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The Windsor Hills Baptist Church is the kind of Church that makes Senator Barack Obama pretty nervous.
 The Windsor Hills Baptist holds a youth conference every summer that tries to get young people interested in church. According to the website, the youth conference has all the predictable bible teen camp things like preaching, skits, a big country cookout, volleyball, basketball, choirs, and a preacher kids' conference. There's also a drawing for an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle.
You know. All the typical stuff.
Unfortunately, the gun giveaway has been cancelled. It turns out the head pastor had an some kind of foot injury, so they're not giving away the gun this year. Luckily, someone's loaning the church a shotgun so they can still have the shooting competition.
The Windsor Hills Baptist Church Youth Conference website also contains the complete opinion document of the United States Supreme Court in the District of Columbia v. Heller decision about the right to bear arms. The site doesn't have any word on whether this will be specifically be discussed at the cookout or the preacher kids' conference, but I'd suggest that attendees should bring a highlighted and annotated copy of the Heller Opinion anyway. Organizers will then try to pry it from your hands.
All jokes aside, little events and stunts like this to get young people interested in church usually don't turn out well. For one, they're usually conceived by adults trying to be "hip" and attended by youth who either (a) see right through the adults' charade, or (b) are probably pretty uncool. I'm sorry if the second point above doesn't sound charitable. I don't mean it as an insult, just as informed reporting. I was in category (b) for a lot of my junior high and high school days, so I've been there.
What happened to me is why I'm disinclined to appreciate or encourage young people to get interested in the LifeTeen stuff that some Catholic churches offer. LifeTeen is a format of Mass and Youth Groups that try to incorporate bad Christian Rock and hip preaching to high schoolers who are supposed to be enjoying it. I'll get to that in a moment.
I went to one of these services a couple years ago by accident at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Lenexa, Kansas (yes, the same Holy Trinity that refused to let a Catholic organization use a side chapel for Mass). This is when I was trying to figure out how to be Catholic again and how to rejoin the Church after being away for years. Sunday morning had gotten away from me and I missed all the Masses being offered around town. I found that Holy Trinity had a 5:00 PM Mass on Sundays and set out for evening Mass.
Little did I know.
The lyrics to the Christian rock music were on the overhead projector being shown on the wall right night to our Lord crucified on the Cross. They had a band of about nine gentrifying gray haired old men playing acoustic guitars and swaying back and forth to their own rhythms. About 40% of the people there hadn't been "teens" for at least 40 years--in the spirit of charity, I'll presume they drove their kids to Mass. When Father Tom Dolezal delivered his sermon, he plopped down on the sanctuary steps and sprawled out on the floor and preached from this sprawl for the next 20 minutes or so. It's been a couple years ago, so I don't remember the homily or if it was good, but I do remembering that the whole Mass was a disjointed conglomeration of dippy music and hugging sessions that could best be described as pseudo-Catholic.
 And if I were 13 years old and in junior high again, I bet I would have kind of liked it--or at least thought that I should like it. I had a pretty shallow understanding of my faith back then and was kind of scared to challenge myself. It's a long story that I haven't totally sorted out in my head, but I was developing a stunted personal theology that was about to get totally confused by my Catholic High School religion classes that mixed in strange admiration of Buddhism, Protestantism, Secular Humanism, Deism and "diet" Catholicism that didn't make any sense and wouldn't stand up to my own intellectual thinking. I'd eventually talk myself out of God altogether, but that'd be a few years after I was a smiling 13-year-old gluing felt banners for school Masses in the gymnasium.
You know how young children picture God as an old man with a white beard in a chair that sits on a floating cloud? Kids see this bearded God as some kind of genie who grants wishes, called "prayers", whenever they ask. When kids start to get older, they figure out that God is not some kind of magic-making wish-giver and struggle to replace that notion of God with something else. Enter: felt banners and Christian Rock. Some people never get out of this stage in life; I think some of them end up driving their children to LifeTeen Masses.
By the time I went to college, my Catholic thinking had ended up as Moral Relativism and then just outright quitting. I'd had enough. God seemed like a confusing delusion that was a trick for suckers and dupes, the only people that really figured God out were the atheists and the televangelists. Though I'd never say as much publicly, I didn't have much time for the Church as I knew her and wasn't interested in finding time.
In an unrelated path of my life, I'd eventually end up making a mess of myself and my life; it'd take that point for me to pick something else. You know the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? I decided to change what I was doing; the results I had been getting kind of sucked. I don't need to go over this story again, you can read about it in the introduction if you want.
So what does all of this have to do with Baptists and their assault rifles? Admittedly, not much. But seeing youth conferences and teen camps tend to remind me of this story. I wonder if our attempts to cultivate a crop is just casting seed on rocky ground, where the seed will sprout but doesn't develop roots. Of course the flip-side is true too! It'd be hard to tell an eight-year-old about about St. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul, the sense of loneliness, desolation and abandonment by God that is often considered the hallmark of intensely deep Christian mysticism. Eight-year-olds are still in the felt-banner stage!
But when these Oklahoma City teenagers grow up to be adults, will they still consider the Almighty Lord to be something squeezed between basketball and trap shooting? I don't know. Maybe their conference does a nicer job of addressing these issues than I give them credit. Yet I reserve the right to remain a skeptic.
And not just because it's a Baptist camp and I'm a Catholic! Catholics are pretty good shots too.
During part of the time that I was away from the church and generally disinterested in religion, I figured that one day I'd start going again. I imagined that when I was married and had children, churchgoing would be a regular part of life. We would pack into our flying station wagon and buzz over to church. After Sunday morning Mass, my imaginary future family and I would all go to the imaginary future IHOP and eat imaginary future pancakes together.
Of course I'd do these things one day. My image of my own future wouldn't be complete without those things. Just like guys think of pitching tennis balls to their yet-unconceived sons and women think about teaching their yet-unconceived daughters to knit and vacuum (or whatever), I figured that church and religion would be part of my life again one day.
Yet I wondered when that day would actually start.
Not the get married and make babies part, I figured (and still figure) that day will come when it comes. But the church thing. I wondered when that would start.
If I just waited until this imaginary future family plopped into my lap to start going back to church, I wondered-- feared-- that this imaginary future family would be so entrenched in my ways that I wouldn't able to cajole them into the flying station wagon on Sunday mornings-- and figured that I wouldn't be up for it myself either. (I have a theory about changing and maintaining human behavior: inertia is strong; objects at rest tend to stay that way).
At this point in my life, I wasn't going to church and wasn't interested in doing so. And I had plenty of reasons to not go! Saturday nights usually crossed into Sunday mornings. I felt out of place sitting in church by myself. I don't really like the parishoners/music/priest/kneelers. My roommates or friends would think I'm some kind of space cadet. I'm just so tired on Sunday mornings. I'm strong enough in my religion that I don't need to go every week anyway. Sunday is my only day to rest. I'm not leading the kind of life that befits going to church, they probably don't want me there dirtying up the pews. Like the world needs another bad Catholic. Yadda yadda yadda. None of these were unique to me, none of them very strong on their own, none of them worth doing anything about.
So I didn't do anything about it.
It'd take a pretty crummy point in life to push me from being an inert body into a body at Mass. And my re-energizing to Faith began slowly; I sat alone in an adoration chapel and prayed the rosary quietly. I didn't have any words to say to God other than that-- the routine and formulaic prayers that Catholics say over and over are real blessings to have.
Some critics say that we say our memorized prayers out of habit or routine and that they aren't real conversations to the almighty Lord. They accuse Catholics of mistaking prayer for "magic words". The critics are welcome to their uninformed opinions. Sometimes when you don't know what else to say, it's important to have these prayers in your mind and heart. But I digress.
My journey back started alone, just me and Jesus in a quiet little chapel. Then I started going to Mass again. By myself. There's no feeling of alone-ness like going to Mass by yourself in a new parish-- you don't know anyone and figure they're all staring at you. Wondering why you're infiltrating their church. And the truth is that I did feel out of place at church by myself. I did dislike the parishoners/music/priest/kneelers. Sunday was my only day of rest. Giving that up was a real pain. It was a real sacrifice.
Over the last few years, I've taken a different perspective on life. Sunday mornings at Church have changed my opinion of days of rest; they've changed my opinion on parishoners/priests/music/kneelers. It's still a sacrifice, some Sunday mornings still start pretty early. But now I look at it as if I'd miss something if I didn't go to Church. That God is waiting for me and I shouldn't be late to his invitation.
It may sound hokey to you. But I don't go to church for you.
A few weeks ago when I was in New York, I went to Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral twice in that week. And on Wednesday morning when I got up early to go to Church with a friend on the trip, he and I walked the few long blocks from the hotel up to the Cathedral. People were on their way to work, to the tour busses, to stampede their way to wherever they were going. But we were there, getting up early on our vacation for church... and there we saw it.
Something we would have never seen or experienced if we'd slept in like people do on vacations.
But it was providence indeed.
The Lord works in mysterious ways, sometimes he gives us gifts when we give a little for him!
And this was a very special gift, a very special moment that we wouldn't have otherwise been given.
Hallelujah.
Holy cow.
Hot dog.
Creative Minority Report
Sects and the Committee
Patrick Archibold
The next general assembly of the Synod of Bishops, scheduled for Rome in October, will take on the issue of Catholics reading the Bible through a fundamentalist lens. I thought that most Catholics have avoided this by avoiding reading the Bible altogether, but apparently this is a growing problem.
The increasing Protestantization of Catholic thinking on the Bible is a real bummer for the Church. I took a Bible study offered by my parish earlier this year, presented by a parishoner through Scott Hahn's St. Paul Center in Steubenville, Ohio. For seven weeks, I was pretty sure that my Catholic Church had become Southern Baptist. (Please don't get me wrong, I'm no anti-Hahn firebrand. He does fine work and is a super writer. But he treads dangerously close to sola-Scriptura, which can quickly distort a Catholic sensability with centuries of study, writings and Tradition [capital T] that forms the other leg of Catholic doctrine).
But because Catholics have walked away from a Catholic identity, because they turn to the (pseudo-) History Channel for their religious education, and because Catholics don't go to church to hear the Word professed-- it's no surprise that Catholics don't have a a sense of a Catholic way to read the Bible.
When I was a freshman in college, the Resident Assistant in my dorm invited me to a Bible study he regularly conducted in his dorm room. I accepted his invitation and toted my NAB over to join the group. When it was my turn to read, I confidently read the Word to the study group. When I looked up from the page, they were all giving me these quizzaled looks, wanting to know what version I was reading from. I answered that it was my study copy of the New American Bible.
They were having a hard time following along. They used two translations for their group, either the New International Version or the classic King James Version. I've since developed a taste for the richly layered language of the Douay Rheims version and would like to pick up a Revised Standard Version for my primary study bible rather than the NAB (which I've learned is a little clumsy with its vocabulary), but I didn't know any of this at the time.
But my translation tipped off a fierce debate in the room. The NIV readers thought the KJV readers were arrogant elitists, the KJV readers thought the NIV readers were sellouts, no one said a word about my Catholic bible since they'd never heard of it anyway. I left the group when it all came to a head and one other guy stood up and blurted:
If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!
I'm in New York this week to see a couple baseball games and for general tourism. I've attended a couple Masses at the most famous church in America, the great St. Patrick's Cathedral. Three popes have been in this awesome building! I've been where the pope was! You can follow along in my photo collection on flickr.
On St. Patrick's Cathedral, there are bronze plaques on the front of the building commemorating Pope Paul VI's visit and Pope John Paul II's two visits to NYC.
But there is no plaque (yet?) to commemorate His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI's trip to the USA earlier this year.
However, the Yankees have them plaques already mounted in thier Monument Park, which is basically the team's Hall of Fame. I understand that maybe the Archdiocese of New York just hasn't hung the plate yet. These things take time. There's scaffolding inside and outside of the Cathedral. First things first, I suppose. But where the Yankees are tearing down their own cathedral of baseball next year, they're still erecting new plaques for the Yankee faithful among their other greats.
I think it's funny that the Yankees have three popes in their Hall of Fame. Is there any question that Baseball is God's game? After all, the first few words of the Bible are "in the big inning..."
Last weekend, I had the chance to spend a retreat at the Conception Abbey, a Benedictine Abbey in Conception, Missouri. The theme was "Entering Summer: A weekend of reflection", and basically provided a lot of quiet time for me to read, pray and decompress. The retreat wasn't really what I was expecting (though in fairness, I didn't really know what I was expecting), but overall it was still a nice retreat.
As part of the weekend, there were three sessions led by the priests of the Abbey. One of these sessions really hit home with me in a way I didn't see coming. Fr. Daniel noted that summer is always seen as a time of change. The seasons and the weather literally change. School children change grades in summer, schedules change, life changes. It is a beginning of some things and an end of others. To paraphrase, he asked us if this was a summer of beginnings or endings, if we were closing a chapter or starting to begin a new one.
Unto itself, this could be a trite, meaningless query. But it really ran around in my head for a while. Can I close some unfinished business? Can I leave behind something that I've been dragging around?
I'm sure you've guessed that my answer was "yes".
When I was 19 years old, I got a part-time job waiting tables at a now-closed restaurant in Overland Park. I freaking LOVED it. I was good at my job, it was a fun job, those were fun days. I remember thinking that I wanted to do this for the rest of my life, and started putting all my effort into thinking that one day I'd own my own restaurant. Over the next five or six years, I'd change employers a lot, always staying in the bar/restaurant/hotel hospitality business. I'd get a few trainer jobs, then supervisor jobs, then management jobs and I've done everything you can do in a restaurant. I've washed dishes, crunched payroll, wrote menus, worked with world-traveled chefs, sold $300 bottles of wine to millionaires and $1 glasses of gin to cocaine dealers. I've marshaled bar fights, set up for Grammy-winning musicians and spent every hour of the day on the clock in a bar or restaurant at one time or another. I was pretty good at it, and despite my mercurial attitude and temperament, liked it all a lot.
In the restaurant business, you can get all the timeclock that you want. You can work 12 shifts in 7 days. Exciting work too! There's fire, knives, drunks, illegal immigrants, jerkwad managers, high school dropouts, whiskey, arrogance, fights and trysts for all hours of the day or night. It's a perfect job for maniacs, idiots and fools like me.
Until that day when it all started coming apart.
I was in my biggest gig yet, tons of freedom, head of the restaurant, as close as I ever came to living my dream--and it all came apart for me. I was stressed out and overworked, I hadn't taken a relaxing day off in weeks. My roommate and I weren't talking, my girlfriend and I were barely talking, my boss and I were doing more barking than talking. I always had the feeling that I was about to get fired--and once you've got that idea in your head, it poisons every thought you have. Life had that spiraling feeling where you feel like you're losing your grip on everything around you. And one night, I just walked out in the middle of one of the dinner rush on a Friday evening. I laid my keys on the bar for my boss and said I couldn't do this anymore.
I couldn't do it anymore.
And that November night, I decided that the dream was over. I was walking out of the restaurant industry as a career choice for the rest of my life. I didn't want the hours anymore. I didn't want the danger or the thrill anymore. I didn't want that freedom or that much rope anymore.
The way I had defined my life for years and years was over. It was time to come up with something else instead! In the meantime, I had a bit of a self-identity vacuum. For years, I thought of myself as a bartender, cook, manager--whatever. It was part of this "plan" I thought I constructed in my head. It was my self-image. And when that image no longer fit for the way I was looking at the world, I didn't have any other idea to which I could turn. I didn't know who I was, I didn't know how to define myself.
It was awful.
We have all these self-images of ourselves. It's how we project our personalities to others, how we display the people we create ourselves to be. You do the same thing, I promise. There's something about you that says "cool softball guy" or "witty movie wonk" or "proud literary snob" or "down-home country boy" or whatever. Whether it is conscious or subconscious, we all construct these self-identities that we show the rest of the world. Mine was "fun bartender" and it was a REALLY FUN way to live life.
So when the day came to cast aside that identity, I didn't know how to replace it. It was a real, honest to goodness identity crisis. I'd get a job here and there to pay the bills, whether glazing hams for a mail-order meat company or working for my Dad's plumbing company--even waiting tables for a while as the most emotionally detached server that you could ever imagine. I worked for the bank, but never really thought of myself as a banker. I was vacant, to say the least.
Really I still haven't fully recovered from that time. I've got a new direction these days with a decent (if sometimes unfulfilling) job. I'm back in school at nights to build on my bachelor's degree. And with a couple years of trial and error, I think I'm finding a new identity for myself. I'll probably never be the writer that I want to be or the Catholic that I want to be or the husband I want to be or (one day) the father I want to be--but I've got a new set of goals. A new identity. Some of which it appropriate for the blog, some of which is a better story for me to share in person. But finally, I feel like that identity crisis is coming to a close. That this time of personal wandering and confusion might be tidying up its final paragraphs in this section of my story. That this could be a summer of ending--in a refreshingly merciful kind of way.
It's cliché to say that you can't start a new chapter until you've finished writing the old one--and from an author's point of view, that's not even technically true. I offer as proof all the half-written posts on this blog that you cannot see. (Some proof, huh?) But as a metaphor, it's a nice thought. It's time to close this chapter so I can begin a new one.
I think it's going to be a good summer.
Benedictine monks (the Catholic monks in the black robes) have always stuck to the Rule of Saint Benedict, which is often tidily summed up as ora et labora, or pray and work. This summation is a simple lesson for people like me who are easily distracted by all the other diversions of life.
Benedictines pretty much single-handedly saved civilization from the total collapse of Europe in the middle ages. They carved out small enclaves in the wilderness where they preserved literature, agriculture, art-- and nearly every one of the trappings of civilization from the fall of the Roman Empire until the birth of the Renaissance. We owe a great debt to Benedictines, to which we can raise a glass of champagne-- created, in fact, by the famous Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon.
As a gardener, I sometimes take the time I spend in my garden to ora et labora at the same time. It is the simplest example of the Lord's creation to put a seed into the ground and have it bear fruit for our nourishment-- wherein it makes its own seeds again so that they cycle repeats itself in perpetuity. The worms of the earth till and churn the soil for roots to grow, even the squirrels (the enemy of a tomato gardener) do their part by scattering the shards of a tomato fruit along the ground, putting the seeds of the plant into contact with the soil to start next year's long trek for survival. As kids, we all fear bees, for gardeners, they are welcome sights indeed.
These first days of summer-like weather are days of impatience for vegetable gardeners. Our seeds have been in the ground for a few weeks, the young plants are breaking through the soil to touch the sky. But nothing is bearing fruit yet, there are no vegetables on the vines.
Pray and work.
Except for some minor weeding and making sure the garden gets enough water, most of the heavy work is finished for a couple weeks. The only thing left is to pray that this year will be another good crop. Hopefully the harvest will be plenty.
My peas are starting to bud out, hopefully they'll form pods sooner than later. Likewise, the onion plants are looking strong and hearty. Though the tomatoes won't be bearing fruit until July, they're looking strong and hearty. I haven't seen anything from the green beans, but I was pushing my luck with the soil when I planted them, it was just barely too wet to work. I might have hurt the soil structure when I planted the seeds, so they might not be able to germinate in the stiff soil. Likewise for the okra and cucumbers, but I've also planted sprouts for those vegetables-- all may not be lost. The bell peppers look awesome. The brussel sprouts have doubled in size in about a week and a half.
We've had a lot of rain for several days now, the garden needs a good weeding. It's too wet to weed the garden. It's also time to put down a load of mulch-- but I want to get most of the weeds out before I put in the oak wood chips. And again, it's been too wet to get the mulch down. I'll need to work carefully around the young and tender plants.
There's lots of work to do this time of the year. And this turning of the season is also a time where I get very prayerful. The Lord and I seem to have so much to talk about these days. Over the last few months, I've felt like I've really had to rely on the Holy Spirit for some religious direction. Indeed, a priest even told me that I should find a spiritual director (another post unto itself altogether). There's been a lot to pray about-- both for myself and in my prayers for others. Ora
Life can get overwhelming pretty quickly. My job has been pretty intense for the last several weeks. Finals just wrapped up, but my summer classes will start here in a few weeks. My lovely wife and I are going on vacation in a couple weeks. No time too soon! But truely, life has been hectic lately. It's easy to get caught up in all the distractions of life, with softball games, parties, working around the house and yard, the full time job, our t-shirt side business, on and on and on. A guy like me sometimes needs a little help cutting out the distractions from life and drawing back to our simple roles in life and family. Labora.
Pray and work.
Welcome to summer.
 I've never been an exceptionally good student. I'll save you the details, but suffice to say that school and I have never been totally compatible.
But I've been slowly beginning some post-Baccalaureate work at night after I get off work and I have a big final tonight that I do not feel well prepared to tackle. If you get a chance today or this afternoon, drop a quick prayer in for me tonight, I'd appreciate it.
Saint Thomas Aquinas is one of the great "Doctors of the Church". His unfinished opus, Summa Theologica is considered one of the finest theological works in religious and philosophical history.
Thomas was born in Italy in 1225, the wealthy son of Italian nobility. As a Dominican friar, he was a master theologian and lecturer in Rome, theology professor and regent of studies at the University of Paris, he was an advisor to both popes and kings. Though Thomas was respected as an academic, he wasn't really well liked by his fellow friars. Aquinas did not actively partake the Domenican practice of mortification, and wasn't reputed as much of a conversationalist. Some of the other friars gave him the nickname The Dumb Ox; Saint Thomas Aquinas was fat and had slow speech-- an uncharacteristic trait for Domenicans, the Order of Preachers, known for their skill in oratory and rhetoric.
Summa Theologica is his penultimate work, covering Epistomology and Ethics. The "Summary of Theology" was designed as an introductory text to the study of God, and it still read and taught in philosophy and theology classes. It is considered one of the finest works in the Western Canon. The Summa is set up in a "Question and Answer" format, where he posits a question, then answers it. If you've read a lot of Philosophy, Aquinas is nice because his format is clear, but so dense that my eyes gloss over if I read some of the long sections. The work was considered so important that at the great Council of Trent, Summa Theologica was placed on the altar with the Holy Bible and the Decretals of the Church.
But before the Summa was finished, Thomas Aquinas experienced a divine revelation that changed his life. He didn't say much about what he saw, but indicated that his vision was so fantastic that everything he had ever written-- including the great Summa-- was like "straw in the wind"; he abandoned his famous life's work. Overweight, overworked and in failing health, he was sent to the Second Council of Lyons to work for unity between the Latin and Greek churches. Within a few months, Thomas was dead.
Saint Thomas Aquinas is the patron of academics, scholars, students and learning, schools, colleges and universities, against storms and lightning. He is the patron saint of publishers, book sellers and pencil makers. He is the namesake of countless cities, schools and colleges.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.
I was commenting on a Catholic messageboard that I was going to make dinner for some priests in the archdiocese, but that one of the priests has Celiac and must eat gluten-free food-- I was asking for any recipe suggestions, especially for a gluten-free barbeque sauce.
Someone responded, "Celiac? Is that like being a Marionite?"
Goodness, has life just been super-busy for everyone else? I've been a bit over my head lately. My day job is unbelievably busy and some days we have appointments scheduled until 6:30 at night or later. I'm taking some night classes while getting ready for some graduate school work, and it's finals time. My wife and I have a side business, Kansas Tees, and this is the busiest time of the year for us (business is down a little this spring, which is kind of a good thing. If we were as busy this year as we were last year, we would have to refuse some work). We're doing a fundraiser for Rebuilding Together soon, we helped with the parish golf tournament last weekend. The yard needs mowing, the dog needs a bath, the whole house is overdue for a top-to-bottom spring cleaning-- and I haven't even gotten to some of the kitchen remodel that's been three-quarters finished since August.
Phew.
That's the problem with the rat race.
In the end, we're all still rats.
See the whole comic at the exceedingly funny Dinosaur Comics. I love this strip.
My wife agrees that I will be a crochety old man one day.
There’s an office park not far from where we live that has the most amazing tulips that you’re going to see. They crowd the corners of the intersection and bunch around the edges of the neatly cropped boxwood bushes that run near the sidewalk. These tulips are HUGE, they’re perfect red and yellow, and it seems like they just appear overnight. Tulips are the heralds of each springtime, they’re the first burst of color that tells us the dark and gloomy winter is giving way to fresh air and sunshine. When you walk up to the front door of the Walberg Estate in beautiful Shawnee, Kansas—bunches of daffodils greet you along the path to the front step. I like daffodils as much as tulips, I like how the burst of the flower turns sideways, as if the flower is looking out to the rest of the world. Each daffodil presides over a small chunk of springtime, knowing they have a little part in the process.
Of course, the tulips and daffodils don’t just spontaneously appear. I planted the daffodil bulbs over a year and a half ago, having carefully selected each one, working the soil and laying out where each flower would come up when it breaks out of the ground. Daffodil bulbs, like tulips, are planted in the fall, usually as gardeners are pulling the summer flowers for the compost. Planting bulbs is therapy for gardeners, having worked in the long hot summer days to keep the bright summer colors watered and strong in drought, fought against weeds and critters—as that time draws to an end, the last vestiges of the summer sun are put into the delayed satisfaction of narcissus bulbs. We plant them knowing that we won’t see them for months, that some of them aren’t going to make it, that for all the fussiness of gardening, these bulbs are going to do it all themselves without our winter meddling. Those tulips by the office park are transplants, having been raised in a greenhouse and planted into the earth just as each bloom was going to open up. The pretty flowers of springtime are the fruits of many laborious hours, time and money, sweat and sometimes blood.
The peas are starting to come up in the vegetable garden. They’re around 4 inches tall and just developing their little fingers the plants use to climb up their trellis towards the sun. I put the seeds in the ground a few weeks ago, when the ground was still a cold and damp from the winter that hadn’t quite left us yet. Peas have to go in early, they’re usually among the first crops of May that are ready to pick. Since then, I’ve been breaking ground on the new part of the garden, pulling sod from the yard and turning the ground and fortifying the soil so it’ll be ready for planting when each type of plant is due.
The last few nights, I’ve been running the roto-tiller in the almost-too-wet dirt, breaking up the Kansas clay and grading out the high and low spots typical to a new garden. If the ground is too wet, trying to work the ground causes more trouble than good. The mud cakes onto the tines of the tiller, the dirt clumps together into clods that can take months of sun and rain to break back apart, you end up destroying the soft texture of the garden in your haste to get into the garden too early. The problem is that you can’t wait too long. Some plants have to be in by now, some will have to be in the ground within a couple weeks. Of course, springtime rain is unpredictable too! The famous April Showers are a mixed blessing, to be sure. It’s those April Showers that make everyone’s yard look so good before the summer fatigue. It’s the April Showers that push the rosebushes to turn from short brown sticks to crimsony red with velvety leaves, to the bright green stems holding up the Queen of Flowers. But it’s the same April Showers that delay the vegetables, push back the young flower transplants, that make timing the yard fertilizer and treatments unpredictable. April Showers make each lawn mowing a careful weekend chess match, trying to see if by Sunday afternoon the grass will be dry enough that the cut grass won’t clump. Our soil in this part of the world is almost totally devoid of nitrogen, so if you want the grass to be strong and thick, you’ve got to apply the nitrogen before a rain but 2 days after mowing and at least 2 days before mowing again. It’s hard enough to keep up with the fescue anyway, this is the weather it loves more than any other season. Some days it grows so fast and so tall that cutting the grass feels like cutting hay.
Please don’t take this as complaining, it’s all worth it!
In the hot days of a Kansas August, when the backyard tomatoes are as big as a softball (and better tasting on hamburgers), it’s worth it. In the high-sun days of late June, when the cucumbers are juicy and crisp, it’s worth it. When the grind of another workday ends and you’re welcomed home to the trumpets of petunias at the front door, when you’re setting down to dinner with your lovely wife and vase of fresh cut yellow roses can sit on the table with a glass of cool chardonnay, when you kick back with your friends in the backyard grass with a cold beer and nighttime air holds the call of baseball on the radio, gentle reader: it’s worth it.
That’s what springtime is about. It’s not just a time of tulips. Tulips don’t last, daffodils are not long for the world. They’re only the beginning of each new springtime.
I don’t know if this is what His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI meant when he said the Church in America will know a new springtime. But in a way, it’s apt to remember this: Springtime is when the work gets fun, when the afternoon air portends a promise of summer. But it’s also a time of labor, there’s work to be done in the springtime. Springtime means gentle rain and dangerous thunderstorms, it means warm afternoons and devastating freezes. We could get snow in springtime. We could get floods in springtime. It is creation in spite of a chance at destruction. But for the snows or floods, each day is good—and carries the promise that tomorrow can be even better. It’s a time for getting a little dirt on your hands. But we sow today so we can reap tomorrow.
Then indeed, the harvest will be plenty.
My neighborhood parish is sponsoring a house or two for Rebuilding Together, an organization that works to address health and safety issues in the houses of low-income homeowners. The parish group has been together for several years now. They used to operate under the organization of Christmas in October with the Kansas City branch of Rebuilding Together. But over the last few years, they’ve decided that they were large enough and stable enough that with the cooperation of some other large Christmas in October groups, they could start a new chapter of the organization in Shawnee, Kansas and the larger Johnson County area. My folks have been on the Christmas in October team for several years now, and usually help run 2 or 3 houses at the same time.
Usually they do a fundraiser selling sodas and water at the Old Shawnee Days concerts, but Old Shawnee Days has new leadership this year and the word came through the grapevine that the Christmas in October/Rebuilding Together group would lose the longstanding fundraiser and were on their own to find another source of funds. This year, they decided to do a taco dinner on Cinco de Mayo at the parish. Unfortunately, they didn’t reserve the church basement in time to get the weekend before May Fifth, so this year, they’re throwing a Diez de Mayo taco dinner instead.
I have a broad history in the hospitality industry, having worked for a NUMBER of bars, restaurants and hotels in my working days. So they asked my lovely wife and I if we could join the committee and help with planning the dinner. We agreed—the Lord’s work needs time and talent, not just treasure, right?
Well gentle reader, I’ve decided that I don’t do very well in committees. I’m just not very good at it. The problem is that I’m realizing that I’m a headstrong person with definite ideas on how to do stuff; and I don’t tolerate input very well on subjects that I think I’ve got all figured out. No one does, I know. That’s not the point. I guess my point is this: why ask people to be on a committee if you don’t want to listen to their input? If you just need bodies to cut tomatoes and brown the ground beef, then you don’t need a big planning committee. You just need volunteers on the day of the event.
In a way, I think this self-realization came just in time.
The parish bulletin has been running an announcement that the parish will elect three members to the Pastoral Council, the advisory committee to the church for “liturgy, social concerns, social activities, and church properties”. While I could have some good input for all of these topics, lately I’ve been mostly interested in the liturgy of the parish. The biggest problem is that liturgy isn’t the kind of thing that is decided by a committee—at least not in the strictest understanding of Catholic liturgy. Of course, in the real world it is a function of committee. But the Church puts a lot of ink in a lot of books to specifically deal with the liturgy of the Holy Mass. Very little of that ink suggests that Catholicism should be handled by parliamentary procedure.
Which makes me want, all the more, to be on the Pastoral Council—because someone ought to get in there and set ‘em straight, right?
I don’t think I’d get along well on the Pastoral Council. I don’t work well in committees, especially ones where I already have my mind made up. Furthermore, I’d bet that most people make it onto Pastoral Councils because they already have their minds made up. I wonder how much consultation goes on in their advisory role, anyway. And when it comes to things like suggesting a different Music hymnal or digging the cœnopæum tabernacle veil out of storage or gauging interest in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, I’d probably not get a lot of support from the Council—even if I could get elected to the Council in the first place. These aren’t usually things that people are interested in discussing in committees. Truthfully, I don’t think I’m interested in a committee’s opinion on the subject, either.
There’s a lot to be liked about my round spaceship parish. A lot indeed! They have a good, well-balanced congregation, they’re active at doing the works of Christ, and they regularly place among the top of the large parishes in their support to the Archdiocese and her ministries. Please don’t get me wrong. I like it there, I even registered outside of my parish boundaries to join them. But, like so many things and people we love, I love the parish in spite of the areas where it falls short.
But for the time being, I think I’m going to stay out of the committees. No, I think I’d rather make salsa, swing hammers and print t-shirts for the parish than get on any more committees. Volunteer, yes; committees, no. Sometimes I think they’re a particularly cruel form of penance. And I’ve had enough.
Have Mercy!
Quick check: It’s April 11, how is your New Year’s Resolution coming? Do you even remember it?
My New Year’s Resolution was to be a better Catholic, which is to say that I was/am going to do a better job at the outward signs of the Faith. And though I didn’t define it very well, I’m happy to say that I’m still holding strong at my resolution. We’ve already discussed daily mass, but there’s more to it than just churchgoing.
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve given up meat on Fridays and altogether during Lent. It’s an old practice of the Church that we basically gave up on in the 1960’s, and in a lot of ways, it may be somewhat peculiar. After all, there’s nothing un-Catholic about cattle. But it’s been pretty amazing to me how the little outward things have made a big impact on my inward self. Let me explain: on a random Tuesday, I’ll eat whatever I’m feeling like. If we’re out to dinner and a cheeseburger sounds good, I’ll order a cheeseburger. If we’re making dinner at home and we’re in the mood for taco night, we’ll have taco night, ole! But on Fridays, things are different. Our Good Lord died on a Friday, and Catholics are called to make His sacrifice part of our sacrifice.
Don’t get me wrong. Crab legs =/= Crucifixion.
But it does become a spiritual act to eat dinner. There’s a conscience decision to do what I do for a reason other than wanton cheeseburgery. I hope I’m explaining myself correctly here.
A few years ago, I was working a part-time night job slinging pizzas at a restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas. As part of my training, I worked with this guy who went over all the items on the menu, then we ate some of the items that we just went over—it was one of his perks of training that he got dinner out of the deal. He said that we were going to talk about one of their pizzas, but we weren’t going to order it, because it was made with 2 different kinds of pork sausage and that, as a Jewish guy, he didn’t eat pork. I commented that there weren’t a lot of people that kept Kosher laws anymore, and that most of the Jewish people I knew in college were bacon-cheeseburger eaters. Then he explained: now we think that a lot of the Kosher laws came from pretty practical roots: before modern sanitation or refrigeration, a lot of now-common foods were kind of rare. And handling them could get kind of dangerous, because of the way that animals were slaughtered and their meat preserved made people pretty susceptible to foodborne diseases that could kill; even today, pork and shellfish can get contaminated or compromised pretty easily. But if Kosher laws started as a way to prevent trichinosis, today, they do a way different task. He explained it as part of defining his Jewish identity, that he was asked to forgo ham as a way of setting himself apart from the rest of the world. It wasn’t about pork; it wasn’t about shellfish; it was about making each thing he ate a small act he did for God.
Woah.
I cook most of the meals we have around the house (because I spent so much time in restaurants, I really enjoy cooking; my lovely wife is happy to oblige), so I started slipping in fish-Fridays at the beginning of the year. I don’t know if she noticed it at first, but before Lent started, I said that I was going to go carne-vale (Latin, loosely translated “goodbye, meat!”) for Lent. She blankly looked at me as if to ponder the madness that had crawled inside her husband’s brain, having long ago given up asking why I did half the stuff I do. She reluctantly consented to the idea. I won’t expand on it here, but I’ll say that it was easier and harder to do than I thought, but by the closing notes of Easter Vigil Mass, I was calling to make reservations at the late-night two-patty bacon cheddar Jack Daniels beefathon at Thank Goodness It Is a Friday Restaurant.
I’ve never read Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but I admire the essence of the book—that people are so far removed from what they eat that people don’t even consider to think how an egg becomes a McNugget. If someone handed me a cow and told me to make a cheeseburger out of it, I think I’d try to sell the cow and go to Wendy’s. But it’s also what drives the National Catholic Rural Life Conference with their super motto: “Eating is a Moral Act”. Specifically, NCRLC is interested in educating people that the decisions they make at the dinner table affect people all around the globe. I’m inclined to agree, but that’s another topic altogether. What I like best about both Pollan and NCRLC is that they ask people to make recognizable decisions about their supper that go beyond simple urges for buffalo wings.
I do loves me some buffalo wings.
Early in Lent, one of my co-workers was eyeing my baked potato and steamed broccoli in the lunchroom and asked if I’d eaten my sandwich on an earlier break. I replied that it was my lunch and that I’d given up meat until Easter… and got the most slack-jawed look I’ve ever been given. He looked at me as if I just said that I eat moon rocks. Another rolled back in his chair and chortled “Looks like it’s going to be macaroni and cheese for a while!”
Well yes, actually. Who doesn’t like macaroni and cheese?
On Easter ‘morn, I had my share of Easter turkey (and ham!), but by Friday, my lovely wife and I were back to fish-sticks. She’s been very gracious about the whole thing. Good Midwesterner that she is, my wife had never really eaten a fish until just before we met, now it makes up practically 1/7 of her regular diet.
All in all, I have to admit that it’s not really a penance to forgo meat on Fridays. I love fish and I enjoy cooking vegetarian. It’s really not that hard. But what it does do is make dinnertime an offering to the Lord—I do this because of Him. Furthermore, I’ve come to think of it as part of my Catholic identity; being Catholic means more to me than 9:00 AM church services and 10:02 AM doughnuts, so why limit my Catholic identity to a hour on the weekends?
Little things like this don’t mean much by themselves. And as an offering to God, they probably don’t mean much, either. But as a small step on my understanding of Faith, they’ve come to mean a lot to me. Once or twice a week, I wake up early to spend a little time with God. And when we make our weekly dinner plans, I go grocery shopping for Jesus.
I know it may sound silly to you. But I don’t do it for you.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but as a kid, I think a lot of people hoped I’d be a priest one day. I hope I didn’t disappoint anyone, but my calling is to my domestic church at the Walberg Estate with my lovely wife in beautiful Shawnee, Kansas. But I was struggling in Math class in 8th Grade, and my teacher said I could get extra credit if I wrote a report on the priesthood and interviewed a priest about his calling.
My dad suggested a fun young priest at a neighboring parish who was also the Vocations Director to the Archdiocese; I nervously called up the rectory and asked to schedule an appointment. A couple days later, I was greeted by the priest and invited to his office to ask a handful of questions that I had scribbled on a notepad. I don’t remember much of the interview, except that I messed up the tape recorder and didn’t record the interview, but I did have some notes scrawled that I could use for the essay. But more importantly, I passed Math class. Most importantly, I remember a powerful lesson that he gave me about God’s call: it is quiet.
He told me that the calling to the priesthood is subtle. The Holy Spirit fills you slowly. It doesn’t have a specific voice, and it’s easy to overlook or put out of your mind. When the Lord speaks to you, he’ll put a small inkling into your mind—just a passing thought to consider becoming a priest. And you can “change the subject”, and get back to Super Mario Bros. or to the baseball game, and that thought goes away. Except it does not go away… You’ll be tooling down the road one day and cross the railroad tracks when you have a fleeting notion to be a priest. And you can ignore that thought and do something else instead; but it’ll crop up again later. Sometimes much later-- like years later, it’ll sit in your craw and pop up when you’re not expecting it. That is God’s voice, that’s what it sounds like. And I’ve found over the years, He doesn’t just talk to us about priesthood. He calls us back to his Church, he calls us into the confessional, he calls us to our vocations—even if it’s not a vocation of the cloth.
I’ve got a friend who I believe is waiting for his “Saint Paul” moment. Saul was a pretty bad dude, a Pharisee who earned his fame in the days after Jesus’ resurrection by persecuting, arresting and executing Christians in the earliest days of the Church. Remember, it was dangerous to be a Christian in the early days of Christianity. And Saul was one of the reasons it was so dangerous. He famously joined the mob who stoned St Stephen the Martyr in the 6th chapter of Acts of the Apostles. And one day, when Saul was taking a band of vigilantes to break up and arrest a Christian gathering, he was struck by lightning, thrown from his horse, and laid on the ground while hearing the voice of Jesus calling him to be one of the greatest apostle in the history of Christ’s Church.
Most of us don’t hear directly from God quite like that.
Is that what my friend is waiting for? I don’t know. I don’t know how to tell him about the Call, either. I don’t think he reads this young blog, and don’t think I’d ask him too, either. Personal ramblings aren’t exactly the forum fit for evangelization. And I can’t hear his call for him. But I pray for him constantly, that one day he’ll know the power and peace of the Lord. I think he’d actually like St. Paul a lot, the apostle could teach him quite a bit; here’s hoping one day he’ll listen to that little whisper in his ear.
I'm looking for a copy of the Index of Leading Catholic Indicators by Kenneth C. Jones. It is currently out of print.
Does anyone have a copy I could borrow or buy?
It was a rainy night in beautiful Kansas City last night—it’s still raining right now, actually. Do rainy nights make you sleep better?
My lovely wife and I met her brother and his wife out last night to watch our Jayhawks become NCAA Basketball 2008 National Champions. (fun fact: KU’s St. Lawrence Center celebrated the Traditional Latin Mass last semester for the first time in decades. Then the Jayhawks win the National Championship. Coincidence? Hmm…)
Last night, I didn’t sleep well. I’m sure it was a combination of late-night pizza, cold beer, an exciting game, thunder and lightning—but it was one of those nights were you wake up every 90 minutes or so and think you’ve overslept. I’m sure I’m not the only one that has occasional nights like this.
Sometime in the 2:00 AM hour, I woke up worried that today was a Holy Day of Obligation and that I was going to miss it altogether. I wouldn’t have time to go before work and I have night school on Tuesdays and that I was going to not oblige my obligation again. So I sat up and studied the clock for a moment, thinking that maybe there’d be an early-morning mass I could try and make, and what time would I need to re-set the clock to ensure I’d make it.
Then I figured out it was not a Holy Day and that I could just go back to sleep.
So I’m a dork. A panicked Catholic dork. And other than priests (maybe), I wonder if I’m the only one to wake up in the middle of the night wondering if it was a Holy Day of Obligation. The list of lay people to whom that has happened must be very short.
So I think it's time that we become better acquainted, don't you?
My name is Joe, though over the years I've used a few different monikers--both online and in real life. Some people have known me as Joe, George, gjoe, or GJ--but despite the multiple identities, I'm the same on the inside.
I was born, raised and currently live in beautiful Shawnee, Kansas with my lovely wife and our 9-pound dachshund, Frank Furter. My lovely wife and I both graduated from the University of Kansas. Together, we own a custom-printed t-shirt company, Kansas Tees.
We are parishioners at St. Joseph's Church in Shawnee, though I also attend Old St. Patrick's Latin Mass community at Our Lady of Sorrows.
I went to Catholic School from the time I was in 4-year-old preschool until I graduated High School. I was well schooled in how to be a good person, but not a lot of education in how to be a good Catholic. I hated 5th and 6th grade religion class--it was boring and kind of hard, we read all of the major stories of the bible from Creation through Solomon, learned all the parts and equipment for the mass, and were generally bored to death. Looking back, this was the most "Catholicy" part of my Catholic education, and pretty much the last time I ever had any type of formal catechesis.
Like everyone else my age, we had D.A.R.E. officers in the schools, sex-ed in the curriculum, and watched Star Wars as an illustration of how Luke Skywalker was like Jesus who came to save us all.
You know, the typical stuff.
By the time I was a senior in High School, I was confused about God, under-nourished in religion, and smart enough to talk myself out of the whole religion thing altogether. I wouldn't call myself an atheist, at least not in absolute terms. I wouldn't call myself an agnostic, either--agnostics continue their search for knowledge. No, I was just disinterested.
My mother asked, like parents should do, if I was going to church while I was in college. I told the truth: I was not. I think it really let her down. They'd spent a lot of time and money on educating my soul, and I wasn't holding up my end of the deal. Mom told me something that really stuck in my craw and kind of made me mad at the time. She said "If you stop learning about your faith when your 18 years old, you'll always have an 18 year old's understanding of your faith."
I didn't like being told that. But inertia is hard to overcome, and I was an object at rest.
Over the next few years, I'd call myself a Catholic, but wasn't doing anything about it. I could do the prayers, know when to stand, sit and kneel, and knew the Nicene Creed right up until it gets to "believe in the Holy Spirit" (where I still have to check to make sure I get everything in the right order), but it didn't matter. I wasn't going to Mass. I was rolling through life, school, jobs, roommates and life without direction. I had big dreams of opening a restaurant or bar one day, and somehow saw my wandering as some kind of plan.
There was no real plan.
And somewhere around 2004, everything began to fall apart for like the umpteenth time. I'd raced though another 4 or 5 jobs in a year. I was a couple months behind on my rent again. The debt collectors finally quit calling when my telephone was shut off for non-payment, re-activated, re-shut off and reactivated. I'd been dropping job applications around town for a couple weeks, but hadn't heard back from any of them. Staying in my apartment was torture--I owed my roommate money and neither of us wanted much to do with each other. But I didn't have anywhere else to go all day--you know, when people are at work. So I did something that I had never done before.
I still don't know why I did it.
I looked up the nearest church to my apartment and drove over there, hoping there was a perpetual adoration chapel that was open to the public. Inside, I took a kneeler and found one of the plastic rosaries that are always in adoration chapels and began to pray silently. After about 20 minutes, I left, and made myself the promise that I was going to do this every day until I found a job.
I'd go out in the late morning and fill out job applications, scrape together a fast lunch, and head to the adoration chapel to do a ring around the rosary. And somewhere in the second week of doing it, my cell phone started buzzing in the middle of my rosary prayers. I didn't check who was calling or answer the phone, but my heart leaped at the possibility it was someone calling me back with a job. The last 3 decades of the rosary flew by!
It was someone calling to schedule an interview! Maybe 5 or 6 other companies called over the next few days wanting to schedule interviews and eventually I ended up getting hired with one of them. It was a temporary gig until I could get enrolled in school again and finish my degree.
Gentle reader, let me also say objectively, that it was probably a matter of time until I found a job. It was almost inevitable. I had filled our dozens of applications in a few days; the odds were good that someone was going to call me back eventually. But on the other hand, it would be pretty naïve of me to presume that I'd gotten the job on my own, as if the Lord or the Blessed Virgin Mary didn't have a part! In the end, I don't care. I'm giving them the credit. And for 30 minutes a day for a couple weeks, I had gotten my only peace when I gave up trying to live life on my own. The little part of the day I spent on my knees was about the only time I didn't feel like I was fighting for myself; rather, someone else was fighting for me.
Plainly, 2004 was the worst year of my life. But it also started the renewal of my faith. When I admitted that I sucked at living life on my own and needed a little guidance from the Holy Spirit, I wandered back into Sunday Mass and found my seat in the middle of pews. It was one of the strongest--and lonliest--parts of my life. But there were those words that the priest said again and again at Mass that no one else was saying in my life, those words that I needed more than anything else I had ever needed--well, the words speak for themselves: Peace be to you.
Peace.
Well, gentle reader, it was good.
Since 2004, I've lapsed and relapsed a time or two into spiritual neglect. Like a junk car that you never know if she's going to start, a few times I've needed a steady push to get my faith jump-started again.
And since then, I've gotten married, got a house and a dog, and a steady job with a pension and a 401(k), and I'm happy to say that I'm not the person that I was back then. Oh, I'm glad I lived those days, but I am glad they're over! And though I still struggle with my faith, I'm not trying to do it alone any more. It doesn't work. I promise.
Is Christianity a religion for losers? Yeah, maybe. And from a certain point of view, there's real merit in that statement. But I've been one of those losers, and if it weren't for my religion, I'd still be lost. These days, I'm still roamin', it's true. Sometimes I'm better at life than others. But now I have a tool in my toolbox that I never had back then, something I had tossed out carelessly years before.
Peace be to you.
Once a week, I get up early and go to daily mass before I go to work. Usually, I attend Prince of Peace in Olathe, Kansas, because it’s right down the street from my office and their 6:15 Mass is early enough that I get to work at a good time.
This was part of my New Year’s Resolution, that I was going to be a better “liturgical” Catholic. I made myself a pledge that I wasn’t going to miss a Sunday Mass, and that I’d go to daily Mass once a week. In addition, I also decided that I’d hold myself to the days of obligation, and the other big days.
Of course, I promptly missed the first Holy Day of Obligation, January 1, the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. Figures, right? Make a New Year’s Resolution and blow it on the first day? Figures.
Luckily, good sinner that I am, I’ve learned to get back on the Catholic wagon when I’ve fallen off—and think I’ve only missed one Sunday since the New Year. Maybe that is a little passé for more disciplined Catholics, but it’s taken a fair amount of discipline for me to make all the other Sundays than that. Baby steps, gentle reader. Rome wasn’t burned in a day.
On occasion, I go to my home parish for daily Mass at St. Joseph’s in beautiful Shawnee, Kansas. This is the round spaceship parish where I was baptized, raised, educated, and confirmed—and still primarily attend today. My wife and I just live up the street from St. Joseph’s, and we are relatively active young members of the parish.
St. Joseph’s is probably a typical suburban parish in a newly-aging part of town. The congregation is well-mixed, age wise, with the blue-haired ladies and some crying babies in the pews. But maybe it’s my point of view as a still-childless fairly-newlywed that I don’t see many people my age in the crowd. Truthfully, I don’t know if this is a recent development or if it’s always been that way. I don’t think I’ve ever worried about it before. Still, I don’t see a lot of 20-somethings. I surmise that we’re probably the smallest demographic of East-Shawnee residents, and that I’m in the smallest demographic of practicing Catholics. But nonetheless, sometimes it’s a little lonely. Especially so at daily Mass.
It doesn’t bother me when I go to Prince of Peace. I’m usually the youngest person in the room by 30 years. I know a few people that attend PoP, but basically, I’m anonymous there. Which truthfully, I really like sometimes. It’s a story for another post, but I really like the congregation at Prince of Peace (though a lot of other PoP elements are not to my taste). And I like to attend Sunday Mass at St. Joseph’s when I go with my wife and I see the parents of the people I grew up with, I see my parent’s friends, I see the ushers that I’ve known since I was a child.
But daily Mass is a bit different.
Attending daily Mass at my regular parish is a little surreal, and sadly, not in a good way. I feel like I really stick out when I’m there. Like the people I know are watching me, even if I rationally know they are not watching me. It’s not the same as going to a Sunday service. I’m having hard time explaining why.
Daily Mass before work is not easy to do—it means I get up pretty early, and there aren’t many parishes that have a service early enough in the morning. But I didn’t expect that it would be hard in this manner.
At the instance of Rod Dreher in his CrunchyCon blog, these are 10 things I would like (and could be likely) to do before I “kick the bucket”. Here, “kick the bucket” means “die” because, in real life, I have actually kicked many actual buckets. This is an important distinction.
Without further ado, in no particular order:
01 Shoot 80 or better in a round of golf.
02 Fly fishing, successfully catching fish.
03 Learn Latin.
04 Go camping, alone, for 1 whole weekend.
05 Grow corn.
06 Watch a MLB baseball game at the 19 stadiums I haven’t been to yet.
07 See Dave Brubeck in concert before he kicks his bucket.
08 Visit Rome.
09 Get a short story published.
10 Place first in a major barbecue competition.
Oh, sure—there are others. Juggle, marathon, skydiving, trumpet, mountain cabin—but the list should be at least realistic.
My mother converted to Catholicism in 1970, in the tender days right after the New Order of the Mass was being rolled out to parishes around the world. My dad converted a couple years later. They’re genuine Novus Ordo Catholics, good faithful products of the Second Vatican Council. Mom’s been a Eucharistic Minister for as long as I remember, Dad started doing the same sometime while I was in college—it wasn’t until a couple months ago that I had any idea that “E.M.” means Extraordinary Minister, not Eucharistic Minister, and that the very design of that position was to be not-Ordinary. But I won’t critique them here; as it stands, the position as an E.M. has been around for as long as I’ve been born: through as many pastors as I can remember, and with the tacit or expressed approval of all of our Archbishops in my lifetime.
Pope John Paul II was elevated to the papacy just a few months before I was born, and until his death in April 2005, was the only pope I had ever known. And with my entire Catholic formation under John Paul II, I think it’s safe to say I was a JPII kind of Catholic. What does this mean? It’s a question for a series of posts, but I think it can be nicely summed up to say that there was a great emphasis on being a good person and not a lot of emphasis on being a good Catholic. We were encouraged to think of piety as second to charity—that the qualities of a Catholic were seen in the quality of a person’s character. And what a lesson! We’d sing in church that song by Rev. Peter Scholtes “They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love” (copyright 1966) and it perfectly fit what it meant to be a Novus Ordo Catholic.
Please don’t get me wrong—that is not a critique! Indeed, our lives should be to love each other—it’s part of Jesus’ Greatest Commandment. And when that pope slipped the surly bonds of earth, I joined in the chorus of people who called him John Paul the Great, and felt like we had really lost a spectacular vicar.
Enter Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the quiet academic who carried the nickname “God’s Rottweiler”, though I didn’t really understand what that meant. I remember reading a few blogs that touched on religion here and there, and all of them portended ominous things from this new pope. I kind of hoped that the new pope would take the name “John Paul III” and that he would continue in the footsteps of his predecessor, so when he took the name “Benedict”, I was taken aback. A pope chooses a name that would suggest what kind of pope he wants to be, and Pope Benedict XV was an interesting pope—his papacy lasted 8 years, during World War I and the years that immediately followed, leading the faithful through some of the most turbulent years of the last few centuries. But most notably, BXV condemned the “modernist scholars” of the Church, a faction that the Church has to deal with from time to time. Again here, I won’t attempt to delve into modernism for the untutored gentle reader because it’s a subject of a unique series of posts, but this seemed alarming to me at the time. After all—my only pope, John Paul II, was a notably modern pontiff—traveling around the world, jogging in the Vatican gardens, and hanging out with U2’s Bono (at a time that doing so would be considered pretty cool).
Not to mention that the original namesake of “Benedict”, Saint Benedict of Nursia, was a pretty strict guy himself. The “Rule of Saint Benedict” literally saved European civilization during the dark ages and he can be quite arguably recognized as one of the most influential people in most of medieval Church history, but the same Rule (a series of rules, actually) is extremely rigorous and challenge to follow—Benedictines lead a pretty austere life, with rigorous work, prayer, meal and sleep schedules, with vows of stability, manners and obedience, even their comings and goings are regulated by their superior.
A pope who would take the name “Benedict” seemed pretty far off and remote to me, a guy who had only known popes who celebrated Mass in soccer stadiums and had the reputation of being a Holy pop star.
So let me say with no understatement, that I was totally caught off guard when I realized that I was a MAJOR FAN of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI.
Here is a quiet octogenarian who suggested that he wouldn’t travel very far outside of the Vatican, a former college professor who is more interested in playing Mozart concertos on piano than hanging out with Bono, a priest who found great power in the words of the Holy Mass—a Mass that I’d always recognized as important, if admittedly, a little banal (I cannot believe that I typed that). And this quiet octogenarian has been thoroughly profound.
Hearing that this pope was going to make small reforms in the Holy See (the “government” of the Vatican, for lack of a better term) by downsizing the numbers and merging some of the Councils (departments, again for lack) didn’t seem to personally matter much, then or now. But as I learned more about his critiques of Relativism, or that Rationalism is inseparable from Christianity, or that Consumerism is a poison to which we aren’t even realizing we are succumbing—I have to tell you that I was really caught off guard. Not that I was caught off guard because he was saying what I wanted to hear; rather, I was caught off guard because I didn’t want to hear this and yet it was striking a chord in me.
Have you ever had a moment where you realize that you had been really really wrong about something?
Gentle reader, I had been really really wrong.
And it kind of caught me off guard that I had been so wrong.
For a lot of my teenage and young adult life, I think you could sum up my religious and moral opinion as Relativist, or in other words, “nothing is wrong or right; religion and morals don’t matter beyond that morality and religion push us to be better people”. I hope I’m explaining this well. I had reduced religion to a “code of conduct” between people, where our greatest obligation was to be nice to each other. I had passively overlooked the first part of that Greatest Commandment—not outrightly abandoning or ignoring it, mind you, but I didn’t spend a lot of time with it. At one point, I had even taken this train of thought so far as to get into a pointed argument with a Fundamentalist Christian where I took a position that I could now describe as “heresy”, though I didn’t have the words or the frame of reference to do that then. But after a while, the trunk of my stunted theology bore its stunted fruit.
If religion is just about being good people, then why bother going to church? After all, I can be a good person on Sunday mornings from my couch watching the McLaughlin Group, right? If religion is just about being good people, then why even pray? After all, I can be a good person without cranking out some “Our Fathers”, right? And if religion is just about being good people, then why even bother with God at all? Atheists can be good people, right?
And indeed, all of these things are true! But they are also only one part of the picture, and the sad logical result that I ended up with because I had left half of the Greatest Commandment behind. So when Pope Benedict XVI showed up, wearing his ancient vestments, saying Mass facing the wrong direction, and riles up the religious world by altering a four sentence prayer that is said once a year in a form of the Mass that MOST of the Church hasn’t used for 40 years, I kind of thought our good Pontiff might be some kind of a space alien. Imagine my further surprise when I found myself curiously drawn to this pope—part of a spiritual reconciliation that I’ve been going through for the last few years—a person who seemed so remote that I didn’t really understand the man at all.
But he’s drawn me in! His Summorum Pontificum (language note: Latin) was a quiet invitation to join in the Church in a way I didn’t even know existed just a handful of months ago. His planned USA visit is a promise so compelling that I considered getting |
