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?

Heights and Depths and Memoria

by Jenny Lippert

“The glory of God is man fully alive.”

These words of St. Irenaeus came to mind as I gazed upon the cathedral in Chartres, France on my recent honeymoon. Chartres is an architectural gem, rising 371 feet tall, with enormous asymmetric towers, and imposing buttresses all around. The solidness of this centuries-old structure expresses a permanence and stability. It points to something unchanging, and stands in stark contrast to the modern mindset of convenience and ephemera.

I much prefer the cathedral in Chartres to Notre Dame in Paris largely because Paris is so swarming with tourists that one can hardly breathe sometimes. The relative emptiness of Chartres allows me the space to be quiet, to contemplate, and to appreciate the beauty of this great work of art. There is room to breathe and room to pray.

At present, Chartres is somewhat of a unique look back in time. It’s currently in the midst of a dramatic (and apparently controversial) restoration in which nearly 800 years of grime is being cleaned from the interior and it’s being painted to resemble what it would have looked like in the 13th century. The contrast between the restored and unrestored sections of the cathedral are dramatic. The light, colorful nave is so remarkably altered from the dark, grimy sections.

Restored on the left | Unrestored on the right

Not only is the building itself a marvel, but the amount of artistry inside and outside the cathedral is staggering -- meticulous stone reliefs, enormous stained glass windows, statue upon statue upon statue. Hundreds of artists and craftsmen put forth their efforts to enshrine God’s glory in stone and glass.

And yet, there is no signature on this masterpiece. No one knows the names of the architects or artists of Chartres. They remain anonymous to history, though their work endures.

In the rather strange docudrama “F for Fake,” Orson Welles gives a short monologue about Chartres, touching on this very thing:

“You know, it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand, choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust, to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish [....] Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash. [...] A fact of life. We’re going to die. ‘Be of good heart,’ cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced — but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.”

These words echoed in my mind the day after our trip to Chartres when we toured the catacombs under the streets of Paris. The Paris catacombs are an extensive network of tunnels and ossuaries deep underground that contain the bones of more than 6 million people.



Once you get over the initial creepiness of walking through millions of bones, there is a definite sobering effect to the experience. You begin to realize that what you can see on the tour (which seems to go on and on), is really only the tip of the iceberg. As you look on unmarked skull after unmarked skull, you register that each of these belonged to a person, an individual, who had a family and a life and a story and a legacy. Perhaps some of them were great artists, perhaps there were authors, poets, scholars, statesmen. There are no names, only staggering heaps of bones with inscriptions of where they are from and when they were moved. Even King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are there, laid to rest in a vast pile of bones with everyone else, in anonymity.

One particular monument features a line of poetry from the poet Gilbert, surrounded by two plaques that read “Silence, mortal beings” and “Vain grandeur, silence.”

Roughly translated (thank you, Google Translate), the poem reads:

At the banquet of life, unfortunate guest,
I appeared one day, and I die:
I die, and on my tomb, where slowly I arrive
No one will come to shed tears.

When our tour guide brought us to this spot, he asked us eagerly if anyone knew of the poet “Gilbert.” Met with silence, he revealed, “that’s the joke. No one has heard of Gilbert.”

The message of this particular monument was to say that you will all end up like these people and your name will not be remembered in the end -- a rather dark message, but perhaps with the ring of truth to it. At some point in the future, our names will likely not be remembered. What will be remembered of us?

Our tour guide pointed out several times inscriptions that denoted a romantic view of life and death. In a nutshell: we will all die, so live life passionately--full of emotion and intensity. This is, perhaps, how many people approach the inevitability of death. If it feels good, do it. Make a splash. #yolo

Inspirational bracelets for sale
in the in-flight catalogue on the way home

On the other hand, we have Chartres -- the unsigned masterpiece. A sacramental sign of God’s truth, goodness, and beauty. A testament to what man can accomplish with God. A “grand, choiring shout of affirmation” about life and humanity and God.

Likely none of us will be tasked with building a great cathedral. But what are we doing with the time given us? What small corner of the world are we quietly and anonymously beautifying? What ground has God given us to till and what will we make of it? In the end, all of our material works will disintegrate. What are we doing to build up God’s kingdom here and now? What are we doing that will bear fruit in eternal life?

Screwtaping: Comparisons

by Dan Masterton

From time to time, people will ask for spiritual reading recommendations. Never really the true academic scholar despite the preponderance of theology classes that I’ve taken, I skew lighter than most of my fellow nerds. For my money, especially when making recommendations to someone more so on the entry level who needs to be hooked quickly and in a compelling way, I lean on CS Lewis, most heavily on The Great Divorce and Screwtape Letters. These two books offer an imaginative, allegorical narrative style that comes from a place of substantial faith as well as literary accessibility. Here, I want to focus on the latter.

In Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis adopts the persona of Uncle Screwtape. Screwtape is a veteran demon, well worn in the practice of influencing humans. The book is written as a series of letters from old Screwtape to his nephew, Wormwood; while Screwtape seems to write from a mentorship point of view, no longer “in the field” so to speak, Wormwood is in the thick of it, working actively on a living person as they correspond. We don’t get to read Wormwood’s reports from earth, so we just get the one-sided input of his mentor-uncle.

As Screwtape advises his nephew on how to demonize someone, Lewis uses lovely vocabulary to invite you immersively into the mind of a demon. Screwtape calls God “The Enemy” and calls Satan “Our Father.” Perhaps most hauntingly, he refers to the subject of Wormwood’s demonizing as a “patient.” The whole equation leads you to reason through the strategies from the demons’ point of view, and then invites you to simultaneously analyze the demons’ tactics as well as reverse-engineer positive theology and spiritual insights.

In the introduction, Lewis warns that the two common errors with respect to the devil are (1) to claim the Devil doesn’t exist or (2) to be excessively obsessed with him; either way, these errors and the people who practice them are satisfying to the devil. While the book pulls the reader into the labyrinth of thought corruption and temptation allure that evil presents, the book illuminates the central reality of evil, which I summarize in the paraphrased words of Mike Patin: The devil’s goal is to make you think you’re alone, that you’re the only one going through something.

In reality, at bare minimum, Christ is always with us, and we’re always with Christ. Even if we feel disconnected from friends or family, Christ never leaves us. When the devil is most successful, we allow evil to make us doubt God such that we fully separate ourselves from Him. The power of Lewis’ Screwtape Letters is the way that the inverted process helps us consider the ways that evil and temptation creep into our lives, especially into our thought processes. By reading through Screwtape’s explanations, we can see reflections of the darker parts of our own minds and hearts. His tactical rundowns create all too easy resonance (at least for this reader) with the more selfish and shallow parts of who I can too easily let myself be.

I thought, then, it’d be intriguing to invite myself into Wormwood’s shoes. If I were theorizing the playbook for my personal demons, what would it look like? Lately, I have been tempted toward comparisons. Rather than doing and being good for goodness’ sake, for Christ’s sake, for other’s sake, I can sense myself instead choosing favorable measuring sticks that might make me look better, and furthermore create context to unfavorably judge others, too. I’ll leave the rest to my inner Screwtape, and invite you to consider how your letter might look. It’d be intriguing to hear from your demons after you read…

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My dear Wormwood,

As demons do their bidding, we must be careful to stay out of the realm of reason, where The Enemy is all too effective in undoing our work. Argument has long been a wheelhouse for our foes. But your patient is laying tracks for trains of thought that you can build toward the house of Our Father. We must avoid debates where their style of apologetic can succeed. Instead, you can skew this path toward certain emotions and thus stoke self-righteous passions that help our cause. You know that Christian patients remain in play for us, and that their practice can even invite our methods to greater effectiveness.

Continue to show to your patient those churchgoers behind, in front of, next to him. Let The Enemy move his heart toward empathy for these others; let him feel for and sympathize with those who are late or those who are juggling children. Then carry the connection onward to comparisons. Show him the family that doesn’t come forward together for communion -- let him wonder why one stays back while the other go. Show your patient the ones who don’t kneel in worship of The Enemy -- invite doubts about their inconsistent piety. Show him the person beside him who leaves early before the gathering is concluded -- push for judgments against these disjunctors. But do not stumble as you link these chains, for the passions of the heart must be moved toward our Darkness, for if otherwise allowed, The Enemy may more easily move them into the light.

Find other avenues to carry on this comparative impulse. Be attentive to the peaks of virtue in your patient. Watch carefully when he is with his family. Wait for the moments of apparently selfless attention to the little one, and then show him her mother. But choose carefully -- let pass those times when she is otherwise engaged in potentially important activity and focus instead on apparent idleness. Sow doubt in the patient’s mind about the equation. Do not suggest fault in the mother; instead plant seeds of pride in the patient. Affirm and inflate this selflessness and incite celebration of the heretofore kenotic care the father gives. In this redirection, you may yet more effectively conjure feelings of malice and set off the building of a flimsy case of inequality between the parents, assembled foolishly by your patient. Then, without having even antagonized him, you have set a frictious course for him that shuts out more of that horrid light.

Look, too, to the humdrum encounters of daily life. The derelicte at the off-ramp, the man making speeches in the train car, the beggar at the end of the drive-through lane -- these are opportunities to buttress your work further. You may be tempted, dear nephew, to invite simple comparisons between your patient’s wealth and theirs, but don’t be so simplistic. These Christian patients have the basics mastered toward “those less fortunate,” and fairly comfortably do bits of charity to allay their silly souls. Tempting the patient toward ignorance can harden the heart as we seek, and this can invite a fair amount of shadows. Should you feel more confident and want to take the greater risk, choose a deeper tack, and go for the heart. While you cannot quite hear what The Enemy says to him, use your hand to make the patient see the close friends and dear family in these lowly men. Show him the face of his closest ones in these strangers and force that uncomfortable connection. The guilt of not giving money to people who need it only cuts so deep. Ignoring people entirely who might as well be those he claims to love? Well, this is more of a long shot, but its success only deepens and widens the chasm of doubt where we can do our best work.

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape

Monday Musings

Happy Monday, friends. While Dave is off honeymooning in Europe with his beautiful bride, Sarah, I thought I'd pinch hit with a few Monday musings. Enjoy these little vignettes from this blog's editor...

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1. This weekend, I attended a baptism for a family member. It was an afternoon ceremony in the parish church, so it was a smaller crowd of just friends and family. The parish deacon presided and celebrated the Sacrament for us. Before he began, he offered us a special explanation as to why he was holding an iPad and not a prayer book. He explained that he has some vision problems, so many years ago, he downloaded an app with the rites and prayers he'd need for his deacon duties. Rather than squinting at a static book with its small print, scrolling along with the backlit screen and easily enlargeable print allowed him to preside more smoothly and intentionally.

I was delighted. I think we are quite accustomed to seeing clerical folks with red prayer books, often with ribbons dangling everywhere and cracking bindings teetering ominously in tiny altar servers' hands. The visual difference is a small detail but certainly a detail to which one has to adjust. But major props to this man who made a small practical change in order to improve his presence and focus as a minister, especially a minister of the (some) Sacraments. Whether it bothered certain people or not, I was impressed by the simple, forward manner in which he explained himself. Such an approach is almost always the best and most effective way to defuse tensions. Rather than leave people to wonder about the iPad in his hands, people could instead acknowledge his decision and accommodation and better direct their attention to the babies being welcome into our Church. This deacon was to me a fine testament of the importance of a simply pastoral approach.

2. Being with my wife's side of our family, specifically her dad's side, always highlights the unique character of an extended family all assembled together. The greatness of this family is their connectedness, not just to each other (they keep impeccable tabs on one another), but to acquaintances, old friends, and even strangers and workers. They are immensely gifted at socializing, making small-talk, and finding connections. It's pretty awe-inspiring, especially to an extroverted introvert such as myself. On the flipside, they are not great at the details and processes. They struggle to pass along details of plans to each other, often serendipitously luck into things just working out, and take forever to leave somewhere, since everyone's FOMO prevents them from leaving first.


The funny subtext to all of this is the in-laws. We live in the midst of these simultaneously endearing and impressive yet agonizing and head-scratching traits. And time and time again, we realize that, while our better halves bring the social skills, we are the facilitators, the ones who build the schedules and make the trains run on time. While most of us greatly need the soft skills of our spouses and their ability to connect so well with others, they also need our itinerancy in marking out the logistics of life, and generally reminding them to eat meals and sleep a few hours.

I say all of this not because I think we've rescued our spouses or vice-versa. Rather, it's something my wife and I have always known about our own relationship, and something we can see manifesting in similar yet different flavors among her cousins and family members. While a marriage is built on the healthy mix and complementarity of two people who combine their selves and lives together, a strong family, especially such a larger, extended family, is firmed up and strengthened by the subsumption of good husbands and wives into the fold. It's neat to see how, in different ways, my wife and her family members, in their many similarities and bits of individual uniqueness, too, found in-laws that similarly have some fundamentals in common but bring complementary traits as well. A healthy, vital family is a beautiful thing to behold -- something I definitely believe in and freshly witnessed, albeit couched in consistent observational humor toward everyone.

3. I have never been a great pray-er of the rosary. I learned it in school growing up, but I never had a great personal piety toward it. Living in Ireland for a year, that temporarily changed. Each morning we would get to work for the parish daily Mass and join our community in its prayer. We would try to arrive in time for the rosary before Mass, but we wouldn't always make it. After a month or two, I decided that I wanted to always make it, so we agreed that we didn't have to all leave together if someone was running late. And thus it became that I prayed the rosary almost every day, under the careful guidance of our faithful older parishioners. Since leaving Ireland, I have had periods of time where I picked the habit back up, but it has never stuck with me quite so firmly as it did then.

This month of July has brought with it some extra cabin fever. Being completely off of work has its perks, but this stay-at-home dad has realized that those two days of work each week provided a great deal of sanity and balance to my life. Being home with Lucy almost every day necessitates some creativity and imagination to make sure we don't end up sitting around the house all day, every day. One of the simple joys of such free time is to just go for a walk. Even just unfolding the stroller and buckling Lucy into it brings her great excitement, let alone actually heading outside and walking our quiet neighborhood streets.

I used to put on a podcast or just walk with nothing in my ears, but recently, I rediscovered an app I had buried on my phone: The Holy Rosary. I had originally downloaded it for my solo work trip to Arizona when I scouted things for my students' immersion week. Now it has reemerged as a welcome companion for my occasional afternoon walk with Lucy. For someone who enjoys prayer but doesn't always remember all the words to the creeds or the keep the sets of Mysteries and their days of the week straight, the app is a welcome, gentle way to guide my pray in a positive direction. I don't think anyone has ever truly regretted praying the rosary.

4. Back when my daughter, Lucy, was a newborn, I reflected on the blessings of being a stay-at-home dad. I was enjoying my three months paternity leave with an eye toward part-time work to continue being home with her. In the quieter moments of an overnight feed or an early morning encounter when I was alone with her and my wife slept, I couldn't help but feel a monastic calmness toward it all. Even though I was not alone, the peace of a helpless human resting on me, unable to go anywhere else or do anything instead, brought the serenity of a cloister even without the walls.

Now, Lucy is 16 months old, stands (and walks) at 2'7", and weighs in (my frail arms can attest) at almost 25 pounds. She traipses around like she owns the place, whether that's our rented apartment, our parish church, or a restaurant where we're trying to eat out. She is an explorer who wants to climb, run, and touch whatever enters her field of vision. So when she sleeps into the early morning or stays down solidly for one of her two naps (gosh, I'll miss that second nap when it disappears soon), I sometimes find that monastic calm returning. This morning, with my wife off work and sleeping in and Lucy going down late after a long, full family day yesterday, I was able to get out for a run under the partly clouded sun, through the burning-off fog of a cool, rainy weekend. Now back at home, I can cool down with a cold Gatorade, an open laptop to journal, and the silence -- the unbroken calm with the TV off, the baby monitor quiet, and nothing but the background noise of an early Monday morning on our village streets and the gentle whirr of our ceiling fan.

I think back fairly often to the routinized peace of monastic life, as my choir friends and I experienced at the Abbey of Gethsemani while on retreat in college. The constancy and sparseness of their prayer hit me just right, and I always hope that the routines I build and embrace in daily life can more closely resemble monastic dedication rather than the modern obsessions with efficiency and productivity. As the weather has warmed and my legs have gotten running again, these mornings have felt that way. The early alarm, the bowl of cereal, the bit of brief morning reading, and the stretch and run terminate in a moment of calm -- my tired body catches its breath on the couch as the quiet restores and renews me to start the rest of a day.