That One Time I Was Perfect

by Jenny Klejeski

“Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” -Matt. 5:48

This command of Jesus has often produced in me a sinking feeling of discouragement.

Me? Perfect? C’mon, Jesus -- you know me better than that.

It seems an impossible command.

Then I begin to wonder: would Jesus ask something impossible of me?

There becomes a temptation to qualify his words. Well, maybe he meant “try” to be perfect, or “strive” for perfection.

But that’s not what he said. The words of Thomas Aquinas (translated by G. M. Hopkins) come to mind here: “What God's Son has told me, take for truth I do; Truth Himself speaks truly or there's nothing true.” Now, certainly there are certain things that Jesus said that we can wonder about. When He says that the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, we can wonder what He means by that. There is a wealth of fruitful interpretations of parables.

In this case, though, coming at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for interpretation. And any attempt to dilute the text feels uncomfortably like eisigesis, imposing my own meaning on Jesus’ words in order to make them more comfortable for me to hear.

My hearing of this Scripture totally changed this summer when I heard it presented during my Catechesis of the Good Shepherd training.¹ In one type of lesson, a saying of Jesus (called a maxim) is presented and reflected upon. The second maxim given in the schedule of presentations is “Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” One of the first questions our instructor asked after reading the above maxim was, “have you ever been perfect?” My first response in my head was, “no, of course not,” but someone else chimed in, “yes--at our Baptism!”

WOAH. Of course! Now, it certainly wasn’t a revelation to me that we become perfect at our Baptism, that we are totally cleansed of original and committed sin, that we become a new creation in Christ. But I had never before connected this reality with Jesus’ command about perfection.

Maybe I’ve been approaching this passage wrong all along. Maybe the perfection Jesus is calling me to is not something that I achieve if I work really, really hard. Maybe, rather, this perfection is a gift that I receive, not through my own effort, but through the Lord’s totally gratuitous love. Maybe the perfection does not originate in my own merit, but is completely received from the One Who perfects all things.

And being a part of the Body of Christ, I am, already, a “saint” in a true, though yet imperfectly realized way. ² The Church is, paradoxically, both unfailingly holy and constantly being sanctified. I think what I too often forget is that this process of sanctification is not a work of man, but wholly a work of grace.

With our culture’s constant emphasis on doing, there is an impoverished sense of being and receiving. There is a tendency to think that everything rests on our shoulders and that the work of our salvation is something we have to do. Perhaps the only doing we need is to become what we are.

---

1 I’ve written about CGS previously on this blog. You can also get more information about it here.^↩

---

2 CCC 823^↩

Too Busy to Be Kind?

by Dan Masterton

Last week, I was chatting with a friend. Talking about the unseemly brutishness of President Trump as well as the occasional rudeness one finds in everyday social life, she said something that stuck with me: “I will just never understand a person’s inability to be kind.” Whether thinking of the uncourteous self-centered style of Trump or the everyday ways people snub or reject others, she just feels a fundamental dissonance over how people can fail to show kindness to others.

I thought this was such a great insight. For whatever one thinks about politics or social issues, whatever one believes about God and religion, whatever one prioritizes with their time and talents, I feel like most everyone could agree that mutual kindness is a fair minimum standard for all members of the human family.

I don’t know that we’re going to solve the quagmires of social respect anytime soon; there’s no quick fix for Twitter trolling, echo chambers, radicalization, and more. But I think there’s a major root cause of our lack of kindness that needs confrontation: busyness.

We are becoming increasingly busy people. The moments of quiet or stillness in a modern life are few and far between. Our screens are streaming something; our phones are buzzing and sounding with new notifications; our speakers and earbuds are pounding with music. Even when we’re “resting” or “relaxing,” we’re often still multi-tasking, putting a show on in the background while skimming through notifications and updating ourselves on our feeds. This is true at work, too, where many of our jobs are connected to email inboxes that pile up with new messages at alarming rates, and in ways that follow us home through our constant connectivity.

I am seeing more and more instances of this busyness causing people to act rudely and often to ignore people. I think witnessing others’ busyness often helps me to be more patient and compassionate toward them, even when they are rude or ignore me, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still hurt when it happens.

For some reason, busyness seems to have become a legitimate and acceptable excuse for being unkind to others. I think of Jim Gaffigan’s reflection about how having five kids can sometimes become an implicit RSVP of “no” to various events and invitations because sometimes, logistically, a family of seven just can’t make it to something. But that type of context comes from a much different place than our modern busyness, which seems more focused on a person as an individual with an eye to personal needs and priorities that doesn’t look outward as easily.

When you apply for a job or inquire about a position -- and even sometimes when you do a job interview and meet employers personally -- you may never hear anything back. When you get to a counter at a business, you often aren’t greeted or welcomed but just treated at another task to complete. When you text or call a friend to meet up, you may never get a reply. Somehow, efficiency has leapfrogged kindness, and human encounter is the victim.

We need to confront our habits and ask how the way we are acting is impacting relationships -- is my action or lack thereof hurting the way I connect to others? Or am I taking intentional steps to create, sustain, and develop human relationships? I think first of the massively high numbers that populate people’s inboxes and apps. Are all of those notifications being answered? Are you leaving some unchecked or unread? Is that inaction hurtful or neglectful to that person and the relationship?

I don’t have a solution for Snapchat because watching teenagers blitz through screens with the little ghost almost literally makes me sick. But when it comes to a clogged inbox, maybe it involves adding an auto-reply explaining that you are behind on emails and may not catch up until a certain date, to at least give the sender a moment to know they have been heard and will receive a response. Maybe it involves a certain window of time daily or semi-daily to more carefully review notifications and new messages and to reply to each person with some thoughtfulness. Maybe it involves changing one’s phone number or email address and starting from scratch with a message to all one’s contacts that you’re starting over and hoping not to fall behind them.

I am not out to demonize college professors, public figures, and other people in consistently high demand. And I’m certainly a bit of a nobody with underpopulated inboxes and a dearth of notifications relative to peers. I just want a pause-and-think moment where we establish better standards for our communication that more closely match the courtesy and kindness of the increasingly bygone eras of telephone calls, face-to-face meetings, and the less mediated communications.

And I hope I never reach a point where people’s outreach to me outstrips my desire and ability to respond, though it sometimes feels inevitable with the cacophony of notifications always bearing down. If our connectivity is so ubiquitous and potent that we are becoming too busy to be kind, the ends of efficiency and productivity no longer justify the means that such technology enables. We have to stop ourselves from being so busy that we ignore people; we cannot be too busy to be kind.

The Joyful Torment of Fandom

by Rob Goodale

It’s no secret, really, that I have an emotional attachment to the Chicago Cubs, a professional baseball club that won the World Series last year, in case you hadn’t heard. From time to time, this attachment leads me to make decisions that are of questionable prudence, such as spending precious stipend dollars on inside-joke t-shirts or eschewing healthy sleep habits for a solid month to watch postseason games on my laptop in the wee hours of the morning. ¹

Of course, the Cubs finally won it all last year, after 108 years of, um, not winning. I tried to write about it, but to scrunch it down into something expressed in mere words seemed offensive. I spent last winter basking in the surreal glow of a season that didn’t end in heartbreak, perplexed at the reality that a collection of grown men in pajamas hitting a ball with a stick had garnered such depth of meaning, and also wondering with some trepidation whether that meaning -- and the unbridled distillation of joy that comes with it -- might dissipate on the other side of victory.

This season has been largely devoid of the same frivolity that marked the Cubs’ climb to glory, which really started in earnest in August of 2015. As Brett Taylor recently observed in an insightful piece on Bleacher Nation, while we described the 2015 and 2016 seasons with words like “magic” and “destiny,” the 2017 campaign can really only be accurately summed up with the word “grind.” There have been highlights, to be sure -- on a Saturday afternoon in July, as I drove to my new home in Kentucky, I listened as the Cubs ran the Tear Their Hearts Out of Their Chests and Show It to Them as They Die Play² against the Cardinals, which was pretty dang wonderful -- but on the whole, being the defending champions who are expected to win it all has been a freaking slog compared to being upstart renegade youngsters who don’t give a flying pig about your unwritten rules, Cardinal fans.

Despite the year-long drudgery, the Cubs managed to win their division and reach the playoffs for the third straight year, which hadn’t happened since ‘06-’08… NINETEEN-OH-SIX TO NINETEEN-OH-EIGHT. I am abundantly aware that the success of these strangers to whom I am tenuously tied is virtually unprecedented.

The first-round matchup against the Washington Nationals was a grueling five-gamer; the finale prompted the same heart palpitations that I thought might’ve died last year. The Nats outplayed the Cubs in four of the five games. The Cubs won three of them anyway.

Holy freaking crap baskets.

— Rob Goodale (@rgoody33) October 13, 2017

Then, before anyone could catch their breath, the Los Angeles Dodgers won the first three games of the NLCS. The Cubs were out of lives. Leading up to Game Four last Wednesday, I spent the day trying to talk myself out of being emotionally invested: this season has been more than a worthy follow up to last year’s championship, I told myself. I am happy, and if it ends tonight, I’m not going to let it hurt.

A funny thing happened.



Willson Contreras hit a dang moonshot. And then Javy Baez, a human highlight GIF, the Best Things About Baseball Incarnate, hit two. And blew a bubble during the second one.



The Cubs won Game Four, 3-2. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.

I drove to work the next morning, riding a wave of irrational confidence. He who recommends lower expectations as a salve for disappointment is surely not a baseball fan. Crawling along I-75, I began performing amateur mental calculus, figuring out how many things would have to break the Cubs’ way for a historic turnaround, conjuring comparisons to the 2004 Red Sox³ and foolishly encouraging my hopes to soar far higher than any sensible person would allow.

There in the car, a Pope Benedict XVI quote popped in my head, because as you know by now, in addition to being a shameless Cubs fan, I’m also an unabashed theology nerd.

“I… become like someone in love,

someone whose heart is open to being shaken up by another.” ⁴

Of course winning a World Series doesn’t make it hurt less the next year. Of course I can’t talk myself out of being affected by the end of a Cubs season. For better or for worse, all those years of watching on WGN at my grandmother’s house and listening to Pat Hughes and Ron Santo on the radio broadcast in the car with my dad have shaped me into a certain kind of person, one whose heart is irrevocably open to being shaken up by this stupid game.

The Cubs’ season ended a night later, in a dull and mercifully stress-free 11-1 drubbing. It still hurt. I spent the weekend searching for phantom box scores, scratching at a no-longer-existent itch. For seven months out of every twelve, the melody of Cubs games form the soundtrack to my life. It’s fitting, if a bit on the nose, that the radio station that carries their games is called The Score.

I’m already looking forward to spring training, and a winter full of reconstructing expectations. Being a baseball junkie, for better or for worse, is part of who I am. It has formed the structural undergirding of countless memories, and has been the seed planted in the earth that in turn yields lasting friendships.

The joyful torment of fandom, of allowing a small part of myself to live and die based on something entirely beyond my control, lives on. And for that I am most grateful.

---

1 Last year during the Cubs’ magical playoff run, I was living in Cork, Ireland. This did not deter me; I didn’t miss a single out.^↩

---

2 H/T @Aisle424 on Twitter.^↩

---

3 The only team to ever come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a seven-game series, a feat immortalized in the excellent 30 for 30 documentary Four Days In October and, more importantly for my mother and girlfriend, in the 2005 film Fever Pitch.^↩

---

4 Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, pg 197.^↩

The Simpsons I: The Joy of Sect

by Dan Masterton

I am obsessed with The Simpsons. I will, in all seriousness and with full conviction, argue that it is the greatest television show of all time, and that Homer Simpson, simultaneously the best and worst father there is, is one of the greatest characters of all time.

As a person of faith, as a campus minister, and as a theologian, I am attentive to the moments when religion, spirituality, and God make their way into The Simpsons, and I have frequently utilized the show in my ministry as an out-of-the-box, humorous way to engage with this stuff. And it is effective because The Simpsons is a thoroughly smart, well-crafted show, evident especially when its episodes touch on these topics.

When Homer joins Hullabalooza’s traveling freak show, Bart interviews him for a school project. Bart asks Homer what religion he is, and Homer responds, “You know, the one with all the well-meaning rules that never work out in real life? Uhhh... Christianity.” In a later episode (which I'll profile below), a Christian missionary preaches to Homer, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” to which Homer responds, “Yeah, that’ll work.”



The approach of The Simpsons to Christianity could safely be characterized as loving satire. The tone is definitely critical, but it never goes so far as to suggest that Christianity or religion should be abandoned altogether. The show has an understated appreciation for religion and its positive function in society, with a special tip of the cap to the The Big Guy Upstairs, who is the only character in the show depicted with five fingers.

“The Joy of Sect” (full synopsis | full episode)

Homer attends a free resort weekend hosted by The Movementarians, a religious group recruiting new members, and eventually, Homer commits his family to joining the religion, which eventually subsumes Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, too, leaving Marge as the lone holdout.

On the whole, this episode effectively lampoons many effective elements of religion. First, as many guests on the free resort weekend are weakening in their resistance, the ministers start a chant. Sensing that Homer may be hooked by the catchy chorus, they try some call-and-response because “everyone loves a droll, repetitive chant,” a nod to the chants, songs, and hymns of religious traditions that become so fundamental to worship.

Additionally, as Reverend Lovejoy criticizes the cult while preaching to his now very small congregation, he preaches that the cult’s allure “is nothing but a pack of weird rituals and chants designed to take away the money of fools.” He then initiates the passing of the collection plate and asks that they pray the Lord’s Prayer together forty times. Meanwhile, Homer tells his family -- which has left its congregation in the Western Branch of Reformed Presbylutheranism -- they are joining The Movementarians, to which Bart replies, “Cult, church; church, cult -- so we get bored someplace else every Sunday. Does this really change our day-to-day lives?,” a fine jab at the frequent tedium of regular worship. Those who practice religion know the humdrum of religious practice but hopefully also find that the structure and routine of it, especially Catholic Christianity, are there to facilitate intimacy with the divine and its mysteries and create a heartbeat rhythm for the spiritual life. This is an easy moment for me to laugh.



Interestingly, while the cult easily sways many of the citizens of Springfield -- a town not known for its intellect -- they struggle mightily to recruit Homer. As Homer considers attending their free resort weekend, Lisa cautions her father, “Watch yourself, dad, you’re the highly suggestible type,” to which Homer of course responds, “I am the highly suggestible type.” However, the tactics of the cult’s ministers don’t get through the Homer whose fickle interest, short attention span, and insatiable appetite thwart their tactics.

With frustration, they bemoan, “It’s no use; he’s obviously the most powerful mind we’ve ever dealt with.” The kernel of truth here is that “new religious movements” (the academic name for what are usually colloquially called “cults”) often succeed more with educated people rather than uneducated people. One theory is that the often outlandish, wild narratives they create can appeal effectively to educated people who process the story and find some sort of satisfactory and consistent internal logic to it while “dumber” people dismiss it more quickly, especially if it’s complicated.



Lisa comments that she sees the effects of mental conditioning in her father, which hints at the ultimate inefficacy of the cult, especially relative to authentic, ideal religion practice. True religion requires free consent, even if that entails some leap of personal faith. On the other hand, The Movementarians combine the gentle, no-pressure invitation of “You’re free to leave at any time” with heavy social pressures and major expectations on buying in. High expectations are predictive hallmarks of good religious communities: the communities that succeed are those that expect much of their members -- consistent presence, investment in the ministries, contributions to the budget, etc. -- while the communities that lower their standards often fall apart. Fittingly so, The Movementarians and their strict initiatory criteria, at least initially, thrive. However, the flimsy convictions of their members ultimately contribute to the easy and fast downfall of the movement.

The interesting metaphor in this episode is the manner in which joining and de-affiliating ensues. Real life Catholicism involves the Sacraments of Initiation and social commitment to a parish; The Movementarians take your life savings, the deed to your house, and a commitment of ten trillion years of labor, all up front. Whereas real life Catholicism involves cycles of doubt, hesitation, and laziness as we grapple with practicing our faith, leaving The Movementarians involves navigating a literal obstacle course (complete with barbed wire, animals, and other hazards) and weathering legal disputes by lawyers who view you as church property. The exaggeration helps show how religious belonging can be misconstrued and overdone, and how true belonging cannot be solely monetary or legalistic.

Ultimately, this episode shows the dangers of putting anything besides God in the top slot of any hierarchy. Any person, organization, community, etc. that attempts this will always be exposed for the idol/fraud that it is. It calls to mind Acts 5:38-39, when Gamaliel comments on the early Church: “For if this endeavor or this activity is of human origin, it will destroy itself. But if it comes from God, you will not be able to destroy them; you may even find yourselves fighting against God.” At the end of the twenty-two minutes, The Leader turns out to be just some Joe Schmoe on a bicycle-helicopter with a phony spaceship that, taking the metaphor to a literal level, falls apart. During his literal downfall, The Leader rues, “I should have stayed with The Promise Keepers,” a nod to the ephemeral nature of these cults. Moe, a classic rudderless ship who doesn’t know who he is or what he thinks, echoes the sentiment, “It fell apart like everything else I’ve ever believed in.” While poking fun at Christianity and established religions, this episode ends with a subtle tip of the cap to the religions that sustain their believers in legitimate, authentic community founded on our best human understanding of Truth.

First Person Prayer Starts with Me

by Dan Masterton

Back in 2011 when we rolled out the new English translation of the Mass, there was much foofaraw over some of the wordings. While some of the small changes were simple and elegant and aligned us more closely with other languages’ liturgical expressions, other changes felt archaic and unnecessary. I especially noticed how priests were understandably stumbling over the clumsy syntax of some of the prefaces and prayers of the day.

Yet, some of the changes brought a simple beauty and increased sharpness to our worship. Among the changes that have grown on me are the rewordings of our Mystery of Faith responses. Our old tried and true “Christ has died / Christ is risen / Christ will come again” had a familiar cadence to it, but it was a passive, impersonal declaration that lacked the character of many of our other prayers, chief among them the Our Father, which emphasizes our common sonship and daughtership to God the Father in Christ His Son. Our new prayers address Christ directly, words of praise and worship from our lips and individuals and as a Church to our Lord:

• We proclaim your death, O Lord, and profess your resurrection, until you come again.
• Save us, Savior of the world, for by your cross and resurrection, you have set us free.
• When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim your death, O Lord, until you come again.

Our adjusted prayers bring us into the professions, placing us more inclusively in personal, communal prayers rather than stopping at a simple statement of a belief. I like the way these wordings, even if subtly, change our disposition to prayer and invite us to place ourselves more explicitly and intimately within the encounter of prayer.

All of this bubbled up in my heart as my dad went through a recent hospital stay. As people would check in with us and get updates on how he was doing (he’s fine!), they would often express their relief at his stability and recovery with a common anaphora: “Thank God.” It sort of becomes an off-hand interjection that maybe gestures at a passing thought of prayer or of gratitude to God for his grace or protection -- though there are certainly people who are quite earnest in praying for loved ones who are sick or ill -- but it often seems to go no further.

I agree that we need MORE than thoughts/prayers, but I'll go Catholic here & suggest this is a BOTH AND moment for BOTH prayer AND action.

— Dan Masterton (@jesusandchicago) October 3, 2017

In some ways, it’s similar to the increasingly common sentiment, especially on social media, to say “my prayers and thoughts are with” a person or group. I’ve already shared my agreement with those who are frustrated with this sentiment, thinking that it should entail more; it’s a Catholic moment for a both/and not an either/or, for a commitment to pray as well as the initiative to do something concrete and active. That line feels like the right thing to express, especially in a time of grief, but I wonder how much further it actually goes.

For many of us, is simply posting a prayer picture or tagging a post with such a line the full extent of our prayer? I know I have often fell into the trap of stopping there, limiting my prayer to a topic sentence. Couldn’t I offer a rosary for the Las Vegas victims? Couldn’t I take time at a side altar or candle shrine to pray for these natural disasters’ victims? Couldn’t I direct my prayer in Mass for a specific intention? I need to step up my game and back up these generic lines with some legit, personal prayer and intentional context.


One thing that has come to mind is to take those “Thank God” moments and turn them into a prayer in the same vein that our revised Mystery of Faith responses do. Rather than “Thank God dad’s ok,” I need to go deeper to an “I thank God that dad’s ok,” and into a more intentional, first-person prayer. My prayer needs to reflect the reality that we pray not to change God or His will but to seek the clarity of God’s will, to freely and more fully align ourselves to God’s will, to reconcile our whole selves to God. Terse, cliche, one-line blurbs treat God too much like a genie or a moral therapeutic deist butler. Deliberate moments and windows of time are needed to invite me further and deeper. I have to be better.

I know that I am most aware of my holiness, of my existence as a created and loved son of God, when I am praying by being direct and intimate with God rather than being abrupt and detached. My world as well as my soul, its humility, and its patience need much more of the former.

Sowing Seeds and Rescuing Souls: Engaging the Parabolic Imagination

by Dave Gregory

This past Thursday, my men’s faith-sharing group did some lectio divina¹ with the parable from Luke’s Gospel where Jesus is preaching about seeds and different kinds of ground that seeds fall on (Luke 8:1-15). After spitting some game at the crowds, Jesus oddly tells the disciples, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to the rest it is in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.”

This caught us off guard. The statement, oft-quoted by gnostics to prove that Jesus was passing down “secret” knowledge (some translations render the Greek musteria as “secrets” ²), struck us as a bit funky: why do the crowds need parables? why must they remain incapable of seeing, or of understanding? why were the disciples so privileged as as to not need metaphor?

One dude proposed that it’s all about the imagination, as the crowds had not spent time walking with Jesus, drowning in his presence. Unfamiliar with the person and personality of the incarnate God, diverse crowds traveled near and far to see him do his thing; with such a fleeting glimpse, they had not yet really come to intuit what the Nazarene was all about. And thus, he must engage their imaginations, for straight up theological throw down couldn’t cut it with the throngs. An abstract discussion of demonic influence, or hardness of heart, or cultural stubbornness, wouldn’t suffice. The people would forget, because as strangers to Jesus, they had not yet seen what exorcism or personal refusal of conversion looks like. Stories, however... these remain unforgettable.

Much of our entertainment is parabolic. We fill our imaginations with stories of good and evil, of heroism, of suffering and perseverance. Literature and the arts humanize us, teaching us more about our human condition than we would be capable of understanding on our own. Comic books formed my moral imagination as a kid, as did the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood. Plop down the Nicomachean Ethics in front of 12 year-old Dave, and he would have been lost. Engage his imagination with Spider-Man and the Holy Grail and an English bowman and his merry men, however, and that stuff will form him as a person. These fictions imbued within his mind an awareness of the realities of the battle between good and evil, of the constant quest for sanctity (whatever that is), and of liberation theology and social justice. Before there was Katniss Everdeen, there was the hooded Robin of Loxley.

Likewise, Jesus first had to engage the imaginations of the apostles. In chapter 5 of Luke, Jesus teaches some crowds from the boat of Peter, then miraculously catches some fish, and proceeds to invite Peter, James, and John to join him. Even the miracle presents an engagement of the imagination, if we consider what thoughts ran through the heads of Simon and the sons of Zebedee: “With this fisherman, what other things are possible?!” While the miracle is all well and fine and good, it’s the invitation that snags these guys: “Do not fear, from now on you will be catching men.”

The Evangelist does something very interesting here, because he messes around with Jesus’ words. In Matthew, Jesus tells the first apostles that they will become “fishers” -- halleis -- but in Luke, Jesus tells them that they will be “catching” -- zogron -- men. One passage uses a noun to describe the apostles’ new ministry, the other uses a verb, but things go deeper.

The verb zogreo is not a maritime term, as my undergraduate mentor and New Testament professor Alan Mitchell taught our Gospels seminar.³ In other Greek writings, it occurs in the contexts of warfare narratives and medical treatises. With regards to the former, zogreo means to rescue prisoners of war from certain execution, and with regards to the latter zogreo means to resuscitate, to bring a person back to life from death. I remember the beauty of this causing me to tear up in class a little bit.

Writing about fifty years after the crucifixion and resurrection, Luke knew what Jesus was really about, and puts this word in Jesus’ mouth⁴ to reflect the reality of the call. Christ’s invitation to become fishers of men does not present some lukewarm call to draw people into some common mission. More accurately, it’s about life and death. It’s about rescue and revival. It’s about saving people from destruction of soul and charging their existences with joy and meaning. One can easily imagine the oral tradition at work here: the essence is preserved, though the means of communicating that essence morphs. It’s a slight morphing, but a morphing nonetheless, and it’s intentionally undertaken to capture the imagination. Fishing, blach. But saving from death?! That’s a different story.

To return to the Parable of the Sower -- really, the Parable of the Ground -- I’m one of the crowd. I don’t really get it, and I need my imagination engaged; in our technocratic 21st century, agricultural metaphors remain difficult for the modern mind to penetrate, but to the first century mind, the parable must have sung. Praying the Examen of Consciousness⁵ helps me to clarify those moments where there’s spiritual warfare and demonic interference going on, or where my rubbled-over heart has failed to be fleshy. And I realize that there’s a little bit of each sort of ground going on within my own soul, for I am not a homogeneous soil. I do not defend myself from the Enemy at every turn, and I can be a pretty shitty dude in a variety of ways. With this attentiveness, I can move forward: I can adjust, and seek graces were they need be sought (courage, perseverance, patience, generosity, et cetera). I can till that soil, let it lay fallow, remove some stones, set up some scarecrows, and prepare it for a new crop.

---

1 Lectio divina, or “divine reading” is one of the oldest forms of prayer, and is super simple. Put formally, its four stages are: lectio (reading, where the passage is read slowly and deliberately, two or three times over); meditatio (meditating, or reflecting upon any words or phrases that especially strike the ear); oratio (praying, expressing one’s needs, desires, thanksgivings, hesitations, et cetera to God as a result of this reflection); and contemplatio (contemplating, sitting in silence and feeling the present love of the Creator). Put more simply: read, reflect, respond.^↩

---

2 Christianity isn’t about secrets. It’s about Mysteries… like, you know, capital “m” Mysteries. God isn’t a secret, God is a Mystery; secrets can be solved and puzzles can be unlocked, but Mysteries must be experienced.^↩

---

3 Forgive me, Professor, if I am leaving out some nuance here. I don’t have an eidetic memory.^↩

---

4 From a historical-critical perspective, it’s impossible to definitively posit which sayings of Jesus are historical, which are embellishments, and which are pure fiction. In my personal spirituality and engagement with the Gospels, I have no issue with merging the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith; this isn’t an intellectual cop-out, it’s just that I’m not bothered with such questions of parsing factuality when it comes to loving the guy. This being said, given that zogreo is such an unusual word, I’d bet that its usage here is a theological gloss, a Lukan commentary on what Jesus was getting at. ^↩

---

5 For those of you unfamiliar with Ignatian spirituality, here’s a lovely piece on the Examen. While there are infinite methods to praying this way, Father Hamm’s outline has become my favorite over the years.^↩

Narrative Flourishes and Excellent Superiority

by Dan Masterton

I enjoy posting blurbs and observations on Twitter and Facebook about my children and parenting. Mostly I post about how ill-equipped and overwhelmed I am as a parent and how babies for some reason don’t like the taste of wasabi. The blurbs are meant to be (hopefully) funny, silly, and/or insightful. Some of these observations will lean toward a dark, sarcastic take on the prison sentence that is parenthood. In a family-friendly way, of course. 

Occasionally I receive comments that associate my musings with being anti-family, or somehow dissuading people from having kids. Those occasional comments are so absurd they always make me laugh. I wonder if my rant on now wanting to work out is contributing to the obesity epidemic. Maybe I’m also increasing cake sales. I never knew I had so much power. 

Anti-family? This could not be further from the truth. I love being a parent and enjoy finding the humor in parenting. If you complain about how you spend your Saturdays taking your kid to birthday parties, that means you are taking your kids to birthday parties. If you complain about how hard it is to get your kid to read, it means you are trying to get your kids to read. If you are complaining about your kid not helping around the house, that means you have a fat, lazy kid. You joke about it. That’s how you deal. If parents don’t like being a parent, they don’t talk about being a parent. They are absent. And probably out having a great time somewhere. I have done extensive research and, almost universally, found that the people who view my blurbs and observations as “anti-family” are dicks. Failing and laughing at your own shortcomings are the hallmarks of a sane parent. 

When you are handed your screaming newborn for the first time, you are simultaneously handed a license for gallows humor. The guy who invented the phrase “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” probably had a baby. And, for a moment, probably contemplated throwing the baby out. 

-- “Anti-Family”, from Dad Is Fat by Jim Gaffigan, p. 25-26

* * *

Over the last few years, as friends and family members started having kids, I noticed a common trend among these parents: exaggeration. When they would tell stories about the new things their kids were doing, the descriptions almost always seemed unreal. If these stories are to be believed, then kids are walking, talking, and doing palpably adult things at an unbelievably early age.

In reality, most of these milestones are actually referring to not-so-major differences between the limited things their blobby, uncoordinated little guys could do before and after whatever it was that happened happened. These embellishments would drive me crazy. There was no way the stories were true. The kernel of truth buried deep within the narrative flourishes described an apparently small accomplishment and didn’t seem all that special...

Enter parenthood...

Now I’m seeing that there’s indeed a rapturous magnetism to seeing one’s child develop new abilities. And while crawling, walking, and first words are big things to mark and share, the more minute day-to-day stuff that becomes before and in between is pretty striking, precisely because these blobby little guys are so thoroughly uncoordinated. I mean, in the beginning, they suck -- I mean, literally, all they can do is suck. So when they first babble or straighten their legs to "stand" on you or sort of roll over a little bit, it becomes quite noteworthy. And one’s narration of it can get a bit, how should we say, liberal.

As my daughter, Lucy, has grown, you betcha my wife, Katherine, and I have been all over these little changes and improvements, which are so much more pronounced when you have the baseline of seeing your little one every day as a means of seeing these little developments. We decided to lean into the tall tale tendencies and milk it a bit.

Katherine’s favorite tagline, as she concludes spinning a web with a whale of a tale, is, “Our daughter’s pretty advanced,” as we tongue-in-cheek celebrate the elite excellent superiority of our daughter, who is essentially just a really cute lump at this point.

Personally, I’ve taken to adding personifications and metaphors to the stories that furnish Lucy with characteristics and nuance that she won’t be capable of for years. For example, I toted Lucy along on a red-eye flight to Boston. As I journeyed from terminal to baggage claim to shuttle to rental car counter to rental car to highway to lodging in the dark AM hours, I described Lucy’s awake-but-wanting-sleep face as that of “someone who is in a long line who wants to complain but knows that complaining won’t accomplish anything so they just keep their mouth shut.” Here’s what she actually looked like. Pretty humdrum. But the more colorful description is funnier!

Hello, my name is Lucy, and I am a professional business traveler
with significant travel miles, hotel rewards points,
and TSA pre-check status to circumvent long lines,
all of which helps me run my Fortune 500 company.

The long and short of it is that (1) I have a lot of sticks up my butt about a lot of things, and worrying about the factual accuracy of storytelling parents is silly, and (2) the important things about these parents’ stories is that they are there to see this stuff happening.

I’m currently reading Dad is Fat by comedian Jim Gaffigan (check out #DadDanReads on my Twitter for my recent reading!). At the top, I transcribed one of his vignette essays, this one about how parents comment on and narrate their parenthood and their kids’ lives. His slightly acerbic wit and matter-of-fact observations make the most important distinction here: some parents are present to their children and families while other aren’t. We may have different ways of coping; some may laugh and joke while others are more solemn and serious. We may have criticisms of how some parents handle things, the styles they use, the degree of embellishment their stories entail (I’m getting over it); each parent and child has to feel it out. Yet, the primarily important thing is that the parents are present, loving and caring for their kids with their best focus and effort, raising a family in good faith to build God’s Kingdom among us. And if that results in cheeky, sarcastic, or exaggerated stories about their kids, then so be it.

So, parents, tell me a story! Tell me how your child discovered gold in the backyard or developed a new, cutting-edge, game-changing app or newly articulated the finer and yet unknown points of string theory. I’ll listen. And I’ll try harder to simply delight in the fact that you’re there with them, loving them, like I’m trying to love my Katherine and Lucy.

I Witnessed Your Baptism Today

by Rob Goodale

There were two other baptisms, actually, though it was the last one -- yours -- that etched itself into my temporal lobe. No disrespect to the other two tots, who were equal recipients of sacramental grace. They simply were not as striking as you.

I watched from my pew with barely muted awe as a tiny human was completely disrobed, there literally in front of God and everybody, and thrice dunked into surely frigid water. You screamed and kicked and spit and probably shouted all kinds of words that would have made your mother blush, had anyone been able to understand you. No one did, which is fortunate for your mother, although it probably just made you even madder.

Once, twice, three times submerged into the living water, and then wrapped back up in your robe, caterwauling the entire time. Your father held you higher than Rafiki held Simba, the proudest dad in the whole dang place. It was then that I considered, despite our language barrier, whether perhaps I really did understand you after all. And I became a bit envious, truth be told, because there have been a great many times that I wanted to scream and kick and spit and shout all kinds of words that would make my mother blush. Since I am 26 and not currently being plunged into frigid water, such a reaction would not be met with same the smiles and laughter that greeted your crisis.

You did not comprehend what was being done to you, only that it was unpleasant and unfamiliar and probably entirely shame-inducing, what with the public nakedness. How could you have known that at that very moment you were being plunged not only into the water, but into the most beautiful wild tragic desperate love story in the history of everything, one that spans millennia, and one that already has a happy ending.

The real hang up of the thing is, even if you had known that, the experience would have been just as excruciating, which is a word I use advisedly. I daresay this will not be the last time that someone you can barely see and do not recognize thrusts you headlong into a vast pool of incomprehensible grace.

Gazing at you up there on the altar made me do some real deep thinking, man. I thought of my favorite cantankerous child-turned-dragon, who had a somewhat similar experience. When I touch the water, they tell me I could be set free. Nobody seems to want to talk about how painful or terrifying it might be, except for you. Thank you for your prophetic screams, pleading with me to see the depth of love that made all this possible. Someday, perhaps you will see the significance of this day, and know why it made me cry.