Book Review: I-Choice

Just when I thought my book had disappeared into the wilderness of the publishing world, never to be seen again by me or anyone else, along comes this book review from Fr. Jonathan Blake, who I was in seminary with.

Read it, and then, if you haven't yet bought my book, buy it here. Thanks, Fr. Blake!

An Open Letter to the Catholic Blogosphere, On Pentecost

Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.

But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before:those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self- control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.

Galatians 5: 16-26

Reflection – ‘By their fruits you shall know them’ has to be one of the most practical precepts of the whole of the Gospels, in the sense of providing a standard by which almost anything can be measured and evaluated in a simple, almost obvious way.

What are the fruits here? This is the question that always needs to be asked when we are trying to figure out if we’re on the right track or not in life. And it’s not exactly like the fruits of the flesh and the fruits of the Spirit are really, really similar—like only a certified expert can tell the difference between, say, ‘enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels’ and ‘peace, love, kindness, patience’. ‘Fornication, impurity, licentiousness’ do not look all that much like ‘faithfulness, gentleness, self-control’.

I don’t want to talk much about fornication, etc., today, though—my series on Humanae Vitae has provided me ample space to give my thoughts on matters of sexual morality and chastity, and will continue to do so when I get back to it. It does seem to me that the world of social media, and particularly the Catholic blogosphere, could do well to reflect on the works of the flesh of ‘strife, quarrels, anger, dissensions, factions’ as opposed to the works of the Spirit of ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.’

As Pentecost draws near, and we all are supposed to be yearning for, welcoming, praying for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit in our lives, it is worth examining our consciences precisely along those lines. I try, generally, to keep up with what’s going on in the Catholic blog world, without being obsessed about it, and certainly without feeling like I have to get involved in it (I frankly loathe the band wagon phenomenon where ‘x’ says something or ‘y’ happens, and then everyone has to write about x or y and what they think about it, and blah, blah, blah).

And… ummm. Kindness? Patience? Generosity, as in assuming the best of people who you may not agree with? Gentleness, as in not perpetually coming out with all guns blazing towards those whose positions you may not like? Love, as in… well, surely to God we know what it means to love one another, don’t we? If we don’t, why on earth are we holding forth publicly as Catholic writers on the Internet?

These are in scant evidence, often, in the Catholic blogosphere, and this is not good. I’m not going to give lots of examples because then I would be singling this blogger or that writer out, and it’s not one or two writers, and it’s not ‘the conservatives’ or ‘the liberals’ or ‘the trads’, as far as I can see. It’s fairly endemic. ‘See how those Christians love one another’, the pagans used to say in the days of the Roman Empire, and the pagans in the Roman Empire mostly became Christians. I don’t think we’re converting too many pagans these days with our example of mutual love, forbearance, and kindliness.

Evangelization, folks – it is the word of the day, if not the century. And we evangelize above all by example and by presenting a vision of what Christianity is that is actually attractive to people. Shrill denunciations, mockery, scorn, expressions of outright hatred and vituperation for those in the Church with whom we disagree—all of this is profoundly anti-evangelical.

We can make our points and express our opinions without all of that, you know. Anyhow, perhaps this feast of Pentecost would be a good time to resolve to hang up the quarrels, envy, factions, dissensions, strife, and enmities, and pray for the Spirit to show us the path of kindness, love, patience, peace, self-control, and gentleness.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit, and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth. Amen.

This Week in Madonna House, May 8-14

This week in Madonna House was a little less than ordinary, deo gratias. If memory serves, I posted this weekly column a bit early last week, since a week ago today was the annual March for Life in Ottawa.

I won’t write about it at this point (old news!), but about fifteen to twenty MH people, myself included, took part in that event this year. For myself, it is a day of intense prayer, witness, and personal presence in the midst of a most distressing and tragic reality of our modern world, which is that human life is not protected from its beginning, and that our society has chosen to pit the very real needs and rights of women against those of their own children in a sick sort of zero sum game. It needn’t be that way, but it is, and it is to our shame that it is so.

Two of our members stayed in for the youth conference the following day, staffing a book table. MH is a small community, but our longevity and apostolic vitality in the Canadian Church is shown by how appreciated our presence at these big events is. It is always a day when we deepen our connections with the many, many people who have been touched by MH over the years.

Coming back to the home front, the Directors’ Meetings continue. Speaking personally, these have taken up most of my time since they began. While I cannot say much about them in this public forum obviously, they have been a very rich sharing together of the work of God in our community. One word of wisdom from one our elders, though, struck me as something to share: “Death to self really means surrendering the right to have everything figured out.” Amen. And so we strive, not so much to figure stuff out, but to discern, as Catherine Doherty put it, the footprints of Christ etched on the soil of the world, so that we may walk forward in them faithfully.

It has become the custom during the meetings to have a speaker come in and give us some presentation on something or other that will aid our communal reflection. This year we didn’t organize anything; we didn’t have to, as it happens, since a local friend and neighbor invited Heather King to the area to speak, and she was more than happy to come to MH and include us in her talks.

For those who don’t know her (and can’t be bothered to click the above link), King is a writer and speaker out of Los Angeles, who has written much on her own experience of addiction, recovery, conversion, brokenness, grace, faith, with considerable depth, beauty, and humor.

It turns out that she has a long acquaintance with Catherine Doherty and MH, and so she was delighted for the chance to come and meet us. She writes about her visit here, although she makes us sound a bit like Amish superheroes or something in that post (churning butter at the speed of sound! Leaping tall woodsheds with a single bound!), which is deeply amusing.

Her time with us was a deep encounter of heart with heart, life with life. Superficially her life is utterly different from ours, a writer living alone in the heart of urban LA, but the spirit out of which she lives and pursues her vocation as writer was so one with our spirit that she was able to connect deeply with us in a very short time.

Beyond that, I can’t do justice to her talks and time with us, but I encourage people to look her up if 

you’re not familiar with her, and read her books. She’s a real gem.

Beyond that, MH is a bustling place these days. The gardens remain a key priority in our work at this time. We planted onions together one evening after supper. Other crops are going into the ground as well, and there is much field work going on to prepare the earth for further sowing. The weather has been wet and warm, which is just what you want for the planting season. We are building a new cabin at our Cana Colony, the family camp we have run for almost 60 years, so as to better accommodate the many families who apply for that experience.

The guests have been few in number, but they are trickling in at a steady pace. Lots of short termers right now—students coming for a week or two after their year ends, that kind of thing. And life goes on here in its normal blessed way—lots of work, lots of prayer, lots of love and the struggle to love. And that’s all I can think about what happened ‘this week in Madonna House’. 

Coffee With God

Someone pointed out to me that Kathryn Lopez is blogging about Catherine Doherty today. Lo and behold, not only is she doing so, but on the very subject of my Benedict post this morning.
Quoting Catherine:

Maybe for you it’s different, but for so many people, God seems very distant. But he’s really right there, with you. I always invite him for a cup of coffee. Do you know that God never drank a cup of coffee while he lived on earth? They had no coffee.
Mentally, I invite him for coffee. I take the Bible and put it between us, saying: “Lord, you sit there and I’ll sit here. Here’s your cup of coffee, and here’s mine. Now we’re going to have a dialogue from your own book called the Gospel. So now I’ll be the apostles and you be yourself.”
 

Read the whole thing - it's worth it! 

The Unlimited Evil of Fascism

In a rare move for me on this blog, today I'm posting a link to this brilliant post from Mark Shea. It is basically an e-mail from one of his readers, but it nails the whole question of our time right on the head.

He writes:

One critical error people make in contemplating fascism is to believe that fascism is about ideas, dogmas, or programmatic solutions to human problems. Fascism is none of those things. First and above all, fascism is a belief in the state as the supreme human achievement. Or, as the Party recently said, the state is the only thing we all belong to. This gives the fascist state a flexibility unknown to most totalitarian movements, notably socialism, which are bound by dogmatic commitments and the corresponding need to pretend that the dogmas are productive.

Put another way, the magical thinking of socialism is like fan fiction — it’s limited by a background story. So Pope John Paul II, when he was a cardinal in socialist Poland, could upbraid the socialist utopia for failing in its constitutional promise to respect religion. In contrast, the magical thinking of fascism is unlimited, which makes fascism a much more potent and insidious form of evil...

Go and read the rest, and maybe even pass it along - this is precisely what we are up against increasingly in our world.

Sexual Authenticity

... is the title of a book by Melinda Selmys subtitled "An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism." She was the guest speaker at Madonna House this past Friday, and is a faith-filled, funny, and deep thinker on issues of gender, sex, and faith.
Utterly Catholic and utterly original, provocative and passionate, I recommend this book highly, and her blog, which can be found at this link.
And... that's all I have time for today!

Greetings, Shea Readers... Now About That Conscience Blogging...

Oh, I see that Mark Shea just gave me a link (thanks, Mark!). My series on conscience just wrapped up, at least for now, but is just down a few posts, or you could click on the 'talking about conscience' label at the bottom of this post. I do think it's crucial for us all to get clear as we can in our own minds about what conscience is, since it appears we are facing serious attacks on it and will be for the foreseeable future. What we don't understand, we will not fight to preserve.

Catholicism Isn't Great...

You know, I don't do this very often, but once in a while I read something on another blog that is just so... I don't know. What I would say if I was as good a writer as this person or something like that.
Anyhow, this guy is my new favorite blogger, and is worth the link, to say the least. He claims to be 18 years old, which I really find hard to believe, and I am eagerly looking forward to the scandalous moment when he is unmasked and his true 50-something identity exposed to the world.
Here is a small snippet of a recent post:

The Cross is not an event that took place at one time, at one place in the world. The cross is a spear plunged by God into the void, and the world swells and exists around it.
The life of the Blessed Virgin Mary – the Immaculate Conception – was not merely a remarkable life compared to the human beings around her. The life of Our Lady was the life humanity was made for. The Thing Itself.
The Sacraments of the Church – Communion, Confession and the like – are not mere supplements to life, as one might be supplemented by drugs, literature, friendship, or romance. No, the Sacraments are the Thing that all supplements imitate – from heroin to meditation, adventure to friendship. The Sacraments are 7 rocks flung with violence into the muddy water of things-that-make-life-worth-living. All else is ripple...
Catholicism isn’t great; Catholicism is.

 Read the rest of it - this is just a taste!

Good Advice

Fr. Michael Winn came and gave a talk on Eastern Christianity at MH last week. On his blog he gives the twelve steps need to become the saint God made you to be. Read, and do!

An Interesting New Blog

This looks like a good blog resource for people in pro-life work. One woman's journey through abortion to recovery and healing. We need to get stories like this out there, I believe, and this woman is very courageous to make herself vulnerable in this way.