Recently in Christianity Category

This morning on my way in to work I was listening to one of my favorite radio shows, the Bobby Bones Show on 96.7 KISS FM. Bobby read an email from a young woman who had hooked up a year ago with ... some guy.

As a result, she got pregnant, and got an abortion, without informing the man of either. Her question: Should she inform the man she hooked up with?

Bobby solicited opinions from listeners, and he offered his own along with his colleagues on the show, Lunchbox, Carlos, and Amy, who is known among the group for being more religious.

All of the men agreed that the young woman should not tell the man about the pregnancy or the abortion, because it is too late to do anything about it, it wouldn't do the man any good, and he probably wouldn't want to know anyway. Amy wondered what pregnancy counselors would say.

Below is a comment I emailed to Bobby, Lunchbox, and Carlos (known as "Los").

Hey Bobby, Lunch and 'Los:

I'm a regular listener to your show and I thoroughly enjoy it -- even though when you all are talking about what to do in relationship situations I disagree with you guys fairly often.

But today I feel compelled to share my thoughts on what you guys discussed -- specifically the young lady who got an abortion without telling the father (or father-to-be, depending on one's beliefs regarding prenatal life), and whether she should.

Just to let you know, I'm a Catholic in my 20s, engaged to be married in September to a beautiful, awesome woman -- and suffice to say, in the words of Kelly Clarkson, "I do not hook up." So yeah, I'm usually on Amy's side. And I don't suspect anything I say will surprise you.

The young woman should absolutely tell the man that she became pregnant and got an abortion. As soon as possible.

My concern is not whether the guy has a right to know. My concern is not whether he would want to know. My concern is not whether it would do him any good to know. My concern is whether someone else -- particularly, some future potential one night stand -- might benefit from him knowing.

I would argue, she clearly would.

As long as Captain Hookup is blissfully ignorant that he caused a pregnancy that ended in an abortion, his behavior will not change.

I understand that maybe one or more of you gentlemen on the show may not have a problem with his behavior -- at least with the hookup, per se. I don't judge you guys for that. We have a difference of opinion.

But that may be because, to your knowledge, you've never been in a situation like his. If you were informed that one of your hookups aborted a pregnancy you caused, would that make you think differently about hooking up? Might it change the way you live your life? The decisions you make? Is that, at least in part, why you wouldn't want to know?

You may also question whether informing Captain Hookup would actually cause him to change his behavior. Maybe he knows he has already caused four pregnancies that ended in abortions, and doesn't care. Perhaps. But I would argue he is at least more likely to change his behavior if he knows.

Because he may very well be going about his life with no idea that the way he is living it creates situations like the young woman's whose email you read today. That would be a valuable lesson for him to learn, and it may save another young woman down the road similar misfortune and potential heartache. If it creates heartache for him, well, he earned it.

Thanks for reading, fellas. Have a great day.

M

The Washington Post reports that in Salt Lake City, Utah, at Temple Square and Brigham Young University, Mormons seem to be working with Catholics on marriage prep.

"Mormons have a lot to teach Catholics about emphasizing marriage as a God-given vocation," writes Anthony Stevens-Aroyo, a Catholic.

Whether Catholics must learn from Mormons about the holiness of marriage is up for debate, as far as I'm concerned. But there is no question that many of us Catholics certainly can learn about the holiness of marriage from someone.

It is sometimes believed in Catholic circles that the celibate priesthood is the way to go if one is "holy" like that, while marriage is more "natural" and "normal." On the other end of the spectrum the celibate priesthood (or religious life) is considered the really honorable thing for a person to do with one's life, while marriage is considered somehow more worldly and less righteous. I will sometimes hear people pray for "vocations to the priesthood and religious life." Nothing wrong with that of course.

But Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York has said most aptly:

"That's where we have the real vocation crisis. We have a vocation crisis to lifelong, life-giving, loving, faithful marriage. If we take care of that one, we'll have all the priests and nuns we need for the Church."

He is absolutely correct.

The joining of one man and one woman in holy matrimony is just as much God's idea as is the priesthood.

Stevens-Arroyo continues:

In Catholic America, I fear, we don't advertise often enough that the Sacrament of Marriage is a vocation. While the LDS and a host of Protestant churches function as places to meet "good wives" and "reliable husbands" for believers seeking worthy marriage partners, Catholic churches pray more often for celibate vocations to the priesthood and religious life. Certainly, celibacy is an essential gift to the church and should be maintained, but there are far more Catholics who are married than those who are celibate. If we need priests to function as Christ's Church, we also need married people to fill the pews and take on lay ministries.

None among the gods can equal you, O Lord; nor can their deeds compare to yours. -- Psalm 86:8

But instead of taking the form of religious deities, the new gods are simply taking the form of ... stuff. Entertainment, materialism, basically a whole bunch of white noise. We may not live in a time or a society at least in the Western world where there are many other "gods," but we sure have a lot of stuff.

That's not a bad thing, at least not always. The more I personally see of all the absurd stuff out there competing for my attention, the more confident I become that I'm living for the greatest gift in the world, which is the Gospel of Christ, and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Not because of my own genius or insight of course, but because it was given to me. It's my heritage.

My favorite Catholic writer, Peter Kreeft, once wrote, "We become like the goals we pursue." So if we pursue absurdity, if we pursue white noise, we become the absurd, we become the white noise of celebrity and greed and sodomy, and all that. We know what the white noise is. If we pursue pointless, we become pointless. And I don't want to be pointless.

The question is what is the goal of your life. I know that at least generally for me, I want to make people happy. I want to make people smile. I don't want to just write a blog about stuff that upsets me, which I have done in the past and which would be very easy for me to continue doing. But I don't want to because in many cases that would just upset more people. Not that I want to ignore the problems of the world. But if all I do is talk about what's wrong with the world and I can't inspire people with something better then I miss the forest for the trees.

The world needs good news. The world needs a reason to smile. And I want my life to be that. I want my life to be a life that blesses other people's lives.

And if that sounds at all like what you want to do too, then you and I have one option. We have to pursue God, who "bestows on us every spiritual blessing in the heavens" (Ephesians 1:3).

This is Satan's big lie: that we can become like God by storing up power and knowledge and wealth for ourselves in this world. No, we become like God by pursuing Him. And when we pursue Him, other blessings follow from that.

When we pursue God, we become blessing for others, because we show them the face of God, the face of Jesus.

When we pursue Him, we become like His love: unconditional.

When we pursue Him, we become like His truth: undeniable.

When we pursue Him, we become like His goodness: unshakable.

When we pursue Him, we become like His beauty: inviolable.

Let's pray to Him that we can remember to always pursue Him first, so that we may become more like Him, so we may go out to our neighbors who are living in a world that is drowning in stuff, and give them a reason to smile.

Came across Psalm 125 yesterday:

Those who put their trust in the Lord
are like Mt. Zion, that cannot be shaken,
that stands forever.

Trust is difficult for someone like me. Someone who is very cerebral and likes to have all the answers all the time.

It is good to know God and know HIs word and His ways as much as we possibly can. But we can never know even our closest earthly friends so well as to completely understand everything they want and exactly what they are up to all the time. There will always be moments where they have to say to us, "Trust me."

How much more often, then, will God say to us, "Trust me," and how foolish would we be not to oblige.

In a relationship with an earthly friend, provided the friend is reliable and trustworthy, clarity as to what he is up to often comes only after our trust is placed in him.

Like in the movie Aladdin when the title character asks Princess Jasmine:

Do you trust me?

She doesn't know what he's up to until after she says, "Yyyeeeesss?"

Now again it is true: "Trust me" moments are easier the better we know someone. The better we know a person, the more confident we can be that he will not use our trust to take advantage of or hurt us. The second time Aladdin asks Jasmine if she trusts him, she says "Yes" with much greater ease and confidence that everything will be all right. So with God*.

But as with a regular person, we are limited by our singular vantage point. We can't know anyone completely. To demand to know a person completely before trusting is to trust no one ever.

So with God, when we stop trying to completely understand Him and His motives and simply trust Him, and let Him do His work in our hearts, the answers we wanted so badly before we trusted Him will naturally come to us. But trust has to come first.

Every morning when we wake up, God asks us: "Do you trust me?" And we have to answer Yes or No. If you answer yes, don't be surprised if He grabs your hand and tells you to jump.






*who similarly is trying to win our hearts, though dissimilarly not by disguising who He really is.

Been thinking a lot about the Holy Spirit lately. Fr. J said in his homily last Sunday said that the Holy Spirit "makes the difference." It makes the difference between a loving church community and a cold and distant one. It makes the difference in a generous and giving person and a miser. It makes the difference between a person who is ready to change and a person who is stuck in his old ways.

David Mills of "First Things" magazine wrote this week about "Spirituality without Spirits," or the modern popular concept and lifestyle of "spirituality" as opposed to supposedly cold hard "religion."

He writes about Lady Gaga -- who may not be so celibate after all -- telling a newspaper that although she was raised Catholic, she now prefers a more "spiritual" type of God.

"There's really no religion that doesn't hate or condemn a certain kind of people, and I totally believe in all love and forgiveness, and excluding no one," she says.

Mills debunks the whole "spirituality" myth -- which is that one can be spiritual without the actual relationship with the kind of Spirit that one encounters only in religious practice. To be religious is to be spiritual -- to engage with and encounter a true spirit that is beyond us, that challenges us, and that can change us.

I'm presently reading a book by John Paul II on the Holy Spirit: Dominum et Vivificantem: The Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World. That first Latin part means "Lord and Giver of Life," which is what we Catholics call the Holy Spirit every Sunday at Mass.

Because every human heart desires God, I think it can certainly be said that persons who subscribe to these sorts of popular, ephemeral, non-substantive types of "spirituality" are looking, objectively, for the Holy Spirit. In other words, everyone wants life, and the Holy Spirit stands ready to give it to them to the full. But their perception, often received from popular media, is that the Holy Spirit, and the Church to which He gives life, will not give them the kind of happiness that they seek from living spiritually.

Why? Because of the moral claims that they make. It's that "Holy" with a capital "H" that some of us find so unnerving. That's what, I suspect, Lady Gaga is talking about. She thinks that religion is about hating and condemning people. That's her concept of morality. If it was my concept of morality, I would agree with her. A lot of people would, and that I suspect is why the concept of "spirituality" is so appealing, why so many characterize themselves as "spiritual but not religious."

But religion, at least the Christian religion, is about loving and accepting and including people. But therefore it must be about hating and condemning certain lifestyles and practices, both in our own lives and in the world writ large, that are fundamentally incompatible with loving our neighbor the way Christ loves us. If certain sexual practices -- and let's be frank, the vast majority of objections people have to the moral claims of the Church come down to sexual practices -- are condemned and excluded by the Church, that is the reason.

The reason why certain practices must be excluded may not always be clear to us, but many things regarding God are not always clear, and nonethless true. My purpose here is not to make the case for these teachings. That would take many more blog posts. I simply say the basis of these teachings is not hate and exclusion, but love and inclusion -- of all people.

The concept is rooted in scripture, as John Paul II notes in his book. In John Chapter 16, Jesus tells his disciples that when the Holy Spirit comes, He will "convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment."

Well there's the rub. All you have to do is watch a few episodes of "Intervention" to know that we human beings do not like to be convinced of our own sin -- of our imperfections and our need to change. Religion -- Holy Spirituality -- does that. Spirituality does not.

Last night, T, her maid of honor, and I watched the Disney film The Princess and the Frog.

I've only been to New Orleans once in my life, which is weird for a Cajun boy from Lafayette. But based on my limited experience, it's pretty spot on. Spot on in a cliché way of course, but as my fiancé observed, they were respectful of the Cajun people. The writers could have been a ot more ridiculous and poked a lot more fun at Cajun culture. But then, if they had, the last thing you would see is a group of politically correct Cajuns protesting the movie. There's no Association Against the Defamation of Cajuns or anything like that.

Some parts of Cajun culture are omitted from the film -- including its deep religious elements. I found it interesting that the clearest depiction of religion or the supernatural was the voodoo villain Dr. Facilier. There is a good-guy voodoo lady in the film as well, but of course, she fights voodoo with more voodoo. Other than them the closest thing to religion in the film is wishing on a star. The central character recognizes at one point in the film the utter futility of doing so, while the voodoo powers are clearly very real from beginning to end.

This is not a big surprise, of course. It's a Diseny movie, and Disney has never been about the kind of religion one finds in the real world. Disney is about "magic." Disney characters don't pray. They "wish upon a star," because that is supposedly more appealing to a mass audience.

None of this is a deal-breaker, mind you. The movie is fun and laugh-out-loud funny at times. The characters are all endearing in their own way. The coolest one is Ray, an adorable firefly who helps guide the central characters through the swamp. Ray's Cajun accent is uncanny. He is voiced by Jim Cummings, who among other things has provided the voice for WInnie the Pooh (and Tigger too) going back to the 1980s.

I give it three stars out of four, which in the world of Ebert and Roeper is a thumbs up. I liked it.

... Ha! I just looked up Roger Ebert's review and he gave it three stars too! He actually makes the good point that the film reverts back to classic Disney animation. No CGI, no 3-D chicanery. Just great and simply drawn characters living in a world of painted backdrops. Awesome.

And the film got 84 percent at Rotten Tomatoes. If you haven't seen this movie yet, and you're looking for some funny, classically animated Disney adventure, this won't knock your socks off but it is a safe bet.

Came across an interesting article at the website for Crisis Magazine, a lay Catholic publication, by a guy named John Zmirak, whom I've never heard of but seems pretty insightful.

His argument: the theological virtue of love (or more clearly charity) cannot be properly understood or properly practiced without a proper understanding and practice of the "merely natural" virtues of justice (moral righteousness), temperance (moderation, avoidance of excess), fortitude (courage), and prudence (smart thinking).

Without the clear understanding and proper practice of those virtues, we cannot fulfill Christ's commandment, that we love one another as He loved us. For Jesus Himself was a model not only of the theological virtues (faith, hope and love), but of those four natural virtues as well.

The Christian message of Love, Zmirak writes, is not that only our conception of "love" by itself is sufficient without anything else to place it in context.

The example upon which he draws is indeed Benedict's comments regarding the abuse scandals, when he said:

"Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. In one word we have to re-learn these essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues."

Love without respect for justice is not really love, but a corruption of it. In modern popular culture, there are many conceptions and practices of "love" that do not include justice, or temperance, or courage, or prudence. They may involve strong emotional attachments and warm-fuzzies, but a strong emotional attachment and warm-fuzzies are not a foundation for a loving relationship in the Christian sense.

Some may argue that this makes it appear that God's Love is not enough, that we devalue God's Love by saying that it needs other virtues to make it work.

But I would say it is precisely by practicing these simple, ordinary human virtues that we place the value in Love that it truly deserves. Without these ordinary virtues, we strip Love of its identity. Love becomes merely an undiscerning affirmation of everyone, even those who need to be called to conversion, and everything, even the most heinous crimes. Love is challenging. As Zmirak put it:

Grace builds on nature, but it cannot simply replace it. If we're unjust, rash, intemperate or irresponsible, it won't simply cripple our attempts to practice faith, hope, and charity -- it might actually render them evil.

It's been all over the news since he said it. Here and here for starters. Pope Benedict XVI has said that it is sin "within the Church" that has led to the sex abuse crisis the Catholic Church now faces.

Sounds pretty terrible and scary. But it is good news.

It looks like Vatican Radio broke the story and everyone else ran with it. Said the pope:

... attacks against the Pope or the Church do not only come from outside; rather the sufferings of the Church come from within, from the sins that exist in the Church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way: the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies on the outside, but is born from the sin within the church ...

But his comments aren't surprising. He is essentially saying what those who follow the pope, and what many faithful Catholics, have known since the sex abuse scandals first started to break in America.

The crisis in the Church is a crisis of fidelity to Christ. It is rooted in the steady departure of the Church from fidelity both in preaching and in practice to the New Covenant in Christ. Components of this departure include a watering down of solid theological and moral teaching, and thereby a de-valuing of the admission of personal imperfection and penance before Christ. But at the root of it is a departure from prayer. At some point, Benedict seems to believe, the Church lost her prayerful soul. All the other ills flowed from that. Benedict continued:

... the Church therefore has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the need for justice. Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. In one word we have to re-learn these essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues.

Again, this is good news. Why? Because the illness can be cured with prayer. Our prayer.

It has long been understood that the Church is not limited to the clerical hierarchies and religious celibates. The Catholic Church is all the baptized Catholic faithful. We can hardly affect what detractors and critics on the outside say about the Church and about her faithful. We are quite in a position to strengthen the soul of the Church itself, which is the Body of Christ.

If a man's body is bleeding because of what someone else is doing to him, then he faces the tall order of defending himself and changing the behavior of another. But if a man's wounds are self-inflicted, what he must do is simply change his own behavior. Unlike if his wounds are inflicted by an outside agressor, if he and he alone is responsible for his wounds, then the choice of what to do now is entirely his.

What happens to the Church now has nothing to do with the kind of press she gets. As the Holy Father has said, it requires conversion. In other words, it is our free choice.

Came across this passage from Hebrews Chapter 3, verse 13 while praying the Divine Office this morning:

Encourage yourselves daily while it is still "today," so that none of you may grow hardened by the deceit of sin.

It reminded me of that Kris Allen song "Live Like We're Dying," which is basically about not waiting before you say or do something really important to or for a loved one. The song definitely has a Christian element to it, about how we never know when the end is going to meet us face to face, and we need to always make sure we are reconciled with others.

Encouragement does not only mean "affirmation," telling someone he or she is doing a good job. It can also include telling someone that he or she is capable of doing better.

None of us, in this life, will ever reach a point where we cannot be any holier than we are at the present time. There will always be something more we can give to God. There will always be a way for us to grow closer to Him, to invite Him more into our hearts. There will always be some aspect of our lives in which we can be more like Jesus. That is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Think about who in your life needs to hear that.

Because the key is not to beat ourselves up for not being better than we are now, but to encourage each other to grow.

Prayer is like planting a tree in an empty backyard. One may not always feel like planting a tree. One may even be pressed into doing so by a friend or politely asked to help do so by a dad to whom one owes much of his present success.

Planting a tree takes a great deal of effort, especially in a place like Central Texas, where one encounters hard rock about an inch beneath the surface. You plunge the shovel into the nice brown dirt a couple of times, and then, CLANK.

At that point, all you can really do is keep plunging the shovel into the ground again and again. And what difference might you see between one plunge and the next? If you're not the strongest dude on the block, probably not a whole lot.

So it is with prayer. It may have a certain novelty and fun at first. But then it becomes work. And at times it may appear to be fruitless work. You may not see much if any difference in your life from one prayer to the next. In that way, it may be easy to get discouraged. But one must keep the end in mind.

You might ask yourself, while you're plunging that shovel into the ground over and over again, only to dislodge a couple of tiny limestone shards, what is even the point? The point is not merely to plunge away with increasing impatience and anger at the rock. The point is to make room in the ground. Why? To plant a tree.

You're plunging that shovel into the ground over and over again, at great discomfort to yourself, blistering your hands, in order to bring new life, new beauty into your backyard (or your parents' backyard, as the case may be). The tree spices up the backyard and brings shade to the grass below. It turns the backyard from a flat, uninteresting place to potentially, one day, a garden.

But it starts with plunging that shovel into the hard rock ground.

So it is with prayer. It is the first step to bringing new life into the spiritual soil of one's soul. And at first all one can do is repeat the motions. But one must keep the end in mind. The end in mind is holiness -- turning our flat, uninteresting lives into something more, something blessed and joyful. Prayer is making room in our very crowded hearts and minds for that new life -- which is God.

If I had brought the new tree into the backyard and just thrown it on the ground without first making room for it, the tree could not have taken root. No roots, no life. No life, no shade. No new beauty. In order to enjoy the benefits of the tree, I have to make room for the tree.

If we want to enjoy the benefits of God in our lives, if we want the deep interior happiness and comfort that only He can give, we have to make room for Him. Over and over again.