What I'm giving up for Lent

I am glad to report that I'm finally feeling semi-human. I still have a bad headache and an annoying cough, but it's such an improvement that it feels great.

Unfortunately Lent has not gone as I'd pictured so far. I'm so disappointed that I wasn't able to make it to Mass on Ash Wednesday or this past Sunday, but it's for the best since this awful virus is very contagious.

Anyway, after our discussion about what to give up for Lent, I finally came up with something that feels like it's exactly what I should do. After praying about it I was suddenly acutely aware of how very immersed in worldly ideas and values I still am: I pick up Us Weekly a couple times a month, always Tivo The Soup and the opening monologue to Jimmy Kimmel Live, love to read the snarky pop culture coverage at Defamer, etc. So, for Lent, all of this is out. I'm also going to avoid Drudge and other salacious news coverage. I'll check the Zenit headlines on my MyCatholic home page and follow stories that seem important, but that's it.

Another thing I'm giving up, as I alluded to in my last post, is comments and stats on this blog. Comments will be closed on all posts made during Lent, I won't read comments that come in to old posts, I have no Sitemeter stats, and I took my site off of my Bloglines feed so I can't see how many subscribers there are. I want to chronicle my experiences this Lent with no distractions and no preoccupations about which commentor said what, who's linking to me, how many people are reading, etc.

So, that's what I've given up for Lent. My headache dictates that that's all for this post. As I feel better posting will resume with more regularity.

Calling in sick

UPDATE 2/25/07: Amazingly, I am still sick. Today is day six of having a fever and generally feeling like the floor of a taxi cab. Hopefully I'll feel better in a couple days and I'll be able to resume posting (and walking, eating, leaving the house, or just anything other than sitting in the recliner chair in the living room).

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As you can probably guess, I have lots of thoughts on this last Lent before I am received into the Catholic Church. Unfortunately I'm not able to post any of them right now because my dad brought back some awful virus when he returned from his job in Abu Dhabi this weekend, and I'm really sick. I'm having a hard time keeping my fever below 102, which I need to do since I'm pregnant, and I spend most of my time in the recliner chair watching Tivo'd EWTN shows and making noises like "uhhhhng" to make sure everyone knows how miserable I am.

Hopefully I'll feel better in a few days, at which time posting will resume, and I'll tell you all about what I decided to give up for Lent (hint: the fact that comments are closed and the Sitemeter tag is down has something to do with it).

I hope everyone is having a nice week.

"Did they see something I don't?"

I just got back from a trip to Barnes and Noble which was, with two young children, an advanced exercise in the art of multitasking. On the way out I paused for a moment to check out the display table of featured books, and I came across Victor J. Stenger's latest book where he denounces the concept of God, called God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. I believe it's part of his series called I Don't Believe in God. Seriously! I SO Don't! I'm Going to Write Another Book About It.

Since I had my own personal circus in tow I wasn't able to spend much time flipping through it, but I did read through the reviews on the back cover (spoiler alert: Richard Dawkins loved it), which were as follows:

Darwin chased God out of his old haunts in biology, and he scurried for safety down the rabbit hole of physics. The laws and constants of the universe, we were told, are too good to be true: a set-up, carefully tuned to allow the eventual evolution of life. It needed a good physicist to show us the fallacy, and Victor Stenger lucidly does so. The faithful won't change their minds, of course (that is what faith means) but Victor Stenger drives a pack of energetic ferrets down the last major bolt hole and God is running out of refuges in which to hide. I learned an enormous amount from this splendid book.

~ Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion

Marshalling converging arguments from physics, astronomy, biology, and philosophy, Stenger has delivered a masterful blow in defense of reason. God: The Failed Hypothesis is a potent, readable, and well-timed assault upon religious delusion. It should be widely read.

~ Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation

Richard Dawkins is contractually obligated to make derisive jabs at "the faithful" in every statement he makes, so that one wasn't too remarkable. But what did strike me is Sam Harris' quote (which echoes many Dawkins quotes), and his reference to "religious delusion".

Obviously, these guys don't speak for everyone who does not believe in God. But they are representative of certain types of atheists who are making their voices heard more and more, the kind who heap scorn upon the mere concept of belief in a higher power, often referring to people of faith as delusional, irrational, ignorant, and even stupid.

I can't call them out too much since I used to be one of these people. But what jumps out to me about these sorts of statements now is the lack of wonder and curiosity about what made such a large percentage of the great minds of history believe in God or some sort of other spiritual realm.

Socrates, Plato, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Michelangelo, Einstein, and all the other brilliant minds who believed in the soul, in God or gods, in a designed universe: these people were not idiots. They also don't strike me as delusional, irrational, or the type of people to unquestioningly swallow fairy tales just because it was their culture or the way they were raised. And though they didn't have electron microscopes or the Hubble telescope, they had good heads on their shoulders when it came to understanding the world and weren't timid wallflowers who feared questioning things. I really doubt that any of these men believed in a "God of the gaps," where they decided that God must exist simply because they didn't know where the stars came from. Many of them are the founders of the modern sciences that we prize so much today. I can't picture any one of them reading The God Delusion or God: The Failed Hypothesis and renouncing their beliefs after being dizzied by the intellects of Dawkins and Stenger.

This, of course, does not mean that God does exist. It doesn't prove anything either way. It just seems that this new crowd of book-writing atheists is glossing over a lot of human history and insulting the forefathers of their fields to denounce all believers as irrational or foolish. It seems like they've never taken the time to sit back on a dark, starry night and gaze at the heavens, thinking for a moment of the great minds of science who came before them and wondering, "Did they see something I don't?"

Good mothering with a house full of little ones

I went to my OB/GYN for the first time about this pregnancy yesterday. I was actually going to wait a bit longer, but I became convinced last week that I was headed for a miscarriage and mainly made the appointment to confirm this fact and find out what to do next.

To my great surprise and relief, they found the heartbeat. And since I'm at 11 weeks, it looks like we're on schedule for baby #3 to get here in seven months.

Because I felt so certain that I was going to miscarry, I hadn't thought much in the past week about all the challenges that we're going to be facing over the next year. (In addition to the concerns I listed here, I also realized that we don't have a car that fits three car seats.) So as I drove home from the doctor's appointment it was almost like finding out I was pregnant all over again.

In general I feel surprisingly calm and confident about the prospect of having a three-year-old, a fourteen-month-old and a newborn. But there are times (particularly when I'm tired) when self-doubt creeps in and I worry that I'm won't handle it well.

One of the reasons is undoubtedly because I've had no exposure to big families. I, my husband, and my father are all only children. None of my friends are from big families. Growing up I didn't know big families or families with more than two closely-spaced children. We subscribed to the "Disneyland" method of child-raising, where it's your duty as a parent to limit your family size and spacing so that you can devote your full attention to each child much of the time, have each kid in five different activities, pay for their college educations outright, afford all the best Mozart-playing educational toys, premium pre-schools, etc.

Given this background, I worry sometimes that maybe I'll cut corners, that my children will feel that they don't get enough attention from me. I read this post on Bearing Blog recently, where she wonders if having more closely-spaced children might cause her to be "a mother I don't admire". I had to laugh when I read that, because I worry about the same thing but I already do half the things on her list of bad mothering qualities. I too worry about becoming a "mother I don't admire" -- and my bar is loooooow, since I admire pretty much everyone else's mothering skills.

All that said, my gut tells me that this will be fine, that my kids will be fine, and that once I get over the financial challenges and the difficult newborn period it'll be wonderful to have three children close age. Yes, I will probably cut more corners than my friends who only have one child under the age of three at any given time. But I am a caring, conscientious mother and I will do my best. I don't think it'll be that bad.

So, as usual, I ask you readers: what do you think? Truth be told, I'm looking for some positive reinforcement. (If you think I'll crash and burn and that I should start a savings fund for my kids' psychiatric care, no point in saying it since the baby is here and there's nothing I can do about it now.) But I would love to hear stories, anecdotes, advice, words of encouragement, etc. from those of you who have experience with families of closely-spaced kids.

Catholic Blog Awards

Mrs. Darwin just emailed me to inform me that my wonderful readers have nominated my site in the following categories for the Catholic Blog Awards:

• Best Individual Catholic Blog
• Best New Catholic Blog
• Best Written Catholic Blog
  

Thank you! If you'd like to vote for this site, go to the Catholic Blog Awards voting page and create a login (it's quick and easy, I promise).

And don't forget to vote for DarwinCatholic in their categories as well. Luckily none of our categories overlap, otherwise we might have to start running ruthless negative campaign ads in our Catholic blog power grabs.

Suggestions wanted: what should I give up for Lent?

As most of you know, I enter the Church this Easter. It's funny that of all this time spent feeling Catholic, I've still never received the Eucharist in my life. Needless to say, Lent will have special meaning for me this year. I've been mulling over what I should give up, but haven't come up with anything good.

I would love to use this as a time to try fasting, but I'm pregnant so that's out. I'd like to give up something that's definitely "painful" in the sense that it's a struggle for me to go without it; yet, I don't want to give up something so major that I'm just not able to do it.

Anyone have any suggestions? What are you giving up for Lent? I'm not even sure exactly what the guidelines are here. You're supposed to give up something that's comfortable or pleasurable to you, right?

Catholic marriage preparation

Before my husband and I can have our marriage made official in the Church, we need to take a marriage preparation classes. Our parish's marriage course is a relationship-strengthening series of classes both for engaged couples and those already married. It's held at a romantic Italian restaurant, and for each class we watch the official course video and then do workbook exercises as a couple. There's no Q&A or interactivity with anyone else, just time alone together. Everyone I've talked to who's taken it simply raves about it and can't say enough about how much my husband and I are going to love it.

Unfortunately, we don't love it. It's so positive and peppy and upbeat that we feel like schmoes for not thinking it's just fantastic. But, while we love spending the time together, we're just not fond of the message.

Here are my issues with this course:

• Though the course creators (who are the presenters on all the videos) consider themselves Christian and throw some Bible verses into each lecture, they always go out of their way to assure viewers that they do not have to be Christian for this program to work.
  
  
• The lectures often veer into politically correct territory, such as when one of the presenters balefully told the example of a couple with young children who realized that their big problem was that the husband [gasp!] secretly didn't want his wife to work (though luckily he was able to overcome this problem).
  
  
• A lot of the advice is the feel-good, touchy-feely "let's work on our love language!" type of message. Think: Joel Osteen talking about marriage. That's not all bad, but concepts like humility or selflessness are only touched on in a round about way, e.g. "Your love life will improve if you forgive one another!" or "You'll understand your spouse better if you listen more!"
  
  
• We haven't gotten to the class titled "Good Sex" yet, but based on the fact that contraception was mentioned as something for you to debate amongst yourselves in a previous lecture, I don't think it's going to be a Theology of the Body type experience. I looked ahead in our workbook and found this listed as God's Truth on Sex: "[Sex is] a gift from God for our pleasure and enjoyment within a marriage relationship." Really? A few other bullet points follow about how it's a deep way of communicating, adds intimacy your relationship, etc. but there's not a single mention of the connection of sex to the creation of life in the whole section. Not to be nitpicky, but this is not in line with Church teaching, right?
  

So those are my complaints. I understand the appeal because the presenters are so positive and they do offer some solid advice and interesting relationship-building exercises. There is definitely a place for their peppy "God Lite" message, but I don't think that that place is in a Catholic church. Couples can find plenty of this type of secular, you-don't-have-to-be-a-Christian advice out in the world.

On a personal note, my husband and I had most of this stuff down even before we were married. We're both pretty open, calm people who generally communicate well. We've always had a good relationship. But what our relationship has become since embracing Catholic teaching is something completely different. We've been transformed as individuals, as a couple, and as a family. In particular, the understanding of Church teaching on openness to life in a marriage has taken our relationship to a level which we could not have previously imagined. It's been a beautiful experience.

That's why I hate to see our parish offering a course with such a bland message. The more Catholic churches shy away from upfrontness about Church teaching regarding things like suffering, selflessness, humility, the purpose of sex and marriage, etc. the more it reinforces the impression that this is bad news, a burdensome message that you want to hesitate before delivering. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It's surprising to me that the marriage ministry directors have received seemingly nothing but rave reviews about this course. Are we the only ones who notice that, umm, this is isn't very Catholic? As I listen to these lectures and see the nods and smiles amongst our fellow participants, I often wonder how a more serious, orthodox Catholic course would go over (like one of Christopher West's programs). I tend to think that people are starving for the truth, for orthodoxy. But, in cases like this, and with the recent popularity of the "God Lite" message, I sometimes think that the time-tested technique of watering down the message to make it more palatable is as popular as ever.

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UPDATE: I emailed our RCIA director and found out that we will be taking a Theology of the Body course at some point before we're married in the Church. I'm glad to hear this. Although, since a lot of folks turn to my current marriage course when in times of trouble, I'd really like to see a program with a Catholic message.

Taking to the airwaves

For those of you with Sirius radio, I'll be on Lino Rulli's show, The Catholic Guy, on Channel 159 tomorrow (Friday) afternoon.

Understanding meaninglessness

The other day I came across the Ignatius Press Blog's coverage of Steve Pinker's piece in Time where he makes points like this [paraphrased]:

• The notion of an afterlife devalues life on earth, leading people (e.g. the 9/11 hijackers) to do bad things on earth in favor of some sort of eternal reward.
• When you don't believe in an afterlife or an immortal soul, you believe that "life is short" and use that realization to do all sorts of good things in this life, from being productive to practicing forgiveness.
  

Good for him that those are the conclusions that his worldview leads him to. There are, obviously, a lot more scary behaviors a person with a godless, soulless eternal consequences-less worldview might find justifiable. That aside, the thing I find most striking about these kinds of pieces is how blithely the writers deliver the message that, in the grand scheme of things, we are nothing and nothing matters. That when each one of us dies, it's the end. Each life's significance only a mirage, the perception of the other meaningless chemical reactions that are their friends and family, who will also soon disappear.

It's easy to talk about death on a surface level without really internalizing what it means. I did this for much of my life as an atheist, pushing the thought of death and meaningless way down into my subconscious. But, unfortunately, I accidentally really "got it" and fully realized my own meaninglessness when I was a teenager, and it threw me into a sinking, crushing depression that I struggled with for seven years. (In a testament to my hardheadedness and certainty that my atheistic worldview was correct, it was not belief in God that eventually brought me out of it. Though I realized belief would "rescue" me from my suffocating despair, I just couldn't make myself believe something that I thought was clearly not true.)

Anyway, around the same time I read the Ignatius post, I received this email from a reader who has recently lost his faith. His words sound familiar to me. He's looked at the world without God and knows what that means:

I really want to be able to believe wholeheartedly that there is a God and a Heaven...This has been a huge concern on my mind for quite some time now. [Doubt about God's existence] just popped in my head during a break from school, and despite my best efforts, I cannot get it to leave.

I want to stop worrying about all of this and go back to being the way I was 3 weeks ago. I want to get the notion that life is pointless because it leads to nothing out of my head. It's gotten to the point where when I see an elderly person on tv, I think about death. I eat a good meal, and I think, what's the point? I go to class and I am jealous of the people who just worry about assigned readings, or the professor who is doing their job, because they are not plagued with this awful feeling I am experiencing.

He gets it. He knows the "awful feeling". I'm guessing he also knows the sleepless nights, frantic search for distractions, strange feeling of looking at others as they happily go about their day and thinking, "How can you act like you don't know?!"

I often wonder if Pinker, Dawkins and others like them have really internalized what they're saying. Because, at least in my experience, when you fully realize what it means to be an atheist -- that you and everyone you love are just chemical reactions, that all the poetry and wars and art and music and love of all humanity amount to not even a blip on the radar screen of the universe, that we are all simply a more complicated version of what happens when you mix baking soda and vinegar together -- you don't feel like writing pithy essays about it.

What about all this other "stuff"?

More and more I feel myself becoming one of those people to whom God's existence is obvious (I'll explain how that happened in another post). This has led me to spend quite a bit of time thinking about how I could have spent all of my life up until recently thinking it was so obvious that God *didn't* exist.

I've managed to boil it down to a few broad categories of issues that made it seem obvious to me that the godless worldview was the most accurate description of life and the universe. Most of them are fairly uninteresting to me now since I see clearly what I was missing. But there is one that continues to be an intriguing question for me, and that I think is a big issue for many atheists and agnostics. A very inarticulate summary of the issue is this: "Why is there so much stuff that has nothing to do with us?"

The Judeo-Christian tradition teaches that humans are a large part of why God created the universe, and thousands of years ago I can see how that wouldn't be hard to believe. But now that we have carbon dating and the Hubble telescope it's hard not to be struck by the sheer quantity of life and matter that exists and has existed that has nothing to do with humans. This beautiful photo is of the Andromeda galaxy which is packed with billions of stars and is so far away from us that its light takes 2 million years to get to us. Even here on earth there was flourishing life tens of millions of years before humans came along.

The order and balance and elegance of the universe, to me, seems like something that was intended by a Great Engineer. Yet perfect order and balance usually go hand-in-hand with efficiency. And when you think of all this "stuff" that's been going on for billions of years and continues to go on today that has (seemingly) absolutely nothing to do with us, it seems rather inefficient. (I suppose there's no doctrine that says God can't be inefficient if he wants to, but it doesn't strike me as a quality the Perfect Being would have.)

If humans are a main reason that God created the universe, why bother having billions upon billions of other stars and planets floating around out there, the vast majority of which we'll never know anything about? Why bother with trilobites and archaeocyaths and all the other now-extinct Cambrian life? Why not just create the earth, plop some humans on it and leave it at that?

I have my own theory about this (as does my husband, who has issued a standing invitation to all stars, nebulae and quasars to meet him on Jeopardy), but since so many of my commentors are great apologists, I want to hear your thoughts first.

The real vocations crisis?

Whenever I hear about the vocations crisis, the first thing that always jumps to mind is Archbishop Charles Chaput's foreword in Christopher West's The Good News About Sex and Marriage. Using barely more than one page, he makes a compelling case that the real vocations crisis is that of marriage and family life. He writes:

Very few [discussions about the vocations crisis] deal with the most fundamental vocations crisis of all: marriage and family life.

It's no accident that priests and religious emerge from believing, practicing, loving Catholic families...The love between a husband and wife is the foundation stone upon which every other Christian vocation is built.

If you want to do something about the "vocations crisis"...you can begin right here [referring to West's book].

This really resonates with me. In particular, in my (admittedly limited) observations of Catholic culture, I've noticed a very strong connection between openness to life on the part of the parents and openness to a call to religious life on the part of the children. It makes sense that the two would go hand in hand: if a couple is open to God's will in terms of weighty issues like family size, they would probably be open to God's will in terms of their children's vocations. If, however, a couple carefully plans precisely how many children they will have and when, and closes off the possibility of anything unexpected, they would probably raise their children with a similarly controlling mentality, that they (not God) will decide how their lives will play out.

As an eloquent fellow blogger recently said to me in an email, "If we don't trust the Lord's timing with our wombs, when do we trust it?" It seems to me that it's an uphill battle to try to get lots more priests and religious out of the ranks of the current culture that (even in many Catholic circles) takes it for granted that each person should control the events of their lives with an iron fist, relying very little on Providence.

I think that Archbishop Chaput really hit the nail on the head when he said that the lack of true Catholic marriages is the real vocations crisis, and that we must start there if we hope to increase the ranks of priests and religious.

This opinion, however, is coming from someone very new to Catholic culture. What do you (my Catholic readers in particular) think?

A NOTE ON COMMENTS: In re-reading this post I see that it has high potential for tangents, as anything relating to the priesthood or Catholic teaching on marriage always does. I'm really interesting in the issue of the vocations crisis, so let's try to stick to that. For those who wonder about the Church's teaching on contraception, Christopher West's article here is a pretty good summary, and we had some debates about it back in May here and here.