My latest post at AmazingCatechists.com: How do you share R-rated saints in a G-rated classroom?
(Well, sometimes you don’t. But most of the time — St. Maria Goretti sit down — most of the time, you can. The trick is in preparing ahead of time to avert disaster.)
1.
This morning I woke to the sound of the septic guy’s truck rumbling outside my bedroom window. I started to panic — they weren’t supposed to be here until next week, and I still needed to move some plants out of their way. Then I realized it was just the tank-emptying guys, not the installing-new-drain-fields guys, and I relaxed. But I quick put on yard clothes and went out to investigate anyways.
2.
And learned that the drain field guys would be arriving in twenty minutes.
3.
The drain field guys helped me get the last of the plants out of the ground. Thankfully it’s been wet all week. Now I’ve got homeless plants sitting in bins in my back yard, waiting for me to decide where to put them.
4.
The most interesting thing was watching the septic guys dispose of trash. The trench for the drain field is about six feet deep. They lay the drain pipes, and big columns of mesh-wrapped packing peanuts that are the new gravel of the septic world. And then anything that needs to be thrown away — shrink wrap, tin cans, old pipe dug up in the process of cutting the new field — they just toss it in the trench.
My sense of order was disturbed, but I reminded myself that if not here, then these items would just be hauled off to be buried in some other patch of earth. Jon pointed out that you would not want to touch the old drain lines — better to just let the backhoe nudge them back underground.
5.
It is really cool watching a skilled backhoe operator work in a tight space.
6.
Don’t forget to pray for Allie Hathaway. Thanks!
7.
Le Papillon is a mighty good movie. It’s French, very French, but no humans die and it has a happy ending. (It does have the obligatory smoking scene.) Beautifully rendered, the language is artful and the English subtitles do it justice. My five-year-old has watched it more than once, and she doesn’t seem to mind not knowing the words. The seven-year-old minds – but she needs to practice her reading anyhow.
Helpful film for the French student because the dialog is spare but covers lots of good language-learning territory. Advanced students will appreciate the word play and the chance to learn a few interesting idioms. Head’s up, the film ranges over a number of touchy subjects (abortion, mental illness, honesty, fit parenting, the Final Judgement, etc.), so parental presence is called for. You wouldn’t want to miss this anyways. Excellent film. I could watch it three times in a week.
Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who’s got all your Apocalypse needs covered. Especially Robot Apocalypse.
1.
Yesterday was our 17th Anniversary. We had dinner on the screen porch — steak, tater tots, spinach, cantaloupe, champagne. Even the kids were full before dessert. I can’t remember when it started, but we’ve taken to having a family dinner for our anniversary, and pointing out to the kids that it marks the founding of our family. Which makes it their holiday, too. After the kids went to bed, parents finished the champagne and got into the cheesecake.
2.
Best Water Meter Ever. It takes several layers of those cheap all-paper plates from Aldi if you’re serving steak. Why paper? Because the septic system is old enough to run for president, which in septic-years is much more than a little stately silver around the ears. We’re avoiding all excess water usage until we can get a new drain field cut in sometime next week. And so the SuperHusband installed one of these on the back patio:
It’s connected to the hose for a water-supply, and underneath, instead of drainpipe there’s a one-gallon bucket. It’s fascinating seeing exactly how much water you use to wash hands or brush teeth. Major incentive to conserve water so you don’t have to keep hauling the bucket off to some suitable corner of lawn. Can I count this as school?
3.
Bleg: Boys, Porn, and Chastity. Had a friend in for tea Sunday afternoon, and she gave me a timely head’s up on the reality of tweenage boys and the very rapid transition into Exceedingly Immature Manhood that is somewhere on the horizon for our boy. (Right now, the only girl he likes is the dog.) Since I know that at least a few of my readers are:
or:
or:
Want to offer any advice? Practical. Links, comments, a post of your own and link it back here. I’m all ears. Anything helpful. Thanks!
3.5
On Saturday I bought an 18-pack of Busch Light. I tasted some, warm. It’s kind of sweet — sort of a malty fruity seltzer product. Interesting. But it’s not for me. It’s for
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Well that’s all for today. Tuesday is Link Day for all topics, not just beer, chastity, and laundry tubs. Help yourself if you are so inclined. Post as many as you want, but only one per comment or the spam dragon will eat you up and I’ll never even know.
Brad Warthen posted a photo of the controversial Time Magazine cover over at his blog. I won’t here, though I suppose you’ve seen it. I’ll describe it in a minute.
Time poses as a respectable newsweekly, and so it’s supposed to be reporting about real issues. The topic at hand is delayed weaning, and we are supposed to be upset that a three-year-old might still be nursing. Difficult to get upset about that, unless you can somehow stage it as a sexual issue. Keep in mind that typically a three-year-old still needs help with bathing, toileting, and often may need diapers changed. Can a child be sexually abused as part of all that? Sure. Would there be any reason to suspect a dysfunctional or abusive relationship merely because a parent looked after a child’s hygiene? No.
I’m going to describe the photo, and what’s noteworthy is that there is nothing unusual about this. I can be pretty sure that if I draw the right readership, I’ll be told I’m an uptight prude for calling the mom’s outfit immodest. These are the clothes young women wear to serve in ministry at church, for example. It’s all so normal.
Mom:
Mom’s wearing ballet flats — nothing tiltating there. Which also make her as short at possible. Important in a minute.
Mom’s wearing tight jeans — technically, these are tights. Wonder of spandex, we can now have “pants” that fit like something which, a decade ago, went under a skirt to keep your legs warm in winter.
Mom’s wearing a camisole. Remember camisoles? They used to go under your clothes.
And that’s it.
We, as a culture, think this is normal. Girls dress this way at church. Well you know what? It’s not normal. It’s underwear. And when you pose someone in her underwear on the cover of a magazine . . . it’s that type of magazine.
Now I know your daughter who dresses this way is sweet and pure and innocent, because I’ve met her or a girl just like her, and in addition she’s delightful, polite, intelligent, and devoted to her faith. I don’t question her motives. She’s just wearing what they sell. But still. She’s walking around in her underwear. And doesn’t know it, because everyone else is too. The empress has no outerwear.
So. On the cover of Time, we have a woman in her underwear. A young, beautiful woman. Her eyes and her posture say, “I dare you.” Or, perhaps, “Come and get it.” We’ll go with “I dare you.”
Now for her boy:
He’s three, but he’s a little taller than a typical three year-old.
He’s dressed like a little GI – camo pants, grey knit shirt, running shoes. Grown-up hair cut.
He’s standing on a chair, which though you know doesn’t make him taller, really, your eyes see that head way up by her shoulder, and your brain thinks “twelve years old.”
The clothing, the relative heights — this preschooler has been done up to look like a pre-teen boy. In an age when grown men do their best to look like pre-teen boys.
Recap: A woman in her underwear, with a child made up to look like a grown-up, doing what grown-up men do in their bedroom with their wives during intercourse. That’s child porn.
It’s not about breastfeeding.
Allow me to hurt your brain a little more. Make that boy pose like a GI caught with his pants down. Have mom kneel down, same outfit, same “I dare-you-eyes” as she reaches up with a baby-wipe to clean that bottom . . . child porn.
It’s not about breastfeeding.
It’s about the fact that our culture is sex-obsessed.
It’s about the fact that if you even mention modesty, you must be some kind of Victorian prude (I’m not so impressed with the Victorians, but apparently some people are). Even among Catholics, the hot thing is to declare modesty is context-dependent, and more about a state of mind, and anyway here’s a picture of someone, somewhere, dressing this way fifty years ago, so that makes it modest. Also, look at this piece of classic art. We all know artists were protected from impurity until 1957. And then it degenerates into the Burka argument, since neither Nazis nor pedophile priests can be brought into the discussion so easily.
Our culture hears the word “breast” and thinks “sex”, since sex is what everything is about, all the time. We worry about three-year-olds nursing, because we know that by five the girls will be dressed like little prostitutes — surely that boy must be getting warmed up for his kindergarten girlfriend.
I edited out the last paragraph because the SuperHusband said it exceeded even the bounds of Rant-o-Rama. For those who feel shortchanged, I point you to this excellent, charitable, and informative post on modesty over at Aggie Catholics. Where they are kind, and hip, and not at all ranty like your cranky hostess here.
1.
In my family growing up we had a set of Mother’s Day rituals — taking Mom out to breakfast, going to the garden center to buy flowers to plant for her, sometimes even exchanging of gifts and cards. When the Boy was born, I expected SuperHusband to just know what to do. After all, my family’s traditions were hardly secret — you see that kind of stuff on TV. I assumed everyone just knew.
Except that he didn’t. Tears ensued. Until I discovered one year that actually, there is a much, much better way:
2.
Making my own breakfast. Why not have a day a year devoted to eating exactly what I want, prepared the way I like it, and you other people please just stay in bed and give the mother an hour of quiet to enjoy it? It really is better.
3.
But I did tell the poor man what I wanted this year: For him to please get repaired the watch he gave me a different year. It needs a new battery and a new clasp, and yes I could take it to be repaired myself, but you know, he’s a mechanical engineer. What a great way to show his love, driving to the store himself to oversee the repair of a tiny metal mechanical device?
Luckily there’s no deadline, except that I’d really love for it to be fixed by the end of August, when I go to the Catholic Blogger Foretaste of Heaven Conference. Where our lovely 7-takes hostess will be speaking, no less. I am wildly excited.
4.
Last year for Mother’s day, SuperHusband gave me a reprint of this book:
Which taught me how to make my own vinegar. Seriously easy and you feel so crunchy-granola, and also it uses up wine ends. And it is better than anything you can buy.
Small hitch: The cloth-covered Famous Grouse bottle serving as miniature vinegar barrel reminded the SuperHusband he wanted to resume homebrewing. He’d been on a long toddler-rearing hiatus. So he did. Causing us to stop buying wine. But I did the calculation, and it is cheaper to buy a bottle of Aldi wine and make vinegar out of it, than it is to buy Publix-brand red wine vinegar. So that’s what I do.
5.
Speaking of famous grice: The SuperHusband was in the doghouse the other week, and to demonstrate the sincerity of his love, he came home with a bottle of Laphroaig for me. Which was a tiny bit strange, because I had not been grousing about a lack of single-malt. And the stuff is expensive. But in a moment of virtually Therese-like holiness, I figured: Hey, this is good! Might as well enjoy it!
He really does love me, you know.
6.
A prayer for Allie Hathaway is prayer for her mom, too. You can’t go wrong.
7.
The American Frugal Housewife was not the first historic housekeeping title on my shelves. The previous Christmas the SuperMother-In-Law, who knows me well, gave me this one:
Mrs. Beeton’s is much heftier than the Frugal Housewife, and addressed more towards homes with servants, and our servants are mostly the electric type anymore. But I came across this eminently reassuring and useful* bit of advice about the rigors of breastfeeding and the avoidance of colic:
The nine or twelve months a woman usually suckles must be, to some extent, to most mothers, a period of privation and penance, and unless she is deaf to the cries of her baby, and insensible to its kicks and plunges, and will not see in such muscular evidences the griping pains that rack her child, she will avoid every article that can remotely affect the little being who draws its sustenance from her. She will see that the babe is acutely affected by all that in any way influences her, and willingly curtail her own enjoyments, rather than see her infant rendered feverish, irritable, and uncomfortable. As the best tonic, then, and the most efficacious indirect stimulant that a mother can take at such times, there is no potation equal to porter and stout, or what is better still, and equal part of porter and stout.
And with that, I bid you a Happy Mother’s Day.
*Do not use this advice. Or if you do and then need sue someone, sue Mrs. Beeton. Her idea not mine.
Faced with so many Catholics, even the leaders of many Catholic institutions, openly rejecting the teaching of the Church, I had to ask myself last week: Why shouldn’t I go the same way? If Georgetown and Notre Dame are allowed to call themselves Catholic, why should I feel compelled to avoid their purported errors? If you can be Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden and not be excommunicated . . . maybe they are the ones who are right after all. Maybe the Catholic Faith is about our finding our own path, and each doing what he feels is right, and the Catechism is just so many suggestions, helpful to some, not required for all. Maybe.
Having entertained that thought experiment, what convinces me to persist in my catechism-slinging? Here’s my list:
1. Jesus was crucified. If Jesus just wants people to go their own way, do their own thing, why die on the cross? Those words: “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” The Jewish leaders who campaigned for the cruxifiction were, by Jesus’ own words, only doing what they thought they should. If that’s not a sin, why forgive?
And if truth and the will of God can be molded to fit our situation, and there’s really no need to worry about fine details and firm definitions, why sweat blood in Gethsemane? If the Father’s will is merely that we each do our own will, Jesus could have slipped off in the moonlight the way he’d done plenty of times before.
There’s a branch of dissenting Catholics who deny the crucifixion and resurrection, treating one or both events as mere myth. In which case, sure, a mythical God feels no pain, the blood and the anguish must be just as fictional. But I don’t think the Incarnation is nothing more than an especially glorious fireside tale, because of the next reason on my list.
2. The Martyrs died for their faith. An agonizing death for the sake of a little incense? I don’t think so. If the ancient faith were a mythical faith, Roman officials wouldn’t have written letters advising each other how to deal with those cantankerous Christians. A mad man can gather a few suicidal followers for a short time; no one persuades synagogue after to synagogue throughout the whole Roman empire to face death rather than recant a myth, generation after generation.
It is possible the early Church was wrong, and Christianity is not true — plenty of men have shed their own bled in defense of a mistaken cause. But those who give their lives freely, for the martyrs were never coerced by the Romans — the Romans urged them to spare their own lives with a few simple gestures — those who give their lives freely do so because they believe they must. That the faith of the Church requires an absolute loyalty to Jesus Christ and no other. A Christian can, and should, respect the honest unbeliever; but respect is something different from agreement. In the early Church, “find your own path”, or in the Roman style, make Jesus just one more god in the pantheon, this it’s-all-good-enough Christianity was no Christianity at all.
3. I’m not ready to throw the saints under the bus. Were all these martyrs and saints who insisted on one Lord, one Faith, one Truth — were they kindly people sorely mistaken? Did the Holy Spirit’s promise to lead us into all truth tarry a while, and we didn’t get the real faith handed on until 1960-something? When we canonize someone, we don’t claim their every word was Gospel, their every action impeccable. Saints err. This saint didn’t reason into the Immaculate Conception, that saint had a bad temper, and there’s an alarming amount of disagreement about dress codes and attachment parenting. (I suppose the modern Church is very saintly that way.)
But every single saint, all of them, wrong about the same basic facts about the faith? Saint Thomas Aquinas as a jolly old fellow who gave it his best on theology, buy the man a beer and tell him that really there’s nothing particular to know about Jesus, but thank you for getting so many Dominicans off the streets and into the university? Saints Isaac Jogues and Kateri Tekawitha showing their remarkable pluck, and hey, there’s room in the celestial sweat lodge, relax and try some pantheism for a while, you look like you could do with a change — it’s all the same thing anyway — hey, what happened to your hands, buddy?
Nope. My brain just won’t go there. Because of my final reason.
4. I’m sane. I mean that in the most charitable way. (And the most limited way.) I spent two decades in school, learning “creativity” and “critical thinking”, which was education-code for “outlandish is good” and “If you can convince people, it must be true.” I had a harrowing moment in business school when I persuaded my accounting professor the wrong answer was in fact correct — the assignment was to argue the assigned position, so I did. It was wrong, and anyone with half a brain could see it. But I could argue well. I persuaded her. It was my first brush with the darkness of dishonesty. After that I quit going along so nicely with inane assignments. I graduated anyhow.
But I didn’t really learn how to reason — that is, to find the truth — until after I reverted. In returning to the Church, I was beseiged by arguments against the Catholic Faith not from the anything-goes crowd, but from sincere and fervent evangelical friends. The stakes were high: My own spouse was now a born-again evangelical (protestant) Christian. Try telling someone five years into a happy marriage that he’s gotta start using NFP, and by the way, our marriage isn’t valid and we need to get a priest to fix it. The man had good reasons to doubt the credibility of the Church before; now the ol’ Mother-n-Teacher is intruding into his bedroom and making his wife think crazy-wacky-papist-talk.
You can’t buy into “it’s all the same thing” when your good friends are giving you books telling you the Church is the Dominion of Satan. You have to answer the question. You have to examine the evidence, and decide one thing is true and another is false. No quantity of parables about blind men feeling the elephant can make Satan and Jesus into the head and tail of a big grey spirituality that squirts water out its trunk.
I could choose not to know the answer about God — to be agnostic about Christianity the way I am agnostic about evolution. (I don’t care enough about evolution to have an opinion on it, nor to bother forming one.) But whereas I could in good faith believe that knowledge of God is unimportant, I could not in good reason believe there is no single answer about God. Either evolution happened or didn’t, and if it did, it happened in either this way or that. Species didn’t evolve for those who want that to be their truth, and get plopped down as-written for those who prefer a younger and more predictable planet. Either Jesus is the Son of God, or he isn’t. Either He founded a Church, or he didn’t. Either the Pope is head of that Church, with the ability to teach authoritatively, or he isn’t.
A Catholic can in good faith be unable to answer these questions — to lack the mental capacity, or the free time, or even the knowledge these questions exist. But to know these questions abound, and in sound mind believe there are no absolute answers to them? No. As certainly as a child knows either the dog ate the cupcake or it didn’t, sane Catholics know that facts are facts, whether we know the facts or not. Good faith demands good reason.
Last week in the comments to “Catholics Acting Catholic”, Anna asks:
How? How does the modern church read the same scriptures as me and MISS that Christ is Lord, He is The Only Way, The. End. ???
The Church is made up not of partisan chunks, but of individuals. Anna and I agreed it was unwise to speculate on what might make any one person lean this way or that in their approach to the faith. But I don’t need to speculate about myself. Before I was a pope-loving, catechism-slinging revert, I was agnostic. And before that? I was one of those other Catholics. The catechism-optional, find-your-own-path types.
(Which is how I found my own path out of the Church — and later, following the same method, found my way back in.)
So, to answer Anna’s question . . . What was it that made me, in 1991, a Georgetown kinda Catholic? (At heart, if not in wallet.) Thinking through it, my response is very simple: It was the religion I’d been taught my whole life.
My parents were both Catholic, but we barely went to church when I was little. After I received my first holy communion at age 7, we quit attending Mass or CCD. It was one of those parishes where they didn’t do confession until later, so I spent the next decade receiving communion, but never going to confession, or even knowing anything about that sacrament, except what I saw in movies.
Every year at Easter, my mom would say, “And we’re going to start going back to Mass every Sunday from now on,” and every year we wouldn’t. But she didn’t give up. In 1988 we moved from metro DC to a small Bible-belt town, and my mom argued it was social necessity for us to turn out a church every Sunday. She was 50% southerner by birth, which gave her some authority as an expert on these matters, and plus you could count the baptist churches and know she was right. We went to Mass.
It was kinda fun, after I got over my snotty teenage attitude. Being Catholic in a baptist-methodist town was countercultural. In your face. Also I loved the God part.
We didn’t do anything crazy though, like praying at home, or reading the Scriptures, nothing Bible-Thumper like that. We read the same newspapers — Wall Street Journal, the local paper, the diocesan paper. We watched the same TV shows — heavy on the MTV during the day, sitcoms at night. My sisters and I read good wholesome magazines for teen girls, like YM and Elle. I thought the USCCB’s movie reviews were awfully uptight — I just ignored them. If someone suggested maybe certain music wasn’t so edifying, I would have scoffed. Paranoid types. Throwbacks. Idiots.
Our parish did offer Catholic sex ed, and we attended, but we also did secular sex ed — both at school and via everything we read and watched and listened to. My parents no doubt wished they could instill a few Catholic moral values in that department, but they had no notion that it was possible — not even, perhaps, entirely convinced it was necessary. One evening our Catholic youth leader did a presentation about Catholic teaching on sex. Birth control wasn’t a topic — neither for nor against. I raised my hand and asked her this: What if two people had promised to marry each other, and they were faithful and they really were going to get married and stay faithful — would it matter if they had sex before hand?
She was literally stumped. Unable to say it was wrong. Unable.
After all, she’d been raised in the same religion as me — the religion of the popular media and public schools and rosy planned parenthood commercials. This was the faith of our nation. Our religion was Modern American, flavored Catholic.
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Why be a Catholic-favored American? Well, for one thing it’s a beautiful faith. The liturgy, the art — we had a gorgeous parish church, wonderful musicians. There’s the sense of history. There’s the McDonald’s factor, too — when you travel, you always have a place to fit in. And just as I’d proudly say I was part-Irish or part-German, it was a pleasure to have a Catholic identity. I expect I would have made just as fervent a modern American progressive-Muslim or progressive-Jew. It’s a heritage. You love your heritage the way you love your grandma, even if she does sometimes let slip a racist remark, and you know your better, but you never say anything because she’s your grandma.
And here’s the other thing, and this is the truth about many good Americans, whether pagan-flavor or Catholic-flavor or gay-flavor or you name it: Nice people. Kind people. People who do good things for others. People who try their best to be the best person they can be. Faithful catechism-reading Catholics don’t have the corner on the Niceness market. Nice is universal.
So why stick around a Church that I thought was wrong? Well in the long run I didn’t, but my departure had more to do with being out of town on the weekends and falling in with non-religious friends than it did with an active dissent from the Church. So what kept me claiming the name of Catholic for many years, until I finally gave up on the Christian thing altogether?
Oh, sure, you sometimes maybe heard or read some Catholic thing that you disagreed with. But when find-your-own-path religion is the voice of the entire wider culture, and a prominent voice within the Church? You go with it.
And that’s it. I left for college (State U, no money for Georgetown) an exuberant, rosary-praying, sometimes-Bible-reading Catholic teen, but one who had no serious Christian discipleship, no serious training in the faith, and not a single voice pointing to a faith that was something other than American Mainstream Culture with incense and candles attached. State U did the rest of the work to finish off that remnant of a faith.
And interestingly, it was the hardcore, this-is-not-mere-culture, Do You Accept Jesus as Your Lord and Savior evangelicals who both cemented my final separation with Christianity . . . and brought me back into the fold. Whence a baptist deacon unwittingly plopped me down at Mass on a Wednesday morning in 1999. And with a little help from Jack T. Chick, I stayed. And started doing what the Catechism said.
Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who is nothing if not good for Death Star-themed humor.
1.
SuperHusband took the relatively healthy contingent to the family reunion [Bethune Homesteaders spared infection — castle residents went straight to our ancestral family’s farm, Curley family kept safe] and I stayed home with the weekend’s victims. Got a lot of writing done, that’s nice. But look, Barbecue!
2.
Having spent a weekend holed up in quarantine with an iPod, the Boy returned to the land of the living in order to show me this:
3.
And also this:
3.5
Not half a take, but themed on the halves: You’ll be pleased to know that while I learn slowly, I do eventually learn. Monday I promised my would-be publisher I could have the manuscript on the new, expanded, book-length version of the catechist booklet done by June 30th — and assured her that I what meant was “I plan to have it done by the 15th, so there’s two weeks of padding in there.” Which I felt pretty good about saying, because I know I could get it done by the 1st.
See? Take the estimated time to completion and double it — twice. My operations management professor would be so proud.
Curiously, in checking those dates for the writing of this post, I accidentally set my computer’s clock ahead to June 29th. Don’t worry, I put it back.
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PS: Link day. Help yourself if you are so inclined. Though I can’t imagine there’s anything on the internet to top Barbecue-Zombie-Stormtrooper Day. Post as many as you want, but only one per comment or the spam dragon will eat you up and I’ll never even know.
Saint Gianna Beretta Molla: The Gift of Life is my latest review book for the Catholic Company, and they are in luck once again, because it’s a great book!
I knew the gist of St. Gianna’s life, but this was the first detailed biography I’d read, and I think it’s an excellent introduction to the saint. It’s a compact, readable biography that starts with the marriage of Gianna’s parents in 1908. Through the lens of family life, we see St. Gianna working to discern her vocation and make the most of the struggles she faces throughout her life, as well as the tremendous joy she found in marriage, motherhood, and her work as a physician.
Reading Level: Upper elementary and up. My fourth grader (average reader, Catholic girl — which makes a difference, see below) read it in one afternoon.
Why this is a great book for Moms: I know that technically it’s a children’s book. But when you have small children, you really need something that can read in five-minute snatches (with interruptions every other paragraph) and still hope to reach the end of the book before you forget the beginning. And this a book not only about a mom, but with some encouraging details for normal moms. Just look at these saintly facts:
See? You need to read this. Saintly living for normal people.
Why this is a great book for pre-teens and teens: There is a very strong emphasis on vocation. Even though it was easy enough for my fourth grader to read, it would be perfect for about a twelve- or thirteen-year-old. Super book-club or youth group discussion choice, if you have a group of teen girls who get together to talk about Catholic stuff.
Sanity via history through biography: As a teenager, St. Gianna’s parents pulled her out of school for a year so she could rest and regain her health. They felt the vigor with which St. Gianna was pursuing her studies was wearing her out, and she needed the break. This is a teen who eventually went on to earn her M.D. If an American parent did this today, in many cases there would be significant legal and financial penalties for both parent and child. For this one anecdote alone, I’d recommend this book. You can’t think clearly about public policy if you are utterly wrapped up in the quirks of your own time and place.
Cautions for the would-be reader:
1. It helps to have a general background in Catholic culture before starting the book. There is a very helpful glossary at the back of the book, for those of us who never can remember what it is that makes a basilica a basilica. But for teaching this book to a mixed group of students with varying amounts of Catholic up-bringing, I would plan to go over the vocabulary and cultural notes for the next week’s class session before students did the reading.
2. There is a clear and straightforward explanation of the moral choices St. Gianna faced when she was diagnosed with a tumor during her last pregnancy — another reason this is a great book for adults. But it would be helpful for students to have a knowledgeable teacher to explain some of the basic moral principles that come into play. St. Gianna’s death is also a good illustration of ways Catholics can choose to handle end-of-life situations.
Conclusion: This one isn’t leaving my shelf. Recommended if you want an enjoyable, readable introduction to St. Gianna’s life, encouragement in your vocation and efforts at holiness, and a real-life example of moral choices in medical ethics and end-of-life issues.
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Thanks again to the Catholic Company for their on-going efforts to keep bloggers from ever getting bored. I received this book in exchange for an honest review, and it’s not my fault I picked a book I happened to like (okay it is — but I didn’t know it would be this good in these ways). In addition to their work of mercy instructing the ignorant, The Catholic Company would like me to remind you they are also a great source for a baptism gifts or first communion gifts.
Eric Sammons sent me a pdf review copy of his new book, Holiness for Everyone: The Practical Spirituality of St. Josemaria Escriva, not because we’ve ever met or even know each other on the internet, but, I gather, because I really liked his first book, Who is Jesus Christ? (Which I wholeheartedly recommend.) He’s smart that way. I like this one too.
What is isn’t: We have to start here, because it’s easy to guess wrong.
What it is:
St. Josemaria Escriva is a 20th century saint whose spirituality is very much in line with St. Therese of Lisieux, whose Story of a Soul was a bestseller during his formative years, and Blessed Theresa of Calcutta, who was his contemporary and likewise informed by the spirituality of St. Therese. Basic Catholic practical holiness — what you see in the lives of every saint across all of history.
St. Josemaria’s particular charism was the insistence that saintliness is not for the vowed religious only — an error of his time, and still a struggle among Catholics today. We tend today to either fall into the get-thee-to-a-nunnery trap, or just dismiss saintliness as something that hardly matters anyhow. St. Josemaria’s contention, and Eric Sammons’ as well, is that it is possible for you and I to actually be holy. And that there are specific steps we can take to cooperate with God’s grace in working towards that goal.
As with Who is Jesus Christ, Sammons’ text is packed with information and insight, but still approachable for the average reader. It covers similar territory as Christian Self-Mastery, but far more readable than that classic. I personally found every chapter to be helpful for me — life-changing, even.
Who would enjoy it? I’d recommend this for older teens and adults who want to be challenged with practical ways to grow in the Christian life. This is not mere inspiration: expect to be pushed to make specific resolutions about your prayer life and penitential practices. There are discussion questions at the end of every chapter, making this a great book club choice.
This would make an excellent post-confirmation course for 11th and 12th graders — either taught in a high school religion class, or as a parent-teen book study. (Also think: Post-RCIA discipleship group.) Because the text ties to free, online additional reading (Escriva, assorted Encyclicals), it would be easy to make a rounded-out senior-high religion curriculum using this book.
This is an ideal introduction to the writings of St. Josemaria Escriva. I picked up a (print) copy of The Way while I was reading this book, and coming to it already well-versed with how Catholic spiritual training works, I find The Way to be awesome. I’m thrilled to have been pointed in that direction. But I’d caution you: Do not read The Way without first reading Sammons’ book or some other similar work. Taken out of context, St. Josemaria’s collected comments are a recipe for scruples, misunderstanding, and stomping off in a fit of exasperation or despair. Combined with a healthy, balanced view of Christian spirituality, enlightened by a work like Sammons’, The Way becomes the perfect ’round-the-house spiritual cattle-prod — think Imitation of Christ, Football Coach Version.
Conclusion: Highly Recommended for Catholics for ready to grow in their spiritual life, and looking for an approachable, step-by-step walk through how to go about it.