Digital Contraception

I wonder if I should just stop there, with that phrase - "digital contraception" - attached to this image, and allow us time to ponder this picture?

In this crowd of "popearazzi", (if I might coin a phrase,) an older woman, face radiant like Moses on the mountain, gazes without obstruction on Pope Francis, who appears to be looking at her. She's not touching him but is clearly touched. The younger woman, hand actually grasping the Shepherd's hand, holds in her other hand a smartphone, through whose 3 x 5 screen she stares at a pixelated image of the actual man five feet away from her. Granted, she too is touched. Both are joyful and smiling, but there is something sociologically intriguing about this image. Which of these two is having an actual, personal encounter? A 'communion of persons' for only a fleeting moment?

I think we all know where this is going. And you may have strong feelings about it.

Some history. Facebook launched 11 years ago this year. YouTube is just 10, and Twitter is 9 years old. The first iPhone debuted only 8 years ago. What a decade it's been. The digital revolution is in full swing. A tsunami of smartphones brimming with social-sharing apps has washed over nearly every continent and seems to be omnipresent, popping up even in the most remote of Third World villages. It's important we talk about its effect on us as persons, called to interpersonal relationships. I hope to do this in a circumscribed manner. So let's shift gears for a few paragraphs and then we'll return to this pregnant phrase, pardon the pun, of "digital contraception."

Decades before the digital revolution, in fact, shortly after the sexual revolution of the late 60's, the Theology of the Body debuted. It's a biblical and philosophical reflection on the human person by St. John Paul II; a glorious life-giving vision of the potential of human love. It speaks of how our sexual complementarity as created by God is meant to be a fruitful sign, imaging the gratuitous gift-giving nature of God Himself, Who lavished on creation from the very beginning a design of communion and complementarity that, when embraced, is creative and efficacious on many levels. It's an extensive catechesis on the human person as imago dei, a being fully realized in relationship, in family, for God in His deepest essence, as St. John Paul II wrote, "is not a solitude. God is a family."

Those who have reflected upon this beautiful teaching of the Holy Father, who have opened their hearts, minds, and bodies to its life-giving truth, can certainly attest to this fruitfulness in their own lives. When one receives the teaching, which in essence is Christianity itself, the gospel "reloaded", then the walls come tumbling down. Illusions are blown away. Misconceptions about who God is and who we are get a proverbial facelift and our faith is lifted! One finally sees within one's masculinity or femininity, not a confused and solitary shuffling around for meaning and purpose that we must construe by ourselves, but a divine dance. A holy communion. A divine romance.

Circling back... Today, the life-giving joy that flows from living the theology of the body shines all the more brighter as we live and move and breathe in this increasingly suffocating, contraceptive culture. When I speak of contraception and of a contraceptive mentality in the present culture, it isn't merely the biological block. It isn't merely latex or a pill that is the issue. That exterior contraception is really the manifestation of a deeper interior contraception. An emotional contraception. A kind of spiritual contraception that holds back the heart and soul of one person from another. We see it everywhere. We struggle with it at multiple levels. In our frenetic activism we've failed as receivers. We've neglected to become that naked heart to the real and raw encounters of everyday life.

In his beautiful reflections on our common home, Laudato Si, Pope Francis wrote "We were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact with nature." (Laudato Si, 44) Can we add our little gadgets to this list?

Pope Francis advised us that "the accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality which pulls us in one direction. It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life... a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything." (Laudato Si, 113)

These naked hearts, open to encounters with the real world of persons and signs and wonders often feel as though they are the person who escaped from Plato's dark cave of self-inverted shadows and they've seen the light. They return to the cave changed. They try to express what they've seen and heard and touched with their hands but everyone in the cave is touching screens. 

The walls of smartphones that we've seen in the photos and videos of the recent visit of Pope Francis are certainly not intrinsically evil, or even sinful, but they sure seem strange. In a certain sense, these phone walls can be just as much a block to the life-giving call of humanity to love as other forms of contraception. I think you all know what I'm talking about. You all have experienced it in your own lives, in restaurants, movie theaters, workplaces, sidewalks and even busy streets.

Dozens of times per day, people hold up a very thin wall in front of faces. A 3 x 5 screen that aids us remarkably in communicating with others, yet too often hinders the communion with the real flesh and blood right in front of us.

Again, Pope Francis' insights here are spot on. In the Joy of the Gospel, he wrote that some people "want their interpersonal relationships provided by sophisticated equipment, by screens and systems which can be turned on and off on command. Meanwhile, the Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction. True faith in the incarnate Son of God is inseparable from self-giving, from membership in the community, from service, from reconciliation with others. The Son of God, by becoming flesh, summoned us to the revolution of tenderness." (Evangelii Guadium, 88)

During the recent visit of Pope Francis to the United States, watching video and looking at photographs from the various places he went, I was struck again by this reality of "digital contraception". I fall into the same struggle, I wrestle as much I'm sure as anyone with the wonder of these little gadgets but it leaves me wondering. Many of us touch these screens so many more times a day then we touch other people's hands and little heads of children, and blades of grass and the bark of trees. Our touchscreens have left us out of touch with the very real world we've been placed in by God. I think we need once again to possess our possessions rather than have our possessions possess us. Let's all make a promise to be more present, to be more of that naked heart who can really receive the other person in front of us. For as C.S. Lewis once wrote,

"Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses." 

____________________________

Originally posted here for the TOB Institute

The Marriage Made in Heaven: Soul Meets Body

Ignore for a moment the strange name of the band, Death Cab for Cutie. If they knew how big they’d become on the music scene, lead singer Ben Gibbard confessed, they would’ve thought twice about picking that obscure name anyway. ("Ben Gibbard - Interview". Time Out Chicago. August 24, 2011) In this month of Valentine’s where we seek the warmth of love amidst the cold of winter, I’d like to take a look at this band’s sweet song “Soul Meets Body” and their search for meaning in life.


As with everything in this blog that references pop culture and Catholicism, we sprinkle a little holy water on it and voila! We have something mystical. It’s not meant to be an imprimatur sanctioning the entire life and work of the artist. Reading the lyrics to the tunes he’s penned, Gibbard seems to be a struggling soul who vacillates between a great hope in love’s lasting power and the hollowness that sees this world as all there is. But in this struggle for meaning, so often, great beauty is born. 



From their album, Codes and Keys, released in May 2011, “Soul Meets Body” soars as an achingly beautiful song with echoes of the original plan of God for humanity. It pines for that original unity in which the world and all of us were intended to live, and from which we have all been sundered by sin.



I want to live where soul meets body and let the sun wrap its arms around me and bathe my skin in water cool and cleansing and feel, feel what its like to be new

I always thrill at the hearing of songs like this in popular music, from bands not necessarily religious. It points to that universal thirst for a harmony between flesh and spirit that can be found everywhere, in everything. Musicians today are scratching out their notes in the cynicism of a post-Christian age, amidst scandals and hypocrisy, and even radical doubts and attacks on the existence of God. Some are truly seeking a deeper meaning in things, looking for answers. I find Death Cab for Cutie more real than most in facing these deeper questions. 

As Catholics, we believe God stamped this thirst for healing and wholeness in the human heart to remind us of eternity, and nothing in this temporary world can totally quench that thirst. Nothing can snuff out the desire either, not even a poor first experience of religion, or the scandalous example of some believers. It seems a wound from the past shaped lead singer Gibbard’s vision of the Catholic faith he was raised in. It’s revealed in the song "I Will Follow You Into the Dark":

In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black and I held my tongue as she told me "Son, fear is the heart of love" So I never went back 



This experience is beyond tragic, since we know St. John tells us “perfect love casts out all fear.” (1 John 4:18) The wounds of an earthly father can change our view of the Heavenly Father. The sins of a school master can alter our knowing the love of the Divine Master. I wonder how effective this teaching of fear of punishment might be for the young as an introduction to God. Hmm. Ponder this thought of Pope Benedict XVI:



Our first experience of God is so important; we either experience Him as the police guard ready to punish or as creative love that awaits.



Creative love is what we long for, and in fact it’s what God wants to pour out over our hearts through the Church’s sacraments. Sadly for some, individual pieces of the conduit this truth can flow through (namely human beings) can be a bit... rusty. But that’s our fallen human nature, not the Divine water of grace. Gibbard sings that he “never went back” to the Catholic Church (he refers to himself as an “indoctrinated Catholic even though I haven't been to church of my own volition in 10 or 15 years now." - www.filter-mag.com. September 3, 2010) But not going back doesn’t mean he’s not moving forward. Back to the tune of Soul Meets Body:



And I cannot guess what we'll discover when we turn the dirt with our palms cupped like shovels but I know our filthy hands can wash one another’s and not one speck will remain

We must keep digging. This digging deep into life’s experiences can reveal hidden treasures. Listening to the ache for meaning can itself give us meaning. I believe the key here is the element of the journey. The ancients termed it fides quarens intellectum - faith seeking understanding. And we do this together as the song sings, for we need a reunion of not only soul and body, but of person to person, and God and humanity;


And I do believe it’s true that there are roads left in both of our shoes but if the silence takes you then I hope it takes me too. So brown eyes I hold you near cause you’re the only song I want to hear. A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere... Where soul meets body...

For all those seeking a love that satisfies and that original harmony between soul and body, the spiritual and the material, man and woman, there is a melody playing. It’s the Song of Songs. It’s the Creative Love that awaits in the Heart of Jesus, in the ocean of His mercy. Yes, even despite the oil spills of humanity’s sins. He’ll wash one another in this mercy, and not one speck will remain!

In the music video for the song, which I highly recommend watching (below) we see a host of musical notes peeping out of a darkened forest floor as Ben Gibbard walks past. He meets his band in a little cabin and they play their song. We watch the notes rise up through the canopy of trees, over forest and field, past houses and towns and cities, to the sea. Some notes are detained, caught and even captured along the way. But a remnant make it through all obstacles. Those musical notes are each of us willing to seek and hopeful to find. We sing and cry out to the sea to “bathe my skin in water cool and cleansing. And feel, feel what its like to be new...”




Let us pray for a refreshing look at the waters of our baptism. The sea of grace is there for us, and we must swim it!

“Put out into the deep on the sea of history with the enthusiasm of the new evangelization."
- Blessed John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 6



____________________________________________________
Originally published in Phaith Magazine, February 2012

Why I Love Being a Catholic Teacher



I absolutely love being a Catholic educator and I cannot imagine teaching in any other realm, or in any other light than that of the Sanctuary Lamp, nestled near the Altar of God.


For me, it means Jesus is close at hand. It means the Master is just a heartbeat away, and He is the heart of my classroom. For me, being a Catholic educator means exactly the opposite of what some might imagine teaching religion to be (religio means "binding"). I AM FREE.




I am free to think, to question, to seek and to explore the universe God made and to find the truth of things and the inexhaustible mystery of things. I can live and move and have my being in a relationship that God has joined and no one can tear asunder: the marriage of faith and reason, biology and theology, heaven and earth, at once the mathematically measurable and the mysterious. 



“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and science... It is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute a truly religious attitude.” 

- Albert Einstein

As a Catholic teacher... 



I am free to inject into my words the beliefs of my heart. I can let the light of the name through Whom all things were made, JESUS, shine throughout the work of my classroom and not fearfully hide it under a basket. My Catholic faith takes me out of the present Dark Ages that divorce God and Science. In the world of Catholic education, they are still happily married.


In a noisy age full of distortion and media deception, my work can be a subtle kind of inception. Like Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Inception, I am planting the seed of a thought into all of my students that they are called to greatness. A greatness not only in this world... in any field they choose, but beyond the rim of this world, in everlasting relationships expanding towards an eternal horizon.


I can tell you without hindrance that life is not just about acquiring facts but more importantly friendships. We are destined to be a communion of saints burning with the desire to know not only the world in which we live but the Word in Whom and through Whom all things were made.



I can be holistic in this call to holiness, weaving the threads of all things sacred and secular into the tapestry of my classroom, never divorcing what God has joined. Since the WORD became flesh and dwells among us.... everything is holy now.


I love being a Catholic educator because here I can “speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth..." so thank You, God.

But there are many false images of what Catholic education looks like in the media. Played to death is the idea that the Church hates and fears science, that it is outdated, antiquated, and always belated when it comes to new discoveries. This is a lie pure and simple. 

The Catholic vision is not to be confused with a rigid, fundamentalist, creationist view of the world so often ridiculed in the media. I’d like to shine some light on the lies and dispel the shadows:



Science was actually born in the Church, as was the concept of education as we know it today, the idea of the university.

Some Fun Facts (taken from the work of Ben Wiker and Jonathan Wright): 




Fr. Giambattista Riccioli was the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body. 

Fr. Athanasius Kircher has been called the father of Egyptology. 

Fr. Roger Boscovich has been called the father of modern atomic theory. Copernicus the astronomer was a Catholic, and later in life it is thought that he was ordained a priest and actually administered a diocese. 

Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk, is hailed as the father of modern genetics.

 Lazzaro Spallanzani, one of the greatest biologists of the eighteenth century, was a Catholic priest.


In the sciences it was the Jesuit order in particular who stand out as pioneers; there are some 35 craters on the moon named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

 By the eighteenth century, they had contributed "to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter's surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn's rings. 

They theorized about the circulation of the blood, the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon effected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light. Star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics..." - Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits, 2004, p. 189

"In January 1933, the Belgian mathematician and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre traveled with Albert Einstein to California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his Big Bang theory, Einstein stood up applauded, and said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”

 (from this excellent article)

During this Catholic Schools Week, I want to invite all of us to meditate on a quote from Blessed John Paul II that I’ve often shared with my own students: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth - in a word, to know himself - so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”

Family Bonding

The first thing that a person finds in life and the last to which he holds out his hand,
and the most precious that he possess, even if he does not realize it, is family life.
- Blessed Adolph Kolping

The history of mankind, the history of salvation, passes by way of the family...
The family is placed at the center of the great struggle between good and evil,
between life and death, between love and all that is opposed to love.
- Pope John Paul II

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
- Pope John Paul II

The family is the great catechism God has given the world. The work of our lifetime is to learn how to read it and then study it prayerfully.
- Mike Aquilina

Caution: Contents May Be Hot

A few years ago there was a famous (or infamous) lawsuit filed against a certain fast food chain, claiming they were negligent in neglecting to tell the consumer who burned herself while spilling coffee that the contents of said coffee cup could potentially be, get this, HOT.

In lieu of this apparent no-brainer, many wagged their fries and threw up their cheeseburgers (sorry, that didn't come out right); "Are you kidding me? Everyone knows coffee is HOT!"

Next Sunday in beautiful Lancaster County, PA, I'll be starting off a week long Head and Heart Immersion course on Blessed John Paul II's Theology of the Body. Sure, it's been around since 1984, and the addresses began in 1979, and the seed form for this whole teaching can be found in his epic work Love and Responsibility written in the 1950's, and it's all inspired by the Bible itself which has been around for some time.... but I would daresay we'll need a label on it... CAUTION: CONTENTS MAY BE HOT.

Why? Because sadly many think that the Church is quite cool, if not cold, when it comes to the topic of human sexuality. It's all about the rules, the prohibitions, the commandments. "Control yourselves! At least until you're married!" And worse still, many imagine, sexuality has nothing to do with God or the "spiritual" life Catholics are supposed to be all about. Many seem to think of God's love as an insipid, disembodied, "nice uncle" kind of love. We think it's enough to be "nice" to one another, as God has been "nice" to us. Blah! CONTENTS: LUKEWARM. And we know what the Bible has to say about what is lukewarm (Rev3:15-16).

The real version of the truth of who we are and what we're called to be is a blazing and consuming fire of love in the visible universe! The Catholic Faith is a living flame, carried by Apostolic runners throughout the centuries, despite any who have perhaps lost that fire in themselves or in their delivery of the Flame to us. But the Flame is the same that burns in the Sacred Heart of Jesus Who said "I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!" (Luke 12:49), despite perhaps any poor filters that have carried it to you.

We grow up hearing words like chastity and we think it's a cold no to passion, when in reality, it's "a vivid and separate thing... Chastity [therefore] does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc." (G.K. Chesterton, The Daily News, Nov 4, 1905). 


The papal preacher, Fr. Cantalamessa, who gives retreats to the Pope and the College of Cardinals (talk about a high pressure job) said, "In the world we find eros without agape; among believers we often find agape without eros." 


This must change. It's all about rediscovering our Faith, human love in the Divine plan, and redeeming the language of love! As St. John Climacus once wrote, over 1400 years ago: "The chaste one is he who drives out eros with Eros." Lust pales in the light of true love. Human love is perfected and purified when it's open to the Divine Fire! Eros and Agape are meant to be married, and in Jesus they truly are. In the theology of our bodies too, they are meant for marriage. God is simply awaiting our response to His wedding proposal.


Please pray for me as the teacher (holding the torch!) and for the students of next week's course, coming as they are from all over the world (from Haiti, China, Mexico and Canada and across the United States); the relay racers who will receive the flame. May we all be open to the Divine Love starting this Sunday, which providentially is the Feast of Pentecost!


CAUTION: CONTENTS MAY BE HOT!

An Experience of the Father’s Love

An Experience of the Father’s Love

“We love because He first loved Us” – John 4:19—

ONLY 5 SPOTS LEFT!

When:  Friday, May 6^th at 6pm – Saturday, 

             May 7^th at 6pm

Where:   Malvern Retreat House

              315 South Warren Avenue

              Malvern, PA  19355

Cost:  $110 (includes meals and accommodations)

$50 deposit due with registration, refundable before April 6

Remaining $60 due by April 20 (checks payable to Catholic Young Adults of Chester County) There will be a waitlist if retreat is full at the time of registration.

Join the Catholic Young Adults of Chester County (CYACC) as we celebrate

the greatest love of all; the love of God!

We will be joined by Bill Donaghy of the Theology of the Body Institute 

as he leads us in a truly transformative retreat.

For more information, please go to www.cyacc.org or email us at cyacc1@gmail.com

If You Say YES Then...

If you answer YES to at least 5 of the following questions you must do the next logical step. Are you ready? Operators are standing by...


1. Do you want to be happy? 
2. Are you distressed by the current situation in Libya? 
3. Have you ever prayed that Lady Gaga and/or Madonna would turn their creative passion into a volcano of love for God and the beauty and gift of femininity?
4. Have you ever experienced divorce in your family or your extended family and wanted it to go away? 
5. Have you ever dreamed of finding perfect love? 
6. Do you like food? 
7. Do you enjoy intense and uplifting conversations about the deepest questions of life with people of all ages from all over the country and beyond? 
8. Would you like to lose yourself (and find yourself) in a deep heart and head academic immersion into the inspired meditations of a man about to be declared "Blessed" by the Catholic Church?
9. Are you intrigued by Amish people? 

10. Could you use a week of retreat with Holy Mass, adoration, confession, and praise and worship music? 
11. Would you like to hear me sing 80's music at random intervals while quoting from Blessed John Paul II ? 
12. Would you like to possibly find your soulmate. I'm just saying it happened once before. 
13. Have you been hearing a lot of press about Theology of the Body and always wanted to learn more? 
14. Would you like to celebrate Pope John Paul II's May 1st beatification in a really substantial way, one that would make him really happy, even happier than he is right now in the Beatific Vision (if that's possible)?


If you answered YES to at least three of these queries, then really need to CLICK THIS. Then scroll down to June 12!!

Registration Open for TOB Immersion Course!

I'm happy to announce an upcoming course I've been invited to teach again: The Head and Heart Immersion Course on Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body. It's already opened for early registration and will be offered at Black Rock Retreat Center in beautiful Lancaster County, PA. It runs from June 12 to the 17th. You can download the flyer with all the info here. To register online, simply click here. All our week-long retreats include:


• Five days of learning and interactive lecture (30 hours of classroom time).
• Time for relaxation and networking with others surrounded by 100 acres of beautiful wooded countryside at Black Rock Retreat Center in Quarryville, PA (50 miles west of Philadelphia).
• Daily Mass, adoration, and confession will be available.
• Round trip shuttle from the Philadelphia Airport is available.


Teaching the late Pope's meditations on the gift of human sexuality and its connection to Divine Love will take on a whole new light this June. It will be just a month after John Paul II's beatification on May 1 in Rome! So I'll be relishing quoting again and again "Blessed" John Paul II! 




What is the Theology of the Body? Basically, a reflection on what it means to be human, male and female. Where did we come from and where are we going? It looks at the two greatest questions we can ask; "Who am I?" And "Who is God?" The starting point for getting to the answers is us. It looks at the human body not just as a biological organism, but as a theological reality; a work of God. We look at what it is about us that makes us so restless in this world, different from the animals, always hungry, always searching for More? And then it looks at love as a lead into the answer. The Pope says that in our call to communion with each other as man and woman, in human love, there is something of the Divine, something touching on the Infinite. All human love is a sign, an icon, a pointer to Something Beyond ourselves.


God has stamped right in our bodies a mystery that reveals Who He is! You see, a man is called to be a gift, in his very body, for the woman. And the woman is called to receive this gift right in her very body as woman. And this beautiful coming together of husband and wife creates new life! And the union, as beautiful, powerful, and wonderful as it can be, is really just the first sparks of the Love that we are made for beyond this world. The Church says that in the joys of their love, God gives spouses and families a foretaste of the joys of Heaven!


I hope you can join me for this powerful week of prayer and reflection. Those who attend find it a life-changing experience, and a transformation in the Spirit for both head and heart! Indeed, the whole person! To learn more about this teaching of Pope John Paul II's, visit TOBInstitute.org

Signs, Signs, Everywhere's Signs...

"... I have made you a sign for the house of Israel..." 
- Ezekiel 12


This morning's first reading at Mass was a bit... dark. The prophet Ezekiel was inspired to literally embody the exile that unfaithful Israel was about to become. He "shouldered the burden" and dug a hole in the wall of the city and escaped in the darkness of night to show the people where their sin was leading them. A sign in his very body of what was to come. God loves teaching us this way, through physical signs and symbols.


A few millennia away from Ezekiel's experience, sitting in the church pew, close to my wife, with a hand on our little boy's soft head of hair, I had a whole other train of thought start chugging down the tracks of my mind. 


"I have made you a sign..."


The summer has allowed me to go, most days, to daily Mass with my family. I'd heard it from Rebecca but now I see how others love to watch our little boy - quite literally the "MASScot" of St. Charles parish. Playing with his books, begging for goldfish, and pointing to Father at the altar (affectionately referred to as "ZAH!"), he brings loads of smiles to the retirees, young couples, and rosary ladies (glue of the Church, seriously) who attend Mass with us.


"I have made you a sign."


It's easy to see that little squirt as a sign of God's love in the world. Any child still dripping with the waters of Baptism seems still in communion with the angels, don't they? But then I thought of Rebecca this morning, and myself, and our son. And the thoughts got bigger. We must all become like little children.... magnets of joy, wonder, trust, and love for others to see. We are a family. We are a sign. A sign in our very bodies of what is to come. And what is that, you ask? LOVE, BLISS, COMMUNION... THE ONENESS. A unity in distinction, three persons in one family. Sound familiar? Whoa. I got schooled by the Holy Spirit, once again. "ZAH!"


An examination of conscience kicked in.... What is the language of my body saying in that pew, in this place, in the grocery store, at the bank, the mall, the many places where we live and move and make our living? Eyes are seeing us.... this little family. Are we a sign of what is to come? We are called to be! Are we in love?

The history of mankind, the history of salvation, passes by way of the family... The family is placed at the center of the great struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between love and all that is opposed to love.

- Pope John Paul II 

I've seen and heard (and been) the counter-sign often enough. Visit a department store at a peak hour or sale and you'll hear all manner of unlove, non-bliss, disunion and indifference in families. With bitterness, division, fracture, and a radical individualism, we can become rotted out building blocks for a culture not long for this world. How can any society stand on such tremulous ground? This is starting to sound as dark as that first reading from Ezekiel this morning... In this present darkness, the faithful family does seem to be exiled!


Hmmm. Well, it's always darkest before the dawn, they say. And such darkness has a way of highlighting the light. Goodness, patience, charity, and basic human kindness have never shown so bright as now, when their absence can seem so mainstream. We have to pray that the morning star still rises in our hearts. And look for grace in the right place. We personally need to get our butts to Mass as often as possible. For into darkness we might go, but for the grace of God poured out on that altar, and deep into the heart of every child who believes. God help us!

To the family is entrusted the task of striving, first and foremost, to unleash the forces of good...

- Pope John Paul II

A MOE Abundant Life

Last week was nearly a "grace overload" for the Donaghys. While we stayed at Normandy Farm Conference Center for the Theology of the Body Congress (which was incredibly inspiring) we had the pleasure of hosting the Missionaries of the Eucharist at our humble abode.

From the very first night (when all 12 of us stayed under one roof) these young missionaries filled our house with prayer. The MOEs, as they are affectionately called, are a traveling band of young people (some post college, some teenagers) who spend every summer "walking from Lewiston, Maine to Washington, DC to proclaim the beauty of the Catholic faith to everyone we meet, specifically through the Theology of the Body." 

They stay with host families, in church basements, school halls, anywhere they can rest their heads. And they'll talk to anyone; businessmen, families, kids, drug addicts, homeless men and women, the lonely and forgotten, and the young and materialistic. Everyone on the road for these young people is just another Jesus they haven't met yet.

They sang Evening Prayer from the Church's Liturgy of the Hours, they goofed off with our little boy, they prayed grace reverently before we tore into those five delicious pizzas, they talked to us and to each other into the wee hours of the night on faith, and witness, sharing stories, and the power of God's love so needed in the modern world.

I remember Erin speaking of the "beautiful people" that she and another of the walkers met that day in the city of Philadelphia. They sounded like they were the ones being given so much in this walk of faith. What a tremendous gift and a comfort to know this much wonder, patience, and hope is in the hearts of these young people; it enriched us and it keeps enriching everyone they stay with. They are truly walking the walk!

For more info and to see if you can join them next summer for a part or all of the Walk, contact them here!

Bible Smackdown - The Moses Edition

When Pope John Paul II called for a New Evangelization, he asked that it be "new in ardor, methods, and expressions." I hope this is what he meant... Bible Smackdown is one of my ridiculous attempts (and successes, mind you) at getting my students to read and know (and love I hope) the Bible - the people, places, events, and lessons to be learned in the Word. So enjoy this little "teaser trailer" of our last episode!

THE SKINNY: 1. There are three teams, electing one "Moses" each (beards and robes provided).

2. All the students compile trivia questions from the appropriate book(s) of the Bible, our notes, etc. I add a few of my own as well.

3. I ask a question of the prospective Moseses... ending with the sonorous "ding" of Tibetian chimes, and the points go to the first hand up with the correct answer!

Two heseds (Hebrew for 'mercy') are given a game, where a Moses can ask his team for help "remembering" his life story and God's work in it. THE PRIZE:

The winning team gets to skip a homework assignment the following week!