Where to Find Me, Fall 2021

Last week I ran into a local reader and subscriber at this blog, who naturally wondered where the heck I’ve been. Sick leave is the answer, I’m still on it, hitting about a 25% attendance rate at everything that counts as normal-life.

(No, it’s not COVID. Thanks for asking.)

What I didn’t know he didn’t know (and therefore other subscribers here may have the same question) is that I’ve also blogged at Patheos, and I resumed writing there this summer. My presence there is erratic, heavy on controversial topics, and exists because never-blogging does not work for me. (I have a second disorder called Can’t Shut Up.)

So if you have a disorder called Can’t Get Enough of Ornery Bloggers, you can subscribe at patheos.com/blogs/jenniferfitz and I can take the edge off.

Otherwise I’m largely offline. My Facebook presence is zero; I do tweet headlines and hit the the “like” button on things, but even when it seems like I’m itching for a fight, I’m really not. You’re certainly welcome to follow me there, @JenFitz_Reads is the active account.

How to Find a Great Speaker for Your Evangelization Event

I am doing zero speaking gigs at this time — no phone interviews, no zoom meetings, no radio shows, I’m pretty happy if I hold a conversation at all, with anyone, definitely not booking your parish or diocesan event. But of course you’ve read my book, or at least looked at the cover, and now you just have to have me, right? Nah. Here’s what you need to do:

Work through the book with a small group of picked volunteers from your parish or ministry. There are discussion questions at the end of each chapter, so you don’t need to prep anything.
Highlight the parts you really, really, really want your larger audience to know.
Pick the top three most important parts, and make slides about them.
Now, presto, you have a speaker able to address what is most needed in your situation.

You can always do a second talk on three more points another time. Visiting guest speakers make people feel good? But they don’t cause change. Change happens when individuals who are connected with each other in an enduring manner decide to take action on a single, mutually important goal.

You and your small group of locals who read the book together will know, in a way that neither I nor any other stranger can know, what the top three most pressing concerns for you are today. Bring those three concerns to your audience. Use the book to help you find the words and the explanations to communicate the things you already know but maybe struggled to articulate.

Then: Equip your audience. Maybe that’s just giving the encouragement people need to do what they already wanted to do, but were unsure about. Maybe it means removing obstacles. Maybe it means offering resources at your disposal. I can’t do that for you either. But you can do this.

The How-to Book of Evangelization is not a memoir of my amazing ministry, and it’s not a fool-proof recipe that you can replicate mindlessly. It’s the testimony of thousands of ordinary Catholics just like you who have each identified one area where God was specifically calling, and they made the decision to answer that call.

Like them, the only way for you to learn how to evangelize is to try it. You don’t need a speaker for that. You need an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ in the Catholic faith; you need prayer, fasting, and integrity; and you need to say yes.

That’s it.

The book has lots of information on ways that other Catholics just like you have managed to change lives and bring people closer to God. Evangelization is a skill, just like making friends is a skill: Some people are naturally good at it, most of us benefit from receiving a little mentoring. I profile or quote a number of major players in evangelization today, so if you want some tips on where to find a speaker or resources, dig in.

But even though I love to travel and I love to teach, I’m kinda glad that God’s seen fit to toss me in the closet for a while at just the wrong time. It’s not the wrong time. Me writing the book was about the fact that I care about this topic, I had spent years studying this topic, and I have the ability to write things down. Now that it is written down, you have what you need from me.

Enjoy and God bless.

Photo: Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Peterborough (AU), Port Campbell National Park, Worm Bay — 2019 — 0863” / CC BY-SA 4.0

Saying Goodbye to the Person You Don’t Want to Be

It’s resolution season, but I want to talk about something deeper and more difficult. Resolutions are good. Less sugar, more sunlight, regular bedtime . . . some of these small changes can bring out a happier, more energetic, more you person, one you hadn’t fully understood was hiding inside. If you’ve resolved to start flossing, your dentist thanks you. Run with it.

But what if the thing you are struggling to let go of is tied to your very identity?

New Year’s resolutions don’t involve identity changes, I hope. If you have said to yourself, “I am a person who binges on junk food, and my very self would be annihilated if I were to limit that behavior to Sundays and solemnities, for that bag of Reese’s cups (the large ones loaded with peanut butter, like the Good Lord intended, not those pathetic minis) are who I am, and I should cease to be the person God created me to be if I didn’t help myself to the snack bowl every hour on the hour . . .” If you have said that to yourself, then I guess you have a situation on your hands, don’t you?

But usually resolutions are more about polishing and refining, bringing into the limelight the person you have already determined is the better you.

What if the change you are struggling with involves an aspect of yourself that feels essential to who you are? What if you examine your life, and discover your besetting sin, the thing that makes you most miserable, the thing you sometimes confess but usually rationalize, what if you discover that you love that sin because you view it as part of your very self?

To let go of that sin would be to lose your life, you fear.

That’s harder.

It takes precision surgery to be able to say, “I could still be meticulous and conscientious without being a slave to obsessive anxiety.” Or “I could still be passionate and spontaneous without following my every whim with no regard for what gets lost in the frenzy.” Or “I could still be a firm, authoritative, responsible parent without losing my temper when my children misbehave.”

My only message here is: It’s okay to free yourself from the part of “you” that is destroying your relationships and making you miserable. It’s okay to say goodbye, as many times as it takes, to that aspect of yourself that isn’t about your God-given calling, but in fact is overshadowing and dragging that calling down.

It’s a process. You didn’t get into this jumbled-up identity overnight. Even when you firmly resolve, “I am going to hold onto my talents and passions and spiritual gifts, but I am no longer going to let the vice I’ve been sheltering keep hogging up this space in my soul,” even then, the vice is so strongly planted that it will take years of persistent weeding (or a miraculous healing) to root it out.

So my new year’s wish for you is that, if you have been mistakenly embracing one of your faults as if it were integral to your self, that you’d muster the courage to bid it good riddance. Show it to the door. And when it comes back again and again, insisting it belongs in your heart and you can’t survive without it, kindly tell it you’ve had enough and it needs to move on.

***

In light of that pep-talk:

(a) If you are a Catholic writer, media personality, or social media conversationalist of any type, amateur or pro, and

(b) if the fault you’ve been confusing for your very identity as a communicator and evangelist is the “charism of being a jerk”, but,

(d) please consider joining me and a number of others for a small, free, online retreat-conference being hosted later this month.

It won’t fix you overnight. You’ll probably discover that some of the people in attendance, people like you who don’t want to be nasty online Catholics anymore, but also have no intention of abandoning their passion for communicating the truth and engaging in rousing, high-spirited discussions on controversial topics . . . you’ll probably discover some of your fellow retreatants are people you passionately despise.

And that’s rough, because we’ll be providing opportunities to overcome your bitterness and reconcile with those wrong-headed dunderpuffs who had the nerve to show face at your life-changing retreat.

If you’re feeling brave, please join us.

Fun Stuff: Intro to Evangelization & Discipleship Webinar, Live with Me! Tues. 6/30 @1pm EST

Book launches this spring have a NASA-like quality: There is a plan in place, and there are a thousand reasons the plan might or might not unroll on the intended date.

Still, the webinar whiz at Our Sunday Visitor? She isn’t dependent on symptoms and exposures and whether the printing press is able to open safely this week. She makes a living just zoom-zooming away. Therefore, barring an asteroid hitting my garage-library or some other very high-bar-even-for-2020 level of disruption, my Live On the Internet part of the book launch will be this coming Tuesday, June 30th, at 1pm Eastern.

I asked a few fans (translation: Facebook friends, some of whom like what I write and the rest are probably just being nice to me) what I should put into my presentation, and here’s what they said:

What are the top 3-5 things we should know from the book?
What was your first experience evangelizing?
How do you know when to speak and when to shut up?
How do you keep from centering on yourself instead of Jesus?
How would you bring the Good News to someone who is disgusted with the criminal actions of Catholics, especially clergy?

We’ve got about thirty minutes set aside for the event, so I’ll hit those topics in my prepared remarks, and then if there’s time left over we’ll do open Q&A. I have no idea whether the event will be captioned (probably not, and we all know how auto-caption does anyway), but I’ll post a transcript* immediately after, look for it here.

Warning about the top 3-5 things: I have nothing new to say. I’m going to be hitting the same top 3-5 talking points that have been the contents of Divine Revelation over the past 5,000 years. On the one hand, that’s making you go, “blah blah blah love God, pray, fast, behave yourself, blah blah blah,” and on the other hand? I kinda need that talk, and there’s evidence other people do too.

So maybe you don’t need a shot in the arm in that direction, but maybe you know someone who does. Maybe you just need to be reminded that doing the basic things Christians do matters and makes a difference in people’s lives.

If so, you or they can come to my talk. It’s free.

–> Also it will be a highly entertaining event, because unlike the entire rest of the planet I have not been doing internet video communication non-stop all spring. So that’s gonna be big. Bonus: You can see my scrapwood bookshelf, and if the camera gets pointed wrong, you can see the garage that is still very garage-like despite my calling it “the library” now. We are hoping the camera doesn’t get pointed at the pile of junk I pulled off the shelves to make them look less disturbing. You might or might not see cats. No promises on that.

So that’s gonna be awesome. Don’t judge me for my incomplete Hardy Boys collection, just send me the ones I haven’t read yet, thanks.

Register Here

How to get the book: It appears that the Kindle Edition is already available for sale! Amazon is telling me I can buy it with 1-click, so that’s pretty nice? FYI if you get the e-book and read it this weekend, come Tuesday a couple stories I tell will be ones that are not in the book. I’m not actually going to read from the book or anything, because you can read a preview on Amazon if you want to find out what my book-writing is like.

As soon as I get word paperbacks are shipping, I’ll let you know.

Cover art of The How-to Book of Evangelization: Everything You Need to Know But No One Ever Taught You, courtesy of Amazon.com and Our Sunday Visitor.

*Transcript of my prepared comments will be ready to post immediately. Yes, I’ll be sticking to them religiously, ahem, because it is so, so, so very easy to say something dumb if you ad-lib on these topics. If there is time for Q&A, what I’ll do for a text version is take the questions that came in and make a blog post or so fleshing out my quick answers and clearing up any confusion I created. You’ll be dependent on whatever the tech team can bring you as far as a transcript of my bumbling attempts to answer questions on the fly.

The Patron Saint of Fat-Shaming Victims

The man you want on your side Blessed Isnardo of Chiampo, feast day March 22nd. From Butler’s Lives:

Isnardo, we are told, in spite of the fact that he led an extremely ascetic life, was very stout, and physical exertion of any kind was a matter of much difficulty for him. . . . On one occasion a scoffer ridiculing the speaker’s corpulence shouted out, “I could no more believe in the holiness of an old porpoise like Brother Isnardo than I could believe that that barrel there would jump of itself and break my leg.” Whereupon, we are told, the barrel did fall upon his leg and crush it.

He wrought other miracles as well, but that’s the one that everyone remembers.

Artwork courtesy of Wikimedia, CC 3.0

So How’s It Going, Jen? (Spring 2018 Edition)

I’m about a year overdue on a personal update. Short version: It’s good. Very, very good.

How good is it? So good that if I don’t work and workout enough every day, I get restless.

And that’s about all there is to say. About me, anyhow.

***

I thought I’d post an update now because the last of my homeschoolers is starting school next week, and that can make people think, “Something must be wrong,” or, “The mother must be burned out,” or stuff like that. My close homeschooling friends are aware that L. & I were due for a change of format, and we looked into creating a multi-day hybrid school (which may yet happen a different year); both of us seem to do better when we’re working with a group of friends rather than just the two of us solo. But I would have gladly transitioned that direction and kept on homeschooling.

What happened, though, is that A.’s 6th grade teacher got to talking about schools for next year (for A.). My 8th-grade homeschooler L. & I did the advance work scoping out a school the teacher suggested we look into, and L. loved the school. It seemed ridiculous to tell a kid that she shouldn’t try a thing she really wants to do, that looks like it could be a good option for her in terms of her total formation, and which was a realistic option for our family. Starting at the midterm in 8th grade (at the administration’s invitation) seemed like a wise idea, since it allows L. to give the school a try before the pressure of high school credit- and GPA-tracking kicks in.

Something fun: We were nervous about the school’s placement exams. L. is a super-bright, extremely observant and creative kid, with an undeniable knack for problem-solving, but test-taking is not her strong suit. She’s an outside-the-box thinker, and she doesn’t excel at working under pressure. The school (small, church-operated) is not equipped to provide extensive learning support services, so they assess students prior to admitting them to make sure the students are coming in on grade level.

We were a little worried, because I grade that child’s math tests. I know she can solve the problems (because she can explain how to solve them, teach other people, etc.), but her tests don’t always show it. She sat through a day of 8th grade classes and said she was confident she could do the work, and I trusted her judgement on that — but wasn’t sure the tests would agree with her assessment.

Much to her surprise, even though she thought she did poorly on the math exam (and perhaps she did), she placed firmly at grade level. Double surprise: She placed in a 12th+ grade level for reading comprehension. (Spelling . . . not so much. But we knew that was coming. Not a show-stopper.)

Sooo . . . guess that homeschooling thing was going okay.

She’s excited. I’m happy for her. And now I’m figuring out what my new occupation is going to be.

Here’s a nice hiking photo from France last summer. By “Here’s a nice hiking photo . . .” we mean, “Why yes, it’s going very well, thank you.”

Who Owns “Social Justice”?

One of the news sources I flip through occasionally is Al Jazeera. It’s not the only place I’d turn for information (goodness gracious!), but for coverage of Middle Eastern politics it’s a bit more thorough than the average American paper, go figure. Al Jazeera also has good human rights coverage sometimes, such as this investigation into Britian’s modern-day slave trade. Catholics are big into human rights.

The most painful fallacy I see among Catholics is the false dichotomy between “social justice” and “life issues.” It’s moldering baggage from the Church’s political divisions over the last fifty years or so: We know that a branch of dissenting Catholics labeled themselves “social justice” warriors, and so our alarm bells go off whenever we hear someone talking in vague terms about peace and justice and not much clear doctrine.

We have to cut this out.

Catholics who believe the entirety of the Catholic faith are not obliged to hand over a portion of our faith to agnostics-in-Catholic-clothing. We get to own the whole package: the Trinity, the Church, the Sacraments, Scripture, and the entire Christian moral life. We don’t have to settle for our slice of the “pelvic issue” pie and doggedly shun any topic we fear might have somehow, somewhere, been enjoyed by a Democrat. We certainly don’t have to swallow the line that justice with regards to immigrants, the environment, workers, prisoners, or any other category popular on the Left can thereby only be solved by the Left.

The Church proposes a beautiful, sensible, logical, theologically-sound way of looking at social issues, and it’s ours to love and cherish. Enjoy it. Own it. Don’t let anyone deny you your right to the entirety of the Catholic faith.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia [Public Domain]

Four Ways to Avoid Becoming a Bitter Catholic

Up at the Register this morning, I’m talking about ways to not become a person you hate being, in the aftermath of other Catholics being truly horrid:

Bitterness isn’t born ex nihilo. Bitterness is the festering of a spiritual wound, and many Catholics are infected by bitterness because they have suffered real, penetrating, stinging wounds at the hands of their fellows.

When you see someone being rabidly ugly, that didn’t come from nowhere.

When it’s you being rabidly ugly, it often feels like “righteous anger.”

Hmmn. Are you filled with a sense of peace? Do people generally agree that the way you speak and act is gentle and life-giving? Do even some of your opponents speak of you respectfully, because your are well-known as someone who is rational, calm, and has good sound reasons for your beliefs?

Or is it maybe possible that, fault of the hurt you’ve endured at the hands of people who had no right to treat you that way, you’ve started to get a little bitter?

Maybe a lot bitter.

It isn’t easy, but there are some things you can do to help yourself heal. These are some of the things.

And then there were ducks . . .

FYI it’s my editor Kevin Knight at NCR who wins the award for my favorite photo caption ever. That’s his genius, not mine, concerning the ducks. But he is so, so, right. Ducks, guys. Make that #5.

Related: Do you you know Catholics who have grown parish-shy? This fine cat photo was my illustration for Taming the Feral Faithful: How to Lure Serious Catholics Back to Your Parish. You can find an index with this and many other articles about discipleship and evangelization at my D&E index over at the Conspiracy.

Photo: w:User:Stavrolo [GFDL or CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The Coffee-Beer Cure

I wish to thank everyone who has shared my crowd-sourcing post, and those who have given many helpful responses. Every clue is a good clue.

Meanwhile, this is what relapsing-remitting chronic illness is like:

After six months of being a completely normal person for the first time in years, I get whammed with the Return of the Thing early last week. It arrived disguised as a week or two of feeling not-quite-right, and then a bit of a cough when I woke up Tuesday and then Pow! Done.

So I get through the bare-minimum on the schedule (a schedule written for normal people, because I was a normal person a week ago), but not the whole thing. Thank you caffeine I had a super day Friday, and went to bed excited about Saturday, only to, you know, sleep through Saturday. Oops.

Sunday morning pain is down and I’m excited about Sunday, but, whoops, remember that thing where talking makes you lightheaded? Yeah, I haven’t had that in six months. Sure I mic’d up the other week to talk to a room full of eight people, but that was erring on the side of caution, mostly, though okay yes I know that talking loudly is not a great idea even with the Normal Self.

Anyhow, come Sunday talking was right out. Even lip-syncing was a no-go. Worst case of light-headed-while-talking I’ve had in years. Wicked enough I was glad I had a student-driver to do the driving home from church after Mass. I did some talking to some people anyway, because I am not nearly the recluse people like me say that I am, then went home after Mass and slept that off. Went to a friends’ birthday party, sat around listening to people and avoiding talking (mostly), and had a wonderful couple hours and then went home and slept that off.

Tip: If you do something that makes you feel faint, that might make you tired after a while. Even if you enjoy the activity! It’s like your brain doesn’t consider that sustainable behavior.

So I wake up for the third time Sunday and it’s still Sunday, and I’ve been judiciously avoiding junk food this past week despite the fact that it’s Easter and only heretics avoid junk food during Easter, and since I do make an honest effort to keep the commandments, I was practically obliged to have part of one these with dinner:
Evil Twin Brewing Imperial Biscotti Break

For you uncultured heathens, that would be beer with coffee in it.

And then I felt like going for a walk, which I figured would be short, and I grabbed my rosary, which I figured I would end up not praying because one of the comorbidities of feeling light-headed while talking is losing the ability to keep track of prayers silently either, but you never know so I took it.

I thought I’d be dragging myself home in two minutes, and I was wrong.

My head had been cured by the coffee-beer. (Or something.) I prayed the whole dang thing including the extra litany of intentions (you could be on there) I try to add at the end, and that was impressive because when I am flopping around the house uselessly exhausted, Rosary and housework are the first things to go, because trying to keep the commandments and actually keeping them are two different things.

The coffee-beer didn’t even taste as good as it should have. But it effected the cure.

Temporarily. The thing is back now. Sheesh.

Did you know that there exist certain neurological disorders whose symptoms are best improved by alcohol? Neither did I, until I read about one of them this weekend, I can’t remember which. Unfortunately, coffee-beer is, like nearly all the other pharmaceuticals used to treat unpleasant brain problems, loaded with potential for untoward side effects, so you can’t just have it all the time. And you really wouldn’t want to, I hope.

Bleg: Name this Pain

Two interesting things happened this week:

(1) I finally met the physician I’d been referred to last October, and now I know why there was a seven-month wait on appointments. The guy is both competent and humane (like Tod Worner, but a different guy). I like that in a doctor.

(2) I’d been planning to tell him everything’s fine now, but actually it’s not fine. I’ve had a wind-up of fatigue and the same kind of pain I was having last fall — it was still fairly mild on Thursday, but is getting more rather than less intense.

The purpose of this post is to try to find out if anyone else has experienced the thing I’m getting. The rheumatologist has never heard of it, and he’s pretty experienced in his field, and he is also familiar with the types of pain associated with disorders outside his field. The internet isn’t giving up much so far, either. But rare disorders exist, and so conceivably there are people in the world who either get this thing or have seen it in their practice.

If you are that person, my e-mail is below, scroll down to the bottom.

If you are not that person, help yourself to the blog discussion group for the purpose of general commiserating or talking about the thing you get that isn’t like my thing but you still want to talk about it. Please do not e-mail me with those well-meant comments, because I am notoriously bad at keeping up with my e-mail as it is.

Do please share this post around, though. There are sharing buttons below to make that easy for you.

(Please assure helpful strangers that I’m not interested in talking about religion or politics with them. My rheumatologist isn’t really into that. This is strictly a medical-bleg.)

The syndrome we’re talking about is this:

(a) Muscle pain. Not joints, not skin, not your stomach or your sinuses, none of that. Feels like it’s muscles.

(b) Aching predominates, some burning, and the odd needle-like stab.

(c) Affects muscles that have been recently exercised (in the past day or two). So usually legs, since I’m a person who walks, but if I did an abdominal workout it’ll be abs as well, if I did a lot of upper body stuff it could be arms or shoulders, etc etc. It is utterly unlike normal post-exercise muscle soreness. Do not make me lecture you on how experienced I am with the normal stuff. It is not that. Not. at. all.

(d) The pain only comes on when the muscle is at rest. (I get some calf pain with use, but let’s ignore that since it’s distracting. I want to focus on the more perplexing stuff.) By “at rest” I mean when the muscle is relaxed, for example if you’re sitting down your legs might be relaxed even if your upper body is engaged in some activity. So it’s particularly noticeable when laying down during the day for some reason, or when going to bed, but it certainly does not require the whole body to be relaxed. Time of day is irrelevant. The key factor is that the muscle that starts hurting is not presently doing any work.

(e) The pain is temporarily relieved by movement, stretching, or pressure, but returns as soon as the muscle is again completely at rest.

(So if I’m sitting and my leg starts to hurt, I can fidget and the pain goes away. As soon as I forget to fidget, it’ll come back. Unfortunately, one cannot fidget oneself to sleep.)

This presentation is extremely consistent. It started intermittently about a year ago, became significantly problematic last fall, had largely gone away for six months, and has returned in exactly the same form as previously. This consistency is why I’m persuaded it’s a physiological problem that surely other people have experienced.

Some additional notes that may or may not be helpful:

(f) There is no correlation with mental state. Thinking or not thinking about it has no bearing on whether the pain shows up; being anxious or relaxed or distracted or you-name-it is irrelevant.

No relationship to menstrual cycle either. I haven’t detected any other certain associations, other than fatigue and exercise. (This prospect does not really keep me from exercising, because don’t be stupid, you need to exercise. But the sleep-deprivation? Yes, that will slow me down a lot.)

(g) Mine does respond to ibuprofen pretty well most of the time. (I try to avoid taking it habitually though; I only use it if I’m really desperate for sleep.)

(h) For those who are curious, yes my dysautonomia symptoms are ramping back up as well. So there does seem to be a strong correlation between when I’m feeling all that stuff and the pain-thing.

(i) In addition to the muscle pain, I also get random fasciculations along the same pattern, but they are not as prevalent. The muscle that is twitching is not a muscle that is hurting. (Probably because this particular thing involves muscles not hurting if they’re being used?)

(j) My diet is great and I take all the things and do all the things and present as a very healthy person. I have a happy and enjoyable life, including a loving family and many good friends.

For those of you who don’t know me personally, I pretty much live in the present. When something’s not bothering me, I promptly forget about it and move on and think everything’s fine now. Therefore I’m always a bit surprised and mildly insulted when symptoms come back later. (I thought you were gone. What are you doing here? Can’t you see I’m busy?)

Anyhow: If the description in (a) through (e) rings a bell with you, please e-mail me.

I can be reached at: currentresident [at] fitzes [dotcom].

Put something really obvious in the subject line such as answer to your bleg on “name that pain”, or I’ll accidentally delete you as spam. I get a lot of spam, so if your subject line is “hi” or “help” or “about your blog post” or “hot Russian singles want to sell you cheap Canadian Viagra” you’ll be cast into the outer darkness.

Thank you!

Jen.

Photo:By SMU Central University Libraries [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons

Lent Day 43: Not Doing It

Wednesdays are traditionally the glorious mysteries. I finally got back to praying the Rosary today after a gaping hiatus caused by a succession illness (it is a physical act, and thus requires one or another physical abilities), chaos, and inertia.

What was on my mind as I prayed was my inability to accomplish certain tasks before me, and thus my reliance on God to take care of them. This is a good problem, because relying on me is not the wisest course, and in any case the tasks are God’s.

Here is a miracle, to give you an idea of the scope of the whole thing: I made a craft. Not just any craft; one that required both bright colors and straight lines. Also, I had to do it with supplies that I didn’t have spares of, which meant everything had to be done exactly right the first time. No sane person assigns me a job like this. Just never.

So anyway, I get around to the fourth glorious mystery, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Do you know what our Lady did during that mystery?

Nothing.

Just laid there. Didn’t lift a finger.

God did it.

This seems to be the way it works. Want me to conceive the Messiah? I can’t do that Lord, but however you want to handle this go ahead. Out of wine? Son, could you take care of this please? So you’re saying the plan is that you’re going to die on that cross–? I’m just gonna stand here, and you figure out what the system is.

It’s not that Mary does nothing. It’s that she does only the part she can do, and lets God worry about the rest.

***

Request: If you have a charism for bringing empty jars to the attention of our Lord, please consider joining the newly-formed Catholic Evangelization and Discipleship Intercessory Prayer Team group on Facebook. It’s a closed group, but any member can add new members. If you are in the work of discipleship or evangelization and would like people to pray for your mission, please join and post your requests. (Also: Introduce yourself and I’ll add you to the pinned post of who’s who at the top.) Thank you!

Artwork courtesy of Wikimedia [Public Domain].

How to Find a Great Speaker for Your Evangelization Event

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And then there were ducks . . .

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The syndrome we’re talking about is this:

Anyhow: If the description in (a) through (e) rings a bell with you, please e-mail me.

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