustly murdered and we are supposed to be the ultimate 'respecters of life'. If we pro-lifers really want to build a culture that respects life, our response to Dr. Tiller's murder can't be as shallow and self-seeking as Mr. Terry's is in this letter! Nowhere in this letter do I see the Christ-like virtue of loving ones enemy, nowhere. That upsets me. There are much better responses to Dr. Tiller's death from the pro-life community, such as:
http://www.nrlc.org/press_releases_new/Release053109.html

Please let me know what you think if you have time. I am grateful for all you do for the unborn!

sincerely,
Elissa

Tuesday is trash day

I think I might have crushed a dream today. My three year old and I were outside today when the recycling truck came down the alley. He begged me to stop doing yard work so we could watch the truck. When it pulled up to our curb, the driver motioned us over so we could watch the recycling get compacted into the truck. We did, and it was loud. I heard a bit of a whimper and looked to see my boy (who regularly runs around happily saying 'Tuesday is trash day!' and who, at the first distant rumble of a garbage truck, drops anything in order to get to a window as fast as possible) frowning deeply. His lower lip quivered, "I want to go inside!" and when we did, these words: " I do NOT like garbage trucks!"

Quotable Monday

"The world has weekends, and we have holy days. The world prepares us to be food for worms; the Church invites us to the wedding feast of the Lamb."

--Anthony Esolen, professor of English and senior editor for Touchstone magazine. (Read the whole article here).

Quotable Monday

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself"
--Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer, pacifist (1828-1910)

Marriage in an imperfect world

A few weeks ago I read an article in Our Sunday Visitor, "How 'no-fault' divorce has fractured U.S. society". It contains a gem of a statement made by Maggie Gallagher, president of the National Organization for Marriage. "Marriage is the attempt to love one other person the way God loves everyone, and that's hard. You need the support of a community, of a culture, to make it work. If people could do that on their own, we wouldn't need marriage." When Gallagher speaks of community support, she is referring to how no-fault divorce laws do not foster a culture that supports marriage.

I think this speaks to a profoundly overlooked truth about marriage: that marriage is instituted in part to protect its members from each other. Scary, but true. It doesn't exist just because two people are completely mushed-face over one another and are going to blissfully stay that way forever and ever. I think Gallagher hits the nail on the head here: if we could love perfectly, we wouldn't need marriage.

The contract of marriage between two people exists, in part at least, as a fall back when one or both parties would really rather not be married. And of course, no-fault divorce pretty much has wiped that idea off the map, even though the article sites that 4 out of 5 divorcees opposed their divorce. We as a culture are so used to the idea of no-fault divorce, that we almost don't know what marriage is for anymore. It's common to divorce merely because "I'm just not as happy as I think I should be". And because our culture is rife with divorce, marriage no longer means what it is supposed to mean: permanent commitment.

I think there is one other party that marriage is made necessary to protect: children. If laws are created in the first place to protect the innocent, then I can think of no other more appropriate law than the legal contract of marriage. Children are better off when they live with married parents, plain and simple. I could come up with a long list of statistics and anecdotes to prove this point, but I think it's so obvious that I don't need to. I could also write a really long post on this topic, but today is not the day for that. Happy Memorial day, everyone!

Quotable Monday

"It is impossible to fulfill the law concerning love for Me, God eternal, apart from the law concerning love for your neighbors."

--Saint Catherine of Siena, Dominican tertiary, mystic, informal diplomat, doctor of the church (1347-1380)

They're bonding

One of those sweet brotherly moments happened last night as I was getting the boys ready for bed. I was nursing our 10 month old, and I heard my husband say outside the room in the hall to our three year old ' go and say goodnight to baby brother'. Then baby brother surprised me by pulling away from me and smiling, looking towards the door in anticipation. Apparently he heard as well. He did more cute smiling and giggling and kicked his legs in excitement as his big brother came in and went through his ritual of saying goodnight ("goodnight baby brother-wait, wait, don't wiggle...I give you a blessing: in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit" Hug, "uh-uh-UH", kiss, "good night!")

It's always sweet to watch my little baby glory in getting his nightly dose of attention from his big brother, but it was just a little extra special that he understood my husband's words.

homeschooling: reason one

As I've been trying to distill my reasons to try homeschooling our kids, I've come up with my number one reason: I want to firmly establish 'the good' in their minds as normal. I read a post recently by a DRE who stated that almost without exception, the public school kids at his parish did poorly on their sacraments testing before first communion while the homeschoolers did very well. He went on to talk about how homeschoolers did not have a problem with a spiritual vocabulary, while publicly schooled kids did; homeschoolers are engaging their spirituality throughout the day while public schoolers spend the majority of their day in an atmosphere that ignores all things spiritual. It is striking to me that a child who goes to public school will spend most of his or her waking hours around people who generally treat spirituality as an alien concept. What is normal, at least at school (no matter how many Christian teachers there are in public schools), is to ignore anything religious.

I've been hyper aware lately of the fact that I am establishing what is normal in my children's minds by what we do and don't do in our family. Because of this, I'm starting to be more careful not to squander opportunities to speak of faith to our three year old. No one else can establish this as normal conversation like my husband and I can simply because our kids spend nearly all their time with us.

I've also been noticing how thoroughly our culture likes to present a picture of life that has been completely sanitized of religion. For instance, for all the ways Sesame street loves to introduce children to the diversity of our world, I have yet to see the show even hint that someones identity is wrapped up in worshiping God. Do they ever show a Muslim praying, or a little Jewish boy wearing a yarmulke, or a child going for first communion? It seems plain silly that though it is not hard to see a person's religion has a profound impact on who they are, pop culture pretends otherwise. It is normal to ignore the most important facet of human existence; relationship to God. This seems a dangerous atmosphere to raise a child in.

It's not impossible to raise a faith-filled child in public school, but I do think doing so adds one more hurdle to the task. I wish I knew who said this first so I could properly attribute it, but...would you rather raise your child in an atmosphere that makes it easy to be holy, or one that makes it difficult? By homeschooling, I hope to choose the former (Lord have mercy!).

Quotable Monday

Rockabye

Rock-a-bye baby in the tree top,
Don't you know a tree top,
Is no safe place to rock?
And who put you up there,
And your cradle too?
Baby I think someone down here's
Got it in for you.

--Shel Silverstein, author, illustrator, poet, musician (1930-1999)

Fun with covering my head

So I'm back from a moderately long blogging absence. Have I said before that we bought a 100 year old house and could probably spend the next five to ten years working on it? I've been trying to complete some projects around the house, and whenever I do that, I run out of time to blog. But, here goes...

I wrote in January about my decision to start wearing a chapel veil to Mass and I thought I'd give an update on my experience thus far. Here is the unfortunate fact: Like clockwork, I secretly hope I have forgotten the veil every time I land in the pews at Mass. But it's always there along with an arsenal of bobby pins that magically never get lost at the bottom of my purse, and I'm going to keep wearing it. It's a little like going to confession. Do I genuinely like that I have to do it? No. Is it necessary and good? Yes. The veil tends to slowly slip off during Mass and our 9 month old is, um, learning to keep his hands and mouth away from it. (There is one advantage to this- my husband will hold the baby to keep him away from the veil). But my biggest complaint on the veil is entirely due to my own sinful nature: I feel conspicuous. I wonder if other people notice the veil and disapprove because I remember my own shocked reaction when I saw a woman wearing a veil at the first parish we were members at--'Oh. My. Goodness. what does she have on her head?'

As a general rule, I do not like the spotlight. I do not mind things like public speaking when I know exactly what I'm going to say beforehand, but when it's just me, raw and unrehearsed, I feel completely jumbled. It's probably why I am not a very prolific blogger-- I'm too timid to let people see my 'writing out loud' as I once heard blogging described as. I prefer to edit and re-edit, which takes time, and I don't have much of that.

But back to the veil: In my mind, because I decided to veil as an act of submission to the Lord, wearing the veil is a little hurdle of faithfulness that I am challenged to sail over every week that I find helpful. If I can't suffer the tiniest bit of uncomfortableness for Jesus (poor, poor self-image), well...how much zeal do I really have? For me, covering my head is an interior genuflection that lasts the entire Mass. It would be nice to get over my self-consciousness, and to believe that no one really cares what I have on my head, but if I don't, I guess I will continue to be privileged to suffer. I've noticed that Catholicism has a long-standing tradition of embracing suffering, and for good reason: Jesus did. Someday I'm going to write about it. Maybe later this week if I get the kitchen painted!

Quotable Monday

"It's a little-known fact that the real business of parenting is the upbringing of the parent."

-Polly Berrien Berends, author and childhood expert