faith

Confessions of a Struggling LIFT Parent

/ J. Thorp / 2 Comments

Over the past several weeks, 114 parishioners completed our anonymous LIFT Mid-Year Survey. We received a good balance of responses across all four LIFT nights and all grade levels; we heard strong, positive feedback; very frank and consistent negative feedback; and lots of great ideas about things we could do differently. The results of the survey are available on the church website, stmcatholicchurch.org, by clicking the Faith Formation tab at the top of the page.

I take your feedback seriously, not only because it’s my job, but because I’m a LIFT parent, too. I know firsthand what it’s like to remember the night before LIFT that you haven’t even asked your kids about their homework, let alone helped them with it. I know that it’s harder to motivate myself to attend LIFT as my kids get older. I know that some nights, we’re lucky to remember to say Grace as a family before we scarf a late supper and fall into bed.

I know it’s not easy—but I’m convinced we can make it easier. Below are a few examples of things I agree that we should work to change in the coming year:

  • LIFT stands for Learning In Faith Together, but families are separated and learn completely different things.
  • The goal is to help parents to be the primary teachers of their children, but we don’t really help—we give you tons of content and expect you to figure it out.
  • Another goal is to build community, but our only adult interactions are in small-group settings that are easily the most uncomfortable and least liked aspect of the program.
  • For the price of the program, too much of the teaching falls on the parents—especially in terms of sacramental preparation.
  • At a certain point, it no longer makes sense for parents to be required to attend classes year after year with their children—and if it becomes an obstacle to their children attending, nobody benefits.

On the other hand, I also know that staying involved in LIFT has made a difference in my family. I know that when we finally remember our LIFT homework, the kids know what to expect and buckle down to do it—and since they’ve been involved year after year, the lessons aren’t as hard as they used to be. I know that the more Jodi and I model sacramental living, the more the kids pick it up and reflect it back to us. And I know there is no more powerful motivator for an adult to keep growing in their faith that to have their children pulling them along.

Certain aspects of the LIFT program will not change in the coming year. Family catechesis will remain the core model, and the price of the program is what it is in order to balance the budget. Our goal is to build a LIFT program that delivers on its promise of Learning In Faith Together, that provides better value for the cost, and most importantly, that grounds St. Michael families in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and His Church.

St. Augustine writes, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Getting LIFT right won’t happen overnight. But when it does, I believe families will come, not because they are required, but because they want to—because their hearts long for God, and they know they can find Him here.

Blogger’s Note: This article appears in the Sunday, Feb. 22, church bulletin .

LIFT Links: Lenten Edition

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment

Ash Wednesday is this week, marking the beginning of Lent, the penitential season that prepares us for the joy of Christ’s Resurrection at Easter. Too often we treat Lent like a do-over for our New Year’s resolutions or a chance to jumpstart our diet before swimsuit season. But Lent isn’t meant to be about loss–we fast to gain, to grow spiritually.

To that end, this week let’s look at few links on what Lent’s really about, and how to live it as a family.

One last thing: every year, people ask about “taking Sundays off” from your Lenten sacrifices. Some people insist that since Sundays are a feast day and not counted in the “40 days of Lent,” your sacrifices don’t apply to Sundays. Others say that a person out to be able to make it through the entire Lenten season, Sundays and all, without “stumbling” or “giving in.”

It is true that Sundays aren’t meant for fasting and aren’t counted among the 40 days of Lent. It may also be true that if you absolutely cannot abstain from whatever-it-is for the full Lenten season, you could be overly attached to it. My advice to my own family: decide now which you are going to observe and stick to it. If you think it would be a good disciple for you to go beerless or chocolate-free on Sundays, too, I don’t have a problem with that. Just remember that Sunday is a feast day and find ways to treat it as such. But whatever you do, don’t decide that a different day is going to be your “day off”– it’s not a day off; it’s the Lord’s Day, which makes it special — and don’t decide two weeks into Lent that maybe you could have a little just…this…once. That’s a slippery slope that quickly slides from Sundays into other days, too!

Go Ahead: Be a Stick In the Mud

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I watched the Super Bowl last night with my bride and, at times, my kids. They came and went as it held their interest, and I spent the second half contemplating why we consume this (or why it consumes us) year after year.

The game was exciting to the finish, marred at the end by an odd play call that sealed the victory for the Patriots, followed by a borderline brawl as the Seahawks saw the championship slipping away. But the halftime show and commercials were what really sparked my thinking. Unlike past years, last night there were only a couple of commercials that made me happy the younger kids had already gone downstairs to play — unfortunately, one was a movie promo, which means not only will we be seeing it for months, but there’s a feature-length version somewhere. The halftime show, on the other hand, once again had me talking to my three teens about what’s wrong with the world. It was a short, pointed conversation, since halfway through the performance, my eldest went downstairs to practice his bass and the other two voiced their agreement with my rant and tuned out (from the show, and likely me, as well).


I try to stay somewhat familiar with popular music to know what my kids are exposed to, so I watched the whole thing. Afterward I watched Facebook to see what friends, family, and the general public thought. As expected, opinion was polarized between fans of Katy Perry and Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliot (the female rapper who joined Perry onstage) and people who don’t like their styles of music. But I was struck by the number of comments in the middle — people offering some variation on the theme, “At least this year it was kid-friendly.”

Really?

Call me a prude if you wish, but Perry’s lyrics, antics, and outfits are not kid-friendly. Consider just the songs we heard last night: “This was never the way I planned, not my intention. I got so brave, drink in hand, lost my discretion. It’s not what I’m used to, just wanna try you on. I’m curious for you, caught my attention” (I Kissed a Girl). Or “We drove to Cali and got drunk on the beach. Got a motel and built a fort out of sheets. … Let you put your hands on me in my skin-tight jeans. Be your teenage dream tonight” (Teenage Dream).

Of course, these pale in comparison to Missy Elliot’s Work It lyrics, which I will not post here. Elliot’s verbal dexterity is such that I couldn’t make out most of what she said last night, but I’d like to assume that her halftime rendering of her hit song was substantially edited to even make it on the broadcast.

“Well, it could have been worse…at least she was fully clothed and not dancing suggestively, like in years past.”

Modesty comes in many forms, but crouching like an animal in a minidress, snarling, “I kissed a girl and I liked it!” is not one of them. And as I shared with the teenage boys I spoke to at the church on Wednesday, “It could be worse” is a pretty low bar.

Perry’s performance was only relatively kid-friendly, as compared to shows in years past — and that underscores the problem with relativism. This is how we lose the practice, or even the recognition, of virtue: by allowing ourselves to slip so far down the slope that a half-step back toward the top seems like innocence regained. And the entertainment industry knows their target market well. They don’t care if a 40-year-old dad enjoys the show — they want to hook my offspring, and in that respect, it’s probably better if I don’t like it. The gleaming space lion, the cutesy cartoon beach sequence, and the sandwiching of Perry’s more provocative songs between hits Roar and Firework, which even turn up in grade-school music concerts — the whole production is meant to keep the kids in the room.

Folks, like it or not, they are selling sex to your children — and not the life-giving kind. Last night’s post from the Practical Catholic Junto blog summarizes my concerns in two brief quotes:

It reaches the extremes of its destructive and eradicating power when it builds itself a world according to its own image and likeness: when it surrounds itself with the restlessness of a perpetual moving picture of meaningless shows, and with the literally deafening noise of impressions and sensations breathlessly rushing past the windows of the senses.  …

Only the combination of the intemperateness of lustfulness with the lazy inertia incapable of generating anger is the sign of complete and virtually hopeless degeneration. It appears whenever a caste, a people, or a whole civilization is ripe for its decline and fall.

— from Josef Pieper’s The Four Cardinal Virtues

When we say, “It could have been worse,” we are too comfortable. We have lost the capacity for righteous anger that could set the world straight. We’re giving in.

Late yesterday morning, I was talking to one of our deacons, who was shaking his head at the fact that families might skip religion classes to get an early start on the Super Bowl extravaganza. “I’m an old stick-in-the-mud,” he said, half-apologetically. “I’m not watching any of it. Not the game. Not the commercials. None of it.”

I suppose I’m becoming a stick in the mud, too. But perhaps such sticks will be the only thing people can grab onto to slow our descent.

Next year, I think we’ll watch Groundhog Day instead.

Unbroken

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Blogger’s Note: There are both book and movie spoilers below. You have been warned.

We finally saw Unbroken last week. The book version of the story — Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 biography of Olympic athlete and WWII veteran Louis Zamperini — is a spell-binding, white-knuckled page-turner. It’s well researched, lovingly crafted, and unflinching in its portrayal of the danger and brutality endured by Zamperini and his comrades during 47 days adrift in a life raft after their plane crashes into the Pacific and two and a half years in Japanese prison camps.

I know many people now, men and women alike, who have read this book, and every single one has loved it. When I finished it, I told Jodi this man had four or five movies worth of material happen to him in his lifetime, and I blogged that “the fact that all of them really happened to one man is almost too much to be believed.“

Zamperini died just this past summer at age 97. When I heard the news on the radio, I choked up. What an amazing man.


Perhaps it was too much to expect a single film could carry the weight of Zamperini’s story alone. I liked it well enough, I suppose, primarily because it reminded me of the book — but unlike the book, it had no lasting impact for me. I’ve heard both critics and friends offer two reasons for this (Note: Spoiler alert!):

  • Some have said that it’s overly sanitized — that a PG-13 version of an R-rated book simply can’t convey the horrors experienced by Japan’s POWs. Some have suggested that it’s a “Golden Age of Hollywood” sort of movie, well done but too beautiful, without the real grit we’ve come to expect in newer war movies.
  • Others blame director Angelina Jolie for leaving out the book’s final act, which showed both the dreadful toll Zamperini’s years in captivity took on his mental and emotional health, and the path to forgiveness and healing he found in Jesus Christ.
Although I remain disappointed with the pat ending, which relegates Zamperini’s conversion story and personal forgiveness of his captors to an end note, I’m closer in opinion to the “overly sanitized” argument. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad that teens may get the chance to see this movie and learn about the man — and the violence is plenty real. What’s missing, from my perspective, is the moment-to-moment tension and suspense of the book: the arbitrary, madness-inducing, constant fear of violence and death that make Zamperini’s survival and redemption so incredible and uplifting. 

For example, in the film, when Louie and his two companions are adrift on the Pacific, they are hungry, thirsty, sunburnt, circled and attacked by sharks, and strafed by Japanese warplanes, just like in the book…except that in the book, these dangers weighed on the men constantly. While the movie plays up a single shark attack for a scare moment, the book portrays the sharks as an ever-present fear, constantly testing the integrity of the raft and the resolve of the men. In the book, the rubber life raft is shot full of holes more than once, and pumping and patching to stay afloat and alive is steady work. In the book, faced with malnutrition, disease, parasites, and torture, the POWs are constantly struggling to stay healthy enough to endure daily hard labor — and the “victories” that Louie wins over his antagonizer, the Bird, are moral victories only, and fleeting. He wakes the next morning with new injuries and new challenges, still malnourished and still under the Bird’s oppressive thumb.
Of course, great books are rarely matched by the films based on them — but if a magical, whimsical book like The Hobbit can be expanded into three dark and swarming action movies of three hours a piece, perhaps we could have given a little more time to Zamperini. The TV miniseries (think Roots or Lonesome Dove) seems to be a fading form — perhaps that would have been a better choice for Unbroken?

What’s Keeping You?

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment

It’s been nearly eight months since I left the University of Minnesota to work full-time for our parish. At some point in each of my previous jobs, I looked around and asked myself, “Jim, what are you doing here?” Thankfully that has yet to happen since I joined the church staff, but I don’t doubt that it could—work is work, after all.

Faith is work, too. It’s hard sometimes to believe in a good God with so much wickedness in the world, including within the Church. It’s hard to do the right thing when so few people agree on what the right thing is, even within the Church. It’s hard to pray or read or learn more about Jesus, to drag ourselves to Confession, or to haul the family to Mass each Sunday when so many Catholics just…don’t.

I’ll bet at least once you’ve sat in church, looked at Father and the people gathered around you, and asked, “What am I doing here?” It’s a worthwhile question to consider. According to data collected by the Pew Research Center, not only do most U.S. Catholics say they attend Mass once a month or less, but many disagree with the Church’s fundamental teachings regarding marriage, contraception, and the sanctity of life. Yet they persist in calling themselves Catholic. What’s keeping them in the Church?

Well, what’s keeping you? Is it habit or family tradition that brings us here week after week? That makes us seek the sacraments for our children? Is it a hope we hold out for the next generation, even though we may have lost it for our own? Is it a hollow ache in our chest that insists there must be something more to this life? Or is it the peace that radiates from altar, the tabernacle, the Eucharist—peace the world cannot provide?

This month the adults in our LIFT classes focused on the Mass and Holy Communion. We heard the deeply personal testimony of one of our youth ministry volunteers on her own struggles with her Catholic faith—and ultimately, on how she could never turn her back on the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Jesus said, “This is my body…This is the cup of my blood”—and so it is. Jesus is God, and God’s words are the very words of Creation. They bring about exactly what they say.

I’ve said more than once that if we as Catholics truly understood who was present in the tabernacle, nothing could keep us from Him. We would fill the pews to overflowing, bring family and friends to a personal encounter with Jesus. We would gladly sacrifice to spend time at His feet, listening to Him, learning from Him, serving Him.

And yet I don’t do these things. We don’t do these things.

The red lamp above the tabernacle signifies that He’s always there. What’s keeping you?

Blogger’s Note: This article appears in the Sunday, Jan. 25, church bulletin .