fatherhood

A God-Size Space

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

This morning’s thought comes courtesy of St. John of the Cross via Deacon Ralph Poyo, whom our parish staff had the pleasure of following on retreat yesterday, and who never actually mentioned St. John of the Cross by name.

Jesus tells us throughout the Scriptures that we must leave everything behind to follow him. Certain of these passages seem particularly harsh: “Let the dead bury the dead;” “No one who sets his hand to the plow and looks to what is left behind is worthy of the kingdom of God.” I have struggled with these passages over the years, but in the wee hours this morning, lying in the dark, I had a brief moment of clarity.

Dcn. Ralph reminded us that choosing to be a disciple of Christ (in particular, Christ crucified, since Jesus himself tells us that in order to be a disciple we must pick up our cross and follow) is a black-or-white, all-or-nothing choice. He asked us to imagine, on one hand, Jesus suffering on the cross, and on the other hand, a table filled with all these little icons of the people, places, and things of this passing world that matter to us: our spouse, children, family, and friends; our pets, possessions, and pastimes; our worries, anxieties, and sins.

Of the two, we are called to choose Christ—you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength—but it’s hard to embrace the cross and even harder to carry it any distance. So we are tempted to walk to the foot of the cross and break a chunk off from it, to shape that piece of the cross into another little icon representing our Christianity, and to place it on the table with the rest, our tiny God, lost in a sea of idols.

St. John of the Cross writes of the tremendous longing God has for union with us (and vice versa). He wants to live within us, but before He can enter fully, He needs a God-size space. And since our God is infinite and eternal—the source of being for everything—the only space big enough is complete emptiness. Nothing else fits where God fills.

I have thought about this before in terms of the little pieces of the world we cling to or the tiny sins we allow to continue because “they aren’t so bad.” But early this morning, it occurred to me that even clinging to the good things of this world—my wife and children, my vocation as a husband and father, my job, and the parish that I love—can push God out.

This does not mean I must give these things up, only that I let them go to make space for God. If I can empty myself completely and seek Him alone, He who is the source of all good things will fill me, and like Job, I will regain what seemed lost, and more!

God is indivisible, the ultimate All, and we cannot claim just a piece of Him—“But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides” (Matthew 6:33).

The Family That Prays Together…

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Education in the faith by the parents should begin in the child’s earliest years. This already happens when family members help one another to grow in faith by the witness of a Christian life in keeping with the Gospel. Family catechesis precedes, accompanies, and enriches other forms of instruction in the faith. 

— Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2226

Seven years ago our parish switched from weekly CCD to a monthly family faith formation model we called LIFT, or Learning In Faith Together. The reason was solid: children whose parents model Catholic living and make faith and the sacraments a priority are more likely to hold onto the faith themselves. Children first experience God’s love through their parents—and the best way to keep kids Catholic is for parents to teach them by their own words and example!

Our program has changed, but our original goal—to gather as a community to help parents share their faith with their children—has not. How will this play out in our LIFT and sacrament classes this year? By emphasizing three ways we can encounter Christ in our day-to-day lives:

  • In Our Family. This year, LIFT families—adults and high-schoolers, middle- and grade-schoolers—will be covering the same monthly topics at an age-appropriate level, so that the faith-building activities for each month can be a family affair.
  • In Our Community. If the Church is the Body of Christ, then we can encounter Jesus in each other. To that end, LIFT will feature shorter lessons and more practical small-group discussions, monthly personal witnesses or speakers from the parish, and a bigger emphasis on service activities and ways of living our Catholic faith outside of the church walls.
  • In the Holy Eucharist and the Sacraments. The teens on our new LIFT Crew offered a profound, yet simple, insight. “Get people in front of the Blessed Sacrament,” they said, “and let Jesus do the work.” So this year, we will be emphasizing the essential importance of Mass and the Holy Eucharist, as well as Confession and the other sacraments, for adults and young people alike.

I often hear parents say that children learn more attending weekly religion classes. While they may learn more of the content of the faith, without the habits of regular prayer, Mass attendance, and confession, and without discussing and living their faith outside of church, that content doesn’t stick. We often speak of planting seeds, but only when good ground is properly prepared can the seeds germinate.

To that end, we are encouraging all parish families, including those in the parish school, to attend LIFT. For families who have children preparing for First Communion and Confirmation, LIFT is required except in three cases: if the children attend the parish school and have regular religion and sacrament instruction; if the children are a part of our parish home-school group and have regular religion and sacrament instruction; or if the family has no children younger than ninth grade.

We are asking for a commitment—but it’s no more than the commitment we’ve already made as baptized Catholics and disciples of Christ.

We know that the cost of LIFT can be an obstacle for families. LIFT and sacrament fees help to cover the costs of staff, materials, speakers, and retreats, but no one is ever turned away from LIFT or the sacraments due to money. Please don’t let the cost stop you from registering and attending!

If it’s a matter of time, consider this: what better investment of two hours a month can you make? Two hours a month to help lead our young people to Christ by personal example—to make disciples, who are “doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22).

We cannot save time—we only spend it. What greater gift can we spend it on than salvation?

Blogger’s Note: This article appears in the Sunday, Sept. 6, parish bulletin.

Movie Break: Three Days to Kill

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Last night, I watched the recent Kevin Costner flick, Three Days to Kill. It’s the story of a CIA lifer with a broken family who may be dying of cancer, but can earn a chance to try an experimental cure for the proverbial one last job.

I’ve never been a Costner hater, and in fact, I’ve enjoyed him in a number of roles over the years, though he does bring a solidly predictable Costner vibe to most every character he plays. I guess that’s what motivated me to write a post on this movie. It’s not great by any means, and I flat didn’t like a few of aspects of it — but I really enjoyed Costner’s world-weary, worn-out spy. Early in the movie, his diagnosis is delivered matter-of-factly, punctuated flatly with, “You should get your affairs in order. The CIA thanks you for your service.” Now that he’s out of time, he realizes how much he’s lost being away from his wife and daughter doing awful work for an organization that is ready to move on, and his gruff Pittsburgh persona is endearing as he tries to relate to his family again.

Objections? The movie is an oddall mix of violence, humor, and emotion, and it certainly stretches credulity that the perpetually coughing assassin could shift gears from sickbed to superman and back and still be virtually unstoppable. The agent in  charge of this final job (three days to find and eliminate a terrorist and his henchmen in Paris, hence the title) is a young woman who inexplicably goes from a somewhat bookish professional in the opening scene to a bleach-blonde (and later raven-haired), chain-smoking (that’s just mean, given Costner’s condition) femme fatale, raising questions about her allegiances, motivations, and the contents of the mystery drug she’s giving him as a possible cure. The drug accelerates his heart rate (bad in his line of work) and causes mild hallucinations (worse) — but thankfully, alcohol will take the edge off (keeps getting better). To make things weirder, the gal insists upon dressing provocatively and meeting him in strangely lit rooms where dancers gyrate and smoke swirls…the better to provoke hallucinations and suspicions, I guess. His daughter’s boyfriend, too, is called into question, but in several cases, these were just red herrings. (The actual plot twist did take me by surprise, however — not so the reviewer on Roger Ebert’s site, but I tend to shut down my analytics until after the popcorn-muncher is over.) 

It’s the family scenes, plus a great opening gunfight, an intense melee in a deli, and an ingenious car-jacking, that make this movie worth seeing. In retrospect, it reminds me a bit of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven — a formerly icy killer who just wants to be left alone with his family and live up to his wife’s expectations in an environment that brings out the worst of what he’s best at. (It’s interesting that so many action movies these days involve secret agents who want to be left alone: the Bourne movies, the Taken movies, even the most recent Bond movies have this sense of world-weariness…wonder what this says about our mentality these days?)
I would say this movie is a hard PG-13 due to language, violence, seminudity and general weirdness. It could probably have been R.

The Flitter-Flutter of Tiny Wings

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“Geronimo!”

For the past several days, we’ve had just two kids at home, Trevor and Lily. The elder three were at Extreme Faith Camp, Brendan as a leader, Gabe as a member of the prayer team, and Rose as a camper. Their return, I think, was bittersweet for the younger ones — although bored and (allegedly) overworked at points, they enjoyed having Mom’s and Dad’s full attention. Lily got in trouble for interrupting far less, because there was far less to interrupt. And Trev got to go to Culver’s and Jurassic World with just Jodi and me.

We parents, on the other hand, missed our teens. It took only a day or so for me to stop and calculate that we are just six years from potentially being a permanent four-person household, and eight years from Lily being alone with us, At some point unmarked in the past, the pitter-patter of tiny feet was drowned out by the flitter-flutter of tiny wings as the fledglings prepare to leave the nest.

This, I’m discovering, is going to be harder for me than the fact that I, too, am aging and yet still feel like I have much to learn — in fact, my own feelings of inexperience in this world only magnify my anxiety for my offspring. Have a taught them what they need to know to survive? Will they thrive? Will they avoid the pitfalls and snares in which Jodi and I have become entangled over the years? Have the courage to be faithful in public? To remain Catholic, with all that entails?

We see encouraging signs from each of them. Bren, now 17 and approaching his senior year, has changed his views on a military career, primarily due to moral concerns. He takes his faith very seriously: donates to Catholic causes, joins his friends for weekday Mass on Wednesdays, joins his girlfriend Olivia in the Adoration Chapel in our church. Gabe, nearly 15 and a coming sophomore, still has his eyes on the priesthood, joins his brother and friends at Wednesday Mass, and just last night asked where he could find the Divine Office that priests commit to praying daily — hinting that he’d like to take it up, but that he’d rather not do it alone. Thirteen-year-old Emma came home from having been deeply impacted by Eucharistic Adoration at camp, trembling with emotion before the Blessed Sacrament and alternating between sorrow and joy (ending on joy) as she prayed.

Yesterday I came home from the church for lunch, and popped in a DVD that would not play in my work computer. The video came up immediately, and featured Fr. Robert Barron tackling common Catholic apologetics questions in short video clips. I began cherry-picking a few that might be interesting, and Trev, who will be 11 in few days, sat down to watch. For more than an hour, we watched and discussed the rational foundations for our Catholic faith. It’s amazing to see what he absorbs in such a short time, and I pray the same has been true for the others.

Lily, of course, is only three. She knows Jesus by sight, likes to pray (the Angelus and petitions, in particular, and especially for her friends and for babies) most evenings, and is at home in our church, if not fully engaged by the Mass yet. As I continue in my job as faith formation director, planning the coming year’s program, I realize how much more we could be doing with our parish youth, and by extension, how much more I could have done with my own children. Lily will benefit from that realization — and yet when I look at her four older siblings, I wonder how much I should do differently. But how can I give anything less than my all for my family when the stakes are so high and the implications, eternal?

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.