On Ash Wednesday this year, Archbishop Hebda visited our parish and school and presided over the school Mass. During his homily, he asked the school children to give examples of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. One boy suggested that you could fast from lights, “like, with an oil lamp or something.”
Archbishop chuckled and said he had never thought of that before. But I have.
Years ago, I ran across an article by Catholic convert, blogger, and speaker Jennifer Fulwiler entitled “8 Reasons to Turn Out the Lights During Lent.” Her experience captured my imagination, and I pitched it to my own family and those in faith formation at the time as “Firelight Fridays.”
The premise is simple—no electrical lights or screens of any kind after sundown on Fridays during Lent. The results were profound: we found ourselves congregating as a family around the candlelit kitchen table or living room, playing board games, listening to music, or just talking and laughing together as a family. It a couple hours, we would begin to feel snoozy; eventually we would, by common consensus, snuff the candles and go to bed early, sleep soundly, and rise refreshed on Saturday morning.
Two summers ago, Jodi and I and our youngest daughter Lily arrived at a New Family Social at St. Michael Catholic School (StMCS) to learn the ropes at a new school. We’ve been members of this parish for nearly 20 years now, and I’ve been on staff in two different roles—but when our oldest son, Brendan, was heading to kindergarten, we never made it off the waiting list for StMCS. We wound up enrolling him at Albertville Primary, and we never looked back.
That first year…
We are blessed with great schools in this community, including some of the most faith-friendly public schools around. But when COVID derailed our older daughter Emma’s senior year and graduation, cancelled our youngest son Trevor’s theater performance of The Three Musketeers, and confined Lily to interacting with her classmates through a Kindle screen, we began to rethink our approach to educating our children. Two things seemed clear to us at the time:
Once the state gets involved in the day-to-day operations of public schools, it seems unlikely that they will pull back very much.
The best chance for Trevor and Lily to have a somewhat normal school experience during the 2020-21 school year would be in a Catholic school.
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.
* * * * *
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.
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?
This is my father-of-the-groom speech from Brendan and Becky’s wedding on December 28, 2019. I finally got to see this video (and actually hear what I said) for the first time yesterday, and this is one of my favorite things I’ve “written.”
A little context for what you are about to hear:
I had just taken our youngest daughter, who fell asleep during the wedding and was not feeling well, up to my parents’ room in the hotel. The dance had not yet started, and my dad had already turned in for the night. This was a long day for both of them!
There was a blizzard this weekend, so many people didn’t make it to the wedding—especially those from out of state, like Grandma and Grandpa Venjohn.
Gabe had given his Best Man speech just before this, in which he had joked that he felt loved by his big brother Brendan, even though none of our kids have the capacity to express love. (Our kids are often ribbed for their lack of expressed affection toward each other and their parents.)
I had detailed notes in my pocket, but because I was caught off-guard and was thinking about Lily, I never took them out. I had written something like this the day before, while cooking chili for the rehearsal supper in the church kitchen. We had cooked a massive amount of chili at home, then failed to get it cooled quickly for transportation and were worried about giving the entire wedding party and both families food poisoning, so we remade it in Moorhead.
I’m sure that just after this recording cuts out, I said proposed an actual toast. But the speech is what I want to share today, so my dad and Jodi’s folks can finally hear it.
Archangel Stomp 