Spousal Prayer

{I want to begin this blog by promoting the ’cause’ of a woman I came to know in Iowa that I consider to be truly saintly: Sr. Pat Scherer. And here I mean by saintly holiness in work boots. She gave most of her consecrated religious life to the service of the ‘least among us’ (especially immigrants) in a spirit of bright joy and feisty humility that left me forever changed. In fact, she opened me to an abiding affection for Sudanese St. Josephine Bakhita, to whom she was deeply devoted. You may not have known Sr. Pat, but let me say she is a worthy candidate for this award — click here if you want to see and agree}

Okay, on to today’s topic…

I have to say that Deacon Jim Keating at IPF in Omaha is one of the most human of theologians I have ever known, and everything that comes out of his theological mind is veritable gold. I remember when Bishop Pates in Des Moines and I interviewed Dr. Keating on the radio, the Bishop remarked during the break: You can tell he prays.

If you are someone who likes to listen to podcasts, Discerning Hearts has a trove of Keating audio files that are worth downloading. Click here.

But today I am writing about Dr. Keating specifically because I just found out that his latest book is out, and its on one of his favorite subjects: marriage. The book’s core thesis is that marital intimacy, which includes the sharing of the whole of one’s life with one’s spouse, includes the sharing on one’s relationship with God in prayer. In fact, inasmuch as marriage is a sacrament its very essence is a mutual giving of divine grace that, in the ideal, draws each spouse deeper into intimacy with God. Spousal prayer, in this sense, unlocks the latent power of the sacrament to become grace-dealing in marriage and family life; and becomes a source of redemptive healing and transformation. And let me say that this book’s wisdom not just for spouses, but it’s also a very useful source for preachers and pastors whose vocation is to cultivate the life of prayer in married couples.

Read this summary and consider getting a copy:

Spousal Prayer: A Way to Marital Happiness affirms that the sharing of hearts is a necessary commitment in both marriage and in prayer. If we can learn what the key elements of sharing the heart are, and equally what the key elements of receiving the heart of another are, then we will know the greatest of intimacy in both prayer and in marriage.

The mingling of the love of spouse with the love of God has always been the foundation for a life of marital peace, creativity, and vibrancy, not to mention sanctity. In fact, we cannot even understand what marriage is unless we look at how Christ loved His Bride, the Church, till the end (cf. Jn 13:1). For the baptized, Christ has joined His love for the Church to the Sacrament of Marriage.

Each couple is called to allow Jesus to bring them into this great love of His. The couple is not supposed to do all the “work” of love, but rather is called to let Jesus gift them with His own spousal love. In other words, couples should let Jesus live His spousal love for the Church over again in their own love for one another. They do this by simply asking Him in prayer to do so, and by sharing their deepest needs and desires with Him. Marriage is not a “self-help” relationship; it is a deep partnership with Christ.

God of the Bungles

As I have said before, it never ceases to amaze me how many extraordinary insights have come my way by means of everyday people. This is what I am most grateful for in regard to Neal Obstat, that I have become less deaf to God’s voice flashing in life all around me.

Onassis Wisdom

An employee at a local Catholic institution in New Orleans shared with me last Fall a quote from, of all people, Jacqueline Kennedy, and said this quote changed her life the day she heard it as it helped reshaped her priorities in regard to her at-the-time adolescent children.

If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.

She said, “I realized that even though I was doing good things in and for the Church, it was coming at the expense of time with my children.”

Core insight: the final meaning and authenticity of our life’s work revolves around how we tend to those “first things first” that divine Providence has entrusted into our care. And their is no more precious treasure entrusted to parents than children.

It also provides a simple and potent means of discernment: make certain that all your evolving commitments serve the demands of your God-given primary vocation, whatever that may be.

As my children grow, I realize that time is not on my side, that my opportunity for influence is relatively short and terrifyingly decisive, and that my children spell love most vividly as T-I-M-E.

And time is something I have come to relish “wasting” with them.

Not Good Enough, And It’s Okay

My wife and I strive to do our best, repent often for our frequent failings and trust that our decision to daily pray for our children is by far the most crucial choice we make every day.

Thank God God can make good use of our bungles, if we give them to Him. On many nights, it’s my only sleep aid.

Lord, help us to love them as you love them….

Spread love everywhere you go: first of all in your own house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor… Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.”

– Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Re-post for ♥ Day: A CRUCIFIXION TYPE LOVE

Satan once appeared to parish-priest St John Vianney and said to him, “If there were only three priests like you, my kingdom would fall.”

Let me suggest that if there were three husbands like the one this man desires to be, God’s Kingdom would rise. . .

Aye Yai Yai

Just when you thought there were still safe-zones where children could remain free from the mesmerizing power of technologies, spaces where children might still find their way ‘back to nature’ and enjoy at least one life’s irreducibly simple pleasures, you find your hopes at once dashed in the toilet:

Click here if you dare.

But so as to rescue you from the precipice of despair, I include here for your enjoyment a little girl who found Jesus in the i-Less safe-zone of her parents’ bed. Last time I posted this, it was my most viewed post. Click here.

The Cause of My Joy

Patricia Ann Neal, my bride ∞

Shame and Honor

[Note: as I have no time to write new posts these days, I am posting older posts that I never made public because I was not convinced they were done. But, well enough...]

I was talking with a colleague the other day about the breakdown of marriage and family life in the West. In particular, we discussed the specific role of shame and honor in our culture.

Here’s a half-digested spin-off from that lengthy conversation…

True Shame, Right Honor

All cultures, including our own, employ the power of shame and honor to perpetuate and preserve certain social mores. Shame and honor serve as internalized regulators of behavior that relate individuals to social norms, and are absolutely essential companions to a just social order that rewards and punishes those who comply with or rebel against a society’s accepted norms. Shame is an internalized suffering of social censure that greets deviant behavior, while honor serves as an internalized affirmation that accompanies social approbation for one’s socially acceptable conduct.

We agreed that, in this sense, shame is not in itself an undesirable thing. But we added an important qualifier: shame and honor must be founded on the presupposition that the social norms they relate us to are grounded in truth, goodness and beauty, and lead to the cultivation of a community of virtue. Shame and honor are not in and of themselves good or bad, but take on a good-bad character inasmuch as they are related rightly/wrongly to the truth of the human person.

Of course, a thousand nuances flow from this that clarify what is meant by “good” and “bad” shame, but the general point stands that all societies require internalized dispositions of shame and honor if they are to cohere in an orderly way.

My colleague, playing off this point, made an interesting observation: much can be said about what a culture values as true and good and beautiful by the way it parses out shame and honor; or by who it shames or honors. Especially, he opined, it’s instructive to look carefully at the way it informs sexuality, marriage and family life.

Cohabit

We talked more about the almost universal practice of couple-cohabitation before marriage, and its bedfellow, non-marital sex and mused about the extraordinary shift in the culture of shame in this regard: while at one time premarital cohabiting and non-marital sex were considered socially shameful, now those who even infer that such behavior is shameful themselves feel the powerful censure of shame.

This inversion of honor and shame makes the “cost” of thinking, speaking and acting Catholicly much higher, which in turn requires from Catholics a strong sense of Catholic identity, a strong network of like-minded faithful to lend support and a sustained commitment to live as a disciple of Christ who is willing to carry the cross of shame when it’s called for. This “cost” of enduring shame in the act of speaking the truth in love, my colleague said, is what Jesus must have meant in the 8th Beatitude: 

Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.  Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Side Point

An aside, based on my experience. Over the years, especially when I was working on a college campus, I have noted how deeply this cultural shift has penetrated young Catholics. I have had the blessing of watching college-age men and women come alive in their faith, and become wildly desirous to be orthodox and live out their faith. At the same time, very many times, these same young people were actively having sex outside of marriage with (in some cases) another ‘devout’ Catholic. What intrigued me most, though, was not that they had fallen into this pattern of behavior but rather that they often found themselves deeply puzzled by the fact that they didn’t “feel” any shame about their behavior, and wondered how something could really be so wrong when it felt so right. At times they would conclude that ∴ God must not be displeased, as they equated their own internal emotional feelings of shame/pleasure with divine displeasure/pleasure.

I recall one time when I confronted a young man on this issue because of his prominent role in a church ministry. He was a daily Mass goer, frequenting nocturnal adoration and passionately involved in Church activities. I will never forget our conversation, and at the end of it he said in a very matter-of-fact manner regarding his sexual activity with his Catholic girlfriend: “It may seem unorthodox, but we don’t feel bad, we don’t think God minds and we have no intention of stopping. We even pray afterwards…”

Indeed, how deeply we breathe in our cultural air without even knowing how profoundly it informs our Catholic identity! How important our Church’s teaching stands as a prophetic voice apart from culture to help us sift out the wheat from the chaff. Making the hard counter-cultural choice of internalizing this voice of Christ speaking in his Church beats at the very heart of conversion. It is this graced conversion alone that will render us able to face and embrace a Christ-culture wherein we even come to feel the honor of goodness and the shame of sin.

Insight?

Yes, I know, I only here state the obvious.

I guess the personally useful insight I received from our conversation was this: the Church’s call to each Christian is to first be converted in the midst of our culture, allowing culture to be converted in, and then through us. And, in light of our conversation above, we are called to evangelize and cultivate a culture of shame-honor based on the true-good-beautiful as revealed in Christ. It calls for a creative, impassioned and informed response.

 

Heart-rending daughters. . .

At the last father-daughter dance I attended in Iowa, a song came on that took me off guard and made me get teary eyed as I danced with my two girls — one on each foot. My daughter Maria now has banned the song from our playlist because of my “embarrassing” reaction.

This song I have dubbed simply the most cruel ever written for any father who is blessed to have daughters:

Affair of the Mind

I was just talking to a woman the other day here in Louisiana whose husband had indulged in pornography for several years of their marriage.

It’s crushing to listen to the pain she suffered.

What stood out most to me in her recounting of its effects in their marriage was the sense that her own feminine dignity was traumatically demeaned and betrayed. She said the progressive erosion of that trust on which marital love is founded made her feel worthless, and her vivid awareness of what vile things must have coursed through his mind each time he looked at her made her “physically nauseous.”

Revolting

In the Christian view, men stand or fall on their vocation to honor the dignity of women, and to honor them precisely as they exist in the mind and heart of God.

This point was graphically made to me once by a priest in the Confessional a few years ago — “Look, your wife is God’s daughter before she’s your bride, and He expects you to treat her like His daughter. He loved her before you did, far more than you do now and will judge you one day on how well you stewarded this pearl of great price.”

Daughters of the King, the Most High and glorious God.

The Christian gentleman stands among the most radical, counter-cultural avatars of our church’s impending New Evangelization, and the act of total renunciation of pornography can be, for those bound by its loathsome chains, a Christ-Gent’s extreme sign that God’s chivalrous revolution is at powerfully at work.

By George, Not Same-Sex Marriage

Cardinal George has taken it upon himself, even in his illness, to be the “public intellectual” in the public square on behalf of the Catholic tradition in response to the rapid sprint our legal culture is making toward enshrining same-sex marriage as a permanent fixture within American civil law. He laid out his case in two exceptional books — The Difference God Makes and God in Action — but here offers a nice summary of points relevant to the present crisis. Here he engages in subtle, careful reasoning, which is something Americans (in my experience) don’t find as persuasive as brief, hard-hitting, personal story-laden, gut-stirring arguments clustered around highly-charged words that begin with the prefix “anti” or end with the suffix “phobia.” But I think George does a nice job trying to wed the two approaches. See what you think:

At the beginning of the New Year, 2013, a law is being proposed in the General Assembly to change the legal definition of marriage in Illinois to accommodate those of the same sex who wish to “marry” one another.  In this discussion, the Church will be portrayed as “anti-gay,” which is a difficult position to be in, particularly when families and the Church herself love those of their members who are same-sex oriented.  What’s at stake in this legislative proposal and in the Church’s teaching on marriage? Read more…

Wind chills and Saints

Reflecting on our first 6 months in New Orleans, I have noted several major differences between this city and Des Moines, from whence we came.

Our kids have noted these curiosities: the accent (which, actually in many ways sounds like a New Yawk accent), the insanely ubiquitous Saints football team, the ubiquitous “Mary Statues” in yards and in local businesses, and that adults often call other adults, “babe.”

For me, two recent events highlighted the difference.

1. I was talking to someone about a High School football game in the area, and the person said: “The parents at Rummel are faithful fans. They even braved a 40 degree wind chill.”

A 40 degree wind chill.

2. I was working our parish festival in October (too fun!), and the Saints were playing the Falcons. They had wide screen TVs everywhere showing the game, but I could not see anything as the TVs were too far from the pizza bar I was manning. But I knew the game was over, and the Saints had won, when suddenly the music playing stopped and everyone — hundreds of people — started singing in perfect unison (as if on cue) this song:

I said to myself: We’re not in Iowa anymore.