Spring has Sprung...yuk

It is truly amazing how when the temps go up, I go down. Normally it's supposed to be the other way around. You know...S.A.D. (seasonal affective disorder) is supposed to be about Winter. When the temps go down, and the days are darker more people are pitching themselves off of bridges. This is when it's my turn. What sucks, for me, as a Catholic is that this is the time of Lent. NOT GOOD. So, what I end up 'giving up' tends to be God or Mass or Prayer. I don't think that is what the Magisterium had in mind.

I know this is a time of looking inward, but what I see in here scared the bejesus out of me so no thanks. It's a time of self mortification. Catholics just love suffering...apparently. Well, I think I should be exempt. I have something just heinous going on in my lower back and right hip. Some docs say Sciatic pain, some say Trochenteric Bursitis of my right hip, others say Piriformis Syndrome. Know what I say...it frickin sucks and I want it to go away or I want major drugs to anesthetize me. So, since I am stuck in physical therapy, which is making it worse right now (I can't get comfortable lying down AT ALL, which makes sleep nigh impossible) Why nigh....coz there are things like muscle relaxants and benzodiazipine type drugs that will shove me into unconsciousness. But it still sucks. So I am considering all this pain and lack of sleep my mortification because why on EARTH would I want to make it worse for myself??? I am trying to offer it up. But I am a taurus and I bull through everything. I just hope some of it counts for something.

I wish I knew what it was about all the sun and hot that gets to me so badly. You know how some of you out there just loathe Winter. That is exactly how I feel about Summer (and some of Spring too...the hot parts). Now, of course, because I live in the northern burbs of Atlanta it is amazingly beautiful here right now. The flowers, bushes and trees are blooming. Azalea's, Dogwoods, Forsythia it's all so pretty but it comes at the price of my sanity and spirituality. As I get older this seasonal bipolarity is getting really annoying. I mean I know it's coming. I try every little mental trick to move past it but still I am dragged into a desparing pit of depression no matter what. I feel like I am bilocating sometimes, like I can see myself from the outside and I know the problem is temporary but it feels SO REAL.

Combine all this with a lack of appropriate for me air conditioning because my house is an open floor plan so nothing ever really cools off well, except for a few bedrooms. I mean I could really crank it but it would cost damn near a 1k a month to do that and I just can't justify it. So, I spend alot of time in my air conditioned very cold minivan which helps in one way but hurts in another. Driving just kills my hip. I gotta go to confession before Easter. What do I say, "I confess I am losing my religion because it's hot out?"

Oy Vay!
Rach

I posted this on a sidebar awhile ago...then took it off. But it is worth keeping.

"I’d encourage your youngest one to abandon kindergarten altogether. Almost everything I learned was learned outside the classroom, and school itself interrupted my education. Moreover, school locks you in with your peers. That is a mistake. One’s social circle should never include one’s equals. From my earliest years I found children uninteresting and always preferred the company of adults. This was an advantage, because I got to know lots of folks who are dead now whom I never would have known if I had waited until I was an adult. - So I have a collective memory - and oral tradition - that goes back to the eighteenth century, having spoken with people who knew people who knew people who knew people who lived then. - The only real university is the universe and a city its microcosm. That is why an expression like “New York University” is foolish. New York City is the university….Instead of school, children should spend some hours each day in hotel lobbies talking to the guests. They should spend time in restaurant kitchens and shops and garages of all kinds, learning from people who actually make the world work….One day spent roaming through a real classical church building would be the equivalent of one academic term in any of our schools, and a little time spent inconspicuously in a police station would be more informative than all the hours wasted on bogus social sciences. Formal lessons would only be required for accuracy in spelling and proficiency in public speaking, for which the public speakers in our culture are not models, and in exchange for performing some menial services a child could learn the violin, harp, and piano from musicians in one of the better cocktail lounges, or from performers in the public subways….So I urge you to keep your child out of kindergarten, because kindergarten will only lead to first grade and then the grim sequence of grade after grade begins and takes its inexorable toll on the mind born fertile but gradually numbed by the pedants who impose on the captive child the flotsam of their own infecundity." ~Fr. George Rutler

Originally posted by Peter Robinson via The Corner at National Review Online.

Ash Wednesday & Lent

I hope everyone, who celebrates Lent, will have a blessed Ash Wednesday and Lent. Here is an amazingly wonderful prayer that I found while in Adoration. It is in the January 2009 edition of the Magnificat. I typed it here because it is so wonderful I want everyone who doesn't know about (or like me, subscribe to) the Magnificat to be able to use it. My friend Sara and I are going to say this prayer each day of Lent. We thought it was a perfect prayer for Lent, since it has to do with conversion.  ~Peace

Litany of Ongoing Conversion

 

Response: Lord, give me the grace of conversion.

 

Lord Jesus,

 

When I look at my life from the starting point of my own insufficiencies instead if from the fact of your compassion, grace, and love for me. R

 

When I would prefer to live by my own thoughts and my own understanding instead of by your Truth which alone can set me

free, R

 

When I would rather brood over what annoys me than to turn myself over to you who always invite me to come to you, R

 

When I obsess over self-absorption, complacency, and self-assertiveness, R

 

When I get dejected about my sin, not because it offends you, but because it prevents me from being able to take delight in myself, R

 

Whenever I live in a dualistic way, as if my faith and my “real life” are two separate things, R

  

 When I am deceived into thinking my happiness depends on something in the future instead of what you give me in the present, R

 

When discouragement and shame make it hard for me to be faithful, R

 

When I become distraught over the evil I would commit if left to myself, forgetting that I do not live according to myself but that I live in you, R

 

When self-doubt and fear seem to have the last say, R

 

When I miss the point of my fragility, a gift you give me so that I will be prompted to rely on you, R

 

When I am inclined to interpret my problems as punishment and my miseries as being abandoned by God, R

 

When impenetrability takes over my life, making me resistant to your beauty and all the little ways you ordain to give yourself to me, R

 

When I get distracted, my emotions, my passions, my regrets, R

   

When I get duped into thinking I must fix myself up in order to have a relationship with you, forgetting that you come to me with your love just the way I am, R

 

When I treat my faith like some answer to be sought instead of as a loving Presence to be affirmed, R

 

When I get discouraged by chronic or recurring sins in my life, R

 

When I would attempt to earn your favor by my achievements, forgetting that I did not choose you, but it is you who chose me, R

 

When scandalized by my own selfishness and self-assertion, R

 

When the oppressive nihilism of life makes me ignore or reduce the desires of my heart that lead me to you, R

 

When independence or self-sufficiency make me resist the companionship with others through which you will to give me your friendship and tenderness, R

 

Whenever I treat my preconceptions like idols that drain my life of wonder and simplicity, R

 

When the evidence of all that is wrong with my life leads me to become paralyzed, indifferent, or lax, R

 

When I get preoccupied with all my self-justifications try to convince myself that I am lovable, R

 

When I would rather live my life in a safe and sheltered way instead of living my life as a risk, putting your will first in all things, R

 

When the daily inner rebellion makes me cynical and negative about what really matters most, R

 

When my misgivings keep me from receiving the fresh embrace of love you offer me every moment, R

 

~ Our Father…

 

From the Catholic News Agency

McCain pledges to use Roberts, Alito as model Supreme Court nominees

Washington DC, May 8, 2008 / 06:12 am (CNA).- In a Tuesday speech that could have significant ramifications for the pro-life cause, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain pledged to use President George W. Bush’s Supreme Court appointees as a “model” for his own choices.

He also announced the formation of a committee to advise him on such judicial appointments, which have greatly affected the legal status of abortion in the United States.

The Washington Post reports that Senator McCain spoke on Tuesday before a crowd of several hundred at Wake Forest University. He decried what he called “the common and systematic abuse of our federal courts by the people we entrust with judicial power.” The Arizona senator also said that Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. “would serve as the model for my own nominees, if that responsibility falls to me.”

Both of the justices appointed by President Bush are believed to oppose the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide. Some observers believe only one more Supreme Court justice opposed to the decision must be appointed for Roe v. Wade to be overturned.

The remaining Democratic presidential candidates, Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton both opposed the nominations of Roberts and Alito.

McCain zeroed-in on Senator Obama for voting against Justice Roberts, saying the senator “went right along with the partisan crowd.”

“Apparently nobody quite fits the bill except for an elite group of activist judges, lawyers and law professors who think they know wisdom when they see it -- and they see it only in each other," he said, according to the Washington Post.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor responded to McCain’s attack, saying, "Barack Obama has always believed that our courts should stand up for social and economic justice, and what's truly elitist is to appoint judges who will protect the powerful and leave ordinary Americans to fend for themselves."

McCain said that he himself had voted for President Bill Clinton’s two Supreme Court nominees because, he said, he believed they were qualified.

Later on Tuesday, Senator McCain announced the formation of a conservative-leaning Justice Advisory Committee, which he said will advise him on judicial appointments if he wins the presidency. The group will be chaired by former solicitor general Theodore B. Olson and Kansas Senator Sam Brownback. Members of the committee include Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor who is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Besides legal abortion, a conservative change in the Supreme Court could affect other court decisions involving discrimination, civil liberties, private property, and other issues.

Oooh! Now this cool 'zine has a blog.

I have always loved Faith & Family. I started getting it 4 years ago when I started FAMILIA. Well, FAMILIA is complete (4 years went fast!) and I need to renew F&F. In the meantime, they now have a blog, check it out.

Peace,

A shocking epiphany

I know there is a really good chance my kids will read this someday, so it is probably not a good idea to write this down. Also, some may not like me as much for being honest but here it is: I don't like kids. I love babies and toddlers, maybe preschoolers, but between about 5 & 6 and 13&14 they could all be away at a boarding school and I think I would be happy. I think teenagers, at least the ones I know personally, are really cool. So, this leaves me with 2 kids who are 8 and 11 and in that perpetually annoying age. It drives me crazy how hungry they always are and what messes they make. It bugs the hell out of me that they are so easily bored and not easily amused. They are also demanding, especially Ben, and I don't always give in...but it doesn't matter. Andrew, in all honesty, is the most fun right now. He's old enough to have interesting conversations with, I love his sense of humor, his taste in music, and that he totally understands the value of a nap. I love seeing the person he is...who he is making himself into. Autumn and Ben (especially Ben) still don't know who they are and this in between time grates on me.

I love babies because their needs are so pure and basic...warm arms, boobs, sleep, clean diapers. I can do that. I am really good at that. Toddlers find everything fascinating. Preschoolers are equally as interesting as they move toward autonomy. But elementary through middle school age. What a pain. All the crappy aspects of ourselves we start to see: selfishness, greed, jealousy, arguing, sloth. Here I am a Catholic mom, who has thought she wanted more kids all this time, and now I am not so sure. Granted, I am 42 so maybe the effects of aging and impatience has caught up with me. I still love the idea of a baby though. But then I remember what happens around 5 or 6. Plus, I don't like to play. I mean I love the goofy playing you can do with babies and toddlers. I love going to concerts and talking about new music with my teen. But I don't want to play Barbies, stuffed animals, color for hours on end, read comic books, play shooter games on Xbox 360. This is my blog so I will say it: "I hate feeling like I have to entertain my kids", but at the same time am totally pissed that the youngest ones default to TV/Macs/PCs/Gaming.

Maybe I didn't have enough kids (and I am not kidding here). Maybe there are too few kids too far apart. They don't really have built in buddies. It is too late for me to do anything about that. Even if I got pregnant now, and we loosely use NFP so it is always a possibility, Autumn would be 9 by the time another baby was born, Ben would be almost 13 and Andrew would be 19! Andrew is not interested in Hannah Montana or Webkinz and he isn't into video gaming much anymore. He only likes gaming when he is with friends and they have a Halo shoot 'em up or Guitar Hero contest. Autumn's and Ben's only common interest is TV and swimming. Autumn is pretty girly and Ben is not into that stuff at ALL! Plus they fight like Israel and Palestine. I'm sick of trying to make peace and am strongly considering nuking them both.

I feel burnt out by mothering. I loathe the idea of sending Autumn to school, so I don't know what I am going to do. I wouldn't want to send Autumn to public school, but don't have the money to send her to a private school...Ben's issues have seen to that. I guess it's good that the Catholic Church says to be open to life, but that you don't have to have a ton of kids. Maybe this truth of mine, that I have been unable to really notice, until today, is the reason God has prevented me from getting pregnant these last 5+ years when I have really wanted another baby. Maybe he wanted me open, but knows me better than I do myself, and therefore gives lots of babies to people like my friends: Sara B., Rob, Leonie, Kath, Jennifer, Wendy, Melissa W. etc...

I find myself thinking of other things to do with my time instead of constant laundry, cleaning, cooking, cleaning, breaking up fights, cleaning, begging them to do chores, cleaning, grocery shopping, cleaning, prodding them to read or pleading with them to let me read to them, cleaning...you get the picture.

Maybe I am just having a crappy day. Dunno?

What a fabulous quote!

"My education was dismal.  I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers." ~Woody Allen

 I found this over at Red Sea Homeschool.  I also found there this very interesting link called Busted Halo. In my case it would be busted and lost.  Oh, and here is a great one from me...have you ever read either of the Bad Catholic's Guide to...books? If you haven't then go out and get one or both right now. They are hilarious!

Oh, and regarding the pregnancy contagion in blogland, it sure isn't spreading over here, and I  would love to catch it. (boo hoo, sniff sniff) 

Peace~

One of the best Catholic conversion stories EVER!

This is long but so worth the read...whether you are Catholic or not. ~Rach

The following story of my conversion, "His Open Arms Welcomed Me," is the first chapter of the bestseller Surprised by Truth, edited by Patrick Madrid (Basilica, 1994).

"His Open Arms Welcomed Me"
Paul Thigpen

I was quite young the first time I saw him, so I don't remember where it happened. But I do remember being terrified by the sight: that tortured man, thorn-crowned, blood-bathed, forsaken. The sculptor had spared no crease of agony; the painter, no crimson stroke. He was a nightmare in wood.

Yet I was strangely drawn to him as well. His open arms welcomed me; his uncovered breast stretched out like a refuge. I wanted to touch him.

Of course, I knew who he was. After all, I'd won the big prize -- a Hershey Bar -- for being the first kindergartner in our little Southern Presbyterian church to memorize the books of the Bible. And my parents had busted with pride on the morning when I stood before the congregation to recite the grand old affirmations of the Westminster Confession: Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever ... 

But in our church the cross on the wall was empty and clean. We read about the blood, we sang about the blood, but we didn't splash it on our walls and doorposts.

In the years to follow, the man on the cross haunted me. When I found out that a schoolmate wore a crucifix around his neck, I asked my father to get me one. But he shook his head and said, "That's just for Catholics." There was no malice in his words; he simply spoke matter-of-factly, in the same way he might have observed that yarmulkes were just for Jews.

One day my aunt from New York came south to visit. She was always inheriting odd items from boarders in the residential motel where she worked, and this time she shared them with us. In a box of assorted old treasures calculated to fascinate a little boy for hours, I found him.

He was plaster of Paris, unfinished, maybe a foot long, cross and all. I ran my fingers over the smooth surface. The details were remarkable for so humble a work, though he had a flaw in his right foot. He was beautiful. But he was too white, too clean. So I found some old watercolors and painted every detail lovingly, with crimson dominating the whole. Then I kept him under my bed and took him out regularly so I could look at him, touch him, and wonder why he should be in some Catholic home instead of mine.

I don't remember when I lost that plaster body, but it must have been sometime after I became an arrogant little atheist at the age of twelve. Some school teacher I've long forgotten encouraged me to read Voltaire, the Enlightenment rationalist, who convinced me that all religion was delusion. At the time I didn't need much convincing; the adolescent season of rebellion against my parents had begun, and skepticism was for me the weapon of choice. No doubt I tossed out the man on the Cross in the same trash can with the Westminster Confession.

For six years I ran from him, though I thought I was running to truth. I had no choice about attending the Presbyterian church with my family, but every week I repeated a quiet, private act of defiance: Whenever the congregation said the Apostles' Creed, I remained silent.

My heart was hungry but my head turned away from anything that could have nourished my spirit. So I began to feed on spiritual garbage instead. A science fair project on parapsychology introduced me to supernatural forces. But I thought they were only unexamined natural powers of the human mind. Before long, I was trafficking in spirits, though I would never have dreamed they were anything other than my own psychic energies. They would sometimes tell me what others were thinking, or whisper of events that were taking place at a distance. The more power they gave me, the hungrier I became for it. I began to experiment with seances, levitation, and other occult practices -- all, of course, in the name of science. I wanted to become an expert in parapsychology.

From time to time I saw him again, usually hanging beyond the altar in the church of my Catholic girlfriend. His open arms still welcomed me. But since I was convinced there was no God, the most he could represent to me was a suffering humanity. And in those heady days of the `60s, when American youth were so certain they could transform the world, I didn't want a reminder of human brokenness. We were out to forge our own bright destiny in the new Age of Aquarius, and the crucifix was an unwelcome relic of the old order. Like some child of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, born just a few centuries too late, I was convinced humanity could perfect itself through education. So I set out to prove the thesis in the human laboratory of my high school.

Our particular campus was an odd mix of peril and promise. As a first step in fully desegregating the public schools of our Southern city, the school board by fiat turned an all-black high school into a racially mixed one. Amazingly, those of us with a vision for racial harmony were able to build more of it than many critics had expected: Out of the chaos of a totally new student body gathered from utterly different social and racial backgrounds, we forged well-oiled student organizations that helped smooth the process of integration.

In a short time, blacks and whites were becoming friends and working hard to build a community. We became the city's first model of a school that had been forced to desegregate totally, yet had come out of the process racially integrated as well -- and all without violence. As student body president and a central actor in the drama, I felt as if my Enlightenment strategy for changing the world had been validated.

Nevertheless, reality at last bumped up against my carefully crafted visions. First to go was the Aquarian illusion. After a massive transfer of students city-wide in my senior year to complete the desegregation process in all the high schools, the make-up of our student population was radically altered. Some of the new students were militant racists and troublemakers, both black and white. When other campuses in the city began closing down because of rioting, we were put on alert that angry students from other schools were planning to infiltrate our student body and provoke violence there as well.

One lovely fall afternoon, after our homecoming rally, it happened. A riot broke out on campus as I watched helplessly. Black and white friends who had once shared my hopes for a new, peaceful world attacked one another with knives, chains, and tire irons. I naively ran around campus from one little mob to another, trying to break up fights and restore calm. My watch was knocked off my wrist in the struggle, but I was miraculously spared injury -- to my body, that is. My soul was quite another matter. The sight of one young man in particular was branded on my memory. He lay sprawled cruciform in the dust, his arms extended, his face bloody. The wooden nightmare of my childhood had become flesh and blood, and I wept bitterly for the death of a dream. The idol I had made of humanity was shattered, and nothing could put it back together.

Next to die were my delusions about psychic powers. One starless summer night a chilling demonic force, grown tired of its human plaything, commandeered my body. It physically pushed me toward the edge of a nearby river to throw me in. I've never learned to swim, so if a couple of muscular friends who were with me hadn't pinned me down, it would have drowned me.

The next morning I told my English teacher, a Christian who had been praying for me, what had happened. She said I'd had a brush with the Devil. I laughed at her and scoffed: Don't be so medieval. Even so, I had to admit something was out there, and it wasn't a friendly ghost. My teacher gave me C. S. Lewis to read -- at last, an antidote for the poison of Voltaire -- who in turn sent me back to the Scriptures.

It was there that I learned about angels, fallen and unfallen. I found dark references to the powers that had tormented me and the evil mastermind behind them, the god of this world. In the Bible I rediscovered a multi-tiered model of the universe, of nature and super-nature, that fit the realities of my recent experience in ways that parapsychology and the Enlightenment never could.

These were my first faltering steps back toward reality, and with a sobering irony, I came to believe in the Devil before I believed in God. Yet that inverted order of my emerging creed had its purpose in the divine intention: So devoid was I of the fear of God that I had to work my way into it by stages, starting with a fear of demons. The pleasure I'd taken in declaring myself an atheist, unfettered by the rules of any creator, began to crumble: If there was indeed a devil but no God to save me from him, I was in deep trouble.

Yet Scripture was teaching me much more than fear. In the gospels especially, I encountered a man whose wisdom and compassion arrested me. He was the same man I'd sung hymns about as a child, the man on the cross who had stirred me with his suffering; but he was becoming real in a way I'd never imagined possible.

Years before, he'd been much like the hero of a fairy tale: a bright legend that embodied the noblest human traits, but only a legend after all. Now he was entering history for me, breathing the air and walking the soil of a planet where I also breathed and walked. I was still scandalized by the thought that he could actually have been more than a man. But the possibilities were opening up. After all, once you grant the existence of super-nature, you can't rule out God; and if there's a God, what's there to stop him from invading nature? If there's a God, I knew, then the rest of the story, however shocking -- Virgin Birth, miracles, the Resurrection surely becomes possible.

Meanwhile, I began trying prayer as an experiment. My requests were concrete and specific; so were the swift, undeniable answers that came. The evidence was mounting, and though I felt threatened by the prospect of having to submit to the will of Another, a part of me also longed for that submission. Soon I was getting to know believers whose lives convincingly enfleshed the gospel -- or, to use Merton's haunting line, "People whose every action told me something of the country that was my home." When one of them invited me to a small prayer meeting, I came, however awkwardly, and sat silently for most of the evening. But I came back the next week, and the next, because I sensed that these people genuinely loved me, and I was hungry for their love.

A fresh, new breeze was blowing through my mind, sweeping out the cobwebs and debris that had accumulated through six years of darkness. The light of Christ was dawning inside, and all the frayed old arguments of the skeptics soon rotted in its brilliance. The more I knew of the world and myself, the more I found that Christian faith made sense of it all, and the more I longed to meet this man whose followers I had come to love.

Just after my high school graduation, at a massive nationwide rally of evangelical Christians in Dallas sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ, he came to me -- not in a vision or even a dream, but in a quiet, unshakable confidence that he was alive and knocking at the door of my heart. I repented of my unbelief and all its devastating consequences. I confessed to God that Jesus Christ was his Son, and asked him to become my Savior and Lord. My mind at last had given my heart permission to believe, to obey, and to adore.

When I took up Scripture again to read, the centuries were suddenly compressed, and the historical Figure that had replaced the noble Legend was himself now replaced with a living Friend. In my hands were letters he had addressed personally to me, written two millennia ago yet delivered to my home at this moment, so fresh that it seemed the ink should still be wet. He read my thoughts, nailed my sins, told my story, plumbed the depths of my pain.

Overwhelmed, I asked him to fill me with himself.

Two months later I was sitting alone in our Presbyterian church's sanctuary, late in the evening after a service had ended. I'd opened my Bible to the book of Acts -- no one had warned me that it was an incendiary tract -- and I read about the day of Pentecost. I'd never been taught about the baptism of the Holy Spirit or his gifts. But I told God that if what happened to those first believers on that day long ago could happen to me this evening, I wanted it. And I was willing to sit there all night until it happened.

I didn't have to wait long. Suddenly a flood of words in a tongue I'd never studied came bursting out of me, followed by a flood of joy that washed over me for a week. The Holy Spirit baptism was for me a baptism in laughter; I giggled like a fool for days over this sweet joke of God. It was a liberation from the chains of the Enlightenment. This irrational -- or perhaps I should say para-rational -- experience opened my eyes to realms that soared beyond my understanding, and left me face-to-face with mystery. For years, reason had masqueraded as a god in my life, but now I saw it for what it truly was: only a servant, however brilliantly attired.

That realization served me well in the following years when I majored in religious studies at Yale. That school's great, Neo-Gothic library best illustrates the spirit I encountered there: Painted on the wall high above the altar of its massive circulation desk is an awesome icon of Knowledge -- or perhaps Wisdom, though I rarely heard her voice in the classrooms of that campus. She was personified as a queen enthroned above us lowly student mortals, and though we freshmen were tempted to genuflect, I owed my first allegiance to another sovereign.

In the twenty years that came after, faith grew, establishing itself as the heart of the vocations that consumed me: I went on to a graduate school program in religion, and I served as a missionary evangelist in Europe, an associate pastor of a charismatic congregation, and a writer and editor for several Christian publishers.

Those were good years, years of settling into a deep relationship with the God I'd once abandoned. He gave me a beloved Christian wife and two children who learned to seek his face from a tender age. But at last the time came for yet another conversion in my life -- and another baptism of joy.

A Perennial Longing

I had found the Lord, or rather the Lord had found me, in the Evangelical Christian community. I'd been trained to think in that community's categories, to speak its language, to hold its assumptions, to cherish its traditions. It had been for me a life-giving stream, a place of awesome grace and glory: There, I learned to feed on Scripture, to celebrate the Lord's presence, to seek the way of holiness, to enjoy the fellowship of those who are devoted to him.

But in quiet moments, I sometimes felt a longing sweep over me. It washed across my heart whenever I heard a recording of tranquil Gregorian chant or Schubert's aching Ave Maria. It erupted inside me when I visited the great cathedrals of Europe -- humbled by the grandeur of their architecture and the sweaty devotion of all the forgotten saints who had labored to raise those stones to the sky.

I felt it when I read St. Augustine's Confessions, St. Catherine's Dialogue, and St. John's Dark Night of the Soul. These were more than books -- they were doorways into a communion with the saints who had written them. I felt their presence as I read; I even found myself talking to them, though my theological training told me that such conversations weren't permitted.

Most of all, I ached when I knelt quietly in the sanctuaries of Catholic churches. I felt drawn to the tabernacle and the altar. And I sometimes wept at the longing I felt as I lifted my gaze to behold him, hanging there, broken and bloody. After so many years, his open arms still welcomed me. But my mind rebelled against the attraction. Those matter-of-fact words from so long ago always returned to dampen my desire: That's just for Catholics.

The result was a long, thirsty wandering from one Protestant tradition to another: Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, classical Pentecostal, independent charismatic. Each had something solid to offer, each taught me critical lessons in walking with God. But sooner or later I had to admit that none of them was home.

I'd had healthy encounters with the Catholic Church, of course. My childhood girlfriend and her family, and other friends as well, had earned my respect for Catholic faith. The charismatic renewal had shown me how much in common I could have with Catholic believers; I'd even written my senior essay in college on a Catholic charismatic community in Rhode Island. Two good friends, evangelicals from Inter-Varsity, a college group I'd belonged to, had themselves entered the Church, challenging me to consider why.

But Protestant ways of thinking were so deeply engrained in my mind that I found it impossible to reason my way out of them. The legacy of Voltaire and the Enlightenment was farther-reaching than I'd ever imagined: I was so confident of all that can be verbally communicated, so suspicious of all that cannot. I knew that the truth of God could be revealed through a book. But could the power of God really reside in a dusty relic, the presence of God in a fragile wafer, the authority of God in a human pope? Once again, my heart and head were at war.

Even so, my baptism in the Holy Spirit had planted in me the seed of a sacramental vision of the world -- a vision, I believe, that most Charismatics share, if they only knew it. My encounter with para-rational tongues and unexplainable miracles had suddenly introduced me to the mystery of God and chastened my tendency to rely solely on rational understanding in the search for truth.

The Pentecostal experience had also affirmed that to be human is to have a body and emotions as well as an intellect: that God's grace can be communicated through physical and emotional healing, and that worship involves not just minds, but feelings, physical postures, and pageantry as well. As a charismatic I even discovered that God could work powerfully through the spoken prayer, the anointing oil, the laying on of hands, the prayer cloth (cf. 2 Kings 13:20-21; Luke 8:43-44; Acts 19:11-12; James 5:13-15).

All these experiences convinced me that it was God's way to invest the physical with the spiritual, the human with the divine, the natural with the supernatural, the ordinary with mystery. In short, I came to see that Pentecost was a matter of spirit made flesh; a charismatic faith was inescapably a sacramental faith. But I needed more than sacramental experience, more even than that perennial longing, to take me over the intellectual mountain range that stood between me and the Catholic Church. God knew what I needed. So he put me in a Ph.D. program in historical theology where I would find maps to help me scale those treacherous heights -- maps drawn by those who had made the journey before.

The names of the mapmakers will come as no surprise: St. Augustine, John Cardinal Newman, G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Merton, many others as well. A few who never fully made it over those theological mountains themselves nevertheless stood like Moses at the peak, pointing me in the right direction -- men like John Williamson Nevin and, above all, C. S. Lewis.

Lewis once wrote that, long before his reason was converted to Christian faith, his imagination had been baptized by the writings of the Scottish novelist George Macdonald. In my case, long before my reason was converted to Catholic truth, my imagination had been sacramentalized by Lewis's writings. St. Augustine's contribution to my conversion caught me by surprise. Years ago I'd been ravished by his Confessions; the cries of my heart seemed like so many distant, feeble echoes of his longings from centuries before. But once he had my trust, he had me trapped: Sometime later, innocently reading his polemics against the Donatists on the evils of schism, I suddenly realized that I was a modern-day, Protestant Donatist -- and he was rebuking me for remaining separated from Rome.

One by one, each question I had about the Catholic faith found an answer. Like most converts to the Church who have first had to overcome doctrinal hurdles, I found that many problems were resolved when I finally understood the truly Catholic position on a disputed matter, rather than the Protestant misconception of it. Those discoveries are familiar to former Protestants: We all had to learn, I suppose, that devotion to Mary is not worship; that the pope is not held to be infallible in every casual statement he makes.

At the same time, I began to identify and move beyond the Protestant filters through which I was reading Scripture. No longer could I insist on adhering to the plain sense of the biblical text yet interpret Jesus' own words about his Body and Blood figuratively. Nor could I ignore his clear announcement that he would build his Church on St. Peter and give him the keys of the kingdom.

Some puzzles were solved, not by the writings of great Christian teachers or a new approach to Scripture, but by the outcome of great Christian dramas of the past. Church history, I found, was theology teaching by example.

For some, the study of Christian behavior over the centuries, with all its horrors, has led to doubt, cynicism, even atheism. They see church councils bickering over petty jealousies, popes amassing wealth, bishops fathering children, monks living in dissipation; and at that dismaying sight, they lose faith. For me, however, Church history became one long confirmation of two realities: the universality of sin and the sovereignty of grace.

One stumbling block in my way had been the all-too-obvious flaws of contemporary Catholicism. Some modern Catholic theologians I'd read, for example, had more in common with Marx or Freud than with Augustine or Aquinas. I met monks who talked like Buddhists and nuns becoming self-empowered through pagan goddess worship.

But the scandal was overcome when I finally admitted that no Christian community has ever even come close to being perfect. In fact, I saw the Catholic Church's problems repeated in the history of all the groups that repudiated her, that vowed they would never be like her. They reminded me of the adolescent daughter who swears she'll never be like the mother she resents -- yet ends up becoming just like her in spite of her vow.

It was simply historical proof of the Pauline judgment that my Protestant mentors had always been so fond of quoting Romans 3:23, "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." Each breakaway group, I learned, inexorably retraced the missteps of the Catholic tradition to one degree or another because whatever problems the Church has, they are not exclusively Roman; they are universally human.

In taking the long view, I also came to marvel at the sovereign grace of God. Those same bickering councils that Protestants have disparaged nevertheless demonstrated the most astonishing wisdom in crafting creeds that would stand the test of time. Those avaricious popes gave their blessing to men and women of blessed poverty whose explosive holiness shamed their lax brothers and sisters and turned the Church upside down. In John Paul II, in the heroism of the Church in Eastern Europe, in the charismatic renewal and other life-giving movements, I could see signs of God's grace with us yet, despite the serious attacks on the Church both within and without.

At the same time, I saw how Rome has remained the spiritual center of gravity for the churches that have separated from her. However much they try to distance themselves, they keep finding their way back: When the arid, rigid predestinationism of Calvin grew at last intolerable, they turned to Wesley for a more human -- and more Catholic -- view. In the Holiness movement they recaptured something of the Catholic traditions of asceticism and works of mercy; in the Pentecostal movement they recovered a sense of sacrament and mystery.

Meanwhile, even our now-secular society -- itself spawned in many ways by the logical conclusions of Protestant views -- still attempts to make up for the useful Catholic traditions it has repudiated. As G. K. Chesterton once noted, whatever Catholic elements the Protestants threw out of their churches, the modern world eventually reintroduced because they couldn't live without them. But they always brought those elements back in a lower form. Instead of the confessional, for example, we now have the psychoanalyst's couch, with none of the safeguards of the confessional. Instead of a glorious communion with saints who help us on our pilgrimage to heaven, we now have spiritualists who frolic with demons that seduce us into hell.

Yet through all the confusion, I came to see, Rome remains the solid theological standard for those who have separated from her. As even the oldest denominations have succumbed to the spirit of the age on one critical issue after another, the Catholic Church has remained firm -- on the sanctity of life, on the nature of sexuality, on the supernatural foundations of faith, on the essence of God and the identity of Christ. Today as yesterday, Veritatis Splendor -- the splendor of truth, as the Holy Father has so aptly called it -- blazes forth from Rome. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Perhaps most importantly, my reading of Erasmus and Newman and my study of the history of liturgy helped me to see that the primitivist assumption underlying Protestant views of the Church was seriously mistaken in at least two ways. First, Erasmus and Newman taught me that the Church is a maturing organism whose life span stretches across the centuries -- not an archaeological expedition always searching for fossils to help it reconstruct a primitive campsite. They challenged me to defend the Protestant notion that we should desire the embryo over the mature organism; and having studied church history, I found such a defense impossible.

Second, when I studied the history of Jewish and Christian liturgy, I found that even if we could return to the primitive Christian experience, that experience would not resemble most of the Protestant, especially the charismatic, churches of today. The congregations I'd been part of were for the most part assuming that they had recovered a New Testament model of strictly spontaneous worship, local government, and Bible-only teaching. But the early Church, I found, was in reality liturgical in worship; trans-local and hierarchical in government; and dependent on a body of sacred Tradition that included the Scripture, yet stretched far beyond it as well.

In short, all the knotted highways and byways of Church history led at long last to the same seven-hilled city. By the time I'd finished my doctoral exams, I knew I had to enter the Church. My heart and mind were already Catholic; if I turned away from Rome, I would wander, forever thirsty, the rest of my days.

Another Baptism of Joy

The clincher came one morning when I heard about the terminal illness of an old acquaintance. I asked myself, If you discovered that you were dying, what would you do? The answer that leapt to mind surprised me with its suddenness and certainty: I'd enter the Catholic Church right away. It was time to take action.

Even so, the road forward wasn't all smooth. My extended family and a number of friends found the whole matter confusing, though they were graciously supportive. I lost some important business relationships with colleagues in the evangelical publishing world who thought I'd been deceived. I gave up my pastoral ordination and my association with a ministry network on whose board of governors I was serving.

Much more sensitive was the situation at home. Despite many conversations with me about the matter, my wife still found the notion of becoming Catholic a strange one. We finally reached an agreement: If she would come with me to RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) classes and support me in doing what I knew I must do, then I would exert no pressure on her, and I would respect her final decision about the Church. I entrusted her to the grace of God and the intercession of St. Ann, her patron as a homemaker and the patron of the parish where we lived.

When we went to St. Ann's Church to find out what to do next, we were met by a priest who embodied all the best of what it means to be Christian and Catholic. A Christ-centered, Christ-reflecting man of great joy and gentleness, Father Gerald Conmey won over my family immediately. His high regard for the Scripture permeated our instruction, assuring my wife that we weren't off on some dangerous theological tangent.

Not long after, my family joined me in my decision. My wife and I would be confirmed, my daughter would receive her First Communion, my son would be baptized, and all of us would be embraced at last by the Catholic Church all on the same day. Rejoicing, I rushed out to buy them each a crucifix for the occasion.

On the afternoon before that unforgettable day, I was driving home alone from a business errand, my mind on some editing project, when suddenly a flood of joy washed over me. I threw back my head and began to laugh. It was a profound, tear-soaked laughter; a laughter of liberation and relief, the kind I hadn't experienced since that day, twenty years before, when the Holy Spirit had washed me clean inside.

St. Augustine! I shouted out the car window. I'm coming home! St. Thomas! I'm coming home! St. Catherine! I'm coming home! And I laughed till my sides hurt, wept till my eyes ached.

Perhaps God let me undergo that new baptism at such an odd moment to spare my family the embarrassment they would have felt had I exploded in the next day's ceremony instead. In any case, when the time came to go forward for that blessed oil's anointing, I was still joyous, but composed. As I stood, I looked beyond the altar at the man on the cross.

And his open arms welcomed me.

+ + +

Cool Catholic Sites

These may be old news to some, but I thought these were really cool:

Friendly Defenders

Catholic Faith Defenders

Defenders of the Catholic Faith

Scripture Catholic

Peace,

Wear it on your sleeve...literally!

Wear your Catholicism and witness without words.  Very cool website. Monk Rock

~Peace

A great blog I discovered...and a little history

I accidentally found this blog this morning, Ukok's Place.  Of course, there are no accidents with God, right?  It is the blog of a 30 something British mom who is a convert to Catholicism.  The reason I think it is neat is because my patron saint,  St. Margaret Clitherow,  was a British mom who was a convert to Catholicism and one of the 40 English Martyrs,  (she is pictured on my right sidebar). My ancestry is primarily English, with a bit if Scottish and Irish thrown in for good measure.  My mom's family are the Herricks of Southampton, NY (a sister city to Southampton, England) and the first English settlement in New York state (as you can see by looking at the town's seal pictured below with the cute little pilgrim).  The Herricks arrived in Southampton, NY in 1653.  One of our ancestors is the English poet,  Sir Robert Herrick  (pictured below).  In 1869 they opened Herrick Hardware. It is the oldest family owned and run hardware store in America.  Pretty cool, eh?  Andrew's middle name is Herrick, in honor (and now memory) of my mom.  Anyway,  I was baptized in the First Presbyterian Church of Southampton (pictured above) which is also the first Presbyterian church built in the United States.  So, I found it quite fitting, when I converted to Catholicism, to pick as my patron a convert and mother from England.  It's interesting how things can come full circle...isn't it?

~Peace,

BTW, the picture of me at the top of 

my blog was taken in a wheat field in 

Southampton, NY (20 years ago!)

In Magnificat today, I just had to post it. It's so beautiful and true.

This is from Mother Teresa, now Blessed Teresa of Calcutta:

Unashamed of Christ's Words

The Word of God becomes flesh during the day, during meditation, during Holy Communion, during contemplation, during adoration, during silence. That Word in you, you give to others. It is necessary that the Word live in you, that you understand the Word, that you love the Word, that you live the Word. You will not be able to live that Word unless you give it to others.

Total surrender to God must come in small details as it comes in big details. It's nothing but that single word, "Yes, I accept whatever you give, I give whatever you take." And this is just a simple way for us to be holy. We must not create difficulties in our own minds. To be holy doesn't mean to do extraordinary things, to understand big things, but it is a simple acceptance, because I have given myself to God, because I belong to Him - total surrender. He could put me here. He could put me there. He can use me. He cannot use me. It doesn't matter because I belong so totally to Him that He can do just what He wants to do with me.

Lent is a time when we relive the passion of Christ. Let it not be just a time when our feelings are roused, but let it be a change that comes through cooperation with God's grace in real sacrifices of self. Sacrifices to be real, must cost; it must hurt; it must empty us of self. Let us go through the passion of Christ day by day.

Lent...this time it's going to be tough

I told my husband a couple of days ago that desperate spiritual times call for desperate spiritual measures. I am up against the wall in my discerned role as Lay Director for Christ Renews His Parish at my church. I am responsible (with 2 other women) in helping to spiritually enrich and form a group of women over the next 10 weeks in order that they can tell their witness and bring others in our parish closer to Christ and each other!) That is a huge responsibility. So, in order to make sure I am really on my knees during this formation period I have prayed and found out that what God is calling me to do for Lent is give up SUGAR! Normally, I try and do something spiritual in lieu of the 'give something up' kid-friendly route. However, sugar is a huge soothing mechanism for me. And I need to turn to Christ, not cookies. So, I need this Lent to hurt a little. I need some serious self-denial and a 40 day fast from sugar is gonna be some serious self-denial...but the aim of physical self-denial will hopefully end up being spiritual enrichment. This is not a diet. This is very much a kind of fasting. This is really giving up something I adore (in almost any form) for the Lord I adore. My only exception will be to have homemade (by me) birthday cake on my daughter's 8th birthday coming up soon. Other than that it's going to be sugar free for me. I don't believe for a moment that I can do this AT ALL. I do believe, however, that Christ can do this through me, if I get out of the way and let Him.

(I imagine quite soon I will be desperate for Easter to arrive...Lord, preserve me!)

I'll keep you posted.

~Peace

First Reconciliation/Lawn Care

Tonite my girlie goes to her first confession. We have talked about this on and off over the last couple of months, with another last minute cram session this afternoon.

She is 3 weeks from being 8 years old. Let us be honest, confession and reconciliation are just not things the average 8 year old can really grasp. It is something that truly grows with you. I did emphasize to her that she isn't to think that just because her dad and I are grown that we have an easier time being good. I told her that it is when you are grown up that sinning becomes the most easy to do and the most difficult to stop. She was surprised by this. I think kids sometimes tend to think that because they are little and don't know the rights and wrongs of everything or the nuances of various situations that they are worse than grown ups. I told her, she is much closer to Christ and His love as the little girl she is, and the more she can hold on to her simple child-like faith the better.

I reality, her sins are so simple. Of course, like anyone's, they are born of selfishness. But a kids' selfishness is tame compared to ours as adults. I wish my sins were ONLY that I stuck my tongue out at my brother because he wouldn't let me on the computer, even when it was my turn. Instead, mine involve making decisions on how to raise my children, how to treat them, my husband, my friends, those who have hurt me.

 I told Autumn that the simplest way to understand sin is that it is an action against real, true love. That is the love that God gives and want us to express as well. How I fall short of showing real, true love. Autumn is much more above board and loving than I am. That is why Jesus said to have the faith of a child. The faith of a child is like a beautiful green lawn and a child's sins are like brand new young weeds fresh from the ground. Their roots are not buried under layers of dark dirt. They are barely under the surface. They are easily picked and discarded barely hurting the lawn. Most adults, however, have weeds in their lawn that are like that of Nutsedge (sp) deep, tangled and hard to get rid of. And when you have managed to uproot them, how painful it is to the lawn, not to mention the deep holes that are left until new grass grows over them. How I love that Confession helps me to continue to pull out those horrible weeds of sin, in my ever growing lawn of faith. And it is not as easy to grapple with those sins, even with God's help, as much as it is for a little kid. It is also a lot more painful to let go of sinful habits, more than for a little kid. They have had much less time to develop them.

The wonderful thing, and this is coming from a convert who used to mock confession and never really understand it, is that since being able to avail myself of the wonderful Grace-giving Sacrament of Confession (or Reconciliation), I have finally been able to rid myself of sins that bugged the heck out of me as a Protestant, but could never seem to kick. And I didn't rid myself of those sins, God's grace and my cooperation with it, are what did. There is real accountability in this Sacrament...there is no hiding yourself when you bare your soul to the one standing In Persona Christi. You hear the things you do and say come out of your mouth and KNOW there is not one righteous, no not one...only Christ is. Hearing your sins aloud makes you even more aware that YOU DO NEED THE FORGIVENESS OF CHRIST because you hear how unloving you truly are. And the best part comes, the part I could only imagine, but never heard, while I was still an Evangelical, and that is this, "In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I absolve you of your sins. Go and sin no more." HOW AWESOME IS THAT!?! No more wondering if you meant it, if He really did forgive you. You walk out of that confessional on air feeling the Grace and Peace of Christ coursing through your veins. You KNOW that with God's continued help and grace He will help you overcome sins and continue to make you Holy on your life's walk with Christ.

Well, I have to go get Autumn. It is time to go. I am so excited for her. After tonite, the next stop is the pinnacle of Sacraments: the Eucharist...Christ Himself condescending into bread and wine to make it His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. Remember from John 6: "I am the bread of Life, whoevers eats this bread will never die." How loved we are. Just mindblowing!

~Peace

A Gesthemane Moment

I don't know how many of you Catholics out there have ever participated in the Parish Renewal program called Christ Renews His Parish or CRHP (pronounced Chirp for short), but it is an amazing and singular retreat experience.  It is quite unlike anything out there.  If your parish has it...RUN...don't walk...and sign up for the next one.

Well, CRHP is self perpetuating.  It is not stagnant.  Folks attend a CRHP weekend then many from that group go on to present a CRHP weekend and then the presenters kind of move off into various parish ministries and the attendees go on to be presenters and it keeps going from there.  Our parish started CRHP a couple of years ago.  Every 6 months there is a CRHP Weekend for Men and a week or so later their is the Women's weekend.  Each group of people to attend are a team.  I went to Team 1's presentation of a CRHP Weekend, and those in my group who continued to form the next Weekend became Team 2.  Once you have gone to CRHP you may or may not be Called by God to come back to another CRHP team to help them out.  This just happened to me.  I was Called to go and help form Team 6 to put on a CRHP Weekend whose attendees will become CRHP 7.  

There are many roles to be filled for a CRHP weekend.  And only God, in a special discernment prayer meeting will Call those He chooses to certain roles.  No person says to another, "You are meant to do this or that."  Well, at the most recent discernment I was Called to be the Lay Director.  Let me tell you what a hilarious joke on me that is.  And I have been really freaking out over the last few days asking God if he could take this cup from me...after I decided maybe I don't want it.  It is going to stretch me in places I have never stretched and I'm feeling quite inflexible, KWIM?

Lay Directors direct the proceeding of a CRHP meeting. I have to watch time, make  sure folks don't stray off topic, keep to a prescribe schedule, help insure the retreat goes smoothly giving oversight to all other ministry heads.  It's not my show.  I am just helping to direct it.  Okay, stop laughing all of you who know me. I know what you are thinking.  "How could God let Rachel do that?...Her CRHP meetings are going to end up being a train wreck!"  Well, the first one was a bit disorganized, but my Spiritual and Co-Spiritual Directors Ann and Jacki thought it went alot better than I did.  I even got an email from a member of the group, Julie, telling me she was glad I was the Lay Director. WOW! COOL!  I gotta say, I won't be doing ANY of it without God's help.  I think that is why I am where I am.  He knows I need Him for this position. I also adore the women in this team and know that they will help and best of all LOVE me through it.  They won't be judging, just encouraging. So, Fear Be Damned!  Get behind me Satan!  I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me!

Oh, and for any of you Catholics out there reading this who have a Christ Renews His Parish in your church, DO NOT HESITATE!  Sign up NOW!  It will be, quite possibly, the BEST thing you have EVER done for your relationship with CHRIST,  your FELLOW PARISHIONERS, and YOURSELF!!!!

~Peace,

Very Interesting Catholic Political Blog

AnarchoCatholic

The three of them are all law students, married and two of them have kids.  There is alot of really cool stuff here, and plenty to ponder.

~Peace

Really great dialog about Attachment Parenting in Catholic Families

I found this article by reading a post in the Organic Learning blog that is in one of my near circle groups. I have always been an AP parent. And interestingly, I found that using AP with my kids syncs better with Catholicism than Protestantism (I used to be an Evangelical). On the whole, I think AP fits in perfectly with Christianity, and people like the Ezzo's totally freaked me out and made me really angry....to the point where I would hide their books when I went into bookstores. But the more I have read by JPII (which I have been doing in my FAMILIA group) the more I see how AP blends so beautifully with Catholic teaching more than any other Christian theological vantage point.

I, too, like Danielle Bean. I peruse her blog often, and I imagine I will continue to do so. I don't have any books by Gregory Popcak, but I have friends who do. So, I know of him. I really liked the points he makes in the above post (click on the title to get to it). I do, however, own most of William Sears' books, have met him, and several years ago had a fabulous talk with his wife, Martha, on the phone. She actually directed me to a great article at the Christian Research Institute, an evangelical website, on just how unbiblical and dangerous the Ezzos parenting methods were.

What I really loved about the above exchange, however, was how polite they are to each other. I also benefitted greatly from the discussion of integral procreation and how God gives us the gifts of children, not just timing. This is important to me because I have wanted another child, DESPERATELY, for 5 years. I have stopped charting for over a year...and still no baby. God really is in control. My dh and I have a son with Bipolar Disorder. God knows how much time and energy he takes from us and out other 2 children. If we are blessed by God to have another child someday, I will know it is because God KNEW that Ben needed all that extra time from us...and that another little soul might have suffered needlessly if brought to our family any earlier.

Being Catholic and a parent who practices AP are all about TRUST in God and the way He created us to be. What else is there that would encourage Saintliness other than that?

~Peace

Control

I hung out with Sara (next to me in middle photo) a few days ago and helped her with her blog. She sees me as a blogwiz (of course the very idea would make my husband explode with laughter). Regardless, I was totally psyched to help her. So now she has a picture of her family and some coolio widgets etc...I even got her on nearcirlce and she was really excited about that. I LOVED helping her. I really had fun.

(BTW, Andrew doesn't really drink. He's not 21 yet. However, he was making fun of all of us at a dinner party we threw over the weekend. He said 'Hey, look this is what happens at a 'Catholic dinner party' and took the picture of me and Sara and the one above us which was a pic all the bottles of wine. Then he had me take the pic of him pretending to drink Tequila through a funnel. Admittedly, our friend John, was making some killer Margaritas! So, when it comes to Christmas parties....Catholics do have more fun!)

Sara and I always have these winding, stream of consiousness, theological, pedagogical and just plain cool conversations. We were talking alot about CONTROL. . She has also blogged about it at her site Those That Wonder. So we were chatting about how, maybe on the surface, some might think that moms like us, who are really into our Catholicism, might be automatically stereotyped as the controlling, authoritarian, structured type of moms. Not me though...nor Sara really either. I really don't believe that my Faith gives me any right to control my kids. I have a *right to raise them*, but *not control them*. I am to do my best to instill our family's faith and values. I try to live my life in a way so that they will come to understand what I (and their father) believe is truly important and worthy of wanting...their Catholic Christian Faith. I want my kids to learn to control themselves. Robert and I have to show them how to do that by the way that we control ourselves. If my kids only control themselves because of external pressure exerted on them from us, or others around them, how are they going to live as adult who can make their own decisions? I want my kids to be able to internalize the way we live and what we believe so that they learn to control themselves from the inside out. So, how does *that* happen?

So far, around here, it happens through lots of conversations some calm (and some not so calm sorry to say) and acting out examples of how one would accomplish things like getting their point across or what they need, even what they might want. It is so true that the expression "Do what I say, not what I do" will not get you far with your kids. They are watching us...THEY ARE WATCHING US! I have to admit that most every crappy, naughty, selfish thing I have seen my kids do or say, they have seen me do first. I think if maybe parents admitted that to themselves things with their kids would get better. So, the way I help my kids THE MOST with interalizing all the virtues so that they can live them is for me to live a virtuous life in front of them more often than I am doing now. And that is hard because I am everybit a sinner as they are...more so because of age.

Ever wonder why Our Blessed Mother appears to kids more than adults? Because they ARE innocent and less sinful than we are. So why are so many of us out there so desperate to CONTROL our kids and make them better? I don't know because so many of us are NOT BETTER with age, maybe more wise and experienced, but sad to say, we are less transparent sinners (like kids are) and more covert, manipulative sinners. Am I suggesting that kids are perfect, or can't benefit from our experience? No! of course not. I am suggesting that controlling their lives may be more sinful than helpful on our parts. Even Jesus told us to "have the faith of a child". Children are very important to God and he doesn't think they are mindless little brats who need to be controlled and coerced to grow up. Instead he tells us to be like little children. Innocent, trusting, curious, loving, open etc...

So, all that being said, I am trying to control my children less (I don't do much controlling of them to the outside world to begin with, so I am sure the thought of even less control by me is frightening to some). I want to guide them more, show them more (with my actions) how to live...and because they have me for a mom...I will be showing them (unfortunately with some of my actions) how NOT to live as well...but hey! then they will see me go off to Confession. So I *can* win for losing.

I know I will come back to this topic. But for now, I am done pondering in print.

~Peace~

Peace & Hostility Cookies (with recipe)

There will never be peace in the Middle East until there is peace in the backseat (of my car, between my 2 youngest kids, Ben and Autumn). I mean, REALLY, if children from the same loving family can't seem to stop being so hostile, blaming, yelling, arguing, and fighting is there any hope for the Jews and Muslims? They are from different faiths, which rose from the same family, and they've had a beef with each other about who is God's favorite for centuries?

I used to be Protestant (a vehemently anti-Catholic one at that). So, I can understand being indoctrinated from childhood into believing the worst about a belief system and those that adhere to it; which in my case was Catholicism. Admittedly, I was never encouraged to strap a bomb to myself and take out the local parish in the name of John Calvin. So, I guess that is where I part company with the over-the-top hostility circulating among some in the Middle East.

So, back to Ben and Autumn. As a Catholic mom, I really, really try to help them understand that they are hurting themselves, their family, the Church, and God by being so mean to each other...and over such petty stuff. I eschew corporal punishment, so I try to make consequences meaningful. But half the time the "meaning of their meanness" still doesn't get through their heads. Even though it is true that "I am the Mom", I really don't like to wield that power like a dictator. I try to engage my kids and help them to see what is going on. I try to encourage mutual respect for each other and focus on how God wants us all to treat each other. It is amazing to me, though, how sin breaks in. The "Me" in each one of them becomes all important and nothing else exists. The total selfishness and complete lack of empathy or understanding toward the other, and me, can be stunning. And hey, I know I am not the most peaceful chick walking the planet. I have the so-called Irish Temper (and the Scots have it too, of which I am also descended.) Apparently, the other 1/3 of me, the English (staid, keep a stiff upper lip) part has been completely squashed by the other two more fiery temperaments of my heritage, and rarely sees the light of day. (My poor husband.) However, God is really working on me and aspect of my personality. Having a hot temper isn't always a bad thing. It is the way one uses it that makes it bad. I think there is a difference between managing conflict positively and plain old open hostility. Both stem from a passionate personality. So, I am trying to take my passionate little kids and help them turn it into something good. For example, I am "on Fire" for the Catholic Church. I passionately defend her teachings...even the unpopular ones. Being unafraid to speak up and doing it with gusto makes people pay attention, but I can't do it angrily or I will lose my credibility to those I am trying to reach. However, the only attention I have been getting lately is that of the public watching me wrangle my two little warring countries (I mean kids)...not the attention I am quite wanting for them OR me.

After 37 years of being anti-Catholicism and 18 years of being an Evangelical Protestant, God brought me all the way home to His Church...the Catholic Church. I believed in Him for so long and was always looking for him and he guided me where I needed to go...but certainly not in my time...always His time. So, too, I hope and pray that He will bring peace to the Jews and Muslims by bringing them to his Son, who IS peace. So it is with God's help, I will continue to encourage my children to live together in peace, instead of battling against each other in anger. I fear, however, that it's going to take a lot longer than I thought. I shouldn't complain, though, because God's been patiently waiting for us to get our acts together for thousands of years!

In closing, I want to share a couple of pictures. I was baking today when all Hell broke loose between my little Israel and Palestine. First there are the Peace cookies: Beautiful, sweet, with a perfect texture, and giving off a delightful aroma ...the perfect sugar cookie...which I made while I blissfully baked through the afternoon. Then, there are the Hostility cookies: Ugly, burnt at the edges with a hardened center (the kids were yelling and I forgot about them until I could smell them...not good!). Makes me think of the real things: Peace is beautiful, blissful and a peaceful person perfumes the air with the love of God. Hostility makes one spiritually ugly, hard-hearted, and leaves those around them feeling burned.

Sugar Cookie Recipe

1 cup butter

2 tsp vanilla

2 eggs

2 cups AP flour

1 tsp Cream of Tartar

1/2 tsp Baking Soda

1/4 tsp salt

a good grating of fresh Nutmeg

Sugar for dusting

Oven to 400F

Beat butter til pale and fluffy

add vanilla, mix well

add eggs beat well

Combine all dry ingredients

(don't leave out the nutmeg it makes the cookie)

then add to wet ingredients and mix well.

Drop on greased cookie sheets a couple of inches apart and bake until they match the first picture above (about 6-8 minutes). Lay on a rack and sprinkle with sugar while they are still hot, so that it will stick. When cool enough devour with a cold glass of milk. Totally Awesome!

Peace!