Go ahead, ask me anything!

My mother-in-law is here to help out for the next few days. That either means that:

1. I'll be so busy getting things done that I won't have time for blog posting;
   
2. I'll be such a productivity machine that I will get enough done that I can take some time for blog posting; or
   
3. I will look at the list of things I hoped to get done while she was here, know somewhere in the back of my mind that I could not accomplish everything on this list if I made ten clones of myself and we all drank a gallon of coffee, but I will refuse to consciously acknowledge this fact and end up in a state of overwhelmed paralysis in which I end up posting to my blog all the time as an attempt to avoid reality*.
   

Because there is some chance that option A will actually happen, I'll steal an idea from Toddler Dredge and do an open post where readers can ask me anything, because answering questions is a lot easier than coming up with blog post ideas on my own. (The one question I ask you to avoid is why my blog is invisible to Technorati, because every time I ask myself that question I end up banging my fist on my keyboard and using inappropriate language.)

I can't guarantee that I'll answer all questions, but I'll try. So, go ahead. Ask me anything.


* Some of you may be thinking, "Weren't you the one who wrote this post?" I know. And I've been great about incorporating that into my daily life. But for some reason I have yet to make the mental connection that that is not just true for every day but also for when I have help. My brain is still stuck in this mode where I convince myself that I would be capable of superhuman levels of productivity if only I had help with the kids, so when I do have help I bite off more than I can chew. Every time. Hopefully some pattern recognition will kick in here.

That book meme

Darwin, Creative Minority Report, Literacy-Chic, and Shakespeare's Cobbler (anyone else?) tagged me for this meme.

Book Meme Rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

The nearest book is actually the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is still sitting on my desk from my post about my conversion to Christianity as told through the books I read (though the version here is different than the one than shown in the post). So here are the three sentences after the fifth sentence on page 123:

Jesus accepted his rightful title of Messiah, though with some reserve because it was understood by some of his contemporaries in too human a sense, as essentially political.

Jesus accepted Peter's profession of faith, which acknowledged him to be the Messiah, by announcing the imminent Passion of the Son of Man. He unveiled the authentic content of his messianic kingship both in the transcendent identity of the Son of Man "who came down from heaven", and in his redemptive mission as the suffering Servant: "The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

I tag Cynical Christian (though for some reason I feel like he probably doesn't do memes), Pipsylou (Finding Wonder in the Mundane), Red Neck Woman (Postscripts), Taylor Marshall (Canterbury Tales) and Ouiz (Chez Ouiz).

How I became pro-life

I've been wanting to put this together ever since I read Abigail's touching post with the same title. I've been dabbling at this post for a few months, and finally feel ready to share it. I apologize that it is so long, I just couldn't figure out how to condense it without leaving out important details. I hope that you will find that it's worth your time to read the whole thing.


Who is human?

Back in college I remember reading about how in certain societies throughout history, I believe in this case it was the Greeks, it was common for parents to abandon unwanted newborns, leaving them somewhere to die. It was so deeply troubling to me, and I could never figure out what was going on there: how on earth could this have happened?! I mean, I knew lots of people, and nobody I knew would do that! In fact, in our society you only hear about it in rare cases of people who are obviously mentally disturbed. How could something so obviously evil, so unthinkably horrific be common among entire societies?

Because of my deep distress at hearing of things like this, I found it really irritating when pro-lifers would refer to abortion as "killing babies." Obviously, nobody around here is in favor of killing babies -- and to imply that those of us who were pro-choice would advocate for that was an insult to the babies throughout history who actually were killed by their insane societies. We weren't in favor of killing anything. We simply felt like women had the right to stop the growth process of a fetus if she faced an unwanted pregnancy. It was unfortunate, yes, because fetuses had potential to be babies one day. But that was a sacrifice that had to be made in the name of not making women slaves to the trauma of unwanted pregnancies.

I continued to be vehemently pro-choice after college, and though my views became more moderate once I had a child of my own, I was still pro-choice. But as my husband and I were in the process of exploring Christianity, we couldn't help but be exposed to pro-life thought more often than we used to be, and we were put on the defensive about our views. I remember one day when my husband was in the middle of reconsidering his own pro-choice ideas, he made a passing remark that stuck with me ever since:

"It just occurred to me that being pro-life is being pro-other people's-life," he quipped. "Everyone is pro-their own-life."

It made me realize that my pro-choice viewpoints were putting me in the position of deciding who was and was not human, and whose lives were worth living. I (along with doctors, the government, or other abortion advocates) decided where to draw this very important line. When I would come across Catholic blogs or books where they said something like "life begins at conception," I would scoff at the silliness of that notion as was my habit...yet I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with my defense:

"A few cells is obviously not a baby or even a human life!" I would say to myself. "Fetuses eventually become full-fledged humans, but not until, umm, like six months gestation or something. Or maybe five months? When is it that they can kick their legs and stuff?...Eight weeks? No, they're not human then, those must be involuntary spasms..."

I was putting the burden of proof on the fetuses to demonstrate to me that they were human. And I was a tough judge. I found myself looking the other way when I heard that 3D ultrasounds showed "fetuses" touching their faces, smiling and opening their eyes at ages at which I still considered abortion OK. I didn't have any interest in reading the headlines at Lifesite. Babies -- I mean, fetuses -- seen yawning at 12 weeks gestation? Involuntary spasm. As modern technology helped fetuses offer me more and more evidence that they were humans too, I would simply move the bar of what I considered human.

I realized that my definition of how and when a fetus became a "baby" or a "person," when he or she began to have rights, also depended on his or her level of health: the length of time in which I considered it OK to terminate a pregnancy lengthened as the severity of disability increased. Under the premise of wanting to spare the potential child from suffering, I was basically saying that disabled fetuses were less human, had fewer rights, than able-bodied ones. It didn't sit well.

The whole thing started to really get under my skin. At some point I started to feel like I was more determined to be pro-choice than I was to honestly analyze who was and was not human. I started to see it in others in the pro-choice community as well. On more than one occasion I was stunned to the point of feeling physically ill upon reading of what otherwise nice, reasonable people in the pro-abortion camp would advocate for.

In reading through the Supreme Court case of Stenberg v. Carhart, I read that Dr. Leroy Carhart, an abortion advocate who actually performs the procedures, described some second-trimester abortions by saying, "[W]hen you pull out a piece of the fetus, let's say, an arm or a leg and remove that, at the time just prior to removal of the portion of the fetus...the fetus [is] alive." He said that he has observed fetal heartbeat via ultrasound with "extensive parts of the fetus removed." The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which presumably consists of well-educated, reasonable, intelligent men and women, opposed this procedure. Not for the reasons I thought -- because it was plainly obvious that this was infanticide in its most grisly form -- but because dismembered babies inconvenienced their mothers, and it was better to kill them outside the womb in a procedure they refer to as "D&X". In the College's words in its amici brief:

D&X presents a variety of potential safety advantages over other abortion procedures used during the same gestational period. Compared to D&E's involving dismemberment, D&X involves less risk of uterine perforation or cervical laceration because it requires the physician to make fewer passes into the uterus with sharp instruments and reduces the presence of sharp fetal bone fragments that can injure the uterus and cervix.

There is also considerable evidence that D&X reduces the risk of retained fetal tissue, a serious abortion complication that can cause maternal death, and that D&X reduces the incidence of a 'free floating' fetal head that can be difficult for a physician to grasp and remove and can thus cause maternal injury.

I read the Court documents from Stenberg v. Carhart in a state of shock. A few years ago a friend of mine had her baby very prematurely, and I had visited him in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. He was so beautiful, just like the full-term newborns I'd seen, only a little smaller. Seeing him and the other babies lying there so peacefully in their incubators (some of them with cute little notes written on their incubator tags like "Aiden -- mommy's big boy!"), I was overwhelmed with feelings of wanting to protect these precious, innocent little babies. I was thrilled to hear the my friend's son and all the other preemies who were in the NICU at that time did survive and go home with their parents. So I found myself in a state of cold shock and disbelief that I was reading of people -- not just fringe crazies, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and some Supreme Court Justices -- casually speak about the inconvenience of the skulls and bone fragments of dismembered babies ("fetuses") the same age as those babies in the NICU. The horrors continued when I read Gonzales v. Carhart [some excerpts here...warning: no photos, but the descriptions are extremely disturbing].

It took my breath away to witness the level of evil that normal people can fall into supporting. They were talking about infanticide, but completely refused to label it as such. It was when I considered that these were educated, reasonable professionals who were probably not bad people that I realized that evil always works through lies. I also took a mental step back from the entire pro-choice movement. If this is what it meant to be "pro-choice," I was not pro-choice.

Yet I still couldn't quite bring myself to label myself pro-life.

I started to recognize that I was no better than Dr. Carhart or the concurring Justices or the author of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' brief, that I too had probably told myself lies in order to maintain my support for abortion. Yet there was something deep down inside, some tremendous pressure that kept me from truly, objectively looking at what was going on here. There was something within me that screamed that to not allow women to have abortions at least in the first trimester would be unfair in the most dire sense of the word. Even as I became more religious, I mentally pushed aside thoughts that all humans might have God-given eternal souls worthy of dignity and respect, because it got too tricky to figure out when we receive those souls, the most obvious answer being "at conception" as opposed to at some arbitrary point during gestation.

It wasn't until I re-evaluated the societal views of sex that had permeated the consciousness of my peer group, took a new look at the modern assumptions about the act that creates those fetuses in the first place, that I was able to let go of that internal pressure I felt, and to take an unflinching look at my views on abortion.


The contraceptive mentality

Here are four key memories that give a glimpse into how my understanding of sex was formed:

• When I was a kid, I didn't have any friends who had baby brothers or sisters in their households. One friend's mom was pregnant when we were twelve, but I moved before the baby was born. To the extent that I ever heard any of our parents talk about pregnancy and babies, it was to say that they were happy that they were "done," the impression being that they could finally start living now that that pregnancy/baby unpleasantness was over.
  
  
• In sex ed class we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. After we were done putting condoms on bananas, our teacher counseled us that we should carefully decide when we might be ready to have sex based on important concerns like whether or not we were in committed relationships, whether or not we had access to contraception, how our girlfriends or boyfriends treated us, whether we wanted to wait until marriage, etc. I do not recall hearing readiness to have a baby being part of a single discussion about deciding when to have sex, whether it was from teachers or parents or society in general. Not once.
  
  
• On multiple occasions when I was a young teen I recall hearing girls make the comment that they would readily risk dangerous back-alley abortions or even consider suicide if they were to face unplanned pregnancies and abortion wasn't legal. Though I was not sexually active, it sounded perfectly reasonable to me -- that is how much we desired not to have babies before we were ready. Yet the concept of just not having sex if we weren't ready to have babies was never discussed. It's not that we had considered the idea and rejected it; it simply never occurred to us.
  
  
• Even recently, before our marriage was validated in the Catholic Church my husband and I had to take a course about building good marriages. It was a video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and in the segment called "Good Sex" they did not mention children or babies once. In all the talk about bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest they came to connecting sex to the creation of life was to briefly say that couples should discuss the topic of contraception.
  

Sex could not have been more disconnected from the concept of creating life.

The message I'd heard loud and clear was that the purpose of sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten about altogether. This mindset laid the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being closed to the possibility to life by default, I thought of pregnancies that weren't planned as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street -- something totally unpredictable, undeserved, that happened to people living normal lives.

Being pro-choice for me (and I'd imagine with many others) was actually motivated out of love and caring: I just didn't want women to have to suffer, to have to devalue themselves by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Because it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with "hang-ups" eventually has sex and sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I got lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: to dehumanize the enemy. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendencies to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize the fellow human beings who are on the other side of the lines in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized the enemy of sex.

It was when I was reading up on the Catholic Church's view of sex, marriage and contraception that everything changed.

I'd always thought that those archaic teachings about not using contraception were because the Church wanted to oppress people by telling them to have as many kids as possible, or something like that. What I found, however, was that their views expressed a fundamentally different understanding of what sex is, and once I heard it I never saw the world the same way again. The way I'd always seen it, the standard position was that babies were a horrible burden, except for a couple times in life when everything is perfect enough that a couple might temporarily see new life as a good thing; the Catholic view is that the standard position is that babies are a blessing and a good thing, and while it's fine to attempt to avoid pregnancy for serious reasons, if we go so far as to adopt a "contraceptive mentality," feeling entitled to the pleasure of sex while loathing (and perhaps trying to forget all about) its life-giving properties, we not only disrespect this most sacred of acts, but we begin to see new life as the enemy.

To use a rough analogy, the Catholic Church was saying that loaded guns are not toys, that while they can perhaps be used for certain recreational activities, they are always to be handled with grave respect; my viewpoint, coming from contraceptive culture, was that it's fine to use loaded guns as toys as long as you put blanks in the chamber. Thinking of that analogy, expecting to be able to use something with incredible power nonchalantly, as a toy, I could see how that worldview had set us up for disaster.

I came to see that our culture's widespread use and acceptance of contraception had led to the "contraceptive mentality" toward sex being the default position. As a society, we'd come to take it for granted that we're entitled to the pleasurable and bonding aspects of sex even when we're in a state of being vehemently opposed to the new life it might produce. The option of abstaining from the act that creates babies if we're in a state of seeing babies as a huge burden had been removed from our cultural lexicon: even if it would be a huge crisis to get pregnant, we have a right to go ahead and have sex anyway. If this were true, if it was indeed a fact that it was morally OK for people to have sex even when they believed that a new baby could ruin their lives, in my mind, then, abortion had to be OK.

I realize that ideally I would have taken an objective look at when human life begins and based my views on that alone...but the lie was just too tempting. I didn't want to hear too much about heartbeats or souls or brain activity...terminating pregnancies just had to be OK, because carrying a baby to term and becoming a parent is a huge deal...and society had made it very clear that sex is not a huge deal. As long as I accepted that for people to engage in sex in a contraceptive mentality was morally OK, I could not bring myself to even consider that abortion might not be OK. It just seemed too inhumane to make women deal with life-altering consequences for an act that was not supposed to have life-altering consequences.

So this idea that we are always to treat the sexual act with awe and respect, so much so that we should simply abstain if we're vehemently opposed to its life-giving potential, was a totally new and different message. For me, being able to honestly consider when life begins, opening my heart and my mind to the wonder and dignity of even the tiniest of my fellow human beings, was not fully possible until I understood the nature of the act that creates these little lives in the first place.


The great temptation

All of these thoughts had been percolating in my brain for a while, and I found myself increasingly in agreement with pro-life positions. Then one night I was reading something, and a thought occurred to me, and from that moment on I was officially, unapologetically PRO-LIFE. I was reading yet another account of the Greek societies in which newborn babies were abandoned to die, wondering to myself how normal people could possibly do something like that. I felt a chill rush through my body as I thought:

I know how they did it.

I realized in that moment that perfectly good, well-meaning people -- people like me -- can support very evil things through the power of lies. From my own experience, I knew how the Greeks, the Romans, and people in every other society could put themselves into a mental state that they could leave a newborn child to die: the very real pressures of life -- "we can't afford another baby," "we can't have any more girls," "he wouldn't have had a good life" -- left them susceptible to that oldest of temptations: to dehumanize other human beings. Though the circumstances were different, it was the same process that had happened with me, that happened with the concurring Supreme Court Justices in Stenberg v. Carhart, with the abortion doctors, the entire pro-choice movement, and anyone else who's ever been tempted to dehumanize inconvenient people.

I bet that as those Greek parents handed over their infants for someone to take away, they remarked on how very unlike their other children these little creatures were: they can't talk, the can't sit up, and surely those little yawns and smiles are just involuntary reactions. I bet you anything they referred to these babies with different words than they used to refer to the children they kept. Maybe they called them "fetuses."

AREWP Day 11: On being busy

[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]


A while back I was emailing with Fr. James Martin (author of the must-read book My Life With the Saints), and he casually mentioned something that's stuck with me ever since: on the topic of prayer, he told me that when someone asked St. Francis de Sales how much one should pray, the Doctor of the Church replied that you should pray a half hour each day, unless you're busy. If you're busy, you should pray an hour.

"What a pithy quote!" I thought. "You should pray more if you're busy -- love it. That St. Francis de Sales, he sure does have some great sayings!" And then I promptly forgot about it. Or I tried to, anyway.

You see, as clever as I found that quote to be, I really was too busy. That advice may have worked for those "other" people who St. Francis knew back in the 17th century -- who must have either been very holy or had a whole lot of free time on their hands -- but it went without saying that here in the real world, that advice was nothing more than a witty one-liner to keep in my "good quotes" file.

And then I had my third baby in three years, and got really, really busy. In addition to keeping up with the kids, in our house I'm in charge of bill paying, filing, Quicken data entry, grocery shopping, budgeting, thank-you note writing, investment managing, (not not mention blog posting), etc. As my responsibilities snowballed, that advice that Fr. Martin conveyed would occasionally pop into my head:

If you're busy, pray more.

I would reject this thought as one might shoo away a buzzing gnat, and promptly resume frantically running around from one thing to the next. Yet so often that line would interrupt my inner dialogue, which was usually something like: "How am I supposed to find time to put that huge pile of clothes away when I haven't even cleared out room in the closet and I think I forgot to transfer that money from our savings account I hope all those checks will clear and when am I going to find time to fold the laundry and I still need to write that thank-you note and I DO NOT HAVE TIME to bake that quiche for the potluck why did I ever sign up for that and --"

If you're busy, pray more.

I could not seem to get this notion out of my mind! It was only after I fell flat on my face, crushed under the weight of my to-do list, forced to admit that my way wasn't working, that I decided to give the prayer thing a shot. I assure you, it was not out of any kind of spiritual maturity on my part -- I just didn't have any other options. It was either that or hire someone to slap me every time I started whining about how I never get anything done, just so that I didn't have to hear myself talk about it anymore.

As I've chronicled, I started praying all three major hours of the Liturgy of the Hours. I had a lot of different factors motivating me to try to devote reckless amounts of time to prayer; I wasn't doing it to follow St. Francis de Sales' advice. Yet as I've gone through these weeks of praying more than I ever have in my life, his words have been popping into my head more than ever. And they finally resonate with me on a gut level. I finally understand that they are true, and why they are true:


Now that I'm nearing the end of the second week (third if you count the "trial run" week) of praying the Liturgy of the Hours, I'm feeling the inevitable pressure to backslide that I've felt (and succumbed to) with every other routine I've ever tried to implement. Last night, for example, I got overwhelmed with trying to make a new recipe and pay bills and answer emails all at once, and I ended up doing Vespers more than an hour late. It was tempting to just skip it altogether.

As this example illustrates, I've found that prayer is the "canary in the coal mine" for my life: the more pressure I feel to let prayer slip, to push it aside for something else, the more it indicates that I have let my life slide out of balance. When I glance at my prayer book and think "I don't have time for this!" (as I did last night), it doesn't mean that prayer is too hard; it means that I've piled too much on my plate again. The greater the temptation to skip Matins because I'm running late or Lauds because I have too much to do, the louder the alarm is sounding that something is off-kilter.

What I've found, as someone who is officially "really busy," is that there are so many potential demands on our time, especially in our 24/7 culture. And busy-ness tends to have a snowball effect, where the more commitments you make the less time you have to carefully consider what other projects you take on, and you pretty quickly end up feeling like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. There's a huge temptation to be unrealistic about how much time you have available, to sacrifice peace to get a few more things done. And you find yourself scurrying from one thing to the next, needing to shove everything aside -- including God -- just to keep your head above water.

If you're busy, pray more.

Now I get it. It's not just a pithy quote, it is a critical lesson, probably even more applicable to our current culture than it was in the 17th century. With email and artificial light and cell phones and cars, the modern world lures us to try to squeeze in just a few more things, to tell ourselves that we can do just a little bit more, and more, and more...and prayer brings it all to a screeching halt. Structuring life around prayer means making the conscious, inconvenient choice to put something else in front of the frantic desire to "get stuff done!"

I recently came across a quote where someone echoed St. Francis de Sales by saying, "If you don't have time for prayer, you don't have time for anything." I've found this to be so true. Prayer doesn't impact my ability to get things done; it impacts my ability to make unrealistic estimates about the things I'll get done.

As the newness of the experiment with prayer wears off, it is increasingly difficult to make prayer happen -- not because I don't have time, but because of my tendency to try to do things according to how much pressure I feel to do them, rather than how much time I actually have available. The fact is that God has given me the grace to more than make up for the 30 - 40 total minutes I "lose" in prayer each day. My amount of available work time is the same as it always was. The difference is that I used to live in a perpetual fantasy state where this large chunk of free time was always looming just around the corner, in a magical time and place called "later" I was going to be able to do it all. But now, where the phases of the day have distinct beginnings and ends that are marked by Lauds, Matins and Vespers, three times each day I am forced to leave my "later" fantasy and just admit that I am not going to get it all done. Morning comes to a close with Lauds, activity time comes to a close with Matins, and the whole work day comes to a close with Vespers. It's painful. But it is exactly what I need.

Today is the feast day of St. Francis de Sales. Tonight I'll raise a glass of wine and ask for intercessory prayers from this great saint, who offers us the only good advice I've ever heard on being busy.

From atheism to Christianity: a conversion story through books

Back in this post I was talking about how I strongly encourage Christians to ask the tough questions about their faith. To summarize what I said there, occasionally I meet Christians who seem hesitant to delve too deeply into their faith for fear of what they might find. It's a shame because, in the opinion of this former atheist, by asking challenging questions and seeking answers Christians have absolutely nothing to fear, and everything to gain.

"So where do I start?" is a frequent response I get to that statement. I've finally had a chance to put together a list of books that I found helpful when I was first asking the tough questions of Christianity. I think it would be a good jumping-off point for lifelong Christians (especially Catholics) who don't feel like they have a lot of knowledge of the how's and why's behind why we believe what we believe. This would also be a good list for people who are not Christian but are curious about the religion.

These are by no means the only sources of information I used -- the conversion process was a long road that involved lots of thinking and reading (and eventually praying) and gathering data from tons of different sources. These books alone were not enough to convince me to convert; all the information in the world would not have been enough had my heart not been open to it (as I talked about here). But they are, I believe, good places to start.

One of the reasons it's taken so long to put this together is because I don't want to present this as any sort of definitive list or hold myself out as an authority on the subject: I offer this as a humble account of my personal story, detailing some books that I found compelling in my search for truth about God, the world and the human experience.

-----

The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel

My conversion to Christianity had a very clear beginning: the day I walked into a bookstore and saw this book. In my vague search for religion up to that point, I had been planning to explore Buddhism and other Eastern belief systems first (then Judaism, then Islam, then Baha'i, then that Wicca/"earth goddess" stuff that my friend from college was into...anything but Christianity!) It had never once occurred to me that there was even the most remote possibility that the Christian claims about Jesus could be true, so I was planning to skip over all that. But one day back in July of 2005 I walked into a bookstore, saw this book from way across the room, and knew I wanted to read it. I had no idea what it was, just that I was oddly drawn to it and had to go see it.

As it turns out, the book was exactly what I needed to read. Former atheist Lee Strobel lays out the data that convinced him that the Christian claims about Jesus' life, death and resurrection are true. It's not that the book was perfect, or even that I instantly believed after reading it (I didn't). But it did open my eyes to the fact that Christians had a much better defense for their beliefs than I'd expected. I wrote about it at the time here.


Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

I read Mere Christianity shortly after I finished The Case for Christ, and it added fuel to the growing fire of my interest in Christianity. It was the first book I read where a Christian looked at Christianity from a rational, questioning point of view. One of the reasons this book was probably so helpful to me is that Lewis was himself a former atheist, so he knew how to explain his faith in a way that made sense to nonbelievers.


By What Authority? by Mark Shea

At some point along the way I bought a Bible and started reading it, which left me with more questions than answers (as I talked about here). Around that time someone suggested I read By What Authority, saying that Shea (a convert to Catholicism) provided a good, readable explanation of the concept of Sacred Tradition. I would love to spice up the story with tales of how I wrestled with accepting the notion that God gives us doctrine through the Catholic Church...but, honestly, it was a slam-dunk. This was the missing piece of the puzzle. I had been leaning towards Catholicism for a lot of other reasons, but understanding the concept of Sacred Tradition was what finally made all of Christianity make sense to me.

I still had questions, though. What about the bad popes? What about the Crusades? And, most pressingly, what about those teachings that were just obviously antiquated and oppressive (e.g. their stance on contraception)? I figured that a lot of those crazy teachings must be optional, that perhaps they were categorized under "suggestions" rather than official teachings. I decided to keep reading to see what I'd find...


Catholicism for Dummies by John Trigilio and Kenneth Brighenti

I admit I was a bit embarrassed to buy a "Dummies" book on such a serious topic, but after multiple people recommended it I sucked it up and got Catholicism for Dummies, thinking that maybe I could slip on a fake Summa Theologica cover if I were to read it in public. :) Indeed it was very helpful -- not, of course, for gaining deep knowledge of any one area of Catholicism, but for answering some of my basic questions and pointing me in the right direction for further explanation. For the first time, I started to think that a lot of that Catholic stuff that I had written off as oppressive or old-fashioned might actually have a whole lot of wisdom to it.


The Catechism of the Catholic Church (version by Fr. John Hardon)

At this point I decided to hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak, and get a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the official exposition of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Though you can read the full text online for free on the Vatican's site here, I decided to get this version since a) I didn't want to read that much text online, and b) I heard that this arrangement by Fr. John Hardon was more readable. Reading it was amazing. It was so...not what I expected. Here's one excerpt (chosen quickly from the copy sitting here on my desk) that is the type of thing I found interesting:

[W]ith his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God's existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the "seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material", can have its origin only in God.

The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality "that everyone calls God".

The more I read, the more I became enthralled. As I've said before, when I read the Catholic Church's official teachings on God and what they claim is God's one true church, I felt overwhelmed with the peace of certainty that I had found truth.


Making Senses Out of Scripture: Reading the Bible As the First Christians Did by Mark Shea

Now I felt ready to deepen my knowledge of the Bible -- I'd previously read through most of the New Testament, but didn't know where to go from there. We didn't own a Bible in my house growing up, so I had almost zero familiarity with it. I'd flip through some of the Old Testament books and think, "What on earth is going on here?"

I read a few books on the topic of getting a basic understanding of the Bible, and this one was my favorite. Mark Shea walks the reader through an understanding of the Scripture as seen through the eyes of the Apostles themselves. The Bible, especially the Old Testament, was a lot more understandable once I understood that different books were intended to convey their truths in different "senses": literal, moral, allegorical or anagogical. This book really illuminated the Bible for me.


The Good News About Sex and Marriage by Christopher West

Back on the topic of Catholicism, the one thing I couldn't quite understand was the issue of contraception. I'd been living in this cycle of "Jen thinks she knows better than the 2,000-year-old Catholic Church" --> research and reading --> "Jen does not know better than 2,000-year-old Catholic Church" for a few months, so I was at least open to hearing the Church's point of view on this one. And, on a gut level, something was starting to ring vaguely true about the notion that contraception might not be the best thing for individuals or society. But I still had a lot of serious reservations.

That's where Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body came in. Unfortunately, I was too sleep deprived at that time to get through the massive tome, amazing as it was. So that's where Christopher West came in: he's made his career making the wisdom of the Theology of the Body accessible to everyone. The Good News About Sex and Marriage explained a lot of the questions and concerns I had about Catholic teaching on the relations between the sexes. Reading this book helped my husband and me familiarize ourselves with the basics so that we could move on to other sources which explained them in more detail. To our shock, we found ourselves agreeing -- even though we had some serious issues going on at the time that would make following these teachings very difficult -- after finding what we had found in our research and conversations (and prayers), we knew that we would have been lying to say that we didn't think this was true.

When we actually started to apply these teachings to our lives, everything changed -- our relationship to each other, to God, to our vocations, to our children -- everything. We found ourselves standing in wonder at how our life had done a 180-degree spin and been turned on its head by what we once assumed to be oppressive rules, and it was then that something that we'd come to believe intellectually about Church teaching became something we knew in our hearts: this stuff doesn't come from people.


The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton

I read The Everlasting Man shortly after I came to truly believe in God, and found myself wanting to shout, "Yes! Exactly!" all throughout this book. In this classic work, Chesterton makes the case that Christianity is something that rings true both to the mind and the heart. It takes what we know of the world through science and what we know of our souls through human experience and brings it all together. Though he doesn't use this exact analogy, I found that this book helped me articulate why I came to believe that Christianity is the box top to the puzzle of life.

-----

So there it is: a very abbreviated version my my conversion story as told through the books I read along the way. As I said above, none of these books will convert anyone since that is not something a books alone can do. I think they will, however, provide great starting points for believers who are eager to ask the tough questions of their faith, or for nonbelievers who are starting to think that there might be something more to this whole God thing than meets the eye.

The bottom line is this: if you are seeking God with humility and an open heart, you will find him. And asking tough questions will only speed up the process.


Feel free to use the comments to share your favorite books on these topics as well.

Confessions of an apolitical housewife

"If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one."
- Mother Teresa

Here's a question I've been pondering a lot lately: do I have to have an opinion about everything?

As the election season heats up, I frequently find myself in situations where people are discussing politics. I've found myself struggling to keep up with these conversations. What do I think about immigration issues, No Child Left Behind, Middle East policy, Homeland Security, Kyoto, minimum wage increase, welfare reform, healthcare reform, tax reform and social security reform? I'd been trying to keep up with it all, struggling to sneak in moments here or there to read political sites, even turning on CSPAN for a moment before feeling myself start to slip into a coma, when it occurred to me: maybe I don't have to have opinions about all of this stuff.

I am not naturally interested in politics, so keeping up-to-date on all the issues takes quite a bit of effort. And I'm starting to think that maybe I just don't have the mental bandwidth to keep up with it all right now, that next time someone asks what I think about Senator So-And-So's immigration reform proposal, maybe it's OK to say, "I don't have an opinion about that."

Don't get me wrong: this is also not to say that there are no political issues that I care about. I am quite concerned about certain topics (mostly related to the respect of human life), and do keep up-to-date and informed in those areas. This is also not to say that I don't think these things are important. I think they're all very important. It's just that I don't feel called to make these particular issues my concern right now, and that since I've hardly had any time to read up on them, I feel far from qualified to voice my opinion in anything other than the most broad terms.

I'm starting to feel that for me, in this phase of life, it's just not my calling to be all that passionate or involved in politics, to put much time or effort into trying to better the world through changes in government policy or other large-scale initiatives. Right now, as trite as it may sound to some people, I feel like my calling is to just make my little corner of the world the best that it can be: to work on the immigration issue by continuing to lend a helping hand to some friends of ours who are immigrants from Mexico; to preserve the environment by making sure that our household uses our God-given resources prudently; to reform social security by having lots of future taxpayers; to (as Kimberly Hahn once put it) change the culture, one diaper at a time.

Yet I feel like I'm violating some sort of law when I embrace that mentality, that it's carved in stone somewhere that everyone must have an opinion about every issue all the time. And other people evidently know of this law, or would at least seem to from the looks I get when I say in social settings that I don't have an opinion about certain major issues.


I thought it would be interesting to hear others' opinions on this: what do you think? Is it OK to not have an opinion about certain major issues, or is that just a cop-out?

AREWP Day 5: Permanence

[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]


Whenever I've tried to implement a new routine, a better system for control and organization of my household, it seems that invariably I have to go out of town or have some other life-altering event come up immediately afterwards. And woe be to the people who are anywhere near me at those times, because I always get ridiculously stressed and whine endlessly about how these events are going to derail my plans. I'll snap at my mother-in-law for getting the kids down for nap a half hour late because she spent too long at the park, or moan the entire trip to Houston about how this out-of-town visit is going to just demolish the new routine that I worked so hard to create. Looking back, I had a surprising amount of angst about things as minor as bedtime getting pushed back or breakfast being at a different time than usual.

In this past week of creating yet another attempt at a routine, I think I finally understand why I felt so unsettled by such little schedule deviations: because they were my anchors.

I think the goal with every routine is to create structure, to get as close as possible to the way humans have always lived, with hard stops around which we can structure our days. Naptime being at 2:15 wasn't just important because that's when the kids needed sleep, but because naptime was my hard stop, it was my anchor. Along with breakfast time and dinner time, I used the beginning of naptime to provide structure to my days, to cue me to begin a different phase of the day, a different set of tasks, a different mindset. And when naptime (or breakfast or dinner time) got off track, I was adrift. That structure that I so desperately craved could be demolished with something as simple as eating brunch instead of breakfast one day.

As I've gone through my week, thrilled that this crazy experiment with prayer has been working so well, I realized at some point that I'm not on edge about these things anymore, about some event coming along to derail it all. If I found out we had to go out of town tomorrow I would honestly be fine with it, I wouldn't freak out about it messing up my precious routine. What's different?

In every other attempt to get organized and establish a routine, I've used fleeting worldly things as my anchors, my cues to transition from one part of the day to the next. It's no wonder then that something as simple as a cold virus or an overnight trip could leave me without anchors, without a routine, picking up the pieces of all my big plans.

But prayer is something I can always do.

My prayer book fits in my purse, so whether I'm here at home, on a plane, in the hospital, visiting family out of town, in a hotel, out running errands, on a bus -- wherever I am -- I can always say Lauds, Matins and Vespers at roughly the same times, every day. Unlike all my other routines that revolved around fleeting events specific to this phase of life, there is no foreseeable reason why I couldn't keep this same basic routine, praying the Liturgy of the Hours, every single day for the rest of my life.

That's one of the reasons I have a really good feeling about my odds of keeping up with this: it's not only about praying or organizing or establishing a routine. It's all of that, and more. It's a radical re-thinking of the way I approach life. It's about finally admitting after all these years that my way isn't working, that if I had it all figured out I wouldn't spend so much time feeling behind and overwhelmed; it's about trying to get as close as possible to living as we're designed to live, with daily and seasonal cycles directing how much I attempt to get done; it's about living on God's time, sacrificing large portions of my to-do list in order to balance periods of work with periods of rest; it's about trusting that God will give me the grace to make up for time "lost" in prayer and rest, that if I just trust in him it will all get done (though God's definition of what "it all" involves may be different from mine); and it's about forcing myself to turn to God often, to pause to ask for his help before embarking on each new phase of the day.


This week has been a tough week: I've been up with the baby multiple times each night, unable to nap during the day, and my two toddlers seem to have been replaced by half-human, half-robot superbeings who can demolish the house in the time it takes me to blink. And yet here it is, Friday afternoon, and I actually feel pretty calm. I'm annoyed about the cereal being dumped out on the newly vacuumed carpet and the bowl full of macaroni and cheese landing face-down on the kitchen floor, but I don't feel overwhelmed. For the first time in a long time, I don't feel behind on anything. My to-do list was smaller this week to make sure I left plenty of time for prayer, but what was there did get done. (And, honestly, I probably didn't accomplish any less than I used to, it's just that I accomplished 100% of a smaller list instead of 60% of a larger one.)

The reason I originally called this a "reckless" experiment was because I supposedly did not have one more minute in my day to devote to prayer. I could have proven to you on paper that my life (as well as my family's lives) would be thrown into chaos if I set aside even a few extra minutes to devote to God. Needless to say, I'm thrilled that so far I've been proven wrong -- very wrong. Everything that needed to get done got done. We could all feel God's grace working. Our house was a peaceful place to be (well, as peaceful as it gets with three little kids). As it turns out, putting a reckless amount of trust in God was exactly what I needed to do.

AREWP Day 4: Focus and procrastination

[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]


Until I started this experiment of drastically restructuring my life around prayer, I didn't realize how unfocused I tend to be, and just how much I use the word "later."

Because of the extreme extent to which I am not a morning person, I have Lauds (Morning Prayer) scheduled to begin after breakfast time, at 9:30. An interesting thing has happened: because I know that I'll need to stop all work to pray, I naturally tend to focus more on one task at a time, getting to a clear stopping point before prayer begins.

In the past, breakfast and kitchen cleanup were jumbled together with to-do list items for the day, meaning that rather than having, say, a clear breakfast time that ended when the kitchen was restored to order, followed by folding clothes, followed by adding some pictures to a photo album, it would all be one jumbled project that extended throughout the morning: I would start folding clothes as the oatmeal cooked, then drift off to eat breakfast, fold a few more clothes, set out the pictures to add to the album, put some dishes in the dishwasher, remember that I was folding clothes...and so on and so on. At the end of the morning I'd often survey the house to see a bunch of unfinished projects, feeling like I'd accomplished nothing even though I'd been working all morning.

This week (and last week when I did the trial run), it's been different. Having to stop everything to pray snaps me out of the scattered, unfocused daze. I've naturally fallen into the habit of only dealing with breakfast and cleanup before Lauds, waiting until after prayer to start any to-do list tasks. Having a clear time at which I must stop to pray also motivates me to pick up the pace a bit, moving purposefully instead of shuffling my feet as I did when I felt like I had a daunting amount of unstructured time stretching before me.


Probably the biggest difference I've seen in this area, however, is at Vespers (Evening Prayer). I will be shocked if I don't keep up with commitment #2 for the long haul, because it has already brought more peace to my life than any habit I've ever adopted.

The commitment I made was that every evening at Vespers I will keep the ancient tradition of that being the prayer said at the lighting of the lamps: I will light candles, and though I will continue to keep the lights on as needed, I will use the lit candles as a symbolic gesture that the day has ended, that all work from the day must wait until tomorrow. Though dinner, post-dinner cleanup and bathtime happen after Vespers, all projects and tasks from the day are off-limits until the next morning (creating the rhythm and hard stops I talked about here).

Every evening, as the sun is setting and I see that the time for Vespers is approaching, I glance around the house to see if there's anything I need to do before I light the candles. And I see tons of stuff, every time. My knee-jerk reaction is to fall back on my normal mantra: "Later." All the kids toys I hadn't yet had them put away? "Later." That data entry I need to do at the computer? "Later." The sheets that needed to be changed that I hadn't gotten to yet? "Later." I did not realize how much I say this until I tried to stop.

Having the workday cease at Vespers has drastically reduced my use of the word "later."

What used to happen was that I would keep saying "later" until I finally had to give up and go to bed in defeat when it got ridiculously late. Now, every day around sunset, a few minutes before I light the Vespers candles, I make a conscious decision about what will and will not get done. I finish the tasks I'm able to, and get the others to a stopping point for tomorrow. As usual, I often find that I don't have time to accomplish all that I wanted to do. But here's the difference: now it is an active choice, whereas before the decision would be made for me when I ran out of time and it was way past my bedtime. Now I feel in control, whereas before I often felt defeated and overwhelmed at the end of the day.

This rule also helps reinforce the realization that I can't do it all: when I felt like I had an indefinite amount of time in which to work, I tended to pile more on my plate. This week of forcing myself to make time for prayer, to observe the natural cycles of work and rest that my body so deeply craves, has meant that I haven't gotten everything done that I wanted to do...but it's also meant that I've actively decided what won't make the cut rather than simply running out of fuel at the end of the day. It's meant that the work I did was done with a peaceful sense of purpose, energized by the knowledge that I only have a very finite amount of time to work until a period of prayer and rest begins.


I don't mean to give the impression that I've been gliding through my days on Cloud 9 since I've been praying so much more often. I've experienced plenty of the usual ups and downs of daily life. What I can say, however, is that in terms of bringing a sense of order to my life, in terms of establishing a sense of control over my to-do list and peace at what I can and cannot do, in terms of finally living in a way that reflects the priorities I'm always talking about, putting prayer first has worked better than I ever thought it would. Obviously, it remains to be seen if I'll keep up with it for the long haul. Let's just say that my hopes are high in that department.

AREWP: Frequently Asked Questions

[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]

I've received quite a few questions about this experiment with prayer, so I thought I'd answer them all in one post in case anyone finds it helpful.


What prayer book are you using?

Christian Prayer, the one-volume Liturgy of the Hours, plus the St. Joseph Guide for Christian Prayer pamphlet that came with it. It's a bit pricey as books go so I asked for it as a birthday present.


How did you decide on that book?

Because quite a few bloggers and Amazon reviewers recommended it highly.


Have you ever heard of the Magnificat?

Yes. I decided to use Christian Prayer because a) I heard that it's more complete (not 100% sure that that's correct though), and b) I decided to take a bet that I'll keep up with it (if I do the prayers for more than a year it's cheaper to just get the book rather than a Magnificat subscription). But I have seen the Magnificat and it looks great, and I would recommend it.


Do you read the prayers out loud?

Yes. I read that you are supposed to either read them aloud or at least move your lips, so I do.


What do the kids do while you pray?

I pray in the living room with the kids, so the baby bounces on my lap while the toddlers play. I've been reserving some special toys that only come out during prayer time, so that usually keeps them amused. At first they seemed to think of prayer time as "limits testing time," but they're starting to fall into the habit of amusing themselves while I pray, and since late last week (when I did the trial run) they're more used to the routine. When they're old enough I plan to include them (which will be great, since the Liturgy of the Hours is ideally done with others).


How can you possibly focus?

Between sleep deprivation and general chaos, it's not always possible for me to deeply concentrate on the prayers (though sometimes it is). I do read all them aloud, which helps, and focus to the best of my ability. Per rule #4, I just try my best and accept that it won't be perfect.


How long do the prayers take?

Each one takes about 12 minutes, except the Office of Readings, which takes about 15 minutes (my book has abbreviated readings).


How did you learn about the Liturgy of the Hours?

I read a ton of stuff about it, but two resources to highlight are: Getting Started with the Liturgy of the Hours by RNW, and the Discovering Prayer PDF at the Rosary Shop (the PDF is very long, but you'll find that you only need to focus on a few key sections when you're getting started).

Britney Spears syndrome

I was in line at a convenience store yesterday and the employees had their radio blasting, playing one of those overproduced, hypersexualized songs (you know, the ones with the heavy techno beats and women gasping and singing in a high-pitched, coquettish voices). It was pretty grating, so in an attempt to drown it out I started flipping through one of the celebrity magazines. I hadn't heard the latest about Britney Spears, that she evidently had a complete nervous breakdown a couple weeks ago and was taken to the hospital. As I flipped through the pitiful pictures of her strapped down to a stretcher, looking at the camera with a dazed, tear-streaked face, I realized that the song playing on the radio was hers.

I felt guilty by association, listening to her voice coo lyrics like "Everytime they turn the lights down / Just wanna go that extra mile for you" and "You got me in a crazy position (Yeah) / If you're on a mission (Uh-uh) / You got my permission (Oh)." As an artist, you would expect her latest album to be more of a reflection of her life; you would expect a more mournful tone to the songs, more tales of disappointment and love lost. The one song that does speak to the trauma she's been through in the past year, Piece of Me, is still a hypersexualized track filled with gaspy "aaah"s and "ooooh"s. (I know, I'm disturbingly familiar with her music. Let's never speak of it again.) The theme of her current album foregoes any honest reflection of what's in her heart in favor of tracks with her gasping and panting about how much she supposedly desires to have no-strings-attached sex all the time...because that's what the world wants to hear.


Personally, I've never had a nervous breakdown. I think I came close, though, back in 2000. I vividly remember sitting on a friend's couch one night, I think it was a Tuesday, and feeling like something within me was going to explode. I felt like I just wanted to scream -- and then I wanted to scream again because I didn't even know why I wanted to scream in the first place! I was supposed to be happy -- I had it all! Every area of my life was on track. I had a promising career, I'd recently purchased an adorable condo in an up-and-coming area of town, I had great friends...yet I felt completely lost. I could not figure out why I would feel such angst, so painfully adrift, when I had every important area of life nailed down.

I'd come over to seek my friend's counsel on a variety of matters, but for some reason the topic of dating triggered what I think was a near panic attack. I was single at the time (I met my husband a few months later), and couldn't figure out if I should enter the dating scene or not. For some reason I just could not get comfortable with the idea of living the Sex in the City lifestyle that was so popular among my friends and coworkers. According to my moral code and worldview at the time, not only was there nothing dangerous about women treating sex lightly and "dating" lots of different men, but it was in fact healthy! Yet something within me recoiled at the concept. My theory at the time was that I was still feeling the residual effects of the bondage that women endured for so long before feminism liberated us, that I had yet to throw off the chains of the oppressive patriarchal mentality that still lingered in American culture...yet the more I considered this line of thinking, the closer I felt to nervous breakdown.

Now I understand why.

At the time, I was part of the segment of society where traditional feminine qualities are disdained. As a woman you could express any desire, show any side of your personality, so long as it didn't involve behaviors that humans have always associated with women, like maternal instincts, the longing to nurture others, feeling sentimental, having fluctuating emotions based on your body's rhythms, wanting to be cherished by men, etc. Probably due to a lot of the recent changes in modern society -- high on the list being the constant touting of contraception as a good thing, making us start to feel that what it's "curing" must be a bad thing -- all the nurturing, life-giving aspects of being a woman were scorned. This left a huge elephant in the room around which we had to maneuver, and the result was that the two main options for acceptable behavior from women were either to act like a sex object or a man (or both, a la Sex in the City).

I know that's an extreme statement, and there were some gray areas that varied by socioeconomic group, but it's not too far off. An entire realm of behavior and desires was off-limits for women; if it smacked of traditional notions about what women desire, it was verboten. If women in those circles wanted respect, wanted to be considered intelligent, empowered individuals, they knew the code: sex was OK, as long as you treated it lightly and didn't yearn for tenderness or commitment; working in nurturing fields like secretarial work or nursing was OK, as long as you made it sound like it was completely coincidental that being a woman drew you to that line of work; even having children was OK, as long as you made it clear that your kids were tangential to all the other important things that you had going on in your life.

Of course not all women have every single traditionally feminine desire and personality trait, but we all have at least some of them; and they all must be denied in order to gain the modern world's respect.

Looking back, it's so painfully obvious that this was at the root of my problem that night on my friend's couch. Of all my planning and goals and ambitions, I had completely ruled out anything that involved accepting the fullness of what it means to be a woman. I tried to tell myself that being a woman meant being just like a man, that all those old-fashioned notions of the inherent differences between the genders were just tools used to keep women down. And suppressing such a core element of who I am, burying any thoughts that I might secretly want a lot of those things that women have always wanted, left me in a state of overwhelming angst and inner turmoil.


Having spent so many years forcing myself to seek fulfillment as a woman in the way the modern world said I should, I felt a flicker of recognition at the scene that played out with Britney Spears' meltdown last week. Of course I'll never know for sure what pushed her over the edge, but there was something painfully familiar about that tableau: her voice purring over the radio, telling the world what it wanted to hear, as she was carried off to the mental hospital.

AREWP Day 2: The real to-do list

[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]

[NOTE: I updated yesterday's Day 1 to share how it all played out.]


I am exhausted.

For the past two nights the baby hasn't slept well because of a cold and general gassiness, each night leaving me with about four or five (nonconsecutive) hours of sleep. My husband has some serious things going on at work so that he can't help me at night right now, and I can't nap during the day since the baby rarely sleeps when the older kids sleep.

As often happens when you're extremely tired, everything has seemed more difficult these past two days. Even the smallest tasks are thwarted, like when I was trying to put some pots back in the cabinets only to see that my one-year-old had decided that her spoon would make a good scepter and was flinging applesauce all over the kitchen; or when in the short time it took me to pour food into the cat's bowl the kids had discovered the laundry basket full of folded clothes and had a quarter of its contents scattered across the floor. Even more than usual, I feel like I cannot turn my back for two seconds without chaos breaking out.

I've had days like this before, and it almost always plays out the same way: my frustration level builds and builds as the day wears on, my mantra alternating between "Why is everything so difficult?!" and "I can never get anything done around here!", until the crescendo when I call my husband at work to vent in his general direction, after which I just give up and wallow in self pity until he gets home.

But that's not what happened this time.

Because of my commitment to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, every few hours I have been forced to stop everything, to snap out of my mental downward spiral, and pray. Reading the ancient Psalms, often anguished cries to God in times of great upheaval and tragedy, reminds me of how very small my troubles are in the grand scheme of things. The excerpts from the Gospels remind me to be hopeful in knowledge of the greatest events that ever happened, Jesus' life, death and resurrection. And simply pulling myself out of the daily grind, setting it all aside to rest in God's words, reminds me that nothing that is on my agenda for today, none of the items on my to-do list -- not even the ones with asterisks by them -- really matter.

As I zip open the leather cover of my prayer book, as I flip the delicate pages to look for the ribbon that marks this hour's prayers, I am reminded that I can relax, I can let go of my worry over all the things I wanted to accomplish this day. Because there is only one truly important item on my to-do list today, the same as every day: to know, love and serve God.