Getting my life back

[This is a Part II to the post Putting Our Lives on Hold.]

This weekend will mark my fourth Mother's Day as a mom. It's stunning to think of how much things have changed since that first Mother's Day not that long ago. Three years and two more babies later, I see now that it was the crucible of motherhood that shattered the fragile life philosophy that I learned from the secular world, made me fearlessly seek truth and, ultimately, taught me the true meaning of life. Here are my reflections.


Back when my first child was born, I had a certain amount of angst about being the mother of a baby. It was odd. I loved my son dearly and saw the great importance of shaping another person's life...and yet, there was always this voice in the back of my mind that murmured, "What about my life?" Despite my tremendous love for my child, there was a part of me that felt like I'd hit the pause button on my life the day he was born. The full-time care that babies and toddlers require was so wearying, and I frequently commented to my husband that I couldn't wait until our youngest child went off to elementary school so that I could finally "get my life back!" I felt like there was always a carrot stick hanging in front of my nose, distracting me, promising the glory days to come when I would no longer have little ones around and I could finally get back to really living.

In my mind, the phase of life with babies and toddlers underfoot was drastically different than other phases of life. As I mentioned in my first post on the subject, I assumed that the only way to find fulfillment and meaning in life was to be self-focused. This was the default, the only way to live life to the fullest. Being the mother of little ones was a rare situation in which you were thrust into being temporarily other-focused, and was therefore something to just grit your teeth and endure until it was over and you could get back to the default.

After my second child was born in the midst of painful medical complications, life with little ones got even harder. You'd think that I would have found myself more desperate than ever to move on from this grueling time in my life, and yet, that didn't happen. This was around the time I had started to take a serious look at Christianity, and in the process of reading up on God and what he's revealed to us through his Word and his Church, I started to notice something interesting:

My life as a mother started to make a lot more sense when seen through the teachings of Christianity.

I've said many times before that reading the Christian explanation of why we are here, what we are to do and how we are to live was like reading an articulation of words that had been written on my heart all long -- and this was especially true when it came to motherhood. I increasingly found that my secular, godless worldview offered me no lexicon for describing what was so beautiful about motherhood, and why it was worth it; yet Christianity described it perfectly. I started to find some very interesting answers to that nagging question, "What about my life?"

Christianity was telling me that all those things I yearned for that fueled my self-focused pursuits -- happiness, excitement, security, youthfulness, joy, importance -- were actually yearnings for God, and that I'd never find peace until I sought him. At first that claim sounded crazy, even after I thought it was possible that God might exist. But when I took a hard look at my worldly pre-motherhood life and recalled the travel, the parties, the socializing, the trendy size 8 clothes -- all those things that were supposedly my "real life" that I was so anxious to get back to -- I started to realize something: none of those pursuits ever brought me lasting happiness. In my self-focused life without God there was certainly happiness and joy, yet it was fragile. There was always a feeling of restlessness, a never-ending search for the next big thing. I felt like I couldn't stay still too long, or the happiness might go away.

"OK, I'll bite," I thought after contemplating this for a while. "If I've somehow been groping around for God this whole time and won't be able to truly rest until I find him, how do I go about doing that?"

It was when I got the answer to that question that my entire life -- in particular my life as a mother -- finally made sense.

I discovered that the path to God is the path of agape, of self-giving love. When John wrote in Chapter 4 of his first Epistle, "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love," he wasn't talking about just any kind of love. I "loved" traveling and sleeping in on weekends and pretty much anything that involved me doing things for me without having to make sacrifices. But that's not the kind of love John was talking about. The kind of love that leads to God, that God is, is agape: self-emptying, other-focused, inconvenient, sometimes-painful love.

When I started to seek God by seeking agape, everything changed. For one thing, the carrot stick disappeared; that siren song of the self-focused glory days to come when I no longer had children in diapers was silenced, the tension gone. My life as a mom of little ones was no longer in such sharp contrast to my future life without young children: either way, I'd be serving others. I found that this was the meaning of life, the secret to lasting happiness, the hidden key that unlocked the mysteries of the spiritual realm that I'd spent my whole life trying to find.

And, ironically, after I came to embrace the idea of a life dedicated to agape, I actually ended up with more time for myself. Because in my secular mindset the other-focusedness of the childbearing years was a temporary situation that you would extricate yourself from as soon as possible, my mentality was to just hold my nose and plow through it. I would have thought that to further embrace selflessness would lead to mental and physical collapse! But what I realized, through Christianity, was that a life of agape is not a life of running yourself ragged. To truly serve God and others to the best of your ability is to humbly accept that you are only human, and that there are limits to what you can do. Using the Rules of Life of religious orders as examples (I once posted the daily schedule of the Missionaries of Charity here), I began to see that it was simply not optional that I regularly find time for rest and prayer. I saw that the other-focused life doesn't mean that you can never take a time for recreation and relaxation -- quite the opposite, in fact. It means that you must regularly take time for recreation and relaxation, but that you put these activities in their proper place, realizing that they're not the meaning of life.

After doing it backwards for so many years, it fit like a glove to live a life that was other-focused for the long term and self-focused in the short term.


As this fourth Mother's Day rolls around and I look at my life with three children in diapers, I find that it's a perfect encapsulation of the mystery of human existence, a testament to that most counterintuitive, most important of all truths: that it is only by going through the discomfort of becoming other-focused that we will find what we're really looking for. To paraphrase the Evangelist John, it is only by knowing agape that we will know God.

I've mentioned before that I'm particularly ill-suited for this job: I'm easily irritated, disorganized, sensitive to noise, introverted, and come from a background of being a spoiled only child where I never had to lift a finger around the house. My daily life is not usually what you would call "pleasurable," at least not in the same way as my pre-kid days. I would almost certainly have reported more days as being overall "fun" or "easy" back when I had a cool career than now. From a secular, self-focused worldview, my life should be worse now than it was before. But it's not. I wouldn't say that "my life is better now," as much as I would say that "my life has started now."

Through Christianity, I understand that that the tension I used to feel about my life as a mother was the tension of resisting God, of fearing that if I emptied myself of ego and selfishness that there'd be nothing there to fill me back up. I finally understand that the life of a mom of little ones is in such sharp contrast to the typical life in our godless, secular culture because it is inherently a life of self-giving love, of being close to God.

The lessons I've learned are objective truths about the human experience, applicable to everyone in every state of life, whether or not they have children. Yet, for me, it took motherhood to teach me these lessons. I am so hard-headed and was so entrenched in my old ways that it took the tidal wave of agape that could only come with a house full of babies to break down layer upon layer of selfishness encrusted with fear, and free me to seek the truth.

Through the beauty of motherhood, I think I now understand what it's all about. And I finally got my life back.

Putting our lives on hold

When I first started exploring Christianity, one of the teachings that was most surprising and counter-intuitive to me was the notion that we are called to live other-focused lives.

A product of secular culture, it seemed obvious to me that the way to find fulfillment and meaning in life was to be self-focused (not necessarily selfish, but self-focused). The way I used to see it, serving others was only one of a variety of good and worthy a person might choose to do with his or her free time. By default, you made your life goals based on pursuing personal interests and maximizing comfort; if possible, you would try to find some ways to give back to others, but to do so for any extended period of time would be to put your life on hold.

When I first heard that Christianity taught that our lives are not about ourselves and our own wants, that we are to look to serve God and others before serving ourselves, it was a radically different message than anything I'd ever heard...so radically different, in fact, that it sounded crazy. I resisted it. Wouldn't spending too much time focusing outside of ourselves lead to misery? How were we supposed to accomplish all our big goals and do all those fulfilling things we planned to do if we never optimized around our own desires and wants?

Yet, in the process of resisting this teaching, I began to take a second look at the self-focused philosophy I'd had all my life.

I began to realize that introspecting and focusing on my wants never brought me lasting peace, and that it didn't seem to work for anyone else either. I began to notice that as I started accomplishing some of those big goals that were going to bring me so much fulfillment...I didn't feel as fulfilled as I thought I would. I'd heard before that this Christian teaching about living to serve God and others was not the personal philosophy of the religion's founders, but an objective truth. I'd heard the claim that this, like all the other Christian teachings about moral law and how we are to live, was an articulation of the law that is written onto every human heart by our Creator, a statement of truth about what is best for each individual and for the world as a whole. When I first heard these claims they sounded like so much grandiose religious posturing. Yet more and more I realized that my way wasn't working, and I started to wonder if these Christians might be on to something.

I decided to give it a try. I'd make an effort to spend a whole lot less time searching for meaning and answers within myself, making all my plans for the day, the year, and the rest of my life based on what I felt like doing. Though I would set aside time for prayer and time to myself to recharge my batteries (as religious orders do in their rules of life), I would start to think of my purpose here on earth as nothing more than to serve God and others. Honestly, it kind of sounded like a recipe for misery. But I had learned over and over again that every time I thought I knew better than God and his Church...it turned out that I did not know better than God and his Church. So I gave it a shot.

Almost immediately, I began to see the power of this teaching.

Even with my halting, far-from-perfect efforts, things began to change. For one thing, ironically, I found that everything I sought by focusing on myself and my own needs -- peace, joy, fulfillment, direction, feelings of security about the future -- I began to find only after I stopped looking inward and started looking outward.

The biggest thing I noticed, however, was that to be other-focused is to create an economy of love. Every single time we set our gaze outside of ourselves seek to serve others, whether it's something overt like volunteering at a soup kitchen or something more subtle like simply saying a sincere, kind word to the checker at the grocery store, we add a little bit of love to the world. Through these actions there is more love in the spiritual economy than there was before. The other-focused life is, ultimately, a life of love.


I've been thinking about the power of this teaching a lot lately, noticing how differently I see the world now that I understand that serving God and others is not one of a variety of nice options we might pursue with our free time, but is actually our very purpose for existing.

All of my scattered thoughts on the subject were brought into relief the other day when I had a conversation with an immediate family member (whom I don't want to identify directly). He seemed depressed and uneasy about something, and when I asked him why he said it was about his retirement account. He's deeply distressed that he won't have enough money to afford anything other than a government-run nursing home in his old age. I reminded him that my husband and I would love for him to move in with us when it gets to the point that he doesn't feel comfortable living on his own. We weren't even talking about a situation where he might need intensive medical care, yet he flatly refused to even consider the notion.

"I would never do that to you," he said. "I would never have you put your life on hold like that."

We've had this conversation many times before, yet this time, the first since my conversion to Christianity, I was hit by just what a profoundly sad worldview this reflects. I've always wanted this family member to live with us when he can no longer live on his own, and he's always refused on the same grounds. That part is nothing new. Yet this time I saw clearly that the situation goes beyond an unfortunate refusal of help: it reflects a worldview in which well-meaning people like my relative believe that the best thing they can do for their loved-ones is to not burden them with their presence, where the very meaning of life has been twisted to suck love out of the world.

One of the logical results of the self-focused worldview that is so common in the secular world is that, if we assume that the best use of our lives is the unfettered pursuit of our personal goals and interests, we therefore don't want to get in the way of others doing the same. It creates a situation in which we're all constructing our own little self-sufficient desert islands, not wanting others to get in our way but also not wanting to get in others' way. It leads us to believe that if we were ever to lose our self-sufficiency, our presence would not just be an annoyance but would in fact prevent our loved-ones from fulfilling their very purpose in life.

When I compare my life with the self-focused worldview to my life with the other-focused worldview, the difference is striking. Not that I am anywhere near some saint-like level of always seeking to serve others before myself, but simply understanding that that is the goal, that my own life isn't about me, has changed everything. It's counter-intuitive, it requires sacrifice, and it isn't always the most comfortable path. But it is clear that, truly, this is how we were designed to live. After all these years of trying it my way, it's like I'm finally operating my life according to the instruction manual. And it is ultimately a manual for how to live a life of love, written by he who is Love itself.

Getting older...getting younger

My husband and I came across some old photos the other day. It was fun to take a trip down memory lane as we glanced through our pictures from a 2003 vacation, but I was surprisingly caught off guard when he made the passing comment, "We look a lot younger there!" We happened to be looking at a photo of me, and my initial reaction was to think:

I was younger there?

I did a quick double-take and noticed that I was indeed chronologically less old when I stood on that street in Prague. Yes, of course, what was I thinking? This photo was taken five years ago. I was not only younger, but also a few pounds lighter and more "carefree" with fewer responsibilities. And yet, the picture registered as if I were looking at a picture of an older, heavier, more burdened version of myself. How could it be, I wondered, that I could be five years older, fifteen pounds heavier, and have all the responsibilities of a wife and mother who just had her third baby in three years, yet look at this old picture and feel younger, lighter, and more free now than I did then? The one-word answer is this:

God.

Here's the longer answer:

Sometimes I come across old pictures that bring back memories of times of difficulty; usually, as was the case with our 2003 vacation photos, old pictures bring back memories of laughter and love and good friends and good times. But one universal feeling I have when I look at photos from more than a couple years ago, no matter whether they were taken in times of challenge or joy, is a sense that this picture was taken in the wilderness. It's a sense that, regardless of the actual location of the photo, I was standing in a no-man's-land of trouble and even danger; that, unbeknownst to me at the time, I was carrying burdens I didn't need to carry and wandering directionless across rough terrain when there was a marked path waiting for me. To the girl looking back at the camera, I feel like saying something like, "Hang in there."

In the past couple of years since the beginning of my conversion I've gotten a couple more wrinkles, some new gray hairs, and am starting to feel some aches and pains that weren't there before. Technically, I've gotten older. But I've also come to believe in God, and have begun to understand that my only purpose here is to know, love and serve him. And if to be younger is to be more full of life, more willing to love, less burdened by cares and worries, and somehow closer to the beginning of it all, then I am younger now than ever before.

AREWP Week 12: Refocusing

[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'll just come out and say it: last week was a disaster.

Between a teething seven-month-old, a teething 20-month-old, and disastrous setbacks with potty trainwreck training my three-year-old, it was a really rough week. I had not only fallen behind on laundry and other housework, but the stack of unopened mail on my desk seemed to be somehow breeding and growing larger by the hour, and every time I tried to catch up on email I just felt like crying and legally changing my name to Sisyphus. My husband was helping as much as he could, but it didn't seem to even make a dent in all that had to be done. I was so overwhelmed that I kept forgetting to observe my prayer times. I felt like I was drowning.

One of the emotions I felt most strongly throughout the flameout of last week was simply surprise. "How has this happened?" I kept wondering. Things had been going to amazingly well ever since I started praying the Liturgy of the Hours. I'd had other tough weeks since then where I didn't fall off track with prayer and maintained a sense of peace even throughout tough days. I kept wondering what had changed, what it was that derailed not only my prayer life but the wonderful sense of peace I'd found in daily life. After about the third or fourth time I forgot to pray one of the major hours because I was distracted by something else, I finally realized:

My mentality had totally, fundamentally changed.

For the first couple of months that I structured my days around the Liturgy of the Hours I never forgot to pray, because that was the purpose, the very center of my days. To give you some specific examples, here is a glimpse into my mentality throughout the past few months when thinking about what I needed to do the next day. Let's use examples from Thursday evenings, when, say, vacuuming the living room and mopping the kitchen floor were on my to-do list for the next day:

WEEK 1: "Tomorrow my goal is to serve God first and foremost. I will observe the universal prayer times of the Liturgy of the Hours -- even when it's not convenient for me or what I want to do -- and thus anchor my days with prayer. No matter what else happens, these prayers will get said. Hopefully the structure of having my days guided by set times of turning to God will help me accomplish the other things I'd like to get done, like vacuuming the living room and mopping the kitchen floor."

WEEK 8: "Tomorrow my goal is to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, but I really need to make sure I vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor too."

WEEK 10: "Tomorrow my goal is to vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor. Oh, yeah, and I need to remember to pray too."

WEEK 11: "Tomorrow my goal is to vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor."

I was so amazed at the practical benefits of having my days revolve around prayer that I slipped into the mentality of seeing those practical things as the end I was trying to achieve -- and it all fell apart.

The reason my house was so much more clean and orderly after I started praying the Liturgy of the Hours was not because I'd found a great organizational routine. It was because the way I approached daily life had fundamentally changed. Praying Lauds, Matins and Vespers at their scheduled times was a great exercise in obedience to God: it was never convenient to stop what I was doing and get out the prayer book. It always involved setting aside something else I felt like I should be doing. But in making these little sacrifices I was reminded, three times a day, that life is not about what I feel like doing, that I need to let go of what I want to get done and foster only a calm trust in God.

The grace and peace that entered my life after I started living this way set off a domino effect where everything else fell into place. The order that these prayer times brought to my days meant that housework fell into a gentle rhythm, and it was easy to fall into a routine without even having to think much about it. As I mentioned here, since my working hours were cut down to make more time for prayer, I had more energy to pick up the pace in the times that I did work. To my great delight, the result was a cleaner, more orderly house.

But then the temptation arose to take a shortcut: I loved having my household running so smoothly, so I began to elbow God aside and focus on that alone. As I showed in the example above, the thought process of "Tomorrow I will pray; and vacuum and sweep if it's God's will" drifted into "tomorrow I will vacuum and sweep; and pray if it's Jen's will."

This weekend I was reminded of a quote from Pope Benedict that I excerpted in greater detail in my first post about scheduling my days around prayer:

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.

[Excuse me for a moment while I go tattoo that on my forehead...OK, I'm back.]

At the end of last week I felt like everything was in shambles. I felt like there was no way I could ever catch up on all that I had to do and regain a sense of peace in my daily life. With a laser-like focus on all those important practical matters I needed to take care of, I sat on the couch with my head in my hands, feeling crushed under the weight of it all. I looked at all the notes scribbled on my to-do list, on the disaster area that was my living room, and thought, "I can't do this." And in that moment I realized: it's true. I can't. I can't do it all. I need to let go.

And when I did just that, when I set aside my to-do list and stopped asking myself "How can I get X, Y and Z tasks done tomorrow?" and started asking myself only, "How can I pray tomorrow?" I felt a weight lift from my shoulders, and knew that I was back on the path to peace.

My life on stained glass

Yesterday was only the third or fourth Easter since I came to believe in God. I sat in our church overwhelmed with the joy of someone for whom the Good News is still breaking news.

As I looked around the sanctuary, teeming with life and color, the stained glass windows kept catching my eye. The last time I'd seen them was at night, for the Good Friday service, and the way they now exploded with color in the sunlight made them look like something entirely different than the dark, muted windows I'd seen the night before. That contrast sparked the memory of something...I just couldn't put my finger on what it was.

When the choir began to sign the now-familiar Communion hymn, I became overwhelmed with gratitude on so many different levels; and as I wiped a tear out of my eye, I realized what was familiar to me about the dazzling windows:

Stained glass is designed for light. To look at a stained glass window in the dark is to miss the artist's intent. Its true beauty and full meaning cannot be understood without light pouring through it -- the more light, the better. Even someone beholding a stained glass window for the first time could see that it was crafted by a loving, intelligent hand, and that the artist's sole purpose for creating this object was for it to diffuse light.

My life before God, I realized, was like a stained glass window in the dark. Only now that I have found the Light in which it is meant to be viewed, only now that I understand that the very purpose of my existence is to let as much Light pour through it as possible, do I see it as it was designed to be seen. It is only when I allow Light to shine through the stained glass window of my life that can I see its true, glorious beauty.

Love and conversion

Growing up in the Bible Belt, I was frequently exposed to the expression "God is Love." I saw it on t-shirts, bumper stickers and the occasional Precious Moments figurine, and figured that I pretty much knew what it meant: it was a shorthand way of describing one of God's characteristics, i.e. "God (that Guy we believe in who's kind of like a dad, only nicer) is love (meaning he's really, really, really loving)." Right?

It is only recently that I realized that I had it wrong. One of the biggest lessons I learned in the conversion process, maybe the biggest lesson I learned in my life, was that the phrase "God is Love" is meant to be taken literally: God is love. God = Love. It's not just some characteristic, but his essence. To paraphrase the Cynical Christian's recent post on a similar subject, when we say "God is love," we're not describing what God is, we're describing what love is -- love is God.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, how this understanding of God and love played such a key role in my conversion. It brings light to three issues in particular that would sometimes perplex me as I walked the long path from atheism to belief:


1. It explains the importance of humility.

When I first began to explore the possibility of God's existence, I approached the endeavor the way one might approach proving that something in the material world exists: I put God under the microscope, so to speak, waiting with arms folded across my chest until proof of his existence was presented to me. Occasionally I would read something about the importance of humility, which I took to mean that one should be open to new data. So I'd make a mental note to make sure that I wasn't closing my mind to any sort of proof God might offer me, and promptly return to sitting and waiting with my arms folded across my chest.

This approach made sense since I thought I was seeking an abstract theoretical concept called "God," and saw myself as involved in a process that should require nothing on my part other than observation of data. Yet I couldn't seem to escape this concept of humility -- and the more I read, the more I realized that all these great Christian thinkers were talking about something much more than just admitting that you don't have all the answers. They were talking about embracing radical, self-abandoning humility. I didn't get it. Did these people have hang-ups or something? Why were they so determined to believe that you had to be humble yourself before you could seek God?

Now that I realize that I was seeking not an impersonal theoretical concept but love, Love itself, it makes sense. I won't get in over my head by trying to fully explain the Christian virtue of humility and get into all the reasons it's important; suffice it to say that I came to see a close connection between love and humility. Even in human relationships, I realized, one does not find love by starting with an overly skeptical, "prove it!" sort of attitude. Love is not something that can be dissected under a microscope; to find it requires emotional involvement on the part of the seeker, a willingness to investigate with the heart in addition to the coldly rational part of the mind. It requires a questioning mind, and a humble heart.

Which brings me to the next thing I realized...


2. It explains why it took me so long to "feel" God's presence.

As anyone who's glanced through the archives to this blog knows, I never used to "feel" God's presence. I eventually came to believe in his existence on an intellectual level, but was disappointed that I didn't feel much on an emotional level. It always seemed like I was talking to myself in prayer, and I often felt a bit jealous that other people seemed to "know" God in a way that I did not.

Part of that might have been due to the normal spiritual dryness that most people experience at some point or another, and part is surely because I'm not a very "touchy feely" type of person. But there was another factor as well, possibly the biggest factor: I didn't understand that God is Love. Once I realized that you could replace the word "God" with the word "Love" in almost any instance, the problem behind a lot of my spiritual struggles became clear. For example:

"I'm seeking God" = "I'm seeking Love"

"I want to experience God" = "I want to experience Love"

"I want to know God" = "I want to know Love"

When I considered the statements on the left side of the equations, each sounded like a nebulous, intellectually difficult endeavor that would require lots of passive contemplation from an armchair; but when I considered the statements on the right side, each sounded like an exciting, intriguing endeavor that would require the active participation of my mind, heart and soul. I might not have felt like I knew much about experiencing God, but I did know a thing or two about experiencing love: I knew that you don't fall in love by reading about it in books. You don't increase the amount of love in your life by sitting back and waiting for others to make the first move.

It was when I stopped asking "How does one experience God?" and started asking "How does one experience Love?" that I began to really feel God working in my life.


3. It explains why I now believe in God with all my heart.

In his conversion story, former atheist John C. Wright likened coming to know God to falling in love. He writes: "It was like falling in love. If you have not been in love, I cannot explain it. If you have, you will raise a glass with me in toast." I can't think of a better summary of what I've experienced.

Back when I wrote my original conversion story I talked a lot about how much more sense the world made to me after seeing it through the lens of Christian teaching. The profound changes I saw based on that understanding alone were enough to convince me that Christianity spoke the truth about God and the world. But in the year and a half since I typed that up, something else has happened as well: my life has been infiltrated by Love. A real, external, palpable force of love has entered my life, a distinct presence that wasn't there before. I don't mean that I just feel happy more often or that I try to be more loving towards others or that I think nice thoughts more than I used to (though all that is true), but that the very Source of those things is now involved, and it's not coming from within me.

I used to think I'd always have doubts about God's existence. I'd been too atheistic in my beliefs for too long, so it would be too much of a change to think in terms of the supernatural. What I didn't anticipate when I made that prediction, however, is that I would find Love. This Love that has ever so slowly become the center of my life is more powerful than anything I've ever known, and to doubt its existence would be to doubt reality.

I could have probably come to deep, unhesitating belief in God much sooner if I'd understood from the beginning that by seeking God, I was ultimately seeking Love.

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Just driving

Yesterday the kids and I were getting a bit stir crazy, so I packed everyone into the car to go for a drive. I do that every now and then just to get us out of the house and have a moment to clear my mind. As I drove, I restlessly flipped around the radio but couldn't find any talk shows or music that felt right. Finally, I looked down to see my favorite CD of the Rosary, and knew that that was exactly what I was meant to listen to.

I don't know whether it was the simple beauty of the violins in the background, or Fr. Groeschel's soothing voice, or just the fact that the children were calm and comfortable in their car seats, but as soon as the CD began to play I felt more relaxed than I had all week. And as I drove up and down neighborhood streets, saying the Rosary along with the CD, meditating on each of the mysteries of Christ's life, I began to feel overwhelmed with joy. The act of continuously repeating the simple Hail Mary prayer occupied the frantic, analytical part of my mind, freeing my soul to just wander and experience and feel. For once I was actually consumed with some small fraction of the profound awe and wonder that one should feel when contemplating the truths of Christianity: I felt indescribable appreciation for having any kind of contact with the Creator of the universe, for his death on our behalf, for the opportunity for our eternal souls to rest in the place of perfect joy and goodness, for the fact that God loves our children and our friends and family even more than we do.

The only fitting term to describe how I felt would be "spiritual ecstasy." Yet the irony was not lost on me that I was doing one of the most mundane things a person could possibly do: just driving a beat up old minivan around the empty streets of suburbia. What could be more boring, more lame? And yet, an act that to the outside world would seem to be the height of banality, led to the kind of thrilling joy that humans spend their whole lives searching for.

I think that that moment was a perfect encapsulation of the magnificence of Christian life: for the Christian, there is never an excuse for boredom or mundanity, because more excitement and wonder and beauty than we could possibly comprehend are always right there in front of us, accessible by nothing more than prayerful consideration of the truths of our faith. Once you've discovered God, the heights of human experience are no longer reserved for fleeting moments upon mountaintops or momentous historical occasions, but can be had any time or any place, even when you're just driving.

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One beautiful dream

Ever since I discovered the story of St. Frances of Rome (via Adoro te Devote) I have felt more drawn to her than to almost any other saint. Probably the best adjective that most people would use to describe her life is unfair. From early childhood she desired nothing more than to be a nun, yet when she was 13 her parents had her married to a wealthy nobleman. She was quiet and introverted, yet her in-laws expected her to be vigorously involved in the proper social circles. She lived in a rough time where upheavals within the Church and plague ravaged her city. She often found herself surrounded by friends or relatives who didn't understand her or even ridiculed her. Her home was looted and members of her household staff were tortured and killed. Not one but two of her beloved children died.

And yet, even in those dark days of suffering and strife and death, she showed Christ to the world. The more difficult things got, the more she turned to God. Through her passionate faith and selfless dedication to others, God was able to work in her life, and eventually in the lives of many people who knew her.

I highly recommend that you read the whole summary of her life, but I wanted to share one little gem that brings a tear to my eye every time I think of it. Though her marriage was arranged and originally unwanted on her part, Frances was a devoted wife. After more than 35 years of marriage her husband became ill, and she nursed him as his time on earth drew near an end. He spoke to her on his deathbed, and his last words before dying were:

I feel as if my whole life has been one beautiful dream of purest happiness. God has given me so much in your love.

Whenever I hear people talk about concepts like "success" and "achievement," I often think of that quote. For those of us who are married, what better goal, what more worthy achievement could there be than to have our spouses feel that way at the end of their lives?

I originally thought of finding God as a dry intellectual pursuit, a mere question to be answered. One of the many profound surprises I've encountered on this journey, however, is that Christianity is about so much more than having the right answers or attaining accurate knowledge about the concept of God; the Christian life well-lived is a life of love. And, as we see from the life of St. Frances, even during the darkest times, even when the world outside seems to be falling apart at the seams, God can still work through each of us to make our lives and the lives of those around us "one beautiful dream."

St. Frances of Rome, pray for us.

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The domestic monastery

A kind reader just sent me this article, saying that it might have some food for thought for my ongoing quest to bring peace to my daily life. It was so good I had to share it. An excerpt:

What is a monastery? A monastery is not so much a place set apart for monks and nuns as it is a place set apart (period). It is also a place to learn the value of powerlessness and a place to learn that time is not ours, but God's...Certain vocations offer the same kind of opportunity for contemplation. They too provide a desert for reflection.

For example, the mother who stays home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world. Her existence is definitely monastic. Her tasks and preoccupations remove her from the centres of power and social importance. And she feels it. Moreover her sustained contact with young children (the mildest of the mild) gives her a privileged opportunity to be in harmony with the mild, that is, to attune herself to the powerlessness rather than to the powerful.

Read the whole thing.

Comments closed for Lent | Cross-posted to my links blog

Why I love Lent

This weekend I heard a guy on television talking about Tom Brady's amazing life: he's a handsome guy and star NFL quarterback who was on track to have an undefeated season (this was before the game, obviously), not to mention the fact that he's dating the beautiful Victoria's Secret model Giselle. The guy on television talked about how unfathomably amazing Brady's life would be if the Patriots won the Super Bowl. He stared in wonder for a moment as he reflected on this concept. You could practically see the wheels in his mind turning as he pictured walking off the football field from an undefeated season in the NFL, feeling the rain of confetti, hearing the cheers of screaming fans, heading off to spend the evening with his hot celebrity model girlfriend. Clearly, this scenario represented the very pinnacle of the human experience for this man.

Being too tired to do anything more mentally productive, I took a moment to try to think of what my version of a big Super Bowl win would be. I thought back to the days when my life revolved around pursuing things like status and money and comfort, and thought about what it would have been like if I'd achieved more success in that area than I could have ever dreamed.

One result of this thought exercise is that I realized that my dreams were really nerdy (the best I could come up with was imagining my picture on the cover of Forbes where it was announced that Google and Microsoft were in a ruthless public bidding war over some amazing software I wrote). The most interesting result, though, was that I knew exactly how I would have felt if I had achieved all of my worldly ambitions: excited, prideful, honored...and a little bit depressed.

I'd forgotten about this until now, but up until a few years ago, almost every time something exciting or good happened I would feel a tinge of depression. No matter how great or exciting the situation, for some reason I could never quite feel fully happy about it. Just as my happiness would be about to reach a crescendo, something would make it fall flat, like when a singer just barely misses the high note. I didn't generally struggle with depression in this time in my life; it was just that for some odd reason whenever something particularly good occurred, it would trigger a vague sensation of despair somewhere deep down inside. I didn't understand why this happened, but my best guess was that maybe I had some problem with not feeling like I deserved good things, or that I had some issue with depression that I wasn't acknowledging.

Though those two things may have been factors, I don't think they were at the root of the problem. Thinking back on it today, it's clear that something else, a very real, inconvenient truth was there in the back of my mind when I got that promotion, deposited the big paycheck, bought the cool car, moved into the downtown loft, got that amazing Christmas present, traveled to the interesting places, went to the hip parties, landed a big client: this is as good as it gets...but it's not quite good enough.

The fun wasn't fun enough, the luxuries weren't luxurious enough, the excitement wasn't exciting enough to completely smother out that part of my soul that begged for something more. It wasn't that I wasn't grateful -- to the contrary, I regularly felt overwhelmed with gratitude for all the wonderful things in my life -- it's that there was a subtle but present sense of despair that these things weren't doing what they were supposed to do. I was kind of happy. But why wasn't I fully happy, why wasn't I completely at peace, why was I still a little bit restless, even when I technically had it all?

Christians used to ask in wonder about my life as an atheist, "Don't you feel like there's something missing?" To which I would respond by rolling my eyes. In my worldview, the only things humans could possibly need or want were the goals that our species had evolved to need and want, and as long as I had those things or felt certain that I could attain them (which I did), nothing could be missing from my life. I continued to pursue happiness from the possibilities given to me by the material world alone. At some point I came to the realization that the best the world has to offer was probably never going to be good enough; that achieving my wildest dreams , even my own personal version of a Super Bowl win, would make me happy to a certain extent...but not fully. It was a bitter realization.

This is why I love Lent.

For me, Lent is a reminder that what I once thought was the worst news in the world -- that there is nothing in the material universe that was going to bring me the deep happiness I craved -- is actually the best news in the world. To give up worldly pleasures during Lent, things that I once built my life around pursuing, is to put them in their proper place; to disentangle my hopes and dreams from things and fleeting accomplishments; to set my sights much higher.

Lent reminds me to have a healthy amount of awe for one of the greatest mysteries ever seen: that the human animal, who should know of nothing other than the material world at hand, has from the beginning held on to this perplexing notion that what he needs and wants cannot be found in the only world he's ever seen. Almost every culture throughout history, separated by time and space, has come up with this idea. I always wrote that off when I was an atheist, assuming that people just needed stories about fantasy worlds to make themselves feel better. But now that I have discovered God's existence, I get it. This idea won't die because the thirst we feel deep in our souls is real, and the material world offers us only saltwater to quench it. Looking outside the material world, finding God, is to finally find the pure water that fully satisfies the aching thirst.

Lent reminds me not that all the status and comforts and possessions I've pursued are necessarily bad, but that there is Something infinitely better. To quote C.S. Lewis: "All that we call human history -- money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery -- [is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."

I wish you all a blessed and fruitful Lent.


Thanks to A Great Deception for that Lewis quote.

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.

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 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 wor