An Open Letter to Gift-Givers from a Clumsy Minimalist

by Dan Masterton

Dear Gift-Givers,

I am hard to shop for, and I know it. I don’t really like stuff and things; I like places, people, and experiences. I’m not drawn to the fancy, the luxury, the high end; I am more pleased by bargains, efficiency, resourcefulness, and utility. I am also a horrible recipient of gifts; I do not frequently offer the sort of major visual reactions that creative gift-givers hope to elicit. I’m a real piece of work.

At our core, I feel like most minimalists don’t hate gifts. I swear -- we really don’t. I think one of the major problems is that the types of gifts we minimalists prefer are not the type of gifts people want to give or think they’re expected to give, and trying to break that social expectation and convince people it’s ok to go rogue in this way is pretty tough. People often think they need to spend a certain amount of money or procure a certain magnitude of thing in order to have sufficiently pleased their friends and family. When it comes to minimalists, don’t worry! In my case, let’s just say my Amazon wish list of a new tape measure, carabiners for my stroller, a dustbuster, and new bowling shoes didn’t knock any gift-givers’ socks off.

I guess my hope as a minimalist is always that -- while I know a gift giver should be free to gift as the conditional love of their gift-giving sees fit -- they’ll consider the type of gift I’m hoping for as they creatively decide. Some gift-givers are wonderfully considerate of this. At my recent birthday party, one of my friends gave me a gift card to a movie theater to help treat my wife, Katherine, and me to a date and flatly declared that this gift of a bought-and-paid-for experience was chosen “because you don’t like stuff.” However, folks frequently insist instead on the more conventional gift route; thus, the considerations a minimalist might hope for can get easily set aside in favor of the things and the stuff.

But rather than rambling on about simplicity, minimalism, and aversion to materialism, I need to admit the problems I introduce and aggravate in this equation with my imperfect attitude, chiefly that my outlook clouds my ability to be grateful. Rather than receive a gift and express gratitude and appreciation before all else, my mind jumps all too quickly to my thoughts and opinions on the gift.

Just the other day, my dad brought me a rally towel from the Bears-Packers game, a big win he witnessed in person by which the Bears clinched their first division title in eight years and eliminated the Packers from playoff contention (with help from the Vikings). Rather than immediately thank him for thinking of me by grabbing an extra towel off the seat next to him, I responded, “I already have one of these from a game earlier this year.” My mind leapt instantly to the rally towels already on my office wall, in my daughter Lucy’s toybox, and sitting in piles in my bedroom, a portrait of the excess of possessions I’ve incidentally accrued. Rather than fixating on excess, my priority should be gratitude. Say “thank you,” Dan. UGH. Facepalm emoji. The idealism in my mind wishes the world would meet me closer to halfway than I think it tends to do, but by worrying too much about that, I mess up the most important part -- expressing love by my gratitude first and foremost.

So, to all of you creative, thoughtful, selfless, others-oriented gift-givers:

First, SORRY! Minimalism can get us tied up in austerity so intently that we’re not attentive to the love, generosity, and thoughtfulness demonstrated by others. Please accept my apologies for how such a perspective can spill over and extinguish gratitude. You don’t deserve such a poopy reaction.

Second, please keep trying to challenge your creativity to meet a minimalist halfway. Tickets to a show or concert? A membership or subscription to a great periodical or event venue? Admission to a museum, zoo, or neat attraction? A donation to a favorite charity? A custom coupon promising a future experience together? Any effort toward the gift of a shared experience and new memory goes a long way.

Third, THANK YOU! Even though we minimalists may not give the effusive, demonstrative reaction to gifts that you may hope for, thank you for doggedly attempting to love us and care for us nonetheless. Your earnest attempt to bring love in the world by giving of yourselves is worth doing, even if we as recipients can seem a bit grinchy. While we hope we can work toward healthy, moderate ways to live out minimalism, we also need your creative warmth to temper us and love us.

Sincerely,
Dan, a clumsy minimalist

Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Immaculate Conception

by Laura Flanagan

I have a college acquaintance who is now a fairly successful Catholic artist. This week, she unveiled a series of canvases with detailed images of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s vestments, and noted she went down a rabbit hole discovering the image’s symbolism.¹ After reading her statement, I chose to fall down the same rabbit hole.

On the tilma of Guadalupe, we see Mary with her eyes bowed, and her hands in a prayer of supplication. This contrasts with the Indian goddesses, whose depictions showed their power by looking directly at the viewer with their (often large) eyes. Our Lady at Guadalupe reveals by her posture that there is a greater God above her, while wearing the symbols often attributed to those indigenous goddesses, showing that her Lord is greater than they.

There are many more beautiful symbols to this image, but one stood out to me the most. Mary’s black sash and a bump in her gown indicate pregnancy. This style signals that she is appearing as the Immaculate Conception. Not coincidentally, this is the same name she gave upon being pressed by Bernadette at Lourdes. I imagine Mary likes this title because, like her posture in the image of Guadalupe, it’s meant to point directly to Jesus. Saying, “I am the Immaculate Conception” means, “I am not myself important, except to magnify the greatness of the Lord and the extraordinary preview of grace He has given to me.”

The solemnity in celebration of this gift occurs on December 8, normally a holy day of obligation. However, if you check your calendar, you’ll find that this year it falls on a Saturday, which under most American circumstances would mean a waived obligation for the holy day.

However, apparently I was incorrect last year in stating that the combination of the 4th Sunday of Advent and Christmas was the only time we maintain the consecutive-days obligation. We maintain it again this year for this December 8 feast, but only in the United States. The reason? Our Lady, under her title of the Immaculate Conception, is the patroness of the U.S.A. Like Christmas last year, we are asked to participate in Mass for both the special feast and our usual Sunday oblation.² Both feasts are so important for us.

Mary’s veneration as the Immaculate Conception, both here in the United States and within her groundbreaking appearance as a mestiza girl in Mexico,³ points to the deep connectedness between the entirety of the Americas. The bishops seem to have come to this conclusion before me, as Our Lady of Guadalupe is the patroness of all the Americas in addition to the country of Mexico in particular.

Mary appeared in Mexico to the indigenous person with the symbolism of the Immaculate Conception. She sent an image to the Spanish in Mexico with that same symbolism. Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Immaculate Conception, gives her patronage to indigenous peoples, Mexicans, and persons of all races and countries. She loves and intercedes for all Americans, and desires us to love one another and serve the Lord.

St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, to whom she chose to appear at Guadalupe, was considered a macehualli - essentially a native without a social category other than “poor.” The Lord is found with the poorest, and to them his Mother also gives her special favor. If our Lady were to appear today at the border between two of her beloved countries, she would likely be weeping from the tear gas with her Son’s beloved poor on the Mexican side.

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1 See this Instagram post for the original image.^↩

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2 Should you need a guide to this request from the Church:
In order to fulfill both obligations, you must attend TWO Masses - no double-dipping!
1) A Mass to fulfill the Immaculate Conception obligation is ANY Mass (regardless of the readings and prayers used) that is celebrated between ~4 PM on Friday, December 7th and the end of the day on Saturday, December 8th.
2) A Mass to fulfill the Sunday obligation is ANY Mass (regardless of the readings and prayers used) that is celebrated between ~4 PM on Saturday, December 8th and the end of the day on Sunday, December 9th.^↩

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3 Mestiza is a Latin American term for a woman of mixed race, especially one having indigenous and Spanish descent.^↩

The Words to Pray

by Dan Masterton

As long as I can remember, I’ve known and regularly recited the Hail Mary and the Our Father. I cannot remember when or how exactly I learned them. I remember saying these prayers in elementary school classrooms with my classmates. I remember joining hands during Mass as a child to say the Our Father. I remember learning the rosary and raining Hail Mary’s down over the rolling beads as we prepared for May Crowning. In a time when rote memorization is giving way to the short-term recall named Google that lives in our pockets, the ingrained words of these prayers endure deep in the unforgettable memories of my brain. As a punk teenager, I remember feeling critical toward the especially frequent use of these all too often robotic prayers. If we say them so often that we barely pay attention to their meaning, what’s the point?

At times as an adult and professional minister, I’ve seen our go-to prayers utilized with particular laziness and/or misguided intention. My all-time favorite (or least favorite) has to be a dean of students with whom I formerly worked. He possessed a particularly booming, monotone voice, which he utilized regularly to call for attention, scold kids, and in some cases, (mis)use prayer to quiet a crowd. He’d step up to a microphone at an assembly or before an all-school Mass and belt, “Quiet, please. Let’s begin with a prayer. OUR FATHER. WHO ART IN HEAVEN…” The droll, flat recitation the kids offered back was indicative of the fatigue often felt about these prayers.

Another time I see this trend rear its head is when young people are asked to pray before a group. While they possess varying degrees of comfort with speaking extemporaneously, they have no shame about leaning on their memorized prayers. In this case, it is often far from welcome piety. You’ll regularly hear something like this: “Uh, dear God, thank you for everything you’ve given us. We appreciate it. And, um, let’s just pray an Our Father…” Good hustle, kid.

This brings me to the retreats I direct. We pray frequently on retreat, from small-group blessings to before-meal grace to student-led prayer. The latter unfolds primarily as a precursor to witness talks, when the leadership team steps out of the room and offers a private blessing over the speaker with hands extended. Over the years, I have struggled to get young people to approach this as a prayer of blessing; instead, they often use it as a time to tell stories, offer the person compliments, or crack jokes to loosen the mood. These things can be helpful in relaxing the speaker, but they fall short of inviting God’s grace intentionally to the person being blessed, and often seem like a way to garner cheap laughs or even steal the spotlight from that person. As much as I try to give narrower parameters that focus our blessings toward God, grace, and the person being blessed, detours and tangents arise. So I’ve more or less resigned myself to laying out my hopes for that blessing once, loud and clear at the start, and hoping we stay on that track.

This brings me to the last retreat I directed. Initially, it followed the same trends I mentioned, but the first student who prayed kept his spontaneous reflections brief and efficiently transitioned into a request for everyone to pray the Our Father together. And we did. And I liked it. Sure enough, as teenagers are wont to do, the next person’s blessing followed the same shape – a short but sweet ramble and an invitation to that old familiar prayer. And so the next and the next until our pattern incidentally became focusing and aggregating our prayer behind the words that Jesus taught us. It was really nice and shifted the focus toward where I always hope it will be – a solemn, communal blessing for the speaker.

Back in those often doubt-filled teenage years, I remember being set straight when we learned about prayer in junior theology class. As we reviewed these rote prayers, our teacher called them “familiar prayers,” a nicer title that doesn’t connote such roboticism. By her estimation, these prayers were an essential ingredient to our prayer tradition. She explained that the familiarity of these prayers was a blessing in that they give us the words to pray when we may otherwise struggle to find them.

In the case of my young people serving as leaders, the familiar words of the Our Father were not so much an escape hatch from thoughtfulness but an inviting, warm place to go where the blessing they desired for their teammates could be conveyed with love. As they continue to grow and mature in their faith, they met God halfway, opening with some of their own words and then Christ’s words carry them the rest of the way. It’s a fine line between familiar prayer as a crutch and familiar prayer as an asset, but these kids embraced the words they knew by heart. They used familiar prayer as a way to orient their earnest desires for blessing toward the person for whom they prayed.

Five years ago, as my dad, brothers, and close family members encircled my dying mother, we were overcome with the emotions of saying goodbye to our most loved one. As she passed and we confronted the magnitude of grief in that moment, the only thing we knew for sure is that we wanted to pray. And as we babbled our way to a family blessing over our dear mother, my older brother found his way toward the Our Father and managed to get us praying together, “Our Father…”

There will always be moments when those familiar words come to mind out of convenience, lack of creativity, or even, God forbid, crowd control. But there are also times when the familiar words we know before thinking, or when we cannot even think, will draw us into prayer when we otherwise may not know how to get there. The Our Father comes to us as Jesus’ answer to his friends’ question about how we ought to pray. And this blessing from Jesus endures as a way for us to pray, especially when our own search for words may fall short and the words of Christ come when we may most need them.

The Restless Hearts Are Taking A Rest

by Dan Masterton

Dear readers,

It's pretty crazy that, right now, I'm writing the 416th post for a blog that reaches back almost ten years. I still remember the authentic, not-kidding-you-should-do-it nudge of my old friend, Michele, during a college faith-sharing group that pushed me to actually kick this thing off with a first post back in October 2009.

Over the years, things have evolved. I started as a curious and growing undergrad, looking for a place to share fresh, raw ideas about theology and spiritual life, and then friends and companions have helped carry the blog forward to fun and exciting places.

For a good while, guest reflectors shared about how they live their vocation in whatever place they are at in their life, and twenty-one authors animated the explorations of the72.

Later, as the wildness of the 2016 election geared up, I sought to emphasize the centrality of Catholic Social Teaching in the discernment and conscience of the Catholic citizen. Through speech analyses, candidate evaluations, and honest reflections, #MoreThanRedAndBlue kept CST at the heart of our election fever.

And, finally, The Restless Heart became plural, as three intrepid and faithful writers jumped into the pool with me, and Jenny, Rob, and Dave dove in to our communal work. Later, we added three more to our fold, and with Laura, Erin, and Tim, The Restless Hearts became what it is today -- a vibrant, varying crockpot of reflection on theology, spirituality, social teaching and social justice, ministry, education, and the realities of faith lived richly.

I always tried to keep the seven of us grounded in the realities of what I hoped our blog would be: for readers, a place to receive hearty input and engage their hearts of faith; for us as writers and peer editors, a place for authentic reflection, constructive accompaniment, and, most of all, vocationally rich fun.

Over the last few years, we've missed a few Mondays and Thursdays or taken a week off now and then. But, recently, life has caught up with most of us a little more than it used to do. Marriages, childbirths, personal tragedies and challenges, job and school transitions, and the ebb and flow of family and professional life have impacted the calculus of how we each spend our time.

To help each of us get a firmer handle on stuff as well as to best discern the shape of our blog going forward, I've asked the crew to take a sabbatical -- an earnest, thoughtful rest. I may still post a new piece once in a while, but there won't be regular action. We'll be back in a little while and offer an update on our gameplan to continue this online ministry with all of you.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear from you:

• Thoughts on the types of posts?
• Thoughts on the frequency and timing of posting?
• Thoughts on new directions we could go?
• Interested in contributing?
• Just want to share that you read and enjoy it?
• Care to offer a prayer or blessing?

Send me an email or leave a comment on our Facebook Page or my Twitter account. I'll respond to everyone who chimes in and bring your thoughts into our reflection.

In the meantime, thanks for reading and following. May your hearts remain restless until they rest in God!

-Dan

No Accounting for Taste

by Jenny Lippert

Recently, my husband and I were hit by a wave of nostalgia for oldies Christian music. I don’t remember exactly how it came up, but we soon found ourselves amazed at how many Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant, and DC Talk songs we still remembered all the words to.¹ Most significantly, through this jaunt back in time, we rediscovered the earthy, honest music of Rich Mullins, which came back to me like an old childhood friend. Roll your eyes as much as you want at the lyrics of “Awesome God”, you still get the sense that it’s at least a more honest attempt at worship than a calculated marketing piece to a bland Christian demographic. And this quality of honest attempt and failure I have found these past couple of months to be a Rich Mullins theme. Through a bit of youtube rabbitholing, I found myself not only remembering how much I had enjoyed his music (and still do), but also found myself developing a deeper affection for the man himself.

Referred to as the “uneasy conscience” of Christian music, he retreated from the evangelical Christian music scene to move to a Navajo Reservation in New Mexico. When asked about why he chose to move, he responded, “I think I just got tired of a White, Evangelical, middle class perspective on God, and I thought I would have more luck finding Christ among the Pagan Navajos.”² Woah.

I dislike sentimentality. Fluffy talk and feely-goodiness activates my gag reflex and makes me want to punch something. It isn’t real, it isn’t genuine, and it isn’t nourishing. This aversion to empty niceties or sweet nothings also extends to art and music. If it savors of something secondary--something which depends on pre-conditioned responses to saccharine symbology, count me out. This is why the music of Rich Mullins so appeals to me, I think.

In between songs at one of his 1997 concerts,³ he brought up the idea of taste. Quoting Picasso, he said he believed that “good taste is the enemy of great art.” He explained, “Good taste has all to do with being cultured and being refined and if art has to do with anything it has to do with being human. And one of the reasons I love the Bible is because the humans in the Bible are not very refined. They’re pretty goofy if you want to know the whole truth about it.” He goes on to say that he doesn’t believe God has any taste.

Initially, I found this statement jarring. If you were to say about another person that they had no taste, it would be pretty insulting. So, why is it so hopeful when asserted about God?

I started thinking about what “taste” is, and why we seem to value it so much. One type of taste, that is preferences for things, is pretty innocuous. You like vanilla ice cream and I like chocolate. Okay.

The type of taste that Rich Mullins is talking about, though, is an ideal or standard that we set up for ourselves--a way for us to separate ourselves into “in” groups and “out” groups.

I started to reflect on all of the ways that I brand myself, what circles I desire to be a part of, and what circles I would refuse to associate with. Even as someone who considers herself rather contrarian and wannabe-edgy, I still cling to certain identities--certain tastes--because they are comfortable. I have my “in” group, and though I may be willing to step out of it for a moment in the name of “charity,” goodness knows I will return to it. My self-identifcation with a clean and easy cliche--a life that I’ve imagined for myself--allows me to ignore those broken, sinful, and weak parts of myself.

But this isn’t reality. And if Scripture is any indication, it seems that God really doesn’t have any taste in terms of his “in” and “out” groups. He chooses the goofballs and the screw-ups and the uncultured. He chooses elderly immigrants to father his people. He works through jealous brothers to save His people from starvation. He uses sinful kings to build up His kingdom. He makes a pagan prostitute a heroine who harbors His spies. He uses his eccentric cousin, clothed in a hair garment, to proclaim his coming. He chooses a peasant girl to be His home on earth.



In short, he chooses humanity. And any attempt I make to insulate myself in anything less than human insulates me from Him. The taste of human standards is not God’s taste. And the more I align myself to human cliques and ideas, the more opaque my life becomes, the less I can be used by God. I make myself into the Hallmark cliche that I so despise.

God glories in our weakness far more than in our “perfect” lives. As Rich said, “[Be]cause God takes the junk of our lives, and he makes the greatest art in the world out of it. And if he was cultured, if he was as civilized as most Christian people wish he was, He would be useless to Christianity. But God is a wild man.”

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1 This may or may not have led to listening to “Secret Ambition” on repeat for the next few days...What a throwback.^↩

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2 This whole interview, despite the poor recording quality, is well worth watching.^↩

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3 Again, the whole bit is worth watching.^↩

The Invisible Fingerprints of Formation

by Erin Conway

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the forces and ideas that form us. These are the values that reside deep in our hearts that seemingly lack origin, the ideas that we didn’t realize were shaping us. Combined, these ideas and values cover us in invisible fingerprints, fingerprints that can only be seen when particular circumstances cast a new light on them.

I’ve had several instances in my life where I’ve uncovered these invisible fingerprints.

When I started teaching at a Jesuit school in 2009, for instance, I remember learning about Jesuit spirituality and thinking to myself wow, my whole life has been Jesuit, we just never called it that. Sure, my parents attended a Jesuit parish and grade school, and my dad, grandfather, and brother went to a Jesuit high school, but I never “spoke Ignatian” until I arrived in Baltimore. I never had a name for the values that I saw lived out around me. Instead, the drive to be a woman for others, the desire to center the voices of the marginalized, the practice of growth through reflection, felt “right” to me because I saw them lived out in simple, non-attention-seeking ways. The actions and attitudes of my parents (perhaps also unknowingly shaped) left me covered in Jesuit fingerprints. These things had become ingrained in me without my understanding of what or why or how.

Then, in 2015, Father Ted Hesburgh passed away. As a student at Notre Dame, Father Hesburgh’s name was certainly one I knew and his office of the 13th floor of the library bearing his name was the stuff of legend, but I couldn’t have told you much about who he was or what he’d done for the university.¹ Shortly after Hesburgh’s death I read an article from America Magazine about his life and history and was surprised to find so much of who I am and what I believe woven into his language, in the way he spoke about Our Lady’s University and his desires for her students. I realized that, because of age, maturity, or the distractions of life, I hadn’t understood Notre Dame as a Catholic University when I was there. I didn’t understand the kind of people she was trying to produce. Again, I was stunned to find myself covered in invisible fingerprints, my image reflected back to me.

Most recently, however, I noticed the invisible fingerprints of formation connected to my teaching. This year I’ve been given the privilege of piloting a service learning program in our Sophomore Theology class. It’s the perfect combination of everything I love about Catholic, Jesuit education: an opportunity to get to know students in the classroom; a chance to volunteer side by side with students, modeling faith in action; and a way to implement continual and (hopefully) meaningful reflection. With all these benefits, it’s not hard to believe that I started the year flying high.

But two weeks ago we hit a rough patch. I had a group of students who demonstrated a disappointing lack of maturity at a service site, I watched other groups of students struggle and even seemingly refuse to engage at other sites, and when I created a space for open feedback at the end of the first quarter, close to 1/5 of my students asked some form of the question “why are we doing this?” or “what does this have to do with Theology?”

I was crushed. I had tried so hard to create a space where students could find God in their work with the world and it seemed I had missed the mark.

Disheartened, I went back to the beginning, to the mission statement I’d shared with students at the start of the year.

In the sophomore Theology course at Saint Martin students will explore their call to the creation of a more just world through the formation of loving relationships. As part of his/her Theology class, each sophomore will participate in a continual process of action and reflection that combines volunteering in the community with theological content learned in the classroom. This form of community-based learning promotes kinship and solidarity between students and the communities and sites where they spend time. This experience in the community is aimed at helping each sophomore grow as both a student and a person of faith and is meant to instill an awareness of his/her responsibility to work for justice and transform urban Cleveland.

We hope that this cycle of action and reflection becomes a way of life for our students as they become men and women for others.²

Mission statement in hand, driven to show students that I wasn’t as crazy as they thought, I went back to the drawing board, taking time to gather documents, readings, and resources that could defend our work those who didn’t yet understand why it mattered. I wanted to explain to students (and perhaps myself) why we opted to forgo daily classroom instruction and catechesis to spend time working with marginalized individuals in our community.

Although a better Theology teacher might have gone first to the Bible, starting with Jesus to explain to students why serving the “least of our brothers and sisters” was, in fact, deeply theological, I accessed these ideas (I realize now) in the way that I learned them, in Jesuit texts. I pulled four partial texts for my students: the Saint Martin de Porres High School Founding Curriculum, “What Makes A Jesuit School Jesuit?”, Pedro Arrupe’s Speech “Men and Women for Others” and an article by Dean Brackley, SJ called “The Challenge of the UCA.”

I can’t explain what inspired me to start with these particular texts other than, well, God, but what I found there were the words from my mission statement, words and ideas that had been ingrained into my person, my soul, and my being without my awareness. Once again, I found myself reflected back at me and I recognized the invisible fingerprints of formation.

What I learned, however, was how incredibly satisfying, and even powerful, to put a language to myself, to the person I am. And on top of all that, discovering these fingerprints brought me to a deep awareness of and gratitude for the institutions that have shaped me, the people who have loved me and for the God who has guided me, leaving her prints on my being.

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1 It seems important to mention here that I was not a life-long ND aficionado. I knew little of the University before I set foot on Campus in 2005. In fact, during Freshman Orientation, I found myself a definite outside when we sang the fight song for the first time - I had never heard the song before in my life.^↩

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2 A quick caveat: The fingerprints on this piece of my curriculum are not so invisible. The Mission Statement was *just slightly* adapted from the language used by my last school (Xavier College Prep) in connection to their Junior Praxis Project. Thanks Xavier for making me look good! ^↩

An Education

by Laura Flanagan

Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron made waves with his comment on the need for contraception in Africa, saying, “Present me the woman who decided, being perfectly educated, to have seven, eight, or nine children.” Predictably, a very indignant response came from the mothers of large families with degrees from top-tier universities, posting pictures of their families and letters with the hashtag, #postcardsformacron.

A meme has been circulating with 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Amy Coney Barrett (within whom the dogma of Catholicism lives loudly, according to Sen. Dianne Feinstein) juxtaposed against Macron's image and quote. Judge Barrett has seven children.



I'm not really eligible to send a “postcard.” I only have two children, and I can't even post a picture of them together. However, it got me thinking about the meaning of a “perfectly educated” woman.

What exactly is “an education”? The 2009 Carey Mulligan/Peter Sarsgaard movie of that name, about a sixteen year old’s relationship with a con man in his 30s, implies, well, that her “education” was not found in her school.

The Nickel Creek song “When in Rome” struck a chord with me recently, and not via Chris Thiles’ rugged power mandolin picking. Addressing a “teacher,” the lyrics go:

Hey those books you gave us look good on the shelves at home
And they'll burn warm in the fireplace teacher

I have quite a lot of books on the shelves at home. I don't remember much of their contents, and I'm not entirely sure how deeply I comprehended them to begin with.

One of the single most embarrassing experiences of my life was the oral portion of my comprehensive exams for my master’s degree. I still cringe when I recall it, and I used to cry. My writing portion was strong, but for whatever reason I simply could not answer several of the questions put to me in that exam, meant to dig deeper into my understanding of the texts. I’m not sure why that was, but I (and certainly my examiners) suspect that I didn’t have a real depth of understanding. I could pull out salient points, but was I conversant with the theology? I couldn’t converse well that day, that’s for sure.

I necessarily absorbed much of my education, and I’m grateful that even if I eventually decide to absent myself from the workforce, Clare will benefit from much of my stellar education. But my motivation for many years was to learn merely as much as was needed for the grade, rather than for the sake of the subject matter. Even as that prioritization changed through my love of theology, the ramifications of the grade’s prior primacy still echo through my life now. I love poetry, beauty, music; but I still struggle to understand them, and sometimes don't bother to try because of the difficulty. The external motivation is gone, and the internal motivation often isn’t strong enough.

What is the goal of an education? What is the goal for ourselves and for our children? Through meetings, talks, and resources, the goal I am trying to place in front of my parishioners this year is simply sanctity. (Again, this prioritization is something I’ve learned but clearly haven’t internalized, hence my many failings.) One of my college professors used a character in his books called “Mrs. Murphy” to illustrate a true liturgical theologian. The premise is that Mrs. Murphy knows nothing of theological works, or even church documents. She knows only the sacraments, the communal prayer of liturgy, the communion of saints, and makes use of them because she recognizes their power. The liturgical theologian here is the one who really does the work of the liturgy together with Christ. By this measure, Mrs. Murphy is a theologian par excellence - or, in other words, a saint in the making.

You don't have to be top-tier university-educated to be a saint. Bernadette Soubirous, who is one of my daughter’s name saints, was considered stupid, but she was well wise enough to say things like “I shall spend every moment loving.” André Bessette was recognized as a saint by the bishop referring him to the Congregation of Holy Cross. This was well before he had thousands of visitors at his gate, and then, all the Holy Cross superiors could see were an undesirable lack of schooling and poor health. Benedict Joseph Labre may have been mentally ill, living as a homeless beggar perpetually on pilgrimage; however,but the people of Loreto, Italy could plainly see the witness of his devotion to Eucharistic adoration.

You also don't have to be the mother of many or any children to be a saint, but you can be. And if you need to burn your books “warm in the fireplace” to keep your many children comfortable, the children were always the better choice.

I am trying to figure out what it means for me if it happens that I am only able to raise one child, just as others are trying to determine what their path to holiness is while awaiting their fourth or ninth child, planned or unplanned. Some feel the despair known by Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth, or even Rachel. All of us wonder just how on Earth we are going to manage it.

For various real, serious reasons, a woman (and ideally a couple, together) might choose not to have seven children. To many women, that opportunity and choice is not given. But a woman with multiple degrees and a knowledge of Christ knows that children are more precious than the books on the shelf; they are more precious than rubies, or travel opportunities, or whatever you might name. This woman could actively desire seven children or more. (And as the “postcards” show, she often does.)

The wisest Mrs. Murphys know that God alone bears us up, however many children are given us. Little more education is necessary, and if it is needed, he will provide it.