The placement of St. Peter and St. Paul in the dome is one of my favorite details in our church’s artwork. As we approach the altar from the center aisle, St. Peter is above us—the apostle who first declared Jesus to be the Messiah—reminding us of Whom we are receiving. At the end of Mass, as we exit up the center aisle, St. Paul is front and center above us—the great missionary apostle who took the Word of God out into the world, reminding us of our own mission to invite people into relationship with Jesus and His Church. Continue reading
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Wednesday Witness: Business as Usual
It has been almost a month since Catholics in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis were dispensed of our Sunday obligation to attend Mass, and even less time since public Masses were suspended and we were told by state officials to stay home for two weeks. It seems longer, doesn’t it? It appears likely we will be asked to persist in this relative isolation awhile longer.
People are rightly concerned about the health of their loved ones, the most vulnerable among us and healthcare workers (among other “essential” employees). They are also rightly concerned about their livelihoods and the economy, their family’s mental and spiritual health, and how much freedom and control we are willing to sacrifice based on what evidence.
That’s a great deal of concern. It’s exhausting to carry, and people everywhere are asking, “When will things get back to normal?”
I am not sure they should. Continue reading
Wednesday Witness: Too Much to Carry Alone
I am a proud parent of five children, ages 22 to 8. Our eldest is married in Bismarck, and he and his bride recently shared that they are expecting. Most of my family is from Michigan, where my folks live in a log house we built when I was in high school. Jodi’s family is in South Dakota, for the most part—her parents live in the Black Hills.
We are spread out across three time zones. During this time of uncertainty, I wish we were closer. I worry about all of them: How are they getting on? Do they have what they need? Would they tell me if they didn’t—and what could I do about it? I pray for them daily, but that doesn’t keep the concern away.
Sometime in the past week, I ran across a description of the “layers” of the human heart. The surface layer is the emotional heart; it is reactive and feels what it feels quickly and intensely. The next layer is the intellectual heart; this level weighs the emotions against reality and tries to come to a rational conclusion. But the innermost layer is the spiritual heart, where God resides. This is the core, where we discern the fullness of Truth and experience the peace and joy that come with it. Continue reading
Wednesday Witness: On Busyness
Blogger’s Note: This post first appeared as part of the Wednesday Witness blog series on the St. Michael Catholic Church website.
“Idle hands are the devil’s playground”—so goes the old saying, and I can verify its truth. So many of the sinful traps I fell into as a young man were concealed in downtime and baited with curiosity and pleasure.
It’s good for young men to keep busy, but I am no longer young. These days I struggle with having too much to do rather than too little, and that, too, can be a sin trap. A mentor of mine even has an acronym for BUSY:
Burdened Under Satan’s Yoke
Even if you work for the Church, as I am blessed to do, the acronym may still apply. Perhaps the best Christmas gift I got this year was the Monk Manual, a special sort of planner based on the prayerful patterns of work and reflection in monastic life. This beautiful leather-bound book serves not only to organize and schedule your work days, weeks and months, but leads you to examine what you achieved versus what is really important to you, at which points in the day you were at your best and worst, the state of your relationships and habits, and what God may be trying to teach you. Continue reading
The Better Part
Nearly everyone I talk with these days agrees with me: The summer is flying by, in part because our families are so busy.
A friend has an acronym for BUSY: Burdened Under Satan’s Yoke. We may object that the numerous things we are doing are not evil, but are good and perhaps even important. But we would do well to ask ourselves, are they necessary?
Necessity is a high bar, when you think about it. As animals, we have very few absolute needs: food, water, shelter, and the like. As humans, made in God’s image, we have a few more: freedom, community, love. Meeting these needs for ourselves and our families requires effort on our part—but for the person of faith, there is a hierarchy: God, spouse, children, everyone else, everything else.
Which of these things are we spending time on these days, and in what order? Continue reading
