More Isn't Better

by Dan Masterton

A great episode of The Simpsons, called “Trash of the Titans,” opens with a pitch meeting in the boardroom of Springfield’s flagship department store “Costington’s”:



Cut next to the Simpsons’ living room, where Love Day is in full swing with decorations, presents, and celebrations, all for a holiday invented out of thin air. They open obnoxious, contrived presents, which only disappoint their recipients -- Bart disappointed by his nonsenical “Kisses-Make-Me-Boogie-o-Lantern” and Homer by his stuffed bear, who turns out to be Sir Loves-a-Lot rather than his wished-for Lord Huggington.¹ Then, Love Day is over before it started. The gift exchange ends with haste. Marge has assembled an elaborate, gaudy lawn decoration display that she decides must come down immediately. The rest of the family gathers the wrapping paper for the trash.

Leave it to The Simpsons to properly lampoon our consumerism with such acerbic wit. We can’t help ourselves, and that’s what makes Love Day so insightful. While there’s a fitting time and place for gift exchanges and parties, the frequency and intensity of these moments feels out of control. We look for and invite these moments so often and do them up so big that our consumerist tendencies can’t help but get inflated.

Think of engagement and marriage: proposal photos and stories, engagement party, engagement photos, engagement announcements, bridal shower(s), bachelor/ette party(ies), save the dates, wedding website, wedding invitations, Friday welcome party, wedding reception, late night snack, bride and groom sendoff, after party, Sunday farewell brunch...

Think of pregnancy and childbirth: baby bump photos on social media with time markings, baby shower, gender reveal parties and videos, custom embroidered clothing, newborn photo shoots, birth announcements, sip-and-see visit, baptism reception…

Think even of school: whereas high school and college used to be the benchmark graduations, now we celebrate 8th grade graduations just as significantly, and we’re even giving caps and gowns and full celebrations to kindergarteners² before they start full elementary school...

My goal isn’t to destroy the fun we have in marking major moments. In fact, the hospitality and fellowship aspects are just what we need to stay grounded in relationship. Rather, I just feel like the inertia behind a “more is better” mentality in our social lives is getting scary. Once you or your family members have been to a wedding that includes most or all of the aforementioned items, it’s hard to imagine doing less than all of it, if not more. Once you know someone who’s had a kid and shared the process in all those ways, it’s hard to imagine not following the same template, or even adding to it. When you’ve seen your friends or family get the kindergarten cap and gown treatment, you’ll be darned if your kid isn’t going to get it, too.

I don’t mean to blanket-incriminate you, dear reader, but I imagine you can see such a creeping tendency in your social spheres. And its progress is tough to stop. If you choose to opt out of one of these major moments or to decline one of these elements in your celebration, you voluntarily open yourself up to social scrutiny and criticism. You can quickly be described as cheap, boring, no fun, or worse. And you can become a source of disappointment to friends and family, who may have “hoped you were going to do that, but it’s ok if you don’t.” The implicit disappointment of others when you try to rein things in can become quite palpable.

Spiritually speaking, it’s pretty tough to square a “more is better” attitude with any sort of grounded, centered peace. All kinds of red flags shoot up in my Catholic outlook when I see this consumerism running amok, none more prevalent than my struggling desire to more concretely live out the preferential option for people who are marginalized. I always think back to my friend as he prepared his wedding registries with his then-fiancee; aggregating all kinds of requests for things, he finally stopped and asked, “Where’s the option for the poor in all this?” Setting a beautiful example, the two of them created a parallel registry alongside their traditional registry that listed a few favorite charities to which they encouraged donations as part of the wedding gift process. Nothing in our faith tradition encourages runaway consumerism; a lot in our faith tradition calls us to intentional charity and justice.

Sometimes the best way to audit these sorts of tendencies in ourselves is to think of a kindergartener’s line of questioning -- Why? Why? Why? Something done with the right intentions and careful thoughtfulness will withstand this sort of scrutiny that forces it down to its core. I think a good test case is technology and social media. Even while having myriad ways to communicate -- face-to-face conversation, phone calls, video chats, emails, text/picture messages, social media (Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), and more -- we still struggle to succeed in communicating, as our many avenues often overwhelm us to the point that we don’t actually engage, respond, and interact, often leaving many messages and notifications unread or unanswered. So what’s the point of using all of this?

I think if you why’ed it down to its core, the foundational reason for using it all should be to connect better to others. To which I’d respond, “If you have all these means to connect better to others, is it working well if it’s making your interactions mostly passive and de-personalized?” If so, then more is not better. More is almost certainly worse. And while some may need to go cold turkey when fixated on something, the answer is often found in moderation, in tempering one’s usage and attitude such that the essential and good purpose of something can reemerge. It may come with some side-eye and smack-talk from onlookers, but it can declutter your mind and heart in worthwhile ways.

I find this battle tiring. Having a toddler invites a steady stream of gifts, and my desire to be less materialistic and more minimalistic leaves me looking like something between ungrateful and an asshole. So you gotta pick the moments -- whether in planning a wedding and moving through a pregnancy and childbirth into parenthood or in the humdrum of daily lives. Some things that have worked for me? When I’m reading a book or online content, I try to turn off the TV (or only read during commercials of ballgames). When I’m planning meals or eating, I decline pre-meal nibbles or big, lush desserts. When I’m feeling spendy, I try to remember I have a lot already and redirect the impulse toward memories and experiences to plan and share with family and friends. When I’m combing through our spending and updating our budget, I find a group with my wife that accompanies people on the margins, and we donate a little something beyond what we give to our parish.

My batting average with this stuff isn’t the highest, and I always wish I was more consistent and found more ubiquitous ways to practice minimalism. But the one thing I know is that letting the consumption and materialism unfold without constraint isn’t the way to go and only messes me up. While moments of luxury and indulgence are potentially fairly harmless, letting them suffuse my life hamper my outlook and draw me away from the solidarity and justice I desire and know is right.

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1 Marge responds that they’re “the same basic bear,” but Homer turns the bear away from him and sulks.^↩

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2 Look, I’m not a monster. These photo ops are cute as heck. But to the point, it’s just another unnecessary thing that requires every school and family to buy in with more time, money, and planning to keep up with everyone around them.^↩

One Last Post before Nuptials

by Dave Gregory

Well friends, I’m getting married in a few days, so I’ll try to keep this brief, because I’m currently prepping like a maniac. Erin recently wrote on the cost of faith, and I’ve been pondering this very same thing for several months now. The high school I teach at hemorrhages faculty and staff each year; as a Cristo Rey school, we simply cannot afford to offer salaries that compete with those of the public school system. Moreover, the combination of our renting a building from Portland Public Schools and outstanding loans means that we cannot even meet the payscale set by the archdiocese for its schoolteachers.

Editor's Note: I mean just look at this screenshot of their wedding website that I just took.
The substantial elegant beauty is enough to disgust common taste.

On top of all this, teaching at our particular school entails “getting the emotional shit kicked out of us” (in the words of one colleague, from a faculty lounge conversation a while back) on the day-to-day. This fact of my work has begun to sink into my bones a bit, and while most of my interactions with students are positive, regularly occurring and notably challenging engagements still leave me reeling.

Even those conversations that grow into a form of prayer, of cor ad cor loquitur (“heart speaking to heart,” to borrow from Newman), leave this borderline introvert drained of emotional energy; a student discloses, in the sort of innocent trust that only the less-jaded remain capable of, the difficulties of their non-academic life, and I consequently catch a glimpse of the enormous responsibility inherent to the ministry of education. “You stand in the gaps,” recently declared one of my juniors at a faculty discussion concerning equity, referencing the abyss of her father’s and brother’s absences brought on by gang violence. There’s a weightiness to all this, really, and one can feel the gravity of what one does at De La Salle. It pulls on the lungs, making it harder to breathe.

In short, unless one truly buys into the Lasallian charism and its mission of educating and forming socioeconomically oppressed youth, there’s no real reason to remain.

This environment constantly forces me to ponder what makes the shit-expelling blows worth it, and this ensuing reflection forces me to apply some book learning. It’s all about that distinction laid out by Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship, I’ve discovered, the one that articulates the stark opposition of cheap grace and costly grace and thereby reveals a deep truth: grace isn’t grace unless it costs us. If I’m sitting around on my laurels, reveling in my supposed Christianity, it’s not Christianity I’m reveling in...it’s the snares of the Enemy, who would love little more than lukewarm complacency. The opposite danger, methinks, lies in indulging the hubristic tendency to inflate my own Christian ego; in an era of stark political division, fingers are pointed and cries denouncing the Christianity of others fill the masturbatory space of social media.

I digress. My own pedagogical disposition must constantly deflect these temptations of self-gratifying praise. I can sit here and discuss the wounds inflicted by my students, but so doing would distract from the real work at hand. Real humility, as the saying goes, is not about thinking less of myself, but thinking of myself less. In a very real way, I need to ignore the shit-kicking, for those who fling their feet at my gut are doing little more than testing my grit, my dedication, and/or my ability to care enough about them to endure. They’re just teenagers, I need to remind myself, “Jesus in his least recognizable form,” to steal the words of a Jesuit quoted by a dean I worked with. Every defense I throw up in return, be it indifference or overly-indulgent disciplinary action or misplaced sarcasm, is a failure on my part to love these young human beings into who they become; I’m still growing into this understanding.

In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius instructs that one must hold onto graces for periods of desolation: that is, when you’re in a funk, savor the blessings until the funk lifts. No place has taught me this more than my classroom in Room 208 on North Fenwick Avenue in Portland. Looking back on this year -- a year in which my father has been rendered immobile by the final stages of Parkinson’s and has been hospitalized multiple times, a year in which both my parents and I moved to what seem to be more or less permanent homes, a year throughout which Sarah and I have planned and coordinated all the infuriating details for this weekend’s nuptials, and a year that precedes welcoming a new puppy and the commencement of doctoral work -- I’ve got some graces to show you.

And they come in the form of haikus written by fourteen and fifteen year-olds for final exam extra credit. Although many may be silly, they all reflect a degree of authentic biblical and theological understanding. Others offer pearls of deep truth and mystery, thereby realizing the authentic purpose of a real haiku.

You’re welcome.

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Theological Haikus Composed by Disadvantaged Youth

Regardless of the
situation, sin always
will somehow exist

Jesus loves us much,
no matter if I fail this,
he loves me through all

Finals can be hard.
Theology can be hard.
Just believe in God.

Was Samson like a
Disney princess with powers
like Rapunzel’s hair?

Be a good person.
Judges and kings are bad, so...
so don’t be those.

So God gave up on
the Kings? No wonder they suck.
Basketball is rigged.

Mr. Gregory
is forcing us to do these
haiku poems, dang

God had one job: don’t
break Job, and lost his bet, he
could lose five big ones!

Oh, hello Job, it’s
good to see you once again.
Yeah, thanks a lot, God.

Satan was not bad
in Job, but now seen as bad,
just like my sister.

The Song of Songs was
really beautiful, much much
better than Bieber

Guy: “Let’s add a song
about sex to our God book.”
Everyone else: “Sure!”

The Song of Songs was
too secular, ew, too gross,
too much to handle

If I fail this test,
Jesus might still love me but
my mother will not

God is a puzzle
We cannot figure him out
He’s complicated

I know this isn’t
theological, but have
fun getting married

If Jesus still loves
us then he would give us As.
But you are not him.

Thank God I am an
atheist. Oh wait,
that’s contradictory.

I wish I was a
king, you know...violating
commandments for fun

Why are there minor
prophets? It’s because they didn’t
mind their own business.

I think Jesus would
have letted me use the bath-
room if he were here

Jesus loves you more
than white people love their dogs
and morning coffee

I am nothing but
a blind beggar who received
a merciful gift

The Cost of Faith

by Erin M. Conway

If I say I believe in God what does that mean for my life?
If I say I am a follower of Christ, how must I act?

All year, these essential questions have been written on the whiteboard in my classroom. They’ve framed our conversations on social justice and vocation. We’ve wrestled with them together, in some moments finding their answers more palatable than in others. Oftentimes the answers to these questions result in discomfort - emotional, mental, or, perhaps most frighteningly, physical.

Since the election of our 45th president in November of 2016, I’ve found myself thinking in very real ways about my personal answers to these questions. At what point, I’ve often thought, will I have to put aside my own comfort and put myself on the line for what my faith expects of me? At what point, will I be asked to be criticized in defense of my students and others who live on the margins? At what point will I be asked to place myself in the pathway of potential physical harm?

This past week, I’ve once again found myself face to face with these questions. Surrounded by images of migrant children separated from their parents, photographs of individuals in detention facilities, and stories of workers who live and work near me arrested while at work, leaving children and families questioning why they never came home, I can’t help but ask how my faith calls me to respond.

In times like these I try to remind myself to return to the examen, ¹ looking for the places where God has been at work in my life and using these moments to figure out how to respond now.

Dolores Mission Parish in East LA, decorated for Christmas

There are three physical locations in our world where I can say that I felt an overwhelming physical presence of the Holy Spirit. Difficult to describe and hard to comprehend, I can best explain these moments as being characterized by an almost oppressive collection of emotion hanging in the air. In each of these moments I felt that I walked into a space in which the air was thicker, a place where my soul felt different than it has felt anywhere else. I believe that what I felt in each of these places was love, a lingering presence of God’s love for the people who occupied these spaces and the love of God which they embodied.

The first of these encounters happened the first time I stepped into Dolores Mission Church in East Los Angeles.² I had read enough stories about Father Greg Boyle at this point to be overwhelmed by the importance of that small space even before my arrival. I imagined the countless homilies, funerals, quinceaneras, and conversations that took place in this space. The hearts that had been transformed, the love of God shared, all of it was staggering. But it is one thing to stand in awe of a place. What I felt at Dolores Mission was different. I believe and trust that what I felt there was nothing other than the presence of the Holy Spirit that marked this sacred ground.

The altar at the Chapel of the Divine Providence
where Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated.

My second encounter occurred during my first visit to El Salvador. I stood on the altar in the Chapel of the Divine Providence, in the very spot where Blessed, and soon to be saint, Archbishop Oscar Romero was martyred, and I once again found myself swimming under this massive weight of God. Like at Dolores Mission, I entered this space with a deep appreciation for Romero’s work in his country as well as a reverence for the love he garnered for his people. I knew that he likely saw the assassin drive up and fire his shot but chose to continue with the consecration anyway. But despite all this, what I felt in this space was more than a deep reverence. It was truly God’s presence in my life.

The third encounter also took place in El Salvador, on the same trip and in the same day. We visited the University of Central America, the UCA, where six Jesuit priests were dragged from their rooms and martyred during the Salvadoran Civil War for speaking out against the government and seeking to empower the people. The place where I most encountered God was not in the rose garden where the Jesuits were murdered, however, but in the small room down the corridor where Elva and Salina Ramos were killed. The Jesuit’s housekeeper and her daughter stayed at the UCA that night because they believed they would be safer there than in their own village. They were killed simply because the army did not want to leave witnesses behind. As I stood in that tiny room, I couldn’t shake the image of mother and daughter clinging to one another, knowing these were their last moments together, yet praying that they might have more. The weight of prayer in the room was oppressive.

The rose garden at the University of Central America (UCA)
in San Salvador.

I think what’s important about all three of these locations, the reason that God showed up so uniquely in these moments, is that each space reminds me of what the cost of Christianity can be. Each can be connected to the questions we began with: If I say I believe in God, what does that mean for my life? If I say I am a follower of Christ, how must I act?

A Christian life, a moral life, requires sacrifice of us. It requires that we remove ourselves from what is comfortable, that we step beyond our safe spaces of power and align ourselves with the outcast and the downtrodden. This is what Jesus did and as his followers, we are called to do the same. For those like Father Greg Boyle, this means devoting our lives to educate, employ, and empower those our society chooses to leave out. For some of us, like Blessed Oscar Romero or the Jesuit martyrs of the UCA, this means quite literally laying down our lives to protect and empower a people who are not being treated justly.

So what does this mean for me and you? I think this is a question that deserves our constant discernment. Are we called to simply love Jesus as we encounter him in our neighbors? Are we called to challenge our government when we encounter an unjust laws? Are we called to peaceful protest or civil disobedience? Are we called to physically align ourselves with those our society wishes to harm? Are we called to lay down our lives in the name of our faith? I believe each of us is called to our own unique response to God’s presence. And although I’m not convinced that God calls all of us to be martyrs, there is a reason, I like to remind my students, that the symbol of our faith is Christ crucified. Our faith requires much of us. It may not end in our literal crucifixion but it will likely lead us to make physical, mental, or emotional sacrifices in an effort to create the world God has in mind. God calls each of us to a unique response, but if we aren’t asking what that response might be, are we truly living a Christian life?

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1 For a more detailed explanation of the examen, see the start of this piece.^↩

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2 For those who are unfamiliar with Dolores Mission, it was the parish where Father Greg Boyle, SJ began his ministry working with gang members, a work that eventually morphed into Homeboy Industries.^↩

A Blessing Upon Your Children

by Laura Flanagan

In late May, I was privileged to attend a friend’s ordination to the priesthood. Ordained in the middle of Mass, the fresh priests then concelebrate the Eucharist. But before the close of Mass, they each bestowed a priestly blessing upon Cardinal Dolan, who knelt to receive it; after Mass, their first gestures as priests of God and his Church were to offer “first blessings” to all who come forward. I found it telling that this is one of their first acts as ordained mediators of grace: to raise their hands over the people of God and bless them. Even before they celebrate their first Mass, as “Father,” they bring the blessings of God the Father to his children in this particular way.

Fr. Peter, OP, blesses his parents.

In 6th grade, no matter the faith formation process, our parish students learn all about the Old Testament, and particularly the patriarchs. In these stories, in this family of Abraham, the father’s blessing was a huge deal.

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all gave their children formal blessings, and Jacob even offered a blessing to some of his grandchildren. You may remember Esau’s plea, “Have you not reserved a blessing for me?” after Jacob stole the blessing Isaac had intended for him, and the surprise of Jacob’s crossed hands over Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh, where he bestows with his right hand the greater blessing on the younger grandson.¹

The power behind the blessings, of course, comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God himself directly blesses in Genesis as well; he blesses birds and sea creatures, Adam and Eve, and Abraham, the father of these sons and of many nations. Psalm 68 calls God the “father to the fatherless.”² No person whose parents have not lived up to the vocation (or whose parents have been separated from their children while trying to obtain a better life for them) is truly without a parent to bless them.³ Blessings are definitely the purview of God, but they are often mediated through us.

We are able to request God’s blessing upon anyone and anything via our baptismal priesthood. There is an entire book published by the USCCB called Catholic Household Blessings and Prayers, and it doesn’t require an ordained priest to pronounce the “blessings” contained therein. Even in Genesis, where the father’s blessing is paramount, Rebekah’s whole family blesses her as she sets off to join the family of Abraham. ⁴ As a parent, I am given the specific responsibility to bless my children, and I do when Clare finally gets in bed every night. I use the blessing from Numbers:

May the Lord bless you and keep you:
May he make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you:
May he lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.⁵

That same beautiful blessing was pronounced over me four weeks ago; my friend the new priest had chosen to use it for his first blessings.

It is not for nothing that the blessings of God are so frequently mediated through his priests, from whom we request myriad formal blessings in their ordained ministry. I often remind people that the sacraments exist for us. In the sacraments, grace is mediated through a Father we can see and hear because it aids us in believing the grace is real, while coming from the Father we cannot yet see. The same is true of sacramentals, like the blessing of God. So we bow down for the blessing at the end of our high holy days; we stop by sacristies for blessings upon our rosaries; we bless ourselves with water that a priest has blessed.

My parish has a transitional deacon with us for the year, and I intend to have him bring out the importance of blessings with the 6th grade students of the Old Testament. At the end of the year, after his ordination to the priesthood, we plan to invite those students and their families to one of his first Masses and to receive some of his “first blessings.” I hope this opportunity brings the context of their Scripture study to life, by showing how much value there always has been in the blessing from a Father; and giving them an opportunity to receive it from a Father they care about and know to care about them.

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1 Genesis 27 and 48^↩

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2 Psalm 68:5^↩

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3 I also find Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son to be an important image here, the fatherly gesture of loving welcome reminiscent of how both ordinations and blessings are bestowed. How are we called to reflect that?^↩

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4 Genesis 24:60^↩

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5 Numbers 6:24-26 ^↩

Order from Chaos

by Dan Masterton

I’m a neat-and-tidy kind of guy. I’m not quite OCD, but I do like things to have their assigned places and to be returned to those places after use. I like to clean and do dishes as I cook rather than binge-clean after eating. I like an orderly computer desktop and an organized email inbox.¹

This type of personality has much to reckon with in the presence of an infant/toddler. At first, as my daughter, Lucy, graduated from tummy time to rolling over, her playtime habitat included just a blanket and a handful of toys. As she began to crawl, the growing number of toys needed a little box. As she moved on to cruising and now walking, the toys got bigger and more numerous. And now, no longer confined to smaller areas of our home, her path of destruction from end to end and through each room can sometimes rival General Sherman.

The baseline scene in the morning is books on their shelves, small toys in their crate, large toys at their stations, stuffed animals in their places. After a few minutes of free-range time, these items can migrate to just about anywhere, now that their escort is on the loose. My strategy is to try to restore order every half hour to hour or so, partially to maintain my mental sanity and partially to keep track of the things she has displaced with her explorations.²

As Lucy roams her new world, up on two feet with orangutang-like arms flailing in a daring display of “balance,” her instinct and operative mode is destruction. While fleeting, heart-warming moments briefly elapse in which she puts toys back in a crate or hands loose items back to me, the majority of her time is spent tearing things apart -- ripping magnets from the fridge, pulling every toy out if its crate, pulling every stuffed animal from the shelf, snatching every loose paper from its basket.³ In her primitive toddler fashion, Lucy defaults to tearing things up.

I don’t mean to complain or bemoan my daughter; she’s a lot of fun and pretty even keeled. ⁴ I’ve just been amazed at how sharply she tilts toward destruction. I knew babies are fairly simple-minded as they begin to explore and learn, executing simple tasks over and over again as they study the world and develop their minds. I did not realize how much her exploration would be dominated by pure destruction. As she approaches new areas and apparatuses, her default setting is to tear them apart.

Why doesn’t she incline towards organizing things? Why isn’t her instinct putting disarray into order? Basically, I guess order is a higher level of thinking than lack of order. Even before disorder, a lack of order is the preexisting condition to the prospect of order. So apparently, before she can become any sort of agent of order, she has to explore the disintegration of everything. She has to tear apart each new realm of her world before she can understand how it may potentially go back together. It’s been intriguing to watch.

Her little travels have shown me how innate our default setting of destruction really is. Over time, education, experience, environment, and so much more combine to help us learn and develop, yet at that foundational point in our infancy, we have this sort of default human inclination toward destruction, toward tearing things apart, toward disarray. Whatever understanding we gain of order only comes later.

I can’t help but think of how we socialize as humans. Creating, growing, and sustaining friendships is hard; it takes a lot of time and energy to establish and nurture a strong friendship. On the other hand, it can take as little as a moment to destroy one. For whatever reason, our complex nature contributes to the massive outlay of effort that is required to become friends, but at its core, that same nature makes it comparatively easy to sever a friendship.

I think this reality of our human nature illustrates the insightfulness of metanoia. With all due respect to the born-again experience of our evangelical brothers and sisters, I’ve always found more resonance with the idea of constant conversion. Our broken hearts are in need of frequent renewal. We are always needing to turn more fully toward God. Given our complex nature and this baseline reality of destruction at our core -- surely built upon or within our concupiscence and original sin -- we need to be refilled and refreshed over and over again to reorient our hearts rightly.

While Christian initiation commits our life irrevocably to God in Christ, it’s the metanoia of Sacramental living that sustains and solidifies that truth in our hearts. Commitment to Christ in the Eucharist draws us to communion with others and with God and fuels our hearts with the very person of Christ. The Sacraments of Healing help get us back on this road, and the Sacraments in Service to the Church invite us to commit our very selves and lives to this path. So even as this destructive nature lurks deep within, Christ comes to be with us and in us as we endeavor toward the hard work of love, while resisting the temptingly easy path of destruction.

From our very roots in Creation, we have revealed to us a God who brings order to chaos. While it’s tempting to think God created the world from nothing, the words of Genesis more accurately are describing a God who takes the disorder of an anarchic matter and organizes it into the created world: “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth -- and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters…” (Genesis 1:1-2).

At whatever literal or symbolic levels you read that, when gazing upon the clutter of the universe, God commanded it into the order and beauty of Creation. Seeing the state of disorder, God chose not destruction but Creation. Made in God’s image, our call as stewards of the earth and as the hands and feet of Christ for one another is to carry forth this goodness -- How can the love of God I bring to others draw them from brokenness toward right relationship? How can I prioritize my life, my time, and my energy to most reflect God’s love? How can my Christian living be not just rigid, strict organizing but a firmer orientation toward God? Even as I chuckle at Lucy’s destruction, swallowing my tidy streak to instead enjoy my toddler’s earnest exploration, I know her learning will eventually crest this hill to discover order, and that her experience of Love in our family will be the roots that grow her toward bringing that goodness to our world.

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1 You folks with the multi-digit numbers in parentheses and in your red circles drive me bananas.^↩

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2 Stuffed animals and books are fairly easy to track. Each of the 26 magnetic letters for the phonics toy on the fridge -- not so much. I also find (perhaps biased-ly) that she plays better when she has fresh order to destroy every once in a while instead of an unchecked daylong jag of destruction. ^↩

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3 I promise you that I am not prone to exaggeration and prefer literal descriptions when possible. This is a literal description. She works until the crate is empty, until the shelf is bare, etc. ^↩

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4 For now… I know her 2nd birthday looms, and all you parents out there are preparing your Terrible Twos warnings and advice as you read! As wisely put by fellow Restless Heart and parent, Laura, “I mean, i just a super illustration of how we reject the good merely because it's willed by someone else.” ^↩

Gunsplaining and the Pro-Life Endgame

by Tim Kirchoff

The question of the pro-life endgame was recently brought back into public discourse by Kevin Williamson’s ouster from The Atlantic in light of tweets he made about hanging being an appropriate punishment for abortion and, to a lesser extent, by the Idaho Republican primary for Lieutenant Governor, where in a debate, one of the candidates, Bob Nonini, asserted that there ought to be criminal penalties for abortion and nodded when pressed on whether the death penalty would be an appropriate punishment.

When Donald Trump assented to the proposition that women who have abortions ought to be punished, several pro-lifers were quick to distance themselves from his comments and point out that, prior to Roe v Wade, women were seldom, if ever, jailed for procuring an abortion, and criminal penalties for abortion were only used as leverage to get women to agree to testify against abortionists.

Some such people must have contacted Bob Nonini, the candidate from the Idaho Primary mentioned above: in his clarification of his seeming assent to the proposition that the death penalty should be imposed on women who procure abortions, he said that he intended the death penalty to be part of the statute only as a deterrent and that “it is my understanding that in the history of the United States, long before Roe was foisted upon this country; no woman has ever been prosecuted for undergoing abortion. That is for practical reasons, as well as for reasons of compassion.”

If Nonini had already understood that American women were not prosecuted for abortions even when abortions were illegal, he would have made that point in the debate; he almost certainly conferred with pro-life activists before issuing this clarifying statement. Like many in the pro-life movement, he knows that abortion is murder, but is not so certain about what America’s abortion laws ought to be in light of that knowledge.

When pressed on the point as Nonini was, some may bite the bullet and agree that abortion, as murder, should carry the same penalties as murder, and are thus easily labeled by their opponents as extremists. Others are not comfortable with that final conclusion, but are unable to explain why. Their interlocutors perceive this group as either refusing to acknowledge the logical conclusion of regarding abortion as murder, or are unable to perceive it; if pro-lifers are not dangerous extremists, they are either disingenuous or dimwitted.

There are similarities between this kind of bad-faith critique of pro-lifers and the rhetorical strategy described by Adam Weinstein as “gunsplaining” in the Washington Post. I had seen this strategy in action myself: opponents of gun control would pick fights over technical terms like “assault rifle” to try to expose the ignorance of people who said that they would support a ban on assault rifles. As Weinstein explains, “[The goal of gunsplaining] is not to foster deeper understanding of these weapons, but to further a group identity of firearms owners as beset by a dumb or dishonest adversary, to flatter their insecurities and tell them they don’t need to take gun controllers seriously because you can’t reason with ignorance.”

Gunsplainers, like the critics of the pro-life movement discussed above, try to avoid engaging with people who actually know the subject well (and there are plenty such experts, both in the pro-life and anti-gun movements), unless they can use that person to paint the entire movement as extremists, as they did when retired Supreme Court Justice Stevens penned an op-ed suggesting a repeal of the 2nd Amendment. Their goal isn’t to learn from others, to inform them, or even to argue, but to humiliate others in the service of their own views. I am far more sympathetic to the (admittedly somewhat ignorant) targets of such people than I am those who wield their knowledge as a cudgel.

This latter group, for all their pretense of insight, nonetheless fails to understand their opponents on the most basic level. The desire for stronger laws against abortion or guns starts not in the head, but in the heart—with a horror at the lives lost, and anger at the fact that our legal regime—the way our laws are written and enforced—seems almost deliberately ineffective at reducing the death count. Their position begins with a desire for us to say, as a society, “Never again!”

Would it be a good thing if more people who favor greater restrictions on guns or abortion could explain what sort of legal regime would be better than the status quo? Of course! But any pedant who tries to expose the ignorance of members of the general movement on the finer details of the issue will be understandably, and I think rightly, ignored. If they refuse to acknowledge those people who can provide coherent explanations, instead talking down to the less eloquent members of the movement, they don't deserve to be heard.

Before we expect other people to open their minds to argumentation, we must often begin by opening our hearts to them.

Pipe, Pen, and Rye Close at Hand

by Rob Goodale

I have once more found occasion to alight on the massive wooden rocking chair which makes its home on the front porch, accompanied by the night sky; pipe, pen, and rye close at hand, watching the cars stroll by and thinking of you.

But for the battered state of my heart and your conspicuous absence, it is perfect.

Normal units of measurement seem inadequate with regard to the passage of time. How much is a score? Twenty? Admittedly, that might be overdoing it just a bit.

Three fortnight and ten days ago, I held the gaze of my best friend for what increasingly appears to be the last time -- or, at least, the last time for a very long while. Her gaze, of course, a pale substitute for her hand, much less her person, but we make do in such times.

It has been a strange few months since that small section of the world I foolishly call my own shifted off of its axis. I watch as dear friends and acquaintances alike visibly struggle to find the proper way to broach the subject; they inevitably ask how I am doing, and I can scarce find anything to say. “I’m okay,” I tell them, trusting that particular arrangement of those two particular words to carry far more weight than their approved load-bearing capacity.

Mostly, life is the same. I still cook. I still write. I still watch baseball. I still see old friends, and I still smile. I do listen to more Fleetwood Mac than I used to, which I suppose is something. I also find myself here on the porch rather often; the silent companions I find here seem to be the only whose invitations I never find difficult to accept.

All the ingredients which have made up my life for the past several years remain intact; yet the taste is not quite right without the stock which bound them all together. I suppose people aren’t meant to be compared to chicken stock. That may have been part of the problem all along.

There is no good way to explain the breaking of a heart, nor is there of hurrying it along in the mending. One can gamely attempt to assemble the pieces and loop them once or twice with string and scotch tape, but the true mending cannot be helped with anything other than deliberate waiting, and there is no telling how much.

And so I am left to my pipe and my pen and my rye, sending out silent pleading prayers into the purpling ether and asking the Living Beauty to help them find their intended target.

May she know that I adore her, and am trying to do that less while loving her more, the adoring, of course, rightfully belonging only to Him. May she know she is loved, and may that love, the love of the cosmos’ creator -- but also of very particular persons with faces and names and words -- penetrate her soul and heal it. And may we both, in our unspeakable brokenness, stop waiting, no matter how badly it may hurt to move.

I do not know what resolution is in store, only that I will in all likelihood detest it, and that it will be incomparably better than this.

The End of All Things

by Jenny Klejeski

You know, sometimes the readings at Mass are strangely apropos.

Case in point: this past Friday, at our second to the last school Mass of the year, we heard from St. Peter,

“Beloved: The end of all things is close at hand.”

When I heard those words, I thought of the impending end of the school year, all my grades being due shortly, 8th grade graduation; I thought of going to get the keys to the new apartment the next day, marking the end of living in my childhood home; I thought of my last few weeks as a Klejeski and all the things that need to happen before then.

Not literally the end of all things, but okay, God--I’m listening.

“Therefore be serious and sober-minded
so that you will be able to pray.”

A good friend of mine recently asked me what he could pray for on my behalf. I thought about it for a moment and said, “attention.” I have realized that it is far too easy, in any season of life, but particularly in the especially busy ones to cease to pay attention, to drown in details, and just to lose perspective.

In the midst of end of year grading, it is easy to forget how blessed I am by my job, what wonderful students and co-workers I have, and even what a gift the mundane slog of assignments is.

When I am moving box after box of wedding shower presents into our new apartment, it is easy to forget about all the beautiful people who love us and are ushering us into married life with these gifts.

Even for two low-key people (or maybe I should say, especially for two low-key people), the process of wedding planning involves a lot of potentially stress-inducing details that distract from the real purpose of the whole process: i.e. receiving a SACRAMENT.

Perspective. Attention. Gratitude.

“Above all, let your love for one another be intense,
because love covers a multitude of sins.
Be hospitable to one another without complaining.”

At my school, we have a virtue of the month that we focus on. My principal, in her wisdom, strategically made our virtue for this final month forgiveness. Life is messy--especially when people are involved--and I am grateful for the reminder to go gently, both with myself and others. As my students miss final deadlines, and I miss final deadlines, and there’s a miscommunication with our caterer, and we’re trying move a heavy couch up a narrow staircase in 90° heat, and my students are antsy to get out of the classroom, and I’m antsy to get out of the classroom, and so-and-so hasn’t RSVPed yet, and on and on and on…I am humbled by St. Peter’s exhortation.

Love. Love intensely. Don’t complain.

As each one has received a gift, use it to serve one another
as good stewards of God's varied grace.
Whoever preaches, let it be with the words of God;
whoever serves, let it be with the strength that God supplies,
so that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ,
to whom belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

How often I can lament whatever task is before me as an “obligation” or something burdensome. How hopeful, then, are St. Peter’s words to help me realize that I have been not only entrusted with a task that is particular to me, but also been equipped to carry out that task. And all for God’s glory! What freedom!

And finally:

Beloved, do not be surprised that a trial by fire is occurring among you,
as if something strange were happening to you.
But rejoice to the extent that you share in the sufferings of Christ,
so that when his glory is revealed
you may also rejoice exultantly.

All of it--the struggles, the blessings, the joys, the mundanity--is a gift.