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."


RELATED: How Would You Know?

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.

AREWP Day 1: Priorities and sacrifice

--- UPDATE BELOW ---

[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).]


This morning I looked at my calendar and realized that a childhood friend is going to be in town today, and she's swinging by this afternoon for a visit. I bit my lip a little bit when I realized: she'll be here for Vespers (Evening Prayer). My husband won't be home yet, so it will be just she and I and the kids.

For a moment I went into a frantic "What do I do?!" mode. We've been friends since we were eight years old. In recent years we lost touch but are now rekindling our friendship since she'll be in my area more often for the next couple of years. She has always been a deeply spiritual person but is not religious and doesn't believe in organized religion. Last time she checked, I felt the same way (except that I wasn't spiritual...in fact I was kind of a militant atheist). Let's just say that sitting around and listening to me read psalms and Bible verses aloud for 15 minutes is not what she is expecting to do when she comes over.

People who are the #4 Google result for socially awkward person do not handle situations like this well.

As I was fretting about whether to postpone Vespers, to just start the experiment tomorrow, to violate the first rule I committed to and do it hours earlier before she arrives, a thought popped into mind out of nowhere:

This is where spoken priorities become actual priorities.

I don't know where that came from, but it's true. Priorities don't become priorities by talking about them. They become true priorities by inconveniencing yourself to make them happen. Even if it means that you might look odd or foolish in the eyes of a childhood friend whose opinion you dearly value.


--- UPDATE ---

When my friend arrived we were both exhausted from long days. It's been so long since we last had a chance to really talk, our conversation was a bit stiff at first. After some hemming and hawing, I finally laid it out. Not knowing where to start, I decided to just be completely honest and tell her why saying these prayers were important to me, and let her know that I was worried about her reaction because she was such a dear friend and I valued her opinion so much.

As we walked around the house lighting candles, I told her a bit about my conversion and how much I appreciated her sharing her own spiritual beliefs with me back when I was an atheist. In the breaks between each reading I would tell her a bit more about the Liturgy of the Hours, and pointed out that thousands of other people in our time zone are reciting these exact prayers right now. She listened attentively throughout the 10 or 15 minutes it took to go through it all, and if she was bored or uninterested she sure hid it well.

Not only was it not weird, but it's exactly what we needed.

Our conversation had been stiff before, but me sharing something so personal really broke the ice and helped us move past surface-level chit-chat to really delving into the topics that were most dear to us.

I am so, so glad I didn't skip it. I will remember this lesson next time I'm tempted to push prayer aside for fear of what other people think.

On discussing parenting philosophies

I was talking with a good friend the other day, a fellow convert to Catholicism from atheism, who is expecting her fourth baby in five years. We were talking about how wonderfully crazy it is that our lives are where they are, how neither of us would have ever guessed that we'd be where we are today given our totally nonreligious backgrounds. One thing that came out is that we both agreed that one of the most difficult parts of having children spaced so closely together is simply dealing with the reactions of friends and family members who are baffled by our newfound religion and lifestyles. With each of our pregnancies, we have both gotten reactions that ranged from unsupportive to downright vitriolic. Frankly, we often feel attacked.

Then I came home to read of the blowup about parenting philosophies that was going around the Catholic blog world last week (Hope has a good summary here). I doubt that anybody involved in the debate meant to make other parents feel attacked by simply expressing their beliefs that certain parenting methods are what's best for children...yet that was the effect. There is no more sensitive area than the subject of what makes a good mother. The mere whiff of implication that something a woman is doing may not be in her children's best interest will cut straight to her heart like a knife, even if she disagrees with it.

That's why I think we should be really, really careful in discussions about parenting philosophies, because the more strongly we advocate for one particular method, the more parents who don't adhere to that method are going to feel attacked. Certainly in some cases this is warranted: it is a good thing to decry clear cases of neglect and abuse. Yet the lines between what is clearly abusive or neglectful, what is just less than ideal, and what is simply a matter of opinion, are not clear. They are for each person to discern on his or her own. And I think that we should be very careful where we draw those lines, and ask ourselves when advocating for certain practices as "best" or criticizing other practices: is it worth it?

I can speak with authority on this one because I used to be the worst of them all. When my first child was born I pretty much had it all figured out. I had read all the books and knew the proper way to parent. Unfortunately, however, there seemed to be a lot of people out there who had not read the books and did not know the harm they were doing to their children with their improper parenting. At the time I had a neighbor who violated pretty much every one of the parenting principles in which I believed. I was horrified as I heard her nonchalantly discuss the things she did and didn't do. "I just cannot believe she'd do that to her baby," I lamented to my husband one day after hearing about a choice my neighbor made that I strongly disagreed with. "I feel so bad for her children."

Yet as I got to know her family better, at some point it occurred to me that for all my opinions about how detrimental her choices were for her children's mental health, I had not a single observational data point to indicate that they were anything other than happy, well adjusted kids who had great relationships with their parents. From seeing their family day in and day out, hearing the giggling children yell "Hi, Miss Jennifer!" as I'd walk to my car, I started to wonder if maybe her kids were doing fine, if maybe kids can thrive under a variety of circumstances, even if some scientists say they're wrong. Maybe all my opinions and raised eyebrows about her parenting choices were doing nothing more than adding one more voice to the attack on families.

The traditional family is under attack in our society; I might feel that more because of my nonreligious background, but it is undoubtedly so. Especially families who are involved in their religion, who homeschool, who have or are open to having larger-than-average families -- even the parents who just want to raise their kids with some traditional Judeo-Christian values -- we are under attack. And because of the sensitive nature of the subject of parenting, when we espouse one way as best, when we take a lecturing tone in discussions with other parents, when we imply that perhaps parents who make choices different from our own have not properly discerned God's will for their lives...we're adding to the attack. Again, there are cases when this is warranted, when the cons of wearing down other parents with direct (or indirect) criticism are outweighed by the pros of pointing out something truly dangerous or detrimental. But I think that we should put some serious thought and prayer into where to draw that line. (And I really do mean "we" here -- I am as guilty as anyone.)

Now that some years have passed and the trials and tribulations of motherhood have left me realizing that my best effort is not enough to meet my own high bar, I sometimes think of that old neighbor. I run into her every now and then, and each year I see her children's smiling faces beaming at me from their Christmas cards. She didn't know about all the studies that proved that my way of parenting was superior to hers. But neither did her children. All they knew was that they had a mom, imperfect like the rest of us, who loved them dearly and was doing her best. And while her best may not have been good enough to meet my lofty standards, it was good enough for them.

A reckless experiment with prayer: the plan

[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).]


To reiterate what may or may not have been clear from my last post, my goal with praying the Liturgy of the Hours is twofold: to finally start praying regularly to make prayer the priority I say it is; and to bring some desperately needed rhythm and structure to my life. This second goal is one of the reasons that I'm going to go ahead and say all three major hours rather than just start with one. Because I realize that this is a big change, I make no speculation about whether or not I'll continue this after this week. I will see how it goes, judge the endeavor by its fruit, and evaluate from there.

Also, I should add that I did a "trial run" this past week to see where in my schedule there are natural fits for prayer time, and to give myself a chance to familiarize myself with the process before making any bold proclamations on my blog. :)

Without further ado, here is what I am committing to do from Monday to Friday of this week:

1. I will start praying each prayer within 15 minutes of the time I have set for it: I have written out the times at which I will pray Lauds (Morning Prayer), Vespers (Evening Prayer) and Matins (the Office of Readings). I realize that it is not at all required that I be so precise with the timing, but that's the whole idea about having "hard stops". If I commit to "praying Lauds whenever I can get around to it, sometime in the morning" it will never happen. Giving myself too much flexibility on timing makes it all too tempting to put everything else first, e.g. "I'll start Vespers after I do this load of laundry..."
   
   
2. I will light candles at Vespers (Evening Prayer), and the day's work stops then: As I said in one of my last posts, I yearn to live life in the natural rhythm of day/night cycles, yet I am not ready to make the huge step of foregoing artificial light. But what I can do is observe the ancient tradition of Vespers being the prayer said at the lighting of the lamps in the evening: I will light candles as a symbolic gesture that night has come, and work that is not finished must wait until tomorrow. (This doesn't include our night routine, dinner / cleanup / baths, which will happen after Vespers).
   
   
3. I will be prepared to make sacrifices: If a friend drops by just as I'm about to start Vespers, if the kitchen isn't cleaned up when it's time for Lauds, if I have to take my prayer book with me because I'll be out and about during Matins, I will still stop and pray. I'm prepared that this may cause some inconveniences, but that's the whole point about having hard stops, and one of the big reasons I'm doing this: to inconvenience myself and my tendencies to get distracted and put trivial matters before my true priorities.
   
   
4. I will accept imperfection: Since I am brand new at this and am attempting to do it on my own, I will undoubtedly not do it perfectly. I will make every effort to say each office correctly, but I'm also not going to let myself get derailed if it's not perfect (as I have in the past).
   

That's it. This coming week, life revolves around prayer. Though I will go through my days as usual, I will not worry about doing anything other than simply sticking to these four commitments. Will I get nothing done? Will the house be a wreck? Will the kids hate it? Will the sacrifices I'll have to make to put prayer first be just too much?

We'll see.

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 mentioned before that at some point during our conversion process a family member alerted me to the fact that I am actually related to a Benedictine monk. This long-lost cousin and I have corresponded occasionally ever since, and at one point I asked him if he had any recommendations for how I could better incorporate prayer into my daily life. He told me about something called the Liturgy of the Hours (also called the Divine Office), an ancient liturgical form whose origins stretch back to Jewish worship before the time of Jesus.

He wrote of how the earliest Christians' days revolved around prayer, how they would consecrate each part of the day to God by pausing to say certain prayers (usually psalms) at certain times, setting aside their work to turn their hearts and minds to God. The practice is thousands of years old, and still today every priest, monk and nun from the Pope on down are vowed to pray these prayers each day. He encouraged me to consider this, to join him and all the other religious and lay people across the world who join their voices together in prayer throughout the day to consecrate their hours to God.

"Sounds great!" I thought. "Too bad I don't have time for that."

A few Google searches led me to see that each of the three"major hours" would involve stuff like praying psalms, reading Scripture passages, reading the works of great Christian thinkers...in other words, things that I don't have time for. I decided to just come up with some ways on my own to add some less time-consuming prayer to my days.

None of these ideas for praying more actually happened and, meanwhile, the Liturgy of the Hours wouldn't go away. I started to think that maybe God was trying to tell me something, since I couldn't seem to escape blog posts and discussions and articles about the Liturgy of the Hours. I kept trying forget about it, to push it off to the "fantasy list of all the things I'm going to do when I have tons of free time," but I couldn't get it out of my mind. In the little bit of praying I actually did (like 30 seconds at night) I began to ask God to make it more clear what he wanted me to do here. Obviously I wasn't supposed to actually pray the Liturgy of the Hours since I had too many important responsibilities that left no room for extensive prayer, but what was it? Maybe just pray one of the prayers each day? Maybe learn about it to share with others? I then promptly tried to forget about it again.

Shortly after this prayer I was reading Pope Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth, and came across a fascinating section about Jesus' temptation in the desert to turn the rock into bread. Pope Benedict talks about how this is the temptation that Christians face still today, the temptation to focus on important practical matters like making sure everyone has bread, and worry about all the God stuff later. What struck me was when he talked about what Jesus means when he responds to the temptation by citing the Old Testament verse: "Man does not live by bread alone, but...by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord." Pope Benedict writes:

[Jesus] himself has become bread for us, and this multiplication of the loaves endures to the end of time, without ever being depleted...The German Jesuit Alfred Delp, who was executed by the Nazis, once wrote: "Bread is important, freedom is more important, but most important of all is unbroken fidelity and faithful adoration."

When this ordering of goods is no longer respected, but turned on its head, the result is...ruin and destruction even of material goods themselves. When God is regarded as a secondary matter that can be set aside temporarily or permanently on account of more important things, it is precisely these supposedly more important things that come to nothing. [emphasis mine]

Point taken. I began to really think about all my "important" tasks, and ask myself if they truly allowed so little room for prayer -- after all, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity have helped the world tremendously on a practical level, yet they spend lots of time in prayer. I began to seriously look into the Liturgy of the Hours, researching what it would involve. It seemed counterintuitive that someone in my state of life with three small children would be led to this, but I felt pretty strongly that for some crazy reason I was being called to it.

Meanwhile, I'd been thinking a lot about how to bring some desperately needed structure to my days. It would bring so much peace to my life to have a clear rhythm, a stable routine, but how do I (to borrow Hallie's term) anchor my routines when I have a long history of ignoring self-made schedules? How do I find a natural rhythm to my days, to (as a commenter recently put it) live on God's time when modern technology makes to soooo easy to live on the world's time? How do I create hard stops?

When these two lines of thought finally collided in my mental meandering, "Why should I pray the Liturgy of the Hours?" and "How can I bring structure to my day with hard stops?"...a lightbulb finally went off in my head.

Could this be it?

Could making my daily tasks revolve around these prayers -- instead of vice versa -- as Christians and Jews have done for thousands of years, could this be the key to bringing peace to my daily life? Could putting regular prayer before everything short of emergencies provide the structure I've always yearned for? Could the pre-set times and prayers of the Liturgy of the Hours be the guide I need to not blow it all off and just tell myself I'll do it "later" (as I did with countless other plans for prayer)? Could Lauds and Matins and Vespers provide strong anchors for my days?

I really don't know. But I'm going to try it.


I've said so many times that I "don't have time" for any kind of serious prayer...yet I have never actually tried it. I based my assessment on looking at my schedule in Excel and seeing how full it was, not on actually having tried prayer and found that it didn't work.

So next week, I'm going to knock all my "important" tasks down a notch on the priority ladder, and I'm going to do something I really, really don't have time for: I'm going to pray all three major hours of the Liturgy of the Hours, roughly at the correct time that they're meant to be said, every day from Monday until Friday (RNW has a great sample of what that involves here).

I make no promises of whether or not I'll keep it up after next week, but I feel like this is something I at least need to try. Every day next week will have three hard stops, one for each major hour. Every aspect of the day will revolve around prayer, not vice versa. Other than serious emergency, nothing will prevent me from saying these prayers. I won't be a perfectionist about it -- I'm not yet ready to chant them all, I may need to pause now and then to tend to the kids, and I might mess up parts of it -- but they will get said. And at the end of the week, I will have a realistic estimate of just how much (or little) prayer I have time for, based on having actually done it rather than speculation.

Honestly, I'm interested to see just how rough it will be: will there simply be a few dirty dishes sitting around on Friday afternoon, or will the Health Department be knocking at my door? If at the end of the week I feel frazzled and stressed about all the things that didn't get done, if it does not bring peace to the household, then I can safely put the whole idea to rest and know that I at least tried to do what I felt God was calling me to do. It will be interesting to see what happens when I use prayer to structure my days, putting all other matters second.

Truly, I do not have time for this. I have a three-year-old, an eighteen-month-old, and a four-month-old. I have too much to do. So I guess I'm giving God my time, lots of it, and asking him to work a miracle: if I'm going to get through next week without my to-do list getting out of control and my house degenerating into chaos, I'll need him to do some serious multiplying of loaves here. I'll need help. I'll need grace. Lots of it.

I'll be updating throughout the week next week so you can all get a glimpse into this reckless experiment with prayer. Whether this brings peace and order to my life because I interpreted God's will for me correctly or it's a flaming train wreck because it was just a bad idea that was all in my head, it should be interesting reading either way. :)

One more year

I almost didn't post this because it sounds overly sentimental and cheesy, but it's true. So here it goes...


I turn 31 this weekend. I've never been one to freak out about birthdays, but there have been a couple milestones here and there that caused me a bit of anxiety, thinking, "Man, am I already that old?" And when I thought about turning 31, it gave me pause for a moment to realize that I am truly a "30-something" now, which I think means that I am officially an adult.

But those thoughts were immediately overshadowed with overwhelming joy to think that this year will bring the one year anniversary of us becoming Catholic. And every year that goes by from now on is one more year that I've had God in my life.

I had a great life before my conversion. I was a happy atheist surrounded by family, friends, and all the worldly comforts a person could ever desire. Yet, when I look back on it all, it seems so bleak and somehow lonely compared to now. It's like if you've ever gone inside on a winter day, and it was only when the warm air of your home hit you that you realized just how cold you were outdoors.

When I think of the astounding peace and joy that Christianity has brought to my life, it's hard not to lament all the years I spent without it. It's hard not to find it distressing that I spent three decades ignoring God. I will have to wait until I'm 61 to say that I've been a Christian for more than half my life. From here on out, I think that any anxiety about having one more year gone by will always be vastly overshadowed by the knowledge that it's one more out of the cold, one more year spent in the warmth of home, the Catholic Church.

Schedules and hard stops

[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).]


Contrary to what some charitable readers might think after reading my New Year's post, I have always been scattered and disorganized. Even before I had three kids in diapers -- heck, even before I had any kids, even before I was married -- I lived like this.

In fact, I remember a time a few years ago when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed, I asked my 90-year-old grandfather if people were this busy when he was younger. I was sitting on the edge of his couch, glancing at my watch because I was in a rush to get to "important" thing on my to-do list, but I wanted to take a minute to hear about his life on the farm back in the 1920's. Surely there was a ton of work to do to keep a farm up and running -- was daily life back then the chaotic mad dash that it is today? Did his mom always seem overwhelmed and frazzled, bemoaning how behind she was on everything?

He replied with an emphatic no. Life was not rushed and chaotic. They didn't live under the constant feeling of being stressed and overwhelmed that people seem to today, he said. They had their share of worries, and lots of hard work to do, to be sure, but daily life had a peaceful rhythm to it that is utterly lacking today. I wondered if maybe he was looking back through rose-colored glasses, misremembering life back then. Yet when I asked other people of his generation, they all replied with the same answer: life is hectic today in a way it never has been before.

I've always wondered why.


Meanwhile, my husband has long been intrigued by the impact of artificial light on health. Ever since a vacation we took to Costa Rica where we experienced the inky blackness of nights with few artificial lights -- and the major impact it had on our physical and mental health -- he's been wanting to do an experiment where we try to go a few days without any artificial light, using only candles at night.

A couple months ago he got all excited to make this happen, and when I went to turn on the kitchen light to clean up after dinner he reminded me to light a candle instead. I became increasingly exasperated as I tripped over unfinished cleaning projects and almost knocked over a candle while transferring clothes to the dryer. Then the dusky candle light started to make me feel sleepy, which only added to my irritation. Finally, when I knocked down a stack of folded clothes from trying to put away laundry by candle light alone, I put an end to this crazy experiment.

"This is absurd!" I huffed as I went through the house flipping on every light I could find.

As my husband and I squinted at each other in the harsh overhead light, he suggested that we try the experiment again another time. I chuckled at his naivete -- didn't he see from the way things had gone tonight that such a thing is simply not feasible? "It's impossible," I informed him. "There is no way we could get by with candlelight alone." He pointed out that it is not technically impossible since nobody even had electricity in their houses until relatively recently in human history.

Though of course I knew on some level that that was true, for a split second it struck me as completely incorrect. How could it be possible that people lived before artificial light?, I wondered. I was hardly past the half-way point of my day when the sun had set, not even half way through my to-do list! How did they get anything done?!

"Look," I replied. "The only way we could possibly do a couple nights without artificial light would be...oh." Something dawned on me as I spoke. The only way we could get by on sunlight and candles alone would be to completely, totally rethink our expectations for what we could accomplish; to have all major work completed and cleaned up by sunset; to attempt only quiet activities like reading or sewing or family time in the evening hours...to live like our grandparents lived. We'd have no choice but to slash our to-do lists and our expectations of what we could get done in a day. We'd have to get up early and work purposefully and diligently to get the most out of the fleeting daylight. Feelings of panic and rush would be futile since we'd live with a clear sense that we cannot create more working hours than the light allows, that the sun is going to set when it sets, and there's only so much we can do. Life would have a distinct daily and seasonal rhythm.

It would be pretty peaceful.


I've thought about this a lot lately, thinking of the flaming disaster that was our experiment of trying to go even one night without artificial light, and what that says about our lives and how they compare to all the societies that lived without modern technology. Here are some of the things I've come up with:

Just like with modern finances, modern daily life allows us to live under the illusion that we can add working hours to our day at will. Technology allows us to overspend our time just as credit cards allow us to overspend our money.

Life before modern technology was full of hard stops: the work day ended at sunset -- if you didn't finish laundry during the day there was no going back outside to the washboard at 9:00 at night; the work day began at dawn -- if you got breakfast on the table an hour late that was precious time cut out of you and your family's very finite workday; even finances had hard stops -- when you spent your last dollar there were no tempting "0% interest for six months!" credit card offers waiting in your mailbox. And with a life full of hard stops, even the most disorganized, scattered people must have been forced to have some kind of routine, and to limit their to-do lists. Even people as inept at time management as I am must have been gently reminded to get to a stopping point and wind down their projects each day as the sunlight began its slow retreat from the sky.

When I considered also that in many times and places people lived in small villages where the community undertook activities together -- e.g. the men all went out to work the fields at the same time, the women did the washing and cooking in a community area at the same time -- I started to think that maybe one of the reasons so many people feel scattered and overwhelmed these days is because we're just not meant to have to create our own schedules. Humans are used to powerful forces beyond their control like the availability of light or the momentum of community activities structuring their days. Having an Excel printout just isn't the same. It doesn't provide a true hard stop to simply have a line on a piece of paper. We're free to ignore our arbitrary, self-set deadlines (as some employee at some recycling plant no doubt thinks when he keeps seeing papers with labels like "Jen's Daily Schedule" and "Jen's Daily Schedule - NEW" and "Jen's Updated Daily Schedule" fly by).

I realized that without the structure of cohesive communities and the hard stops of life without technology, people like me are adrift. It is all too easy to float past the arbitrary boundaries I set for myself and lose any semblance of a routine; and by virtue of just flipping on some lights, my workday never really has to end.

There are people out there who are good at self-imposing routines, who have a natural tendency to have a clear end to their work days and observe periods of rest. I am not one of them. I love the idea of creating a "family liturgy," of "imposing order through structure and ritual"...yet how does someone like me bring structure and order to my days? How do I make it real when modern technology allows me to do drift out of the ritual and do whatever I want whenever I want? How do I make sure that "Jen's Family Liturgy" isn't just one more forgotten piece of paper down at the recycling plant? How do I create hard stops?

I've been thinking and praying about that a lot, and think God may have answered my prayers. I'll share it in the next post in this series.

Guest post: A family liturgy

by Steve G.

[Regular commentor Steve G. had some great thoughts to add to my post about bringing peace to my household, so I suggested that he do a guest post. You can see Steve's other guest posts here -- scroll down to see the full list.]

I can't help but continue to see all of this in the context of Gordon Neufeld's attachment theory concepts [summarized in this post], and I think his approach holds the key to understanding the way we should approach such things.

Going back to Neufeld's book, he argues that what we've done in modern society is traded relationships/family as the foundation of society and culture for economics. I think the utilitarian economic underpinnings of modern society have caused us to shift our way of thinking to one of 'getting things done' rather than doing things as part of what works for the good of the family.

Let me give an example of what I mean. I am usually the one who cleans up after dinner in our household. I put all the dishes in the dishwasher, and then get to scrubbing pots and pans. After that we all sit down for treat time, and hopefully some playtime after. For a very long time, I've approached this with an idea towards efficiency. I want to get this done and out of the way so that we can get to the 'fun stuff.'

This put me in the position of feeling like anything that distracted me from the goal was a nuisance. Little hands pulling at my shirtsleeves, little voices asking if they can have their sweety now…these were things that were getting in the way of my getting finished and often left me feeling aggravated by the time I was done.

Well, one day after listening to one section of Neufeld's Power to Parent DVD series (which I HIGHLY recommend) where he was describing life in a traditional town (Provence, France), he talked about how the entire meal time from set up to clean up is a structured routine that everyone participates in. He actually referred to it at one point in religious terms as the 'liturgy of daily life.'

It dawned on me that maybe I should be looking at this (washing up), not in the economic like terms of efficiency, but in terms of relationships. I wondered what I would change if I did that. So, next day, I told the two oldest (7 and 4) that a new routine for mealtime clean up was going in place (I started modestly to keep it doable). I said that we were going to work as a team to do the clean up, and then after that we'd all sit down to treat time (i.e. treat time wouldn't come until we were done).

Everyone would be responsible for bringing their own dishes into the kitchen, where I'd rinse, then put in the dishwasher. For pots and pans, I'd wash then hand off to oldest child for drying, who'd then hand off to middle child who would put the pots away -- the youngest is still a bit young for this.

I tried to look at it with an eye towards enjoying spending time together rather than with an eye towards getting it done.

It's amazing what happened...unexpected conversations, laughter, joking, and fostering of a team attitude just to name a few, and of course it took a good bit longer. But most importantly, well...it actually became enjoyable. I was hanging out with my boys and we were working together. No, it wasn't as thrilling as taking them to Disney on Ice...but in very important ways, it was actually better.

Yes, some days there is grumbling about it. Yes, some days when I feel tired the temptation is there to just do it myself and be done with it. But as we build it into part of our 'liturgy of daily life', it gets easier. The 'liturgy' and structure does the hard work for us and it builds the relationship at the same time.

Neufeld argues very persuasively in the DVD series that in modern society we are approaching discipline the wrong way. He accurately describes how we are constantly 'parenting in the incident.' We think of what tools we can leverage to get our kids to behave as we desire, we are constantly reacting to what they do, should we spank or not spank, should we use timeouts, etc. All at the same time trying to meet all the other obligations as parent, spouse, etc. that we have. It's exhausting.

He argues that we should be setting our family life up differently and uses a phrase that has haunted me since I heard it. He posits that the best way to discipline is to 'impose order through structure and ritual.'

We should mirror those traditional societies where the potentially roughest times of the day (getting ready in the morning, meal times, bedtimes, etc.) are more or less scripted out in a sort of family liturgy. We should let the structure do the work of imposing discipline/order on the family members (ahem...including the parents at times...no?), rather than constantly battling through all the episodes of the day and putting out fires.

Now I don't suggest this to argue that some kind of rigorous military schedule be imposed. Rather the key to any structure of life for a Christian family is what Jennifer taps into as the peace of the family, and what Neufeld would describe as focusing on the good of the relationships involved. My own formulation follows the two great commandants: does this help us know, love and serve God, and know love and serve one another?

I think that if we can begin building these kinds of structures and rituals into our life (bit by bit because until they take hold they require effort themselves to maintain), always within the context of how they nourish and support the familial relationships, rather than how many items get checked off our list, we will be doing ourselves and our children a world of good.

After all, isn't this how God parents us? He gives us the church, the sacraments, the liturgy to draw us closer to him. He imposes order through structure and ritual...through HIS family liturgy.

Any spiritual director worth their salt will tell you that in order to grow closer to God, in order to foster our relationship with Him (our father, our parent), that we need a daily routine, a rule, a liturgy (call it what you will) built around fostering our attachment...our relationship with Him.

Doesn't it make sense that our own parenting and family life, as imperfect as it will be, would follow the same model?

A blogger Epiphany party

I love the internet.

This weekend I went to one of the most fun events I've been to in a long time: Melanie Bettinelli (The Wine-Dark Sea) and her husband Dom (Bettnet.com) were in town so they suggested a central Texas bloggers meetup. Literacy-chic (Words, Words), Hallie (Fruit), I and our spouses all descended on the house of our good friends the Darwins (DarwinCatholic) for a little Three Kings party (beg Literacy-chic to post her "king cake" recipe and the Darwins to post their Mexican hot chocolate recipe -- delicious). There were 13 kids (all but one under the age of six) and 12 adults. The Darwins are probably still cleaning up.

Sometimes I hear people musing about whether or not the internet is a good thing for Christianity. From my experience, the answer is definitely yes. First of all, I don't think I would even be Christian today without the freeflow of information on the internet -- "seek and ye shall find" is a whole lot easier with Google. And, for those of us who are converts, it's really difficult when you don't know anyone else who practices your new faith. I've mentioned before how much reading Catholic blogs helped me feel a part of Catholic culture, even when I didn't know a single practicing Catholic in my area. And now that I've actually met so many great people through blogging -- not just the group this weekend but some other good friends as well -- it's striking to see what a huge role the internet has played in my conversion process.

So, thank you to the Bettinellis for organizing and to the Darwins for hosting. It was the best Epiphany party I've ever been to in my life!*


* OK, it was the only Epiphany party I've ever been to in my life, so that's not a very high bar...but it was a wonderful time, and all of the bloggers there were actually as interesting in person as they seem on their blogs.

Admitting that I can't do it all...or even half of it

[This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here .]


One of my big goals for this new year is to finally get things under control, broadly speaking. Ever since I left the workforce about three years ago I've tried various Fly-Lady-inspired methods for getting organized and developing a routine to stay organized. I am a naturally scattered and lazy person, but I yearn to run my household with a lovely rhythm, knowing that every task has its place on the daily or weekly schedule, that it will all get done so long as I follow my routines.

Yet, in three years, that has not happened.

To give myself some credit, I've made great improvements. I'm more organized and do have more of a routine than when my first child was born. Yet I have never quite been able to conquer that nagging feeling of being a day late and a dollar short, so to speak. I have good days and even good weeks but, most of the time, I feel at least a little bit overwhelmed and out of control. The bills get paid on time, but it's always in a frantic rush at the last minute. The house stays somewhat orderly (emphasis on "somewhat"), but there are always tons of things on my to-do list that I never get to, leaving me with a vague sense of failure at the end of each day. My husband spends almost all of his time outside of work just helping out around the house, yet it's still not enough. I visit friends and have free time for myself, but it's always with the feeling that there are 1,000 other things I need to be doing.

I've been surprisingly good about letting go of anxiety by making the conscious choice to trust that God will work it all out if it's in his plan...yet I've been getting the sense that I'm not living up to my part of the bargain, that there's something different that I needed to be doing. But what?

After standing in a sea of new Christmas presents and suitcases full of clothes from an out-of-town trip and having a little "I NEVER HAVE TIME TO GET ANYTHING DONE AROUND HERE" freakout session last week, I picked up Holly Pierlot's A Mother's Rule of Life to re-read in a search for answers. As I flipped through the first few pages, something immediately jumped out at me: the Rule of Life for Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. In discussing what a Rule of Life is, she gives the example of the Missionaries' daily schedule:

Daily Schedule for the Missionaries of Charity

4:30-5:00 Rise and get cleaned up
5:00-6:30 Prayers and Mass
6:30-8:00 Breakfast and cleanup
8:00-12:30 Work for the poor

12:30-2:30 Lunch and rest
2:30-3:00 Spiritual reading and meditation
3:00-3:15 Tea break
3:15-4:30 Adoration
4:30-7:30 Work for the poor

7:30-9:00 Dinner and clean up
9:00-9:45 Night prayers
9:45 Bedtime

A few things immediately jumped out at me: the first thing I noticed was that the main goal of the Order, working for the poor, only took place between 8:00 - 12:30 and 4:30 - 7:30. The second was how long they allowed for meals and cleanup. The third was how much time they devoted to prayer. The fourth was how early they went to bed. And the final thing I noticed was the simplicity, the focus only on prayer and working for the poor. Just reading through the schedule made me feel peaceful. What a calm, lovely rhythm the Missionaries of Charity must have to their days.

I looked at this Rule over and over again, and it struck me how very different this schedule was from my own -- and not just because we have different vocations. Unlike my daily schedule, theirs spoke of focus; of calm trust that time with God is time well spent; of not trying to do everything all at once. They allow plenty of time for each activity, not trying to cram meals and cleanup into a small time slot, not staying up a few hours later to get more done. It occurred to me how very different their schedule would be if I'd created it for them:

Daily Schedule for the Missionaries of Charity...If I had created it

5:00-6:30 Prayers and Mass [no time on schedule for rise and clean up]
6:30-7:15 Breakfast and clean up [shorter time so that they can hurry up and get to work]
7:15-11:00 Work for the poor [more hours here]
11:00-12:30 Teach religious education classes to children [new activity]

12:30-1:30 Lunch and rest [shorter time so that they can hurry up and get to work]
1:30-3:00 Visit hospitals [new activity]
3:00-3:15 Tea break
3:15-7:30 Work for the poor [cutting out Adoration to get more done]

7:30-9:00 Dinner and clean up [shorter time so that they can hurry up and get to work]
9:00-10:00 Make Rosaries to give to the poor [new activity]
10:00-10:30 Night prayers* [shortened since, hey, nobody has that much time for prayer]
10:30-11:00 Spiritual reading
11:00 Bedtime*

* Night prayers would usually be skipped in order to finish up things that didn't get done during the day. In practice, bedtime would be more like 11:30 for the same reason.

Basically, I'd try to do it all: we wouldn't limit ourselves to working for the poor! We'd visit hospitals and make Rosaries and teach religious education to children and even squeeze in a few more hours of work for the poor; I'd cut out a lot of that prayer time to focus on more "practical" things; I'd squeeze in a few more hours of productivity by cutting down time allowed for meals, morning rising, etc....And the poor sisters would be frantically running all over creation, collapsing into bed at the end of each day feeling overworked and scattered, feeling rushed as soon as they woke up the next morning. They'd live in a state of feeling perpetually overwhelmed and behind...sort of like I do.

I decided to completely re-think my own schedule, and my approach to life.

Inspired by the beautiful simplicity of the Missionaries' daily schedule, I decided to rethink my own schedule with the single goal of creating harmony and peace in my household. Rather than looking at my list of things that "had to" get done around the house and seeing how I could squeeze them in, I first wrote out how long it takes to do the very basic things such as eating, dressing, baths, etc.; then, after I had allowed for realistic estimates of how shockingly long it takes to complete basic tasks with three kids ages three and under (e.g. 1.5 hours for each meal and cleanup), I set out to fill in the time I had leftover.

I turned to my husband for help. He suggested that I prioritize my list of household tasks that need to be done each day/week/month (including things like visiting friends and free time for me), and then we'd go through the list and write in each task where there was an open slot on the schedule. I brought my list over to the couch and started ticking off items. I had just gotten started when my husband interrupted me with, "That's all."

I paused to ask him what he meant. "That's all you can do in a given week. Look at your schedule, it's full. That's it."

No way. That couldn't be it. I had barely even gotten started reading my list! But he was right. When I looked at my schedule with the primary goal of creating a peaceful life and household, trying to emulate the focused simplicity of the Missionaries' schedule, I realized how very little I could realistically expect to do.

Of course I've always known that I can't do it all -- I'm a natural slob so it was no problem to accept the fact that my house is going to look nothing like Martha Stewart's. But I had never realized just how little I can really do in this phase of life. My goal when sitting down to create routines and schedules was always to "get things done," so I'd aim to squeeze in as much as possible. I would drastically underestimate how much time was needed for each task in an attempt to fit more in (I realize now that nothing takes "just five minutes" around here). When my goal changed to "bring peace to my household," it became glaringly obvious that obtaining peace was going to involve sacrificing a huge chunk of my to-do list; that I would have to give up not only on the idea of being able to do it all, but the idea that I can do much of anything other than just keep diapers changed and kids fed and the toys and dirty dishes put away and have some quality time with the kids and free time for myself.

I looked at all the things left on my list: vacuuming the upstairs, a second weekly grocery store trip, cleaning bathroom sinks, organizing the kids' clothes and shoes, regular dusting, a deep clean of the stove and oven, doing a big fridge and freezer cleanout (just to name a few) -- when were these things going to get done?! My husband pointed out that this phase of life is only temporary, that in the future we'll have older children to help. In the meantime, if we're to have a peaceful household, it will come at the expense of these tasks. They'll get done only sporadically, whenever he or I have some unexpected free time to tackle them, if at all. But there is simply no room for them on my standard schedule.

In some ways it's been difficult to come to terms with how little I can do. It's hard to believe that my to-do list for tomorrow has only "laundry" on it -- surely I can do more than that in a whole day! Yet when I picture doing laundry in a peaceful state -- unflustered by having to stop folding clothes for diaper changes, laughing along with my toddler as he very inefficiently attempts to separate lights and darks -- I realize that it requires a lot of time.

I realize now that at the root of my near-constant feelings of not getting enough done was only slightly due to laziness or disorganization: it was due mostly to having too much on my plate, to an unwillingness to take anything that I'd deemed "important" off of my to-do list, and to a reluctance to give up control. I wasn't willing to admit that I might be limited by inconvenient facts of life like, say, how many hours there are in a day.


Letting go of the majority of my household to-do list is actually just the tip of the iceberg of what I've realized I need to change about my daily life, but I'll save that for another post since this one is long enough. Luckily blogging made the cut of things to do during free time, so I'll undoubtedly be writing more about this subject as I attempt to make 2008 the first year that I (with my husband's help) turn my house into a home that is a calm, peaceful place to live.

Resources for someone who has hit rock bottom?

I just got a call saying that the estranged husband of a friend tried to commit suicide this week. It is only by some amazing "coincidences" that he didn't succeed. He's had a tough life and some bad decisions left his life in a really bad place recently. He was raised Catholic but hasn't been to church in years.

He's already getting some kind of counseling and his loved ones offering moral support, but one of his family members contacted me to ask if there is anything in terms of Catholic or other Christian resources that they could offer him. I get the impression that he may be open to turning things around but just doesn't know where to start.

Any thoughts would be appreciated, and please keep this man in your prayers.