Confession

Wednesday Witness: Belong, Believe, Behave

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment

Over the past week or so, I’ve found myself reflecting on a homily delivered by Father Richards some years ago. I have written about it before; the gist of the message was this:

  • People in a group or community often insist that those who want to join behave properly and believe correctly in order to belong (Behave, Believe, Belong).
  • People on the margins, however, need a place to belong, where they can come to believe, and learn to behave (Belong, Believe, Behave).

Belong, Believe, Behave is the natural order of things. From the moment we are born into a family, we need secure attachments to our parents to form healthy, ordered relationships and learn to navigate the world. But once we find our place in the world, we often lose sight of the fact that we ever weren’t a part of it.

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Book Break: Sword of Honor

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Last month, I drove to Michigan and back on consecutive weekends. Roadtripping comes easily for me, especially with a good audiobook. During the winter, I saw an article on the Imaginative Conservative website about Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy, and since I haven’t read anything by Waugh since Brideshead Revisited in 2011, it seemed like a solid choice.

In case you don’t know (I didn’t): Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh is a British man; an author, journalist, and book reviewer; a World War II veteran; and a twice-married convert to Catholicism. Sword of Honor comprises three separate novels published in chronological order: Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961).

The books trace the wartime story of Guy Crouchback, the only surviving son of a once well-to-do Catholic family in England, who is floundering after his beautiful but promiscuous wife leaves him for another man (and another, and another) in the early days of World War II. Despite being older than most recruits, he joins the Army to escape his loneliness and reassert himself as a man—God willing, to do something meaningful with his life.

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All That Wasted Time…

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Several weeks ago I resumed praying the St. Joseph the Worker prayer on a daily basis for the first time in years. The Church teaches that the Holy Spirit calls us to prayer, and this was definitely a Holy Spirit inspiration. For the past month, time and again, I’ve been convicted by a few brief lines near the end of this prayer:

…having always before me the hour of death and the accounting I must then render of time ill spent, of talents unemployed, of good undone, and of my empty pride in success, which is so fatal to the work of God.

Prayer to St. Joseph the Worker

I don’t know about you, but I waste a lot of time. Oh, I get done whatever needs to get done, but that’s a low bar. The real question is, how do I spend the bulk of the time given to me?

I’m working on my old ’66 Ford pickup this summer. Three years ago it was a daily driver, until it conked out along the roadside between Elk River and home. Since then, it has sat in our driveway, in various stages of disassembly, while I tried to track down the problem and fix it. I’ve had the diagnosis and the parts for two years or so, and finally got it running again last month.

What took so long? First of all, there was the anticipation that the job was harder and the problem likely bigger than I understood. I was so worried I wouldn’t be able to finish the job that I failed to start it!

But more than that, I chose not to do it, because I had other projects, other priorities, other things I’d rather do. For example, in the past three years:

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Three Confessions Show My Role In His Mercy

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“Wherever there is repentance, there is faith. Where there is no repentance, Jesus is rejected and His Church persecuted.”

“One Bread, One Body” reflection on John 10:31-42

Over the past few weeks, a handful of lifechanging Confessions have been on my mind. Each resulted in a deepening of faith, but only after I humbled myself and turned once again to God and His Church:

A SECOND FIRST CONFESSION: Not long after Jodi and I started our family, I began to think about my dormant Catholicism. Aside from a brief period in grade school, I had grown up outside the Church and had a lot of questions, misunderstandings, and disagreements regarding Church teachings. Our priest in Michigan, Father Bill Zink, spent an hour or more allowing me to unload my spiritual baggage in his living room, then told me I should ask my questions from within the Church, after receiving the sacraments of Reconciliation and Holy Communion again—in fact, he offered to hear my confession then and there. At first I refused; I said I didn’t remember how, but he offered to help me through it. I had to acknowledge the need for mercy and accept the invitation; to let go of my pride, humble myself, and return to God. That was the beginning of my reversion.

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Growing Younger

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

This post appeared in the Sunday, September 25, 2021, issue of the St. Michael Catholic Church bulletin.

I don’t know if this is typical for adult Christians as they try to follow Jesus more and more closely—but I often feel as though I am regressing spiritually.

It is certainly true that I don’t struggle with the more serious or habitual sins I did as a younger man, before my reversion to the faith—that is real progress. But most of sins I bring to Confession today are things any child or teen might share: short-temperedness, impatience, ingratitude, laziness, vulgarity, jealousy—smaller things deeply rooted in my heart and habits. I struggle to confess these sins, either because they are so frequent and reflexive as to defy counting, or so subtle and ingrained that I don’t perceive them at all without careful hindsight.

Many of these sins are rooted in vanity and insecurity: I become preoccupied with myself and my own needs at the expense of those around me. As a result, I am also a slave to sins of omission (good things not done), another category of wrongs it can be difficult count.

So I’ve been praying to God for an influx of charity—a stretching of my heart—so that I might better see and respond to the needs of others, when and where they exist.

Guess what? God is obliging…and it hurts.

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