Equal Scrutiny and Authentic Encounter

by Dan Masterton

This past Sunday, the priest celebrating the Mass I attended preached on boldness in God’s love. He illustrated boldness by citing both the Gospel and the bishop of Springfield, Illinois. In boldness, Jesus Christ radically demonstrated His love by interacting and spending time with all kinds of marginalized people in society; in boldness, Bishop Paprocki has decreed that priests of his diocese are not to offer Eucharist, Anointing of the Sick, or a Catholic funeral to people in same-sex “marriages” unless they make a specific repentance. ¹

I admired the boldness of this priest in engaging in a divisive social issue, and for doing so in a way that did not contradict Church teaching, that affirmed the teaching on marriage, and yet called for better pastoral treatment of LGBT people. The timing of this priest’s homily was excellent while the timing of Bishop Paprocki’s statement was, let’s say, the opposite of pastoral. He released his remarks just days before members of the LGBT community, allies, and supporters would celebrate Pride around the country.

Fr. James Martin, SJ, just released a new book on ministry with the LGBT community, and you can read the introduction for free. ² Among his opening remarks, Fr. Jim says that calling people their preferred name is important in establishing a rapport and building a relationship; for example, if you meet a new friend named Christopher who asks you to call him Chris, but you call him Christopher anyway, that can be annoying to Chris and prevent the growth of a relationship. With the LGBT community, the Church and its members and ministers would do well to acknowledge this preferred self-description and begin using it. Likewise, the Church and its members and ministers would do well to acknowledge the celebration of Pride, and support the LGBT community in its celebration, rather than use the timing to deepen the gulf. While we cannot support certain activism among Pride, i.e. advocating for gay marriage, we can support their expression and community; I was delighted by the tweets (albeit, small, passive gestures) I saw from a couple great Chicago priests I know who did this well:

Praying everyone who is going to #Chicago #Pride2017 will be safe! Visit one of our many Catholic Church to find refreshment in God! pic.twitter.com/5rbCTRsylj

— Fr. Peter Wojcik (@ChicagoPriest) June 25, 2017

To all my LGBT friends celebrating #Pride2017, ENJOY! A day for celebrating and remembering we all are created in God's image! 🏳️‍🌈

— Fr. Matt O'Donnell (@FrMattODonnell) June 25, 2017

I think a major first step in constructing better pastoral ministry and inclusion to LGBT people comes in our response to and understanding of sin, especially sexually. Everyday married people in the Church receive the Eucharist without extra attention from pastors and Eucharistic Ministers. Though they may be on birth control or using contraception, they typically are not scrutinized (except perhaps if they take clear, overt stances against Church teaching) and receive Communion rather indiscriminately. When it comes to LGBT people, there can be extra scrutiny, often connected largely to the possibility that they are participating in homosexual activity or an irregular “marriage” or union. At times, such increased scrutiny may cause withholding of communion, but some LGBT people may simply stay away in order to avoid a potentially awkward confrontation. This elevated scrutiny, to me, seems incongruous and undue.

When it comes to sexual activity, our Catechism lists seven ways (CCC 2351-2357) that we can misuse sexuality such that we become unchaste. Homosexual activity is listed there, as are porn, masturbation, and lust, among other things. The Catechism does not create a hierarchy of sexual sins and does not differentiate any of these unchaste actions as worse than any others. Each our sexual shortcomings which we must reconcile. While LGBT people, being unmarried, are called to celibacy in order to live out chaste sexuality, heterosexual people are also called to chastity -- married people to chaste sexuality with their spouse and unmarried people to patient celibacy as they discern single or married life.

Sexual temptation and sin are something that all children of God face. We are all called to pursue self-mastery of our sexual impulses and strive for a whole and integrated sexuality in expressing ourselves. These challenges may manifest differently for each person, and on the road to the ideal in Christ, we all must admit our shortcomings and seek reconciliation with others and with God. In our Eucharistic living, our carefully formed Catholic conscience must point us toward the Sacraments of Reconciliation and Eucharist to help us constantly convert to God, whether we are single or married, heterosexual or identify as LGBT. Such repentance of heart is a difficult process to quantify and describe, and making specific demands of how and when it happens feels like a regulation of grace.

I will say that, personally, I have some frictions I’m constantly mulling. I support equal rights for LGBT people -- legal union, tax benefits, hospital visitation, etc. -- but cannot call their union “marriage” or acknowledge it sacramentally as the same as opposite-sex marriage³; I desire inclusion of LGBT people in all areas of society, but I cannot encourage or condone hormone therapy or gender reassignment surgeries that change the sex in which God created people, especially when those interventions are done with children and young people; I struggle to engage in LGBT culture not because I think it’s wrong or evil but because the usual noise and color and vibrancy of it just isn’t my social preference as a more low-key, mostly introverted person.

However, on the whole, I seek Pope Francis’ “field hospital mentality” that emphasizes how the Church and its ministry must be a place of encounter, first and foremost. The metaphor cites the battlefield where a wounded soldier limps back to the medical tent; the medic then doesn’t ask “Why did you get hurt? How did you let that happen?” but rather first triages the injuries and treats the wounds. Similarly, our Church’s pastoral response, across the board and specifically to LGBT people, should be focused first on charity in receiving and supporting people who seek Christ; instead of questioning how they’ve gotten into that state, we first welcome them and be the hands and feet of Christ in serving them with hospitality.

As LGBT people consider their relationship to the Church, our emphasis should be on invitation, welcome, and evangelization. We should be a manifestation of the Gospel and Kingdom by our commitment to charity, our desire for justice, and our constant desire to give praise and thanks to God in liturgy and Sacraments. The Church does not need to harp insistently on social teachings that wider society already knows, especially in a climate in which it seems to only further fuel the culture wars without necessarily informing and forming people. The impulse to catechize and shape should focus first on the kerygmatic truths of our faith and the grace of striving to live in Christ. None of this is the silver bullet that squares the tension of homosexual activity and same-sex unions with the teachings of the Church; continuing to engage with that remains a significant challenge for our community but should not deter efforts to strengthen our community together.

I am not the most vociferous and successful ally or advocate for LGBT people. I don’t know many LGBT people. I haven’t worked with or ministered with many LGBT people. But I admire the few with whom I’ve worked and value their trust, and I desire, though often imperfectly and incompletely, to do well by their witness.

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1 The official statement from the bishop and his diocese can be found here. A news story covering the decree can be found here.^↩

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2 Fr. Jim is a prolific Catholic writer/commenter, and I have mixed feelings about his work. Sometimes, it feels like there’s a quantity over quality element to it. However, he does an excellent job in being visible, active, and accessible to Catholics and others alike on all kinds of media platforms (especially Twitter and Facebook). On the whole, I think his dogged work is an asset to the Church, and especially to its public image.^↩

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3 A few years ago, I expressed on the blog how the Church’s potential to acknowledge and consecrate same-sex unions would be more akin to Holy Orders than to Matrimony in the way that it celebrates service to the Church. I think same-sex couples can commit to each other in service in a way that resembles the selfless self-gift of an ordained person, even if it doesn’t reflect the procreative-and-unitive nature of the Sacrament of Matrimony.^↩

The Restless Hearts on... Social Media

In "The Restless Hearts on...", we as a community of writers will tackle a topic or question communally, weighing in together in conversation. We'll offer a discussion like this every so often, and we invite your suggestions for topics/questions to discuss. Send them along to Dan via email or Twitter. In the second installment, we discuss the social media:

In installment number two of “The Restless Hearts on…”, I wanted to put the realities of social media to the group. We are constantly connected to each other in so many more ways than before, taking the old limited norms of face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and letters/telegrams and cranking it up to include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, FaceTime/Skype, and so many more. As bloggers, we try to utilize social media in positive ways but are certainly still vulnerable to its pitfalls and shortcomings. So I asked the group:

What's the point of social media? What are its implications for our spirituality, relationships, and community?


Rob:

I don’t think social media is inherently bad. I think there are, however, two significant problems it presents. I’ma call these the “False Self Problem” and the “Echo Chamber Problem.”

The “False Self Problem” is the tendency, whether intentionally or unintentionally, to fabricate a false self by carefully curating an online persona that is, at best, a warped version of who I actually am. On one level, I think that this is kind of unavoidable—@rgoody33 isn’t actually Rob Goodale, because I only tweet my cleverest thoughts and my most beautiful or attractive photos, and @rgoody33 is therefore a much better, cooler, and smarter person than Rob Goodale, even though @rgoody33 is kind of a fictional character.

Though this is both real and a problem, I don’t think it’s a particularly damaging one—we do this with in-person interactions, too, after all. I try to only speak my cleverest thoughts, and try to wear clothes and have hygienic standards that make me seem beautiful and attractive. The problem, in my estimation (and this is one that is particularly significant for the teenagers and young adults we all work with) is when no attempt at authentic or honest representation is made, or when deception becomes a conscious and intentional decision. The most extreme examples of this would be cat fishing (RIP, Lennay Kekua) or identity fraud, but we don’t need to be that drastic or sensational to acknowledge that, as a rule, online profiles should accurately represent a real-life identity.

The “False Self Problem” undercuts the possibility of cultivating authentic relationships or creating intentional community, because it implicitly encourages a cognitive and emotional connection with something that’s not real as if it were real. Anecdotally, it also seems like the “False Self Problem” could have a negative impact on self-esteem and identity formation, especially for young people.

The “Echo Chamber Problem” is a bit different. No matter what social media platform I'm using, there’s a tendency to populate my own feed with people who are like me in their thoughts, their interests, their values, even their sense of humor. I’m not here for Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh on Twitter, nor am I here for high school classmates still posting their Farmville updates to Facebook.

The danger here is that I segment my community, systematically removing people who are going to make me angry, sad, or confused. Now, on one level, that doesn’t seem all that bad—this also happens in real life, after all, and building community in this way doesn’t seem sinister or dangerous. But on a deeper level, barring from my circle of people those who think differently sounds an awful lot like discrimination.

Moreover, the “Echo Chamber Problem” leads to ignorance and confirmation bias. If all of my people on social media say that Notre Dame is going to win 10 games this fall, or that Des Moines is one of the top five cities for young professionals, I’m going to believe that this is true, whether it is or not. I think we’re seeing this problem play out in the political sphere as we speak, with far-right news media outlets like Fox News, Breitbart, and InfoWars accusing mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and major television networks of circulating false narratives about President Trump, his campaign, and his administration. If all of my information about the world is coming from one side of this narrative, then anyone on the “other side” seems to be trading in absurdity and conspiracy. Social media can exacerbate this problem, too. The solution, I think, is to make a conscious effort to fight the “Echo Chamber Problem” by choosing to follow people who don’t always confirm my own notions about the world. This is very hard to do.

Sorry for the long diatribe. Thoughts?

Dan:

Ditto to the "False Self Problem." I think social media attracts heavy usage because we are the curators not only of the content we consume but also the content we produce. We don't have to share anything; instead, we choose to share those parts of ourselves that are most attractive, most witty, most cheeky, most informed. In short, we create an image of ourselves that we want others to see. Sometimes, this can be rather harmless, perhaps for users who mainly are just sharing some photos or periodic life updates; other times, this can facilitate the creation of a facade that may or may not reflect the authentic person behind it. A dangerous implication of this is the control we gain. I can see, both in myself and others, the desire to control the timing, manner, and subject of everything I consume, which is wholly impractical and has to be unhealthy. Teenagers, among other heavy users, struggle to adjust to a non-controlled, non-curated version of the world -- you know, the real one. Intensive, super-frequent use of such a medium skews perception so significantly.

I think a wider implication beyond the apps and feeds themselves is the impact social media can have on relationships. I think the strength of this technology comes when it gives us complementary ways to interact and complementary ways to create and sustain relationships, a way to bridge the gap between face-to-face meetings or between lengthy phone catch-up's; I think its downfall is when it becomes the way that we interact and relate. As I see the number of media proliferate -- and as I scratch my head at people who Snapchat when they could simply text or people who FaceTime when a standard phone call is certainly sufficient -- I feel that even as we gain more ways to connect to each other, we simultaneously gain more ways to ignore each other. This is so evident when you see someone's home screen is full of red notification numbers or their lock screen is full of notifications or they’re blitzing through Snapchat stories at an alarming rate; it becomes white noise that fades into the background or a box to check to ensure an interaction has been "made," to get a read receipt or checkmark back to the sender but to do nothing to actually receive the message and respond specifically to the person. I come real close to verbal confrontation when I see people rifle through Snapchat messages and stories with such speed that it's impossible that they've actually gained anything in interaction or relationship via this absolute compulsion.

I'll get more positive as we work through this, I promise.

Dave:

My issue with social media is that it becomes idolatrous in the worst possible ways; while it is a mere thing, it seems potentially a bit more dangerous than most things in how readily it replaces the stuff that actually matters. There are a number of ways we can approach this, but I'll do so through the lens of meaningfulness, along the lines of Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and therapist who wrote Man's Search for Meaning.

After his experience in concentration camps, and throughout his career as a therapist (he developed a form of therapy centered around meaning-making, called "logotherapy"), Frankl came to believe that there are three primary sources of meaning in a human life: labor, relationships, and suffering. Human beings can dedicate themselves to completing their labor to the best of their ability, can come to view it as a source of meaning; this is universally true of all human work, regardless of income. Second, we find meaning in our community and relationships (and one does not need to be married in order to develop meaning-making friendships, as evidenced by those priests and consecrated religious who live their vows most healthfully). Lastly, even though we might not understand why we suffer, any suffering can be redeemed and beauty can emerge from tragedy.

Where's this going?

Well, social media potentially messes up all three of these realms of our existence. First, it distorts our understanding of work's intrinsic value by inculcating within our collective consciousness the notion that work is only good for money. We become consumers extraordinaires. Second, it damages our relationships by superficializing human connections, as y'all have already discussed. We abandon real human heat for the glow of the OLED screen. Third, we project false images of ourselves, pretending that life is perfect and that we are not wounded creatures; or, at the very least, our tendency is to avoid advertising the difficult bits of our existences.

In short, not only does social media become an idol, but the tool with which we forge other idols. As Rob pointed out, we can certainly use social media to complement our lives, and in our pursuit of meaningful existence. However, as a high school teacher, I really only see the negatives. Teenagers raised on overly abundant screen time develop inordinate attachments, literal addictions to things that don't matter. I've had kids flip out on me when I've taken their phones away for a class period. They bully one another; they become less capable of focusing for prolonged periods of time; they lose a great degree of discipline. My best students are undoubtedly those who use their phones the least.

I've decided that I don't want my (future, God-willing) kids to have tablets or smartphones until they're well into their late teenage years. I've seen too many deficient minds to encourage their broad, limitless usage.

Jenny:

I'm inclined to agree with what's been said already. To add, I would suggest that social media changes the way in which we view the world around us and disposes us to view it through a lens of consumption. Social media is very much about passive consumption. We find things that we deem palatable and consume them, without necessarily thinking about them or really even enjoying them. A major problem with this is that, in terms of social media, we don't just consume things; we begin to consume people as well.

In one of my grad school classes, the professor challenged us to go 24 hours without social media. He included himself in the challenge. One of the collective discoveries after this short experiment was our inclination to commodify our experiences. When withdrawn from our usual outlets, we realized a tendency to reduce our experience into something digestible -- a pithy tweet, a perfectly composed Instagram photo, a funny Snap. Rather than enjoying a moment for its own sake, we perfectly frame, capture, and caption it and wait for likes, loves, and retweets to roll in. This changes the way that we interact with our world and the people in it.

Additionally, more and more, social media outlets are designed to jettison those perfectly captured moments after a short amount of time (e.g. Snapchat, Instagram Stories, etc.). These platforms seem to me to be an apt example of our ephemeral throwaway culture that Pope Francis rightly criticizes.

As I wrote about before, I believe social media inhibits our ability to pay attention and consequently weakens our ability to pray. It gives the illusion of making us connected and informed, but in reality, if we're not careful, does the exact opposite.

I'm with David: my kids aren't getting phones or tablets until they are older teens.

Dan:

I think an interesting phenomenon that reflects some of the things touched on here is, what could we call it, the public private message? When a significant other posts a litany of gratitude and excitement over an anniversary, when someone wishes a happy birthday with great wordiness, when someone writes a thank-you post to another person, it's a message that could -- and I'd say should -- just be communicated from one person to another, perhaps by private message, text, call, letter, card, or in-person conversation. Yet, it's shared quite visibly and publicly for everyone who's friends with all people involved to see and consume. To me, it's been a weird way of turning private moments public, presumably because they're most interesting for others to interact with. Sure, there's some value to celebrating good things and affirming others’ goodness in public, especially in sparse and intentional language, but it often feels forced and contrived for attention. Why not just take stationery and printed pictures and send a private note? Personally, the private public message is something I consciously avoid. [Note: I will admit my Open Letter to Cardinal Cupich sort of violates this, but I did write it directly to him, send it directly to him, and receive a reply from him; I then shared the letter to bond and resonate with other parents, employees/employers, etc.]

Yet, on the other hand, there's a utility and joy -- as I try to go more positive now -- to sharing life updates with others. Facebook, especially, trail-blazed a new and interesting way of staying in touch, or at least up to date, that is especially helpful for those friends who you appreciated but who didn't stay a close part of your life due to graduation, job change, moving, etc. You can remain passively a part of their lives and have mild, occasional interactions once in a while; this I think is social media at its best, when it's a complementary way to communicate that isn't replacing true interpersonal contact or when it creates contact that wouldn't otherwise happen.

I try to moderate this by devising posts sparsely, both in length and frequency. When we got married, we posted one status when we landed in Puerto Rico for our honeymoon and took a fast from social media; when our baby was born, we shared one post with the usual details and assurance of healthy mom and baby and let it be; as our baby has grown, we share occasional photos via texts or show off our Groovebook mini-albums to people we see, but we don't want Lucy to become "content" beyond those bits and pieces that help give little updates to our friends. It's so tempting, especially with a baby, as I know her cute little smiles will get more engagement from others than anything I post on my own. To remind myself that life isn't about notifications, I actually have the push alerts, noises, and little red numbers disabled on all my phone apps. Checking my feeds is great for getting up to date on news, commentary, reflection, and friends' lives, but when it becomes blather and addiction to noise and notifications, it's time to close the tab or put my phone down.

Jenny:

I think an obvious positive feature of social media is that it can actually help people be connected. For example, my sisters and their families live in Indiana, Massachusetts, and California, respectively, and my parents, brother, and I live in Minnesota. Social media is a convenient way for us to see and share updates of each others' lives. So long as we don't fall into the temptation of becoming "consumers" of one another, or treating social media as a replacement for more genuine communication (phone calls, letters, visits), I think it serves a good purpose.

In addition, I have definitely experienced moments that the Holy Spirit was clearly at work by means of social media. Sometimes social media has directed me to an article that I really needed to see at a given moment in my life. Other times, I've had people tell me that something I posted was what they really needed to see at a given moment.

Social media is a tool, and like any tool can be used for good or for ill. The Church has affirmed the potential for social media to be a tool of evangelization. So long as we use it in moderation and are aware of the pitfalls, I think it is another means by which we can give glory to God and make Him known, loved, and served.

Rob:

I might be veering slightly off-topic, but I think there's a subtle but important distinction to be made between social media and, I dunno what to call 'em, technologically augmented communication apps (TACA, because acronyms are cool). I think most platforms and programs can be used for both purposes, but when Facebook or Snapchat or whatever is used well, its technology augments the communication that is happening.

I've been dating a girl for almost two years. In that time, we've spent at least 75% of our days living in different states and/or countries. Without Snapchat and Skype, I would have largely been in a relationship with words on a screen or piece of paper, or with my own imagination—neither of which sounds particularly good or healthy. Being able to, as we would say, "see your voice and hear your face," augments our experience of communication and leads us deeper into relationship.

Believe it or not, using these apps in this way is somewhat sacramental. (I'm stealing this entire analogy from Jenny and my former community member, Tom—shouts to you, Tom.) Sacraments exist because God desires to be in relationship with us human beans, only we have these cumbersome bodies, and since He was the one who gave them to us, he knows that we have to use these bodies to be in relationship—there's an inherent and indivisible connection between what we do with them and who we are in all of the non-physical ways. Sacraments utilize "stuff" like water, oil, bread, and wine so that we can experience Love with our bodies—we smell the chrism oil, we feel the water on our forehead, we taste the bread and wine that become the hidden presence of the Creator.

The more sense we engage in this experience of love, the stronger we feel it. So if I read a text from my mom or listen to a voicemail from my boss (because the poor chap still leaves voice mails even though he knows I'm never going to listen to them), it's fine, but the experience is strengthened if I can both see and hear the other person. And of course, simply hearing and seeing without being in the physical presence of the other is a purgatious sort of way of relationship that I am quite eager to leave behind.

Social media apps can facilitate relationship building that would otherwise be much more difficult, both logistically and emotionally. The ability to engage multiple senses at once is beautiful and important, even if this might not be the primary use of these apps for many users. Technology is at its best when it is used in the service of the relationship—and not other way around.

And let’s give the last word to… Dave:

So, continuing the train of thought regarding relationships...

I tried several dating sites over the years, and met and dated some wonderful women while living in California. However, after several years and one semi-stalker, I had sort of given up on online dating, but left a profile up on OKCupid for funsies.

A stupidly beautiful, intelligent, and all-around lovely blue-eyed and ginger-haired Oregonian set her search criteria for "anywhere" and stumbled upon my profile. We had each responded to around 300 of the site's questions, and according to their algorithm based on these responses, we were a 99% match. Sarah dropped me a line, we swapped some correspondence, and I peaced out, because trading messages with someone I would probably never meet proved somewhat depressing; unlike Sarah, I was never daring enough to investigate beyond a 50 mile radius. However, that summer I was teaching a course on the thought and theology of C.S. Lewis, and inspired by his breathtaking written correspondence, I asked if she might want to become pen pals.

Those letters eventually turned into a 14 hour first date at Disneyland, which in turn morphed into a long-distance relationship, which resulted in my moving up to Portland (much like Will Hunting, although the comparison stops there as I am no genius) to pursue a relationship, and as of yesterday, all this resulted in a proposal at a whiskey library.

Clearly, I cannot be entirely hostile toward social media. Various modes of communication via the interwebs enabled Sarah and I to feed our nascent relationship. Without OKCupid, I wouldn't be getting ready to spend the rest of my life with this amazing person.

I dunno if I have any theological commentary to add to this. However, I will say that as dangerous and bizarre and odd as online dating might seem to the uninitiated, it does have its upsides. Rather than meeting a total stranger at some epicenter of social mingling, OKCupid and other dating sites allow folks the opportunity to figure out if they'd even want to date someone, based on the priorities that one holds. I could maintain a degree of selectivity, and figure out if a potential first date held certain non-negotiable values and principles at the center of their lives. Then again, it does remove some of the charm and romanticism that came with courtship before the advent of the internet; online dating makes things a bit mechanical, and for someone who's old-fashioned, this is a potential psychological barrier to overcome. It's worth a shot, but patience and a certain suspension of preconceptions is required. It's just a venue to meet people. You gotta wade through some nonsense (especially for women), but that's true of anything.

Dave and his lovely finacee, Sarah, fresh of Dave's successful proposal.

When The Lord Comes, May She Go Out to Meet Him

by Dan Masterton

On Sunday, June 11, 2017, my daughter, Lucy, was baptized into the Church. On the whole, during the Rite of Baptism, the look on my face was somewhere between an awkward teenager staring at a pretty girl across the room and a person who just won the lottery. It was just real cool.

As a result of said giddiness, let me ramble a bit around some of the awesomeness of watching my dear child travel through the waters of Christ’s death and resurrection into her initiation as priest, prophet, and king.

Here's my dear friend, Fr. Kevin, C.PP.S., baptizing Lucy Karen, as my best friend and Lucy's godfather, Tim, holds her holy little head over the water (not pictured: godmother extraordinaire Steph).

Godparents is hard, yo. My wife, Katherine, and I thought a lot about how to approach it. We talked to a lot of people. We wanted to choose people who are important to us, who love us and will love Lucy, and for whom faith and a relationship with God are important. This isn’t just an honorary title or a feather in one’s cap; this is an intimate, spiritual responsibility.

At the core of our deliberation, we struggled with having, between us, three brothers and no sisters, and so far just one sister-in-law (who we love). We ultimately decided to affirm the excellent job we know our brothers will do as uncles and extend the commission of godparenting to our dear, non-blood family members. As our parents artfully affirmed, we knew we had only good options and just had to choose one of them. We picked my best friend of twenty-two years and counting and wedding-Best-Man, Tim, and our dear friend from college and wedding-Maid-of-Honor, Stephanie. Steph couldn’t get to Chicago for the baptism -- though we know she will bring unparalleled passion and commitment to her responsibility -- but watching my best friend/best man/Confirmation sponsor hold my daughter for her anointing and blessing with water was the cat’s pajamas.

Sacraments are moments of continuity in the life of grace. These moments are not meant to be box-checkers for a spiritual resume that denote a faith picked up and put down with nonchalance. They’re opportunities to come before God and the Church for initiation, healing, and commitment in service. This rhythm, marked regularly by the renewing grace of the Eucharist, orients one’s life and spirit toward the God from whom we came and to whom we will return. For Katherine and me, the thoughtfulness that goes into the details of the liturgy helps illuminate the beauty of the Sacrament; this was true of our wedding and its Mass, and it was true for Lucy’s baptism.

As mentioned above, the continuity of our best friends serving in these huge roles for our family’s Sacraments of Matrimony and Baptism is amazing, not to mention having my best friend continuing in his sponsoring me as a fully initiated Catholic. Katherine suggested to my dad, brothers, and sister-in-law that we do something special with my late mother’s wedding dress, so Lucy’s white baptismal garment was specially tailored using the fabric and features from that dress, which my dad had left preserved from the 70s. We invited my friend, Fr. Kevin, to celebrate the baptism, following the beautiful job he did with our wedding Mass. And Kevin, always one to bring eloquence and catechesis, provided beautiful teaching moments as he executed the Rite of Baptism. Chief among them, as we surrounded the baptismal font, Kevin unpacked the Romans 6 (see vv. 1-4 especially) theology of baptism, that we go down into the waters of Christ’s death and rise from the waters to new life in Christ, describing the holy water -- in the words of the Church fathers -- as a “liquid tomb.”

You get out of it what you put into it. It’s a cliched saying, often used to describe Mass, retreats, religion, etc., and plenty of other things, but it’s just true. The details described above involved foresight, discernment, and intentionality, and those qualities help to steer our hearts toward prayerful consideration of what baptism entails. Then, when we gathered our friends and family in the church on that day, such intentionality further drew our community into more engaged consideration of the grace of the Sacrament.

It makes me think of weddings, and how people often dread or avoid “Church weddings.” They feel that they’re too stodgy, constrained, obligatory, etc. Speaking just for myself, our “Church wedding” was important to us but also became a highlight of the “wedding weekend” experience for a lot of our guests, many of whom are not Catholic or do not attend Mass regularly, and that happened because of the intentionality of the music, the ritual, the worship aid, the homily, the family and friends serving as ministers, etc. I think the fact that we put as much or more energy into the Mass as we did into the wedding reception helped to preserve and strengthen the focus on the Sacrament and not just the open-bar party that followed. If people didn’t put thorough energy into their wedding receptions, they would probably feel constrained and obligatory, too!

The texts of the Church are seemingly inexhaustible sources of beauty. Catholic liturgy is often ridiculed for its rigidity, routine, formalism, etc., as perception can lead people to feel turned off by how we celebrate. However, there’s often unrecognized beauty in the texts of the Church, especially in the carefully written prayers of our liturgies. The prayers all draw carefully on Scripture and the rich Tradition of the faith to invite the faithful into dynamic, rich prayer. The syntax and word choice can be clunky, but I think my own tendency to zone out or simply not attentively listen is a greater obstacle than grammar or style.

In the Rite of Baptism, amid my dreamy-eyed gawking, I was struck especially my this prayer that followed the initial lighting of Lucy’s baptismal candle:

Parents and godparents,
this light is entrusted to you to be kept burning brightly.
This child of yours has been enlightened by Christ.
He (she) is to walk always as a child of the light.
May he (she) keep the flame of faith alive in his (her) heart.
When the Lord comes, may he (she) go out to meet him
with all the saints in the heavenly kingdom.

Immediately, I had an abstract image in my imagination of Lucy coming face to face with immense light. I don’t know what she looked like in this moment, but she was clothed in white. And this little girl, who can’t even crawl let alone walk, appeared in the eyes of my soul as a member of the elect excitedly going to meet her maker.

The profundity of that image really floored me and drove home the gravity of marrying, having a child, and endeavoring to raise a family. As I thought about the baptism in the days leading up to it, I thought of Katherine and Lucy (and God-willing, future children) as the most concrete Kingdom-building my life has seen and will ever see. And this baptism, following on our marriage, is a first concrete step of our family’s work to lay the bricks that build the Kingdom and pave the roads to the fullness of Christ.

In that prayer, in that moment, God gave me a glimpse of what the point of all of this is -- why we bother to commit to another in love, to give of ourselves in parenthood, to bring a child to the water. And as I think of that image again, I realize that in that moment of beatific vision, I’d be standing right behind my daughter as we together reach our Providence. Can't wait.

Here's Katherine, Lucy, and I, with my grandmother's handmade woolen white blanket, hidden somewhere behind the immensity of my late mother's wedding dress, which now finds new life as our Masterton family's baptismal garment.

Litany of saints, With A Lower-Case 's,' At Least for Now

by Rob Goodale

Lord, as I stroll around the grounds where your dear old mom made friends with an illiterate fourteen-year-old who liked to hang out at the town dump, living my way through a haggard week of pilgrimage, I ask that you mold my heart to the whims and movements of the hearts of others, and make their prayer my own.

Those older brothers and sisters of ours who have attended the Holy and Sacred Dinner Party at least thrice a week, for decades, and yet somehow haven't managed to find the time to learn their revised lines, which I suppose have only been changed six years ago, which probably doesn't sound like as much time to them as it does to me: make their prayer my own.

Sweet, feisty Kitty Murphy, who came to Lourdes with countless prayer intentions for her children and her children's children and her children's children's children but without her dentures, which she somehow forgot in Cork: make her prayer my own.

The nineteen-year-old volunteers who spend all day on their feet pushing wheelchairs and smiling and cleaning toilets and listening to stories multiple times and doing dishes, and yet insist on the nightly ritual of ensuring that there are more drinks than hours of sleep, the overexuberant fools: make their prayer my own.

Joseph, the young pilgrim who carries an Irish flag everywhere he goes, and who is so overcome with joy at the sight of the tiny teenage Queen of Angels that he actually, literally pumps his fist in the air like Tiger Woods on the 18th green at Augusta, only it's even cooler and more passionate and fuller of life than that: make his prayer my own.

The woman who read the last of the petitions at the international mass, the one in German, or maybe it was Dutch, I honestly couldn't understand a lick of it, but she read that prayer like it was the most sacred and joyous and important thing anyone had ever asked her to do, and so I understood perfectly: make her prayer my own.

The swarm of prepubescent scarves and berets and cigarettes who happened upon my girlfriend and I, trying to have just one single quiet moment together in France, for crying out loud, but they gamely shuffled along up the hill to leave the two of us with only the stars and the crickets and the wind and each other: make their prayer my own.

The curmudgeon in the chasuble who looks like he's mentally enumerating the vast number of places in this world he would rather find his curmudgeonly self, only he lost count, and is apparently so adrift in his own tragic daydream that he doesn’t even say the words as he hands me God Hidden in the Wafer: make his prayer my own.

The snail we found next to the big rock by the river, who was taking his sweet time moseying across the path, carrying his giant house on his back and inspiring a mini-litany of Very Important Questions like where do snails get their shells, do they grow them or scavenge for them, and where do you reckon this particular fella is headed, and do you think he has a wife and kids, or maybe a husband and kids I guess what would his prayer intention be, because of course snails have prayer intentions, they aren't monsters: make his prayer my own.

Kate, the seven-year-old seraph with a magical imagination that speaks into being new ways of passing time on airplanes, and her Guardian Angel of a grandmother, who seems really to be more companion and friend than guardian; they won't tell you about the leukemia until you finally ask, probably because Kate just doesn't find it to be one of the more interesting or noteworthy parts of who she is: make their prayer my own.

The unnamed, sweaty, mop-headed cherub who refuses to relent in his joyous stomping around, no matter how old and holy this Basilica is or how many people try to shush him: make his prayer my own.

The two Buddhist monks, bald heads shimmering and orange robes blazing, who wander into the crypt, march to the space just in front of the altar, and take photographs of the tabernacle; maybe they got lost and wound up here by some series of haphazard and hilarious hijinks, or maybe theirs is a wisdom that motivates them to come to France and take pictures of a golden box where we claim to keep the paper-thin presence of the Almighty, just for the craic, like: make their prayer my own.

The woman silently scuttling along, leatherbound book in hand, praying the Stations of the Cross in the morning drizzle; she's a sturdy wisp of a woman, eerily reminiscent, in fact, of my own grandmother, though it couldn't be her, obviously, we lost her three years ago after nine decades of the sturdiest years any woman could endure this side of the sturdiest woman there ever was, the one who wears a gold crown in Fatima and a blue field of stars in Mexico, who is of course the model for my late grandmother, and this woman praying the Stations, and for all of us, I suppose: make her prayer my own.

The gentleman in the rosary procession whose phone began to ring right in the middle of the second decade, only instead of noticing it immediately, he let it ring for several seconds before realizing it was his own phone and finally removed it from his pocket, only instead of turning it off and chucking into the river from embarrassment (which is probably what I would have done), he actually answered the blessed thing, only instead of quickly explaining to the person on the other end that he was in the middle of a very serious and traditional and holy ritual and would ring back later, this Blessed Child of God launched into a full-fledged conversation, making plans for this Friday evening, of course, and the only thing I knew how to do was smile and laugh and shake my head and say, “Mother of God, pray for us,” which I’m quite certain she did, that is, of course, just as soon as she finished smiling and laughing and shaking her head herself: make his prayer my own.

Margaret, whose accent was so thick that I’m 87% certain she was actually speaking another language entirely; and Roger, who is staying at the fancy hotel up the town with his parents, thank you very much; and Maurice, who always has his pipe, some tobacco, and a match on hand, just in case; Bernadette, who no matter how many times I tried to explain it still couldn’t figure out how and why I’m not in formation for the priesthood; and Michael, who is brilliant and a former teacher and a great lover of the game of baseball, which is of course no coincidence, given the first two factoids; and all these holy women and men who made pilgrimage to Lourdes, and showed me the face of Jesus: make their prayer my own, make their prayer my own, make their prayer my own, O Lord.

The Gift of Mediocrity

by Jenny Klejeski

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
-T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

Having recently finished another academic year, I can’t help but feel echoes of Eliot’s word in my own life. A bit dramatic, I know, but it encapsulates the sense of anti-climax that I feel at the end of the semester. Rather than feeling a great sense of accomplishment, triumph, or even relief, I mostly feel tired. I find myself thinking about the could’ves and should’ves of the year, not to mention that I haven’t yet mastered the art of planning the elusive enough-but-not-too-much material for the end of the year, and feel like I’ve been doing glorified crowd control for the past week (or two….).

Now, I could choose to wallow in my many shortcomings. Goodness knows as a new(ish) teacher—and a young adult—there are certainly enough of them to go around. With all the things I could be doing better, and my genuine desire to do things well, there can be a great temptation to discouragement.

Over the past few years, though, through the help of community, I’ve discovered an antidote for despairing. This is something I call “embracing the mediocrity.” I realize that this probably sounds odd, so let me explain further.

When I first lived in community through the Echo program, my community members and I felt overwhelmed by the demands that were placed on us. We had just moved to a new state, far from any family or friends and as any first year teacher can attest, the experience of being in a classroom for the first time is something akin to being thrown into the deep end of the pool with little-to-no swimming instruction (and then people start throwing things at you).



In addition, we had certain program expectations such as a weekly community night, which was supposed to involve a meal, an activity of some sort, and prayer together.¹ We were not always (read: often) able, however, to meet all the expectations that were placed in front of us. As such, we began to refer to ourselves—somewhat tongue in cheek—as the “mediocre community.”

With this communal embrace of our own shortcomings came a great freedom and peace. It allowed me to become vulnerable and break down the façades of “having everything together,” which actually allowed me to strive real betterment. Amazingly enough, when you’re not so busy pretending like everything is perfect, you have more time and energy to do the things that you can as well as you can.

Embracing the mediocrity means looking toward an ideal, striving for that ideal, and not becoming discouraged when I don’t hit the mark. It means recognizing my own finitude and trying to grow within those limits. It means leaning into the discomfort and messiness of life, taking things as they come, and seeking excellence in whatever ways you can. It’s a reminder that everything this is not my intended resting place; I’m still on the way.

Christ told us to be perfect. I’m definitely not there yet. Embracing the mediocrity gives me great hope because I know that any power I have for good is His gift of grace at work in my life. It gives me hope because I know that this is not the end and there are better things ahead. 

“And when night comes, and you look back over the day and see how fragmentary everything has been, and how much you planned that has gone undone, and all the reasons you have to be embarrassed and ashamed: just take everything exactly as it is, put it in God’s hands and leave it with Him. Then you will be able to rest in Him—really rest—and start the next day as a new life." —St. Edith Stein

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1 I say “supposed to” because often one of those three things would get jettisoned. ^↩

The Stigma of Discipleship

by Dan Masterton

In fourth grade, our notoriously strict Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Hamick, let us read a comic book, but with a catch -- the comic book wasn’t about a superhero fighting villains and crime; it was about St. Francis of Assisi.

As best as I can remember, it was the type of thing our parents might have had in school -- the kitschy illustrations, the musty scent of old paper, the hokey faux action that baited young minds into attentiveness. ¹ The reason I remember that comic so clearly is that this was the first time I learned about the stigmata. I don’t remember how much, as a nine-year-old, I could grasp the magnitude of crucifixion, but I remember thinking it was pretty cool that Francis shared these marks of Christ. Somehow, the comic delivered this potentially grisly thing in a way that highlighted the privilege of Francis’ stigmata.

Neat picture at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans
of St. Francis' receiving the stigmata.

On Pentecost, ² the Gospel of John tells us that Jesus showed the wounds of His crucifixion to His disciples just before He breathed the Holy Spirit on them. These marks are the evidence of His passion that prove His sacrifice, marks still visible on His resurrected body, and in our Tradition, they become bodily marks borne by some of the most Christ-like among us.

Pardon me while I get etymological again, but it has to be noted that stigmata comes from the Greek stigma. It’s a word that carried into modern English, but the old Greek word denotes a slightly different meaning: a mark made by pricking or branding. So, according to these origins, the old meaning fits literally (stigmata is the plural) as a descriptor of Christ’s wounds. But then, we layer the modern meaning of stigma on top of this: a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or person. This only thickens up the gravity of the stigmata, which are not just a mark of physical torture and serious pain but also an indication of one’s social ostracization.

Such a multi-layered meaning draws my heart in two directions. First, I think of the martyrs, and I feel echoes of Augustine’s City of God³ in my reflection, specifically Augustine’s ideas of what heaven and the resurrected body will be like:

But the love we bear to the blessed martyrs causes us, I know not how, to desire to see in the heavenly kingdom the marks of the wounds which they received for the name of Christ, and possibly we shall see them. For this will not be a deformity, but a mark of honor, and will add lustre [sic] to their appearance, and a spiritual, if not a bodily beauty… But if it will be seemly in that new kingdom to have some marks of these wounds still visible in that immortal flesh, the places where they have been wounded or mutilated shall retain the scars without any of the members being lost. While, therefore, it is quite true that no blemishes which the body has sustained shall appear in the resurrection, yet we are not to reckon or name these marks of virtue blemishes. (Book 22, Chapter 19)

Augustine here describes how the wounds of the martyrs will be visible on their resurrected bodies, and what’s more, they will look beautiful to our eyes. Surely, this is true for the disciples as they laid eyes upon the Risen Lord, yet I feel similar things when I think about other instances. I think also of my hero martyr saints and their sacrifice: the emaciated starvation in charity of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the fiery burns of St. Charles Lwanga, and the bullet wound of Blessed Oscar Romero. And on another level, I think of more familiar witness: the toll that pregnancy takes on the body of mothers (C-section scars, stretch marks, etc.), the surgical scars of organ donors, the bags under the eyes of a single parent. These are the selfless, loving people and actions that give witness to the Gospel of Christ; these are the marks of love which people of faith should strive to emulate.

On the other hand, I think about the many of us who are not marked with these stigmata.⁴ It certainly is not something that we all experience on the journey to justification. However, I look at myself and feel like I duck many of the smaller moments that might draw me toward moments of martyrdom, moments of stigma, moments of being marked as a follower of Christ.

In some ways, it’s a hazard of my being a moderate (in personality and in ideology) as well as being an extroverted introvert. My tendency -- and my safe default mode -- is to hesitate, to hold my tongue, to sit back. I prefer not to be radical, loud, or the center of attention. So in everyday conversations, I may opt not to bring up the calls of our sexual ethic, of our economic justice, or of our environmental stewardship responsibilities in which I so committedly believe; when the person standing on the corner from Planned Parenthood or the ACLU tries to engage me, I politely decline instead of inviting the encounter to learn ideals and passions from each other; when the needy person on the off ramp walks up to the stopped cars, I muster the courage to make eye contact and smile but don’t slow down enough to talk while I can.

These moments aren’t anything on the scale of martyrdom or the scale of literal, visible, physical stigmata, but I think in too large a way, my hesitancy or self-doubt comes from social insecurity. Even with the good deal of self-confidence overall and conviction in my faith that I have, I still don’t respond to each invitation to love, in some way out of fear of its stigma. These missed moments are omissions due to misplaced fear that keep me from embracing the stigma of being a true disciple.

The life of faith may involve intense moments of revelation and epiphany, but on the whole, I feel the truth of metanoia is more insightful and apt. Our hearts are in need of constant, repeated conversion, and the heartbeat of Eucharistic living is how God comes to us to potently fuel that.

In response, I must seek to find more quality and quantity to embrace moments of stigmata to be the hands and feet of Christ that I’m called to be. In this way, I could pay better, even if small and simple, witness to the Gospel and with it allow the stigmata to mark me as one with Christ.

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1 Not quite like the campy Batman show, but pretty close. Makes me think of Bart Simpson learning about St. Sebastian.^↩

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2 Readings for Pentecost this year here.^↩

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3 Full text available online here.^↩

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4 Cool quote from Fulton Sheen shared by Jenny: “Show me your hands. Do they have scars from giving? Show me your feet. Are they wounded in service? Show me your heart. Have you left a place for divine love?”^↩

The Sacramental Enterprise of Cooking

by Rob Goodale

G.K. Chesterton wrote that there are some things that are worth doing even if you are very bad at them, like blowing your nose or brushing your teeth. While it makes sense to pay someone else to build your house or fly an airplane or take out your appendix, it doesn’t much seem appropriate to pay someone who is better at it than you to kiss your wife.

It is my own humble opinion that among these things that Gilbert, that delightfully agitated Englishman, would have each of us do, even if we do them poorly, are: singing at Mass, dancing at weddings, and cooking. Much ink¹ has been spilled about the first, and the second is (I hope) rather obvious and self-explanatory. I wish to weigh in on the third.

I love cooking, and with some practice, I’ve become increasingly comfortable bopping around the kitchen, whipping up some of my favorite dishes.² When I’m stressed, or bored, or lonely, the thing I most want to do is chop some onions and garlic, throw them in a pan with some olive oil, and make something up based on whatever else I’ve got on hand.³

On the face of it, the task of preparing food is simple and mundane. The world renowned chef at a five star restaurant, the line-order cook at the fast food joint around the corner, and my grandmother whirring around her modest farmhouse kitchen—each of them is simply feeding people who are hungry. The primary objective of cooking is to provide sustenance, which is important but not all that complicated, really. Pre-fab astronaut gunk or a hastily made PB&J will suffice, in most cases. It doesn’t take a culinary rocket scientist to make something that will prevent me from starving; in fact, food preparation is yet another task that Elon Musk is probably teaching robots how to do.

But there is obviously a lot more to cooking than this. The formidable ritual of cooking, of formulating in the mind an image of some finished product and then working to bring that which is imagined into reality, is far too sacred to be left in the hands of machines. It is intensely human, an exhilarating participation in the creative energies of the God who speaks life into being and sustains all of creation. Cooking is sacramental; we use our bodies to communicate love through bread and wine (and pasta) to those who gather at our table. We feed because He first fed us.

And yet, even the most brilliantly creative artist is, in a sense, a child in a sandbox. The inventor simply looks around at the things around her and puts what she sees together in interesting and novel combinations. The composer, the engineer, the sculptor, the carpenter, the architect: each of these geniuses is merely taking things that already exist and rearranging them to make something new. No matter what we make, we can only use the ingredients in the pantry.

Meanwhile: God, the Cosmic Tailor,⁴ has fashioned for us a bespoke reality. Everything is measured and measured again, and spoken into existence only once it is perfect, made to exact specifications for a specific need. No human can create this way. In fact, there should be a different word for what we do, because it seems rude to use the same word. The Living God is a maestro, beckoning into existence whatever he desires, simply by desiring it. We mash bits of Play-Doh and sand together and call it a blueberry pancake.

The imposition of this reality is, for me, most palpable in the kitchen. It is here that my creative pride is crushed by the weight of my own finitude. In the adventure of food preparation, I am bound by the ingredients in my pantry, to be sure, but no matter what ingredients I start with, the finished product is never quite what I set out to make when I fetch⁵ the cutting board from the drawer. I am a fallen and sinful human being, which is of course my excuse for absentmindedly leaving the pasta boil for too long.

Still, we strive for ever-elusive perfection. I cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. It allows me to do something, and to continue trying to do it as well as I can.⁶ One of my favorite aspects of cooking (after, of course, the eating) is the endless tinkering. Next time, a smidge more garlic. Maybe shallots? I wonder what would happen if I added honey to this chili? This spirit of innovation is not borne of dissatisfaction with what is, but of hope for what could be. Imagine a perfectly seasoned and perfectly cooked steak—it’s theoretically possible! Why not keep trying ’til we get it right!?

My experience with cooking has been much the same as my experience with singing at Mass and dancing at weddings: a gradual process of self-discovery, wherein I begin to do a thing, choosing to forget for the moment that it is a thing that would be done much more efficiently and pleasingly by some other person with an ounce of training. In a momentary lapse of excruciating self-awareness (and the wondrous cascade of youthful confidence that always accompanies any good risk), I discover the marvelous truth of such things: it is only by beginning to do something, before we have a framed certificate on the wall that says we are qualified to do it, when we just freaking cut loose and go for it, it’s only then that we start to actually learn how to do it.

In this way cooking (and singing and dancing) are sacramental, because they remind me to stop being so dang scared and live, I mean really live in this gloriously haphazard collection of cells that the King of Glory decided to entrust to me, and to use these marvels of art and science that we call bodies to receive grace and mediate it through ourselves and into all those gathered around the table, a table of human beings fully alive,⁷ which is, of course, a table of Glory.

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1 Or at least, the blogosphere equivalent of ink.^↩

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2 Heavy in the rotation these days: Chicken fajitas, 2AM chili, and a pasta dish that started out as carbonara before I started adding to it random things like chicken and zucchini.^↩

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3 Also crucial to this process: music. Loud music. Usually my Spotify Backer playlist.^↩

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4 I think we all have our own little personal images of what God might be; this is one of mine.^↩

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5 #MakeFetchHappen^↩

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6 Adapted from the Oscar Romero Prayer, which was, strangely enough, not written by Oscar Romero.^↩

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7 Adapted from a famous quote from St. Irenaeus of Lyon: “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.” ^↩

The Tree, Tracks, and Hometowns: Faith and the Bible in Josh Ritter's Music

by Dan Masterton

A Still, Small Voice Comes Blazing

One of my sneaky favorite Bible passages comes from 1 Kings. In Chapter 19, YHWH tells Elijah to go to a place on the holy mountain where the Lord will pass by him. A strong wind, a powerful earthquake, and a flash of fire pass by, but YHWH is not in any of those: “after the fire, [there came] a light silent sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. A voice said to him, Why are you here, Elijah?” (vv. 9-13)

The refrain of Josh Ritter’s “Monster Ballads” (song | lyrics | from the album “The Animal Years”) sings of the ongoing, droning search for something:

Out on the desert now and feeling lost
The bonnet wears a wire albatross
Monster ballads and the stations of the cross
Sighing just a little bit

In the way that his folk style can, Josh’s dexterous guitar-playing paired with steady, light percussion pushes straight on from this refrain, with its reference to the Passion, right into the bridge. There, the speaker considers the distracting hubbub of technology that we use to fill our emptiness alongside this voice that ultimately reaches Elijah:

The ones and the zeroes bleeding mesa noise
And when you're empty there's so much space for them
You turn it off but then a still small voice
Comes in blazing from some vast horizon

Josh Ritter is a dynamic folk artist, singer/songwriter, and wildly talented guitarist, who couples colorful, evocative tales of curious characters in enthralling landscapes with regular nods to the spiritual, the religious, and even the biblical to deliver music thickly layered with meaning.

Here, Josh identifies that thing that shakes you from malaise as this “blazing” voice of God that seeks you in the silence. In “Girl in the War” (song | lyrics | from the album “The Animal Years”), Josh uses the odd couple of Sts. Peter and Paul to discuss love and faith, as “Paul said to Peter / you gotta rock yourself a little harder” (a delicious pun) and exhorts him to “pretend the dove from above is a dragon / and your feet are on fire,” an unusual yet potent way to characterize the inspiration from the Spirit. In “Rainslicker” (song | lyrics | from the album “Hello Starling”), Josh describes the placid gaze of a lover with “eyes so patient and calm / as green as the grass that might grow on the 23rd Psalm.” Throughout his music, Josh utilizes motif, metaphor, story, and pithy lines that pack a punch fueled by these references.

Motif: The Tree

In his newest album, Sermon on the Rocks, Josh got more overtly biblical than before. His early release track (which this indie-ish artist even performed on cable late-night show Conan) was “Gettin’ Ready to Get Down” (song | lyrics) It’s a tongue-in-cheek narrative about a run-of-the-mill teenage girl whose small-town Christian family and pastor attempt to rein her in with Bible school rigidity. Josh jams in references to “infidels, Jezebels, Salomes, and Delilahs,” to “the Red Sea, the Dead Sea, the Sermon on the Mount,” and to the can-barely-say-it-with-a-straight-face assertion that “Jesus hates your high school dances.”¹ It’s a boisterous satire of the straight-laced ways of fundamentalist Christians; the song pokes fun at its sharp corners while also working its way to a consensus idea that could follow from a gentler reading of Gospel truth: “Be good to everybody / be a strength to the weak / A joy to the joyful / be the laughter in the grief.”

Deeper than that fun little ditty, Josh also makes two big lyrical visits to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. “Lighthouse Fire” (song | lyrics) opens with this same verse twice:

Gonna build you a cathedral out of nothing but the rafters
'Tween the stars, 'tween the stars, 'tween the stars, 'tween the stars
From the tree of good and evil bring you fruit of the knowledge
Of your heart, of your heart, of your heart, of your heart

Here, it feels like a stark departure from the ancestral narratives and children of Abraham in Genesis; rather than a tree that was rightly restricted by God, here is a love that is fueled by eating of this tree’s knowledge, a knowledge that shows who we are at the core and builds a church that eschews stained glass and statues. Yet, in “Homecoming” (song | lyrics) -- the kind of rich, emotionally weighty ballad that Josh’s folk music so organically creates -- the Tree is not so much a source of rebellious love as a mark of the goodness of home.

As the idea of a true love is intertwined with the town where one grew up, “Homecoming” means returning to the place “where the tree of good and evil still resides,” even hearkening back with longing undertones to “that time before the fall.” Josh sings how this place called home makes a claim on you: “It has my heart / It has my heart / They stole my heart / My heart will stay / My heart will stay.” As the song turns to the joy of that impending homecoming, the verses build to a revelation that seems to spring from the joy of this impending return home: “When the oracle spoke to me she was like a roadside song / Do unto others as you would have them do / Even if in turn they do you wrong.” So here, the tree becomes a mark of what one learns growing up, how it is challenged and changed in leaving, and how the purity and goodness of that truth can be rediscovered in that enduring reality of home.

Metaphor: The Tracks and Train

Reaching back deeper into Josh’s discography, “Harrisburg” (song | lyrics | off the album “Golden Age of Radio”) is a thorough story-driven metaphorization of sin and evil. Here, Josh tells the story of a man named Romero, freshly married at “Our Lady of Immaculate Dawn,” and while “he coulda got married in the revival man’s tent / there ain’t no reviving what’s gone.” Romero quickly slips away from his family -- he “dropped the kids at the mission with a rose for the Virgin / she knew he was gone for good.”²

Woven in through Romero’s flight, presumably off to Harrisburg, is a haunting chorus about the path many of us take, or at least are tempted to choose, toward grass that seems greener that present hardships:

It's a long way to Heaven, it's closer to Harrisburg
And that's still a long way from the place where we are
And if evil exists it’s a pair of train tracks
And the devil is a railroad car

His story is one of following these long-laid tracks and allowing space and opportunity for evil and temptation to draw him away from his faith and family. The final verse shares that “he didn’t make heaven and he didn’t make Harrisburg / he got lost in a hole in between,” and Josh then builds to the song’s end with a biting observation on God, the problem of evil, and our own complicity in perpetuating sin:

Some say that man is the root of all evil
Others say God’s a drunkard for pain
As for me I believe that the garden of Eden
Was burned to make way for a train (for a train)

Stories: Angels, Home, and Smalltown Faith

In an earlier folk tale “Wings” (song | lyrics | from the album “Hello Starling”), the speaker and companions follow a “Blackrobe” to a mission church “where the saints and all the martyrs look down on dying converts” who are struggling on this reservation. The story follows them on a search for some kind of salvation, down rivers, through markets, and to the mountains, with a dreaming refrain woven in between: “It's my home -- last night I dreamt that I grew wings / I found a place where they could hear me when I sing.” Their winding journey ends in the lowlands at the foot of the mountains with “rain that was descending like railroad spikes and hammers.” Finally, the angels -- and the salvation he dreams of -- appear in the final lines of the song: “they were headed for the border -- walking and then running / and then they were gone into the fog but Anne said underneath their jackets she saw wings.” It seems the hope of deliverance he sought remains out of reach, and the angels that symbolized weren’t even seen for certain.³

Along similar lines as “Homecoming,” “Lawrence, KS” (song | lyrics | from the album “Golden Age of Radio”) discusses the claim that one’s hometown and way of life, with its “dirt roads and dry land farming,” make on you. The speaker calls home “a fenced-in piece of nothing where I hear voices on my knees” and then hits the repeated line “but I can’t leave this world behind,” connecting the faith and prayer of childhood with the nature of home. He observes that “some prophecies are self-fulfilling / But I've had to work for all of mine,” hoping that God soon wills something providential for him. Yet turning finally to the words of the local pastor, he concludes:

Preacher says when the Master calls us
He's gonna give us wings to fly
But my wings are made of hay and corn husks
So I can't leave this world behind

It’s mournful of the fate that seems decided by where one is born but also acknowledges that one’s home and upbringing can be, and often are, part of the way of that salvation.

In the darkest song and most powerful story on “Sermon on the Rocks,” Josh describes the dreary landscape of “Henrietta, Indiana” (song | lyrics),⁴ starting with how the speaker’s father and brother were among hundreds of layoffs when the local factory closed in this dry town. The speaker calmly describes where his father and brother turn amid the frustration of unemployment:

Daddy got a taste for the hard stuff
Henrietta, Indiana was dry
We'd ride out to Putney, he'd tell me he loved me
The drive home was always so quiet

This leads right into the simple and downright eerie refrain:

He had a devil in his eye, eye
Like a thorn in the paw
Disregard for the law
Disappointment to the Lord on high

Alcoholism sets in -- as a devil in their eyes -- and fuels the men’s turn to crime, where, perhaps in a move of some kind of vengeance, they commit a triple murder and flee the town. The speaker describes how his brother studied the Sermon on the Mount and “practiced preaching in the basement” until he decided the words there couldn’t be true; instead, the brother substitutes his own dark pronouncement that the reward would come only in escaping this town as he heads off to commit his crime:

Blessed be the poor, he said
Your treasure is on high
All of Henrietta, Indiana heard my Hallelujah
When I finally saw the devil in his eyes

The bleak portrait closes with the speaker constructing a vigil at home to his now-gone brother (and father), where it’s just him now, and the feelings of despair and loneliness have only heightened until he reaches the same tipping point:

At night I leave a bottle on the table
The Bible open to the Sermon on the Mount
Blessed be the poor of Henrietta, Indiana
But happy are those that get out
I think I'll drive over to Putney
The store'll be open 'til twelve
The empty parking lot, the lights, the lonely kid, the register
I see it all clear as a bell
I got a devil in my eye, eye

“Henrietta, Indiana” juxtaposes the frustrations and trials of life with a faith that doesn’t find the answers it seeks. Such an apparent dead end, both in life and in faith, leads to a search for some kind of answer in booze and crime. It’s a challenging and chilling narrative of the emotions felt in tough times. To me it highlights the need for community and friendship (namely, the Church), which help life run deeper than a job and its income and help us understand the messages of the Bible better than when sought in a vacuum entirely on one’s own.⁵

Conclusion: Light in my Lantern

A lot of the power of these songs, their messages, and their biblical and religious allusions comes from exploring dark, heavy places in the human story. Not all of Josh’s music has this heaviness, and a lot of his best songs are thoroughly joyful. In “Lantern” (song | lyrics | from the album “So Runs the World Away”), the refrain repeatedly hopes, “I'll need light for my lantern, light for my lantern tonight / Be the light in my lantern, light in my lantern tonight.”

And as his various descriptions of life’s trials turn to the hope of illuminating each other’s lanterns, he challenges:

So throw away those lamentations; we both know them all too well
If there's a book of Jubilations, we'll have to write it for ourselves
So come and lie beside me darling, and let's write it while we still got time

It’s a passing reference to the Old Testament book of Lamentations that then wonders if there can and should be a book for Jubilations, too. Obviously, the Bible as a whole is a joyful story of God’s love, of His advocacy and opting for Israel and humanity, ultimately revealed in Jesus Christ; yet, here’s a fun thought of considering the love of relationship as the pen that authors our joys to God. We certainly cannot add to the Bible, but we can respond by loving one another jubilantly, even while there is seemingly constant cause for lamentation.

So even while you’re tempted by the Trees of Knowledge, the train tracks, and the apparently out-of-reach salvation, be the light in others’ lanterns and seek the Light that God gives to you in love.⁶

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1 No joke, among the many times Josh smiles while performing his music, the smirk he gets when delivering this silly yet brilliant line is delightful.^↩

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2 There’s something satirical yet incisively true about such an observation being put on the lips of Mary. We turn to her for regular intercession, yet here she seems to have more of an omniscient view. Somehow, it feels fitting that Mary would know that as he leaves the children at her feet, that he isn’t coming back for them.^↩

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3 Josh has a fascination with angels, divine intervention, and the like. He took a sidebar to songwriting to try his hand at writing a novel. Bright’s Passage is the story of a WWI soldier back home in West Virginia whose wife has passed and left him alone with a son. An angel has followed him back from Europe and follows him in his new post-war reality.^↩

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4 Of all the songs I profile here, this is the one that’s most potent to listen to as you read. It’s the quintessential Josh Ritter folk song in the way it creates a rich setting, relatable characters, and a simple but compelling plot that all draw you in as you follow the song. ^↩

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5 Maybe the phrase “to me” is unnecessary, but I feel that the meanings of songs are often intended in a certain way by the songwriter and/or performer but are certainly artfully open to interpretation by different listeners.^↩

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6 Props to my brothers and fellow Josh Ritter enthusiasts, Tim and Mike, for helping me compile these references. Both of them cited “Thin Blue Flame” (song | lyrics | from the album “The Animal Years”), an epic ten-minute song full of powerful references, too, too many to delve into here; about the line “Heaven is so big there ain’t no need to look up,” Mike said, “there’s a starry-eyed optimism that Heaven is all around us, not just up in the clouds but in grace, presence, and all encompassing joy found throughout Josh’s music.” Mike also pointed to “Hopeful” (song | lyrics | from the album “The Beast in its Tracks”), particularly when Josh sings, “She’s been through her own share of hard times as well / And she’s learned how to tear out the heaven from hell.” Mike said it’s one of his favorite lines ever because “even though things might suck pretty bad, this girl has been able to find that elusive silver lining and remain optimistic in a time of sadness or grief or whatever you might want to call it. Optimism can come with that certain sense of faith.”^↩