Curating Faith

by Laura Flanagan

One of the most annoying parts of my job is curating the adult faith library, established long ago with grandiose aspirations but which practically no one in the parish utilizes. In fact, in my five years at this parish, I’ve only had two interactions which involved the library, and I don’t think either person found what they needed. Book donations from parishioners have never stopped, though, and whenever I get a “book dump,” as I call them, I have to sift through what we will recycle and what we will keep and likely never read again.

Many of these books are junk; that’s often why they’re being cleaned out of our families’ home libraries. Every so often, though, there are some gems. The good books I’ll usually keep for the library - as intended - but occasionally I have set aside a book for someone in my religious education program who might like it, and just offered it to them. Maybe they’ll never read it, but maybe they will... and that’s more use than I can probably hope for it in our library.

Rarely, the treasures deposited outside my office door are items other than books. I’ve found a number of interesting bookmarks: inscribed holy cards from a century ago, a gold foiled Arabic word which, despite my best efforts, I was unable to Google Translate. People have deposited the occasional olive wood crucifix outside my office door along with their books, and there are often rosaries of varying quality.

At times, I have wondered what to do with the high quality items that have been donated to the parish. I feel like I should get them into other parishioners’ hands, but until recently struggled with how to do so fairly. How do you facilitate the transfer of beautiful reflections of our faith from a family which obviously has myriad to a family which has few?

To accomplish this end, I am planning a “rosary challenge” in my religious education program for this Lent. For each decade of the rosary prayed, the kids can put an entry towards a prize item of their choice. Great, inventory problem solved.

However… my planning is getting out of hand. Rather than simply redistributing the already-donated items, I’m buying a few Catholic items off Etsy that have amused or stuck with me, in order to ensure that there are some really good prizes.

Interior monologue: 

“For what should motivate fifth grade boys to pray the rosary but the opportunity to enjoy perpetually a magnet which says - and shows - ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, punch the devil in the face’?” 

“Surely someone will want this gorgeous Madonna of the Andes.”

Beads are coming from eBay so I can handcraft a rosary on the theme of Stella Maris. Like I said, out of hand.

The way I’ve spent my time on this illuminated for me that I’m basically acting as a Catholic interior designer for my PSR families. This isn’t the first time I’ve had this problem. I’ve ensured that a botanical illustration of the mysteries of the rosary got into the hands of our amateur (but very serious about it) botanist/retired priest. I ran across a beautiful illustration of Mary, Undoer of Knots, and passed it along to someone who had spent a while looking for one.

There seems to be a constant temptation to buying beautiful (or funny) pieces of art - not because I need to possess them, but because someone should.

But should someone else possess [insert art piece here]? Occasionally, my reflection tends toward how my own particular flavor of Catholicism developed from a conglomeration of those who have taught me.¹ For example: St. Meinrad Archabbey, at which we stopped on our way to last week’s family vacation. St. Meinrad is important to me because of the impact it’s had on my faith and the faith of others when I was a kid. I went on pilgrimage there once with my dad and brother, as referenced in my first Restless Hearts post. Benedictines of the Archabbey heard my confession as a child and sealed me with the gift of the Spirit. I have a painting in my house of part of the St. Meinrad campus, which was painted by a family friend on retreat there. It’s inevitable that when I share the Catholic faith, it will flow from my experience, from what I enjoy, and from what resonates with me and the people who came before me. I’m likely to illustrate a catechetical concept with St. Meinrad.

As glorious as my particular Catholic tradition is,² I don’t need to make Catholics in my own image. A few years ago, my husband’s cousin (who works in fashion) bought a hat for her nonagenarian grandmother, which said grandmother loved, and which was probably not something the cousin herself would wear.³ Bridget had worked as a personal shopper, and mentioned that when shopping for someone else, you have to think not about what you like but what they like.⁴ I think this is the perspective that not only personal shoppers but all gift-givers should cultivate.

I’m not offended if those I catechize don’t take to my devotional darlings as much as I do, although the energy with which I present them means they sometimes will. Maybe it will become more relevant later, or maybe there’s something out there in this big, wide Church which will mean as much to them, and I take pride if I can help them find it.

This year, I’ll put out prizes in this rosary challenge which are a reflection of what I think are valuable illustrations and tools of a Catholic home. I’ll see what gets the most votes, and about what people ask me “Where did that come from?”⁵ From there, I’ll reassess what items will move these people to prayer (both because they are drawn to the item itself, and because they quite literally have to pray to obtain it). Hopefully, at the end of Lent there will be several families with a little more tangible representation of their faith in their home - and may their faith grow in equal or greater measure. And I’m sure I’ll be really intense about finding something even more beautiful to offer next year.

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1 I’m certain the sheer quantity of quotes from C.S. Lewis by various authors in this blog comes in part thanks to David Fagerberg at the University of Notre Dame. ^↩

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2 “tradition” with a lower case “t”, of course.^↩

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3 Dorothy passed away in June; eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord.^↩

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4 Moral concerns being neutral.^↩

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5 I’ll also see if, in the great tradition of catechesis, this idea is only really good in my eyes and in reality is a total failure to prayerfully motivate. Always a distinct possibility.^↩

The Simpsons III: Missionary Impossible

by Dan Masterton

Picking up my periodic thread on The Simpsons (1st post: intro + The Joy of Sect | 2nd post: The Father, Son, and Holy Guest Star), I want to circle back to a classic episode that I pithily blogged on years and years ago. “Missionary Impossible” unfolds after Homer makes a huge pledge to PBS, which he knows he can’t keep, in order to end a pledge break and get his new favorite show back on the air. The chase from PBS’ collectors sends him into the hands of Rev. Lovejoy, who rushes him on to a remote Pacific island on behalf of the Christian faith. Homer becomes an accidental missionary. Hilarity ensues.

“Missionary Impossible” (full synopsis | full episode)

This episode has the characteristically circuitous and roundabout exposition that The Simpsons has utilized so thoroughly over the years. While the lampooning of public television and pledge-break fundraising is otherwise worthy of analysis, we’ll jump right into the meat of Homer’s missionary excursion. But only because an anonymous reader just pledged $10,000 to this blog to get me to shut up.

In classic Homer fashion, his solution to his problems is clumsy and overly simplistic: he rushes into the church yelling, “Sanctuary!,” where the persistently indifferent Rev. Lovejoy pauses his organ cleaning to apathetically listen to Homer’s pleas. The cultural/historical reference is insightful; people have long utilized the humanitarianism of church communities as a way to protect them from potentially unjust treatment. We see it especially today in the case of people facing detention or even deportation as part of immigration enforcement. In that regard, church communities and their leaders are leaning on social tradition that worship spaces are not to be invaded and disrupted by law enforcement officials, at least in the case of pursuing nonviolent offenders. Debatable as it is, the custom provides a tool to justice-oriented people of faith and to those who may be wronged by the justice system. On the other hand, this example in The Simpsons is just Homer looking for cover after he made a bad call. Luckily, Rev. Lovejoy has an ace up his sleeve.

Lovejoy hides Homer in his trunk -- balled up in a mail sack, posing as children’s letters to Jesus that Lovejoy is taking to the dump -- and whisks him off to the tarmac at an airstrip. He loads Homer into a plane and then asks him how he’d life to be a missionary in the Pacific. Before Homer can deliberate, the door is shut, and the plane takes off. As the jet soars westward into the sky, Homer moans, ”I’m not a missionary! I don’t even believe in Jebus!… Save me, Jebus!”

I think Homer here resembles a lot of folks who get involved in service. Their intentions are decent enough -- help others, open my eyes to tough realities, appreciate what I have -- but the transcendent, supernatural, spiritual piece of it throws a lot of folks off guard. When challenged with Scripture to reflect upon, when invited to apply Catholic social teachings (mmmm… solidarity…), when asked how they encountered Christ in service, the enthusiasm wanes. For example, my parish has a sizeable annual contingent that travels to Appalachia every summer to do home repair and other handiwork service. They fill tons of vans and fundraise easily, but they don’t invite the faith piece of it well and make it almost like pulling teeth. The formation and connections are potentially so simple, direct, and concrete, but many struggle to engage that way, like it’s too much to ask. I hear echoes of them in Homer as he pleads with the church for salvation, resists it when it’s concretely offered, and then begs Jesus for salvation from the salvation He offered. Exhale.

When Homer arrives to the island, the outgoing missionaries, Craig and Amy, give him a real brief orientation: “We taught them some English and ridiculed away most of their beliefs, so you can take it from there!” They abruptly walk away and depart on the plane, leaving Homer to stew on that. It’s a dark tip of the cap to the old way of mission in which white westerners, usually from Catholic religious communities, would forcibly cancel out indigenous belief and practice and impose the rituals and teachings of Christianity. While we can’t ignore the history and legacy of it, we can celebrate the increasingly nuanced and progressive ways that later mission work transpires. The newer norms lean more heavily on inculturation, trying to learn and understand indigenous practices and place them in dialogue with Christianity. Those who feel drawn to the Christian faith aren’t forced to discard their culture to belong. In patient engagement that seeks informed interaction but tries to avoid syncretism, neat crossovers emerge that animate Christianity with the local vitality. I think especially of east Asian cultures’ reverence of ancestors informing the devotions to the communion of saints. On Homer’s island here, no such nuance will unfold. Eventually, Homer will instead clumsily impose his culture like a square peg into a round hole.

For starters, Homer figures he can just hand out bibles and let them read. They tell him they cannot read, and he grimaces, flatly complaining, “Does the word jet lag mean anything to you people? Jet? Lag?” I remember getting to Ireland for my volunteer year with all the zeal of a fresh post-grad. I had so much antsiness to do ministry work, and here I was to get started. It’s quite tempting to think you’ll stroll in and hit the ground running converting hearts and saving souls -- my lapsed Catholic Irish friend, Adrian, would even joke, “Dan’s here to save our souls,” and then jokingly deride me as a “damn Yank.” The reality is that before you can do anything, you have much to learn from those you serve and work with, and a lot more efficacy in your example, your competency, and your companionship really than in whatever amount of “doing” you envisioned.

On a related note, Homer lets out his trademark unfiltered reaction as he learns about day-to-day life on the island. Monologuing about watching TV, sitting on a couch, and drinking beer, he quickly finds out that he will have none of those things on the island. Homer drops to the ground, thrashing his legs, and cries, “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” In a delightful moment that shows how doomed Homer is as a missionary as well as how highly these islanders esteem their western missionaries, everyone copies his “prayer gesture.”

Perhaps figuring he ought to stick to the script, Homer pops open the bible and settles on one of the more infamously gruesome texts one could find, a particularly gorey verse from Psalm 68:



He slams the book shut and casually pronounces it to be “as true today as when it was written,” a fantastically reductive truth that gives the poor islanders no chance to understand. It’s a tremendous nod to humanity’s temptation to see the Bible as an arbitrarily utilizable book of axioms, or worse as a source for proof-texting. It reminds me especially of the rash of social media accounts that offer quotes from things “out of context,” my favorite being the Parks and Rec variant. It goes without saying that Bible study must come with context, and preferably informed exegesis, before interpretation.

Homer should of course go for some broader, more basic strokes of catechesis -- maybe some basic Genesis or Christ’s greatest commandments. Instead, Homer opens the floor for Q&A and quickly realizes he has no A’s for their Q’s.¹ Rather than try to learn on the fly how to do good mission, Homer leans instead on his strengths -- social life, especially my means of pleasures that too easily become vices. One could argue that his brand of socializing and community building could lay a good foundation for the germination of a faith community; however, he redirects their development effort from digging a well and building a chapel toward constructing a casino and brewing beer. You can see where this is going.

Homer’s introduction of capitalism and hedonism are a shock to this tight, grassroots community as well as their informal economy. The gambling and drinking quickly cause explosive conflicts and start to ruin the social fabric of the community. Homer realizes his mistake. He bails on the casino and goes to start moving stones toward the completion of the chapel. When they discover him working, they ask him why he’s doing it:

Homer: “You’re all terrible sinners”
Islander: “Since when?”
Homer: “Since I got here. Now, either grab a stone, or go to hell.”

They complete the chapel just before a massive volcanic eruption dooms the island and imperils Homer and his new friends. Of course, the episode ends before this is resolved, and the subsequent episode starts from scratch, with everyone back to base one. But before the lava subsumes everything they’ve just built, we get some great lines on church. Sometimes, we look at our churches with great spiritual, architectural, and childlike awe, gawking at the vaulted ceilings, beautiful metals and glasses, and piety-invoking iconography; other times, we see the buildings as dreary destinations for a lethargic hour of obligatory prayer. Homer lands somewhere in between at the end of this episode: “Well, I may not know much about God, but I have to say, we built a pretty nice cage for him.” The final missionary wisdom comes from an astute islander, counseling his neighbor on their holy day obligations:

Islander: “How often do we have to go to church to avoid hell?
Other islander: “Every Sunday for the rest of our lives.”
Islander: “No, really…”

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1 Homer has one especially great line here. When asked what the one true faith is, Homer replies, “Not the Unitarians -- if that’s the one true faith, I’ll eat my hat!” The Simpsons writers are pretty ubiquitous with their barbs and criticisms, and that’s one of the strengths of their humor. When it comes to religion, they are fairly magnanimous in chastizing and praising faith appropriately. The one exception seems to be the shallowness of Unitarianism.^↩

Playing with some Pro-Life Puzzle Pieces

by Tim Kirchoff

I enjoy jigsaw puzzles. Trying to figure out each individual puzzle piece’s place in the bigger picture and trying to find how it fits with other individual pieces is engaging for me.

Attending the Archdiocese of Chicago’s inaugural Life and Justice Conference last September was, in some ways, like opening a new jigsaw puzzle. There were many individual moments from that day that I knew fit together, but knew would take time to figure out where in the bigger picture they belong. With the next iteration of this conference taking place next month (registration is open), I’d like to take some time to lay out a few puzzle pieces and suggest a few ways they might fit together.¹

The event is, to the best of my understanding, a re-thinking of the annual training and commissioning of the leaders of parish pro-life groups. It now provides training, resources, and opportunities for networking for other parish ministries as well, including immigration activism, anti-violence initiatives, and food pantries.

The conference is part of a larger attempt in the Catholic Church in the United States to make more apparent the fact that the Church’s political activism and charitable efforts are inseparable. In several dioceses across the country, including Chicago, pro-life ministries and other causes have been brought under the same institutional umbrella.

The event itself began with a keynote and Q&A with Cardinal Cupich, followed by breakout sessions and a closing Mass.

During the Cupich Q&A, a woman stood up to ask for advice about a challenge she faces as the leader of her parish’s pro-life committee. She noticed that most parishioners averted their eyes when walking by her display table, and she worried that this was because parishioners had a pre-formed idea of what a pro-life activist looks like—a moralist, waving gory images. This stereotype didn’t represent her or what she wanted her parish’s pro-life group to be, and she wanted to know how she could make the pro-life cause seem more inviting.

Cardinal Cupich, as anyone who knows about the politics of the American bishops would predict, readily sympathized with her concerns. He recommended that she broaden the scope of the group’s activities to include discussions of, for example, the death penalty.

In the subsequent breakout session, a man who has been a prominent figure in the pro-life movement for decades criticized the Cardinal’s advice. Talking about other issues like the death penalty might alienate other people who would otherwise want to be part of the pro-life movement, he warned.

All three of these speakers—the woman, the cardinal, and the pro-life leader—clearly want the pro-life movement to grow, to appeal to a broader range of people and achieve the movement’s goal of building a society that better defends human dignity, not least by ending abortion.

Cardinal Cupich argued that the more interconnected our advocacy is, the more compelling it is. This is true- we need leaders and people on the ground working on issues across partisan lines to make the interconnectedness of these issues more apparent. But I think we also need people who specialize. We need people who focus on individual issues and people who focus on connecting the issues. These groups, moreover, should not get caught up in fighting each other. In fact, they need each other.

Some people will be drawn in by comprehensive witness, but others will be drawn in by the one issue they care most about. Not all of the pro-life movement’s allies are ready to embrace everything the Church teaches (though perhaps they have rubbed off a bit too much on the Catholics they associate with- I have both sympathies with and reservations about the “ecumenism of hate” argument), but if the Church limits her public witness to only speaking about abortion, that does a disservice to the beauty and integrity of the Church’s social teaching and, more to the point, an injustice to the people whose lives and dignity are threatened by other problems.

Catholics across America are engaged in the work of justice, whether it is in regard to immigration or abortion or criminal justice reform. We may disagree with each other on strategies and even on policies, but we must not lose sight of the fact that the Church's witness to justice would not be complete without each one of us, engaged in our own unique vocation. I do not profess to know precisely how all of these vocations (all of these puzzle pieces) fit together, but I do insist that they all form part of a bigger picture.

I have little doubt that the conference next month will give me as much food for thought as last year's. Sr. Helen Prejean is scheduled to give the keynote. I’m not entirely sure what she will have to say to us in Illinois, where the death penalty has been abolished for some time.² Will she discuss the need for more work on prison reform, and ministering to prisoners? Will she take interest in the fact that women come to Illinois from nearby states like Indiana and Iowa for abortions, and whether this gives a particular urgency to pro-life work in this state? Or will she discuss another topic entirely? I only have to wait a month to find out.

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1 If the details are vague in the retelling, it is because they are fuzzy in the recalling. However, broad strokes should suffice.^↩

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2 The pro-life activist discussed above pointed this out in his critique of the Cardinal’s recommendations. Governor Rauner brought up the idea of reinstating the death penalty this past spring, probably as a campaign issue, but his proposal seems to have gone nowhere so far.

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Reflections from the Artist Formerly Known as Tent Boy

by Rob Goodale



I am going to die, is what I told them, “them” being my exceedingly patient mother and father, both of whom had nervous smiles plastered across their faces. They had just finished the first leg of the forty-sixth iteration of the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, better known by its catchy acronym -- RAGBRAI -- which entails roughly five hundred miles on a bicycle but also every kind of homemade pie you can imagine and tenderloin sandwiches bigger than your head and a great deal of laughter and craft beer tents and spaghetti dinners hosted by churches in tiny Iowa farm towns and nights spent sleeping in a stranger’s backyard in a tent, which is where I come in.

Due to ligamental limitations, I was not medically capable of riding a bicycle for any mileage whatsoever, let alone seventy miles a day, every day, for a week. So instead, I drove a fifteen-passenger van from town to town as part of my parents’ team’s support crew, transporting gear and stocking coolers and, most crucially, putting up and taking down a dozen tents every day. These tents were all different shapes and sizes -- the dumbest one, by far, was pentagonal, for no good earthly reason other than to invite a penitential mood into the proceedings.

Quoting Coldplay isn’t a thing I would like to do in print very often, but since my pride is already shattered and lying on the side of a highway somewhere in Story County, here goes: when it comes to putting up and taking down a dozen tents every day for a week, nobody said it was easy, but no one ever said it would be this hard (that’s from The Scientist). I was woefully underprepared for this.

Mom and Dad had made the mistake of asking me how the tents went, which is when I told them that I was going to die. It had taken nearly five hours to put up all of the tents, and both my body and my spirit were on the verge of breaking. I could hardly walk. I was afraid to sit down because I was reasonably certain I would not be able to stand up. My hands, whose labor experience had previously been limited to turning pages in books and pouring whiskey into a glass, began shedding their outer layer of skin in an attempt to escape further punishment. About three hours in, I overheard my lower back, hamstrings, and quadriceps whispering to one another about unionizing and going on strike. Fortunately for me, they ran out of energy before they could launch a full-scale mutiny.

And yet, as they say in the movies about torture, it’s not the physical part that gets to you -- it’s the mental aspect. If my muscles and joints were creaking under the weight of menial labor, they were in mint condition compared to my mind, which was A, embarrassed to be so totally destroyed by such a simple task; B, terrified at the prospect of repeating the day’s misery another six times; and C, ten thousand percent sure that there was no way in a frozen hell I would be able to survive.

So, I told my parents I was going to die, and they both forced a chuckle with those nervous smiles still frozen on their faces, and I shuffled off to find a beer. Night came, and morning followed: the first day.

I drove that fifteen passenger van from the Mississippi River back to the center of the state, where my motley tribe makes its home. This drive presented ample opportunity for reflection (and also for rest, which was bad since I was alone in the van, and so was combated with cold brew coffee and sunflower seeds). I realized that the progression over my week as Tent Boy mirrored, in an uncanny way, the first stages of my career as a teacher.

And then something strange happened: I continued to do the work. Each day, the sun rose and cast its brilliant light on a job that seemed a shade less daunting than it had the day before. The blisters on my hands turned to calluses. I learned the proper pacing, both physically and mentally, to endure the work, and then to my utter amazement, to enjoy it. By Friday, I was actually sad that it was over.

In the weeks preceding the first day of class, people warned me that the first year of teaching was a gauntlet one could hope merely to survive. It is kind of them, I thought to myself, to try to lower my own expectations and do what they can to set me up for success, but I am a young person filled with zeal and so while perhaps these people found teaching hard, this is what I was made for, and I will surely not find it too difficult, is what I thought to myself, like an idiot.

I remember making it to the end of the first class of that day, wearied from the effort of keeping the attention of two dozen sixteen-year-olds for an hour, but generally pleased with myself. Then the bell rang, another thirty juniors poured into the room, and with them, a wave of panic as I realized I had to repeat what I had just done another four times before I could leave.

When three o’clock finally, mercifully arrived on that first day, my roommate and I shuffled wordlessly to our car, too tired to speak. Though I do not remember the homeward commute, I am convinced that we sailed above the crowd of cars on the interstate, carried by the angel of the Lord. We staggered up to our tiny apartment in a massive apartment complex and promptly passed out for about four hours. When we finally woke up, we each ate a small bit and, bewildered, tried in vain to imagine doing it all again the next day. But we did. And before long, we learned not only to endure the labor, but to enjoy it.

The first few steps of any endeavor bring with them a turnstile of exhilaration, dread, panic, and exhaustion, particularly when the new work is imbued with uncertainty, and even more so when it is work that is thrust upon us without our consent. It is acceptable, at the first opportunity for rest, to collapse in a heap of dying expectations and wounded ego -- to be expected, even.

But in due time, left foot follows right foot follows left, and the sun eases itself into prone position under cover of shimmering starlight, and leaves grow crisp and depart from their branches so that floral infants can blossom in their place. Filled with a nonnative strength and beckoned onward by love itself, we discover that nothing is ever quite as terrifying or impossible as it seemed at the outset, when we stood alone on the threshold of life.

As I packed away a dozen tents on Saturday for what will, in all likelihood, be the final time in my illustrious career, I marveled at what God hath wrought. Sure, it may be a bit foolhardy to scrutinize such a lowly exercise in search of deep meaning, but is that not the very reason the Word Became Flesh? To drench our world with a superabundance of grace, so much so that some may even be found in the midst of tents, bicycles, and beer?