In 2016, I was blessed to travel with my son Gabe and STMA Catholic Youth Ministry to World Youth Day in Kraków, Poland. Southern Poland is a wonderful place for a Catholic pilgrimage; so many ancient and modern saints lived and died in so small a region that every day it seemed we visited another sacred site in another blessed city. The big three, of course, were 20th century saints: St. John Paul II, St. Faustina Kowalska, and St. Maximilian Kolbe.
In the case of St. Maximilian Kolbe, we were blessed to visit his religious community at Niepokalanów as well as the concentration camp where he gave his life at Oswiecim (Auschwitz). I say blessed truly, but not in the typical sense of the word. On a sunny summer day, Auschwitz is still and green and peaceful as an cemetery, but still more somber and hushed; the fences, ruins, and the dreadful sign above the gate, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Will Free You), bear silent witness to the cruelty of which humanity is capable.
As we left the camp, we passed a small booth selling items commemorating the place—most prominently, a book entitled Hope Is the Last to Die by Halina Birenbaum. Born Halina Grynsztajn to a Jewish family in Warsaw, she survived the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto during Nazi occupation, followed by four prison camps in succession: Majdanek and Auschwitz in Poland, and Ravensbrück, and Neustadt-Glewe in Germany.
I bought the book, as the most appropriate way to recall the place and what happened there. I finally found the courage to read it this Lent.
It is a strange and beautiful gift to watch your children grow, mature, and start lives and families of their own. Not everyone receives this gift: some lose children before adulthood, some children never grow up, and some grow to pursue paths we would not choose and dare not watch. But—praise God!—thus far our children have surprised us only in good and Godly ways, rebelling only superficially and never for long.
My bride and I take no credit for this, aside from these two decisions: We continue to prioritize our own faith and marriage (our relationships with God and each other), and we continue to work on giving our sons and daughters back to God (to Whom they belong, after all).
Even those decisions we do not live perfectly, which again points to God as the guiding hand that leads each of them home again, not to us, but to Him!
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Jodi and I were blessed to spend both Christmas and New Year’s weekends with all of our children and grandchildren. The Thorp Family Christmas came to Bismarck; we stayed in Brendan and Becky’s house with their friends and renters Ethan and Mia, and celebrated in North Hall at the University of Mary, where both Brendan and Becky work. Their North Hall apartment would be entirely too small for everyone, but as the freshman men were all home for the holidays, we made use of two common rooms, including a kitchen with dual ovens, to visit, eat, and celebrate.
Santa found us there and supplied us well with gifts and treats; Ethan and Mia joined us for meals; and we enjoyed Christmas and Holy Family Masses at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit. Aside from the mysterious disappearance of Jodi’s purse (which has not been located, though no cards have been used), it was a truly blessed weekend.
We brought Emma back home with us from Bismarck, a challenge since 10 minutes before we left for North Dakota, our loaded Suburban died, necessitating a switch to the much smaller minivan, but we made it work. For the week between Christmas and New Year’s, both Gabe and Emma were home with Jodi, Trevor, Lily, and me (and Bruno the Airedale, of course). Then, late on the 30th, Brendan and family rejoined us in Minnesota, as Becky was videographer for a New Year’s Eve wedding in our area. We ate too much, played many games, tried some new drinks, and generally made merry.
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The careful reader may have noticed the word “grandchildren” in paragraph four. This is not a typo, though only Augustine was prowling the corridors of North Hall in Bismarck or gazing starstruck at our tree and Nativity in Albertville. Our second grandchild keeps a lower profile thus far, but should make his or her debut in early July!
The timing is providential, enabling us to meet the newest Thorp just prior to Brendan, Becky, and family’s big move to Rome in August. Our eldest has been hired to lead the University of Mary’s Rome program, and he and his bride will likely spend the majority of the next three years living, working, and raising their family in the Eternal City. What faith, history, art, and architecture couldn’t achieve, Nature will: Jodi and I will be going to Rome at last, if only to eat gelato with our grandkids!
These two—Brendan and Becky—are the most intentional spouses and parents I have ever witnessed. Patient, consistent, and collaborative, they know what they are about and how they want to raise their children. At times I shake my head in admiration, at times in disbelief, but I have so much respect for their first two years of married living. And we love them fiercely.
He says he feels called to life in religious community. He feels called to poverty you can see and feel. And he wants to draw people to Jesus.
This is not “good parenting”…it’s surrender. We pray for God’s will, and this is clearly God’s work. Whether Gabe ever takes perpetual vows and a new name or not, we are blessed to watch, and learn from, him. We love him.
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Emma is with us through the end of the week. Three semesters in at the University of Mary, she has switched majors from Business to Social Work to Philosophy, joined the Honors Program, and rolled her Catholic Studies minor into a second major. She did not go the Rome this fall due to uncertainty around COVID restrictions, and now that she will have family there, she seem more inclined to travel there on her own instead of with the university. She is working as a RA this semester and is surrounded by solid friends who make her laugh and absorb her caustic wit with relative ease.
What does the future hold? She can’t say: at lunch today she mentioned middle-school youth ministry, missionary work, teaching—but only in answer to my leading questions. She is like Brendan in so many ways, but like Gabe in this: She will tell us when she feels relatively certain and not before.
We love her and can’t wait to see who she will become!
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Trevor is a senior this year, just one semester away from graduation. He continues to thrive at Holy Spirit Academy, pushing himself academically and artistically, and this past summer, travelled alone to California to participate in the Great Books Summer Program at Thomas Aquinas College (TAC). Like his brothers before him, TAC is on his short list of colleges for next year, along with UMary—but this Saturday, Father Blume, director of vocations for the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, is coming to talk with him about Saint John Vianney College Seminary (SJV). Trevor has already been accepted to the University of St. Thomas, where SJV is located. A big decision is coming!
In the meantime, Trev works for Heil Taxidermy, like his brothers, and as a math tutor for Mathnasium—and is a Core Team stalwart for our church’s Youth Ministry team, helping to lead middle-school events. He stays a little too busy at times, but he’s learning what he can handle, an essential skill for college, work, or priesthood.
Whatever the call, whatever the decision, we love him.
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Earlier this month, our youngest reached double-digits! Lily is in fourth grade this year and likes to stay busy. Crafts, baking, reading, sports, Legos, dolls, games, art, music, you name it; she enjoys a little bit of everything. This year she joined the Lego League robotics team at St. Michael Catholic School, but tested positive for COVID the week before and missed the competition. (Her team took fourth.) She has lots of friends of both genders, but spends more time with the boys because “the girls just stand around and talk; they don’t do anything fun.”
This February she is looking forward to a trip to Florida with Jodi and me to visit some dear friends; they will spoil her unapologetically while my bride and I take a belated anniversary drive to the Keys for a couple days.
She deserves it. We love her.
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That leaves us. Twenty-five years of marriage have passed in a blink. You might think we should be better at this, and you’d be right—but we couldn’t be more blessed. We are employed and healthy. We looked into diaconate together and discerned instead to invest, for the time being, in our marriage and in my writing, which is beginning to make a difference in the world. It’s funny: The first time I tried to make a living writing for the Church, I wound up unemployed and almost broke. This time, I haven’t worried about paying bills, only trying to serve, and the money is there when we need it.
And Jodi continues to amaze. It is true that men and women are different creatures, but this woman is so specifically different that I must unlearn everything I know about me to understand her. I assume she is mad, or sad, or irritated, because I would be if I were in her shoes, and there she is, at peace, wondering what the fuss is about. My short-temperedness she shrugs off, assuming I’m doing the best I can.
I love her so.
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That’s the latest from the Minnesota Thorps. Wishing the happiest of Christmases and a blessed New Year. Know that our thoughts and prayers are with you even when we are not. We love you, too.
Note: This column is based loosely on a talk my second son Gabe and I gave to parents and teens at a nearby parish on Wednesday evening.You can watch the video here.
Often, I have wondered why God entrusted my five children to me. At times, they seem so grounded and confident that my fatherly advice seems more hindrance than help; other times they are such a mystery to me that I wonder how we could possibly be related. I am exasperated when my brokenness shows forth in their behavior, and overwhelmed when some small seed I buried and forgot about suddenly blooms in them.
This is how it is with the kingdom of God; it is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how.
In case you missed the news, we’ve a playwright in the priesthood: Fr. Kyle Kowalczyk, pastor of the Church of St. Maximilian Kolbe in Delano, has also written, directed, produced, and acted in theatrical productions since high school. This week and next, his Catholic community theater company, Missed the Boat Theatre, is performing Moonshine Abbey, an original musical by Fr. Kyle and composer Sam Backman. It tells the story of a community of monks trying to preserve its rule, identity, and livelihood of brewing beer and distilling spirits during Prohibition.
Time is a strange phenomenon. We’ve all experienced that sensation in which the days seem long and weeks short; where the whole summer stretches out in front of us for sunlit miles…and then suddenly it’s Christmas. Marriage is like that, too. On a hot summer’s day on the South Dakota plains—August 17, 1996—in a little Spanish-style stucco church named for a German bishop, St. Liborius, two kids got hitched. The tall, slim, cleancut groom in white tails was me: book-smart and big-hearted, a little awkward and a lot emotional, with an insecure streak, a dose of self-righteousness, and a professed agnosticism that bore little resemblence to the faithfulness I was prepared to promise to this girl.
And what a girl! Jodi was, then as now, beautiful: dark wavy hair, eyes that went from brown to hazel to green and back, quick to laugh, solid and peaceful, steadfast in her Catholic faith, and willingly to pour herself out entirely for those she loved. She was a fountain flowing; I, a bottomless bucket.
One of us cried at our wedding—the one who saw too well that he was getting the better end of this deal. How could I ever love her enough?
Archangel Stomp 