At the beginning of this year, I committed to wrestling how to balance Godly anger (i.e., Jesus-and-the-money-changers) with detachment. I do not see how these coexist.
I spent a whole heck of a lot of time this summer pulling crabgrass and driving while listening to Fr. Richard Rohr’s 1993 (1992?) reflections on the Sermon on the Mount. This set of talks was mind blowing on several levels, but the thing that has really crystallized in recent weeks is this:
There are things that are genuinely, and permanently, and irreconcilably, in conflict with each other. And yet they are both 100% true, both of God.
For instance: we are called to rage at injustice in the world, to be angry with what makes God angry, to mourn what breaks God’s heart—to agitate and advocate for the Kingdom on earth—the thing we, incidentally, pray for every danged time we pray the Lord’s prayer. Jesus absolutely excoriated people who didn’t make their religious beliefs concrete. Matt. 25 and the cleansing of the temple are good examples, of course, but also think of Jesus ripping into the Pharisees for tying up heavy burdens, heavy to lift, and raising no finger to help. Clearly, to Jesus, the things of the world MATTER. Religion is totally bogus if it’s only in the head and heart. It must be lived, concretely, in the real world. (That’s the whole point of the Theology of the Body.)
Yet we are also called to remember that the only way to really follow Jesus is to bow out of the worldly system altogether. Jesus’ whole thing about the tax and Caesar was meant to say, “Quit freaking out about questions of taxation and authority. It is IRRELEVANT, because you don’t belong to this world. Who cares about the taxes?” No matter what happens here on earth, the end goal is Heaven, so what happens here… doesn’t matter?
It does matter… and it doesn’t.
It is the now-and-not-yet. The both/and.
This is what I have realized in recent weeks. I’m feeling tension because there IS tension. There’s SUPPOSED to be.
Now what do I do with this insight?
To be clear, that’s a rhetorical question. I suspect answering it will take the rest of my life.
You know that saying: whenever you point a finger at someone else, four fingers are pointing back at you? (Well, it’s really three, as you can see, but…)
I think about that a lot in the context of Intentional Catholic. Anything I write, integrity forces me to turn back on myself, mirror-like.
I’ve been struggling through the Bible in a Year podcast… valuing it for the sake of hearing Scripture in a way that helps me grasp the historical context, but struggling because sometimes the commentaries really set me off. The one on Matthew 25—which is sort of the whole foundation of Intentional Catholic–pretty much gave permission for people to say “I’m clothing my naked children and feeding my hungry family. I’m covered.” In fairness, I do not believe that’s what he intended to convey, but it certainly does give tacit permission to ignore the plight of ACTUAL poverty and suffering.
Which is not to belittle feeding and clothing a family. I am up to the tips of my frizzy curls in caring for kids. It’s a real thing.
But it doesn’t negate our responsibility to the poor, marginalized, and vulnerable. First of all because keeping our kids fed and clothed is only a sliver of what keeps us so busy. The vast majority of what keeps us hopping is not essential. We could ALL cut back on some of our luxury and busy-ness and refocus some of that energy on the poor, marginalized, and vulnerable.
But as I sat there stewing and fuming over this, it occurred to me that me sitting in my house writing blogs and social media posts is not clothing the naked and feeding the hungry, either.
Here’s the thing. The conventional wisdom is that not everyone is called to everything. We are supposed to find what we, individually, are called to.
But I am an Enneagram 1, which means I’m very concerned with Getting It Right. For myself AND for the larger world. Enneagram 1s are deeply susceptible to scrupulousness. (Scrupulosity?)
The trouble is, when I, as an Enneagram 1, try to parse out what I feel most passionate about, I can’t do it. It all matters!
I have a child with a disability. Our health care system of access & payment is deeply dysfunctional and a burden on families.
My conscience stings every time I see a homeless person at an exit ramp. How dare we drive by, avoiding eye contact to preserve our own comfort? How dare people on my “Nextdoor” app call them “zombies,” as if these are not human beings with the same innate dignity as themselves?
I see the chaos and suffering that causes people in Central America to flee for the U.S.—and the way some people here villainize those who are desperate for the same security we treat as a divine right. How can I not be passionate about refugee and immigration?
I have godchildren and family members whose skin color will make them a target when they grow up. How can I not rail against those who deny systemic racism?
I had infertility that the medical community wanted to treat by slapping bandaids on it (birth control, artificial procedures) while ignoring the problems that caused it. We have a family because an NFP doctor took the time to find the root cause (PCO + agricultural chemicals in the water—how can I not be passionate about the environment?). So when I see how abortion is the symptom of a host of other problems that are systemic in our culture, how can I fail to rage at those who want to address the symptom while ignoring the causes?
I don’t know what my “one” issue is, because dang it, they’re all equally important. Thank you very much, Enneagram 1. But I can’t do everything. For years, I’ve been trying to learn to respect my limits, to create healthy boundaries.
But sooner or later you have to say “yes,” too.
So for now, I am working a shift at the Food Bank into my schedule, and exploring volunteer possibilities with Refugee and Immigration Services. Because at least there’s a known entry point there.
I am not going to stop talking. But I’m going to start mixing more action in with it.
I want to talk about Dorothy Day and Communism. This was the original post I wanted to write about her, but I felt it needed to be prepared by the two I’ve already shared.
Dorothy Day’s stalwart both/and-ness—and the fact that she WAS a Communist before her conversion to Catholicism–gave her a unique perspective on communism, which of course was THE issue that shaped the world during much of her ministry.
And with all the talk of “socialism” today, it’s still relevant.
As I shared before, Dorothy Day believed in personal responsibility. She had no faith in changing things through the political process–she thought transformation could only come by changing hearts and minds. And she was worried about regulation because of the danger of fascism (she wrote strong words about it in the 1930s, in the era of Hitler, Mussolini, and FDR). Yet despite her antipathy, she DID speak up on political issues, and those words have deep resonance still today:
“I do not think, however, that we are guilty of envy or begrudging a rich man his wealth if we point out the abuses of the capitalist system which allows one man to accumulate the most of the world’s goods while other families suffer year after year, the aching pinch of poverty if not of actual destitution.” (All The Way To Heaven, Kindle edition, 86).
Stop and read that quote again. Let it sink in. Not a whole lot has changed since then, has it? In the past 40 years, since Reagan redefined for the entire country (left AND right) our fundamental approach to taxes and government, total wealth in the U.S. has grown by $77 trillion, but almost all of that went to the richest 10% and especially the richest 1%, while the poorest families among us are all but flat.
How can anyone deny that capitalism serves the rich, not the poor?
Here’s another quote.
“The Bishops of the Catholic Church have stated that many of the social aims of the Communists are Christian aims and should be worked for by Christians. We feel that Communism is gaining in this country, because Christian people do not protest against injustice as they do.” (Ibid., 95).
Communism gained BECAUSE Christians didn’t stand up against injustice. There’s a lesson in that for us in 2022, too.
One of the major messaging points of today’s conservative movement is that America needs to “return to its traditional Judeo-Christian values.” Or, “the Judeo-Christian values on which this nation was founded.”
I see the connection between modern conservatism and traditional Christian values on sexuality. But outside of that I don’t see much connection at all. In preparation for my letter to the bishops on the Eucharist, I read the entire Pentateuch. One of the things that struck me most profoundly was how the early nation of Israel dealt with issues of social security.
And unless I’ve profoundly misinterpreted, in proto-Israel, religion WAS government—until they rebelled against God and demanded a king. But in those early generations, there was a tithe whose express purpose was to support the livelihood of the priests and provide for the “widow and the orphan and the resident alien.” A nationwide tax, in other words, that everyone paid in order to take care of the most vulnerable among them.
Fast forward to early Christianity. In Acts of the Apostles, no one held any property in common; they all laid it at the feet of the Apostles and it was distributed according to need.
Was it really that easy? I have my doubts. People are people, after all. Still, that was the intended foundation of Christian society.
And, um… pretty sure we can all see that that’s the literal definition of communism.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. It is eminently clear that communism, and all its lingering forms of government (cough-cough-Putin-cough-cough), are unequivocally Bad News.
But anyone who legitimately wants to claim a desire to return to Judeo Christian principles is being intellectually and morally dishonest if they ignore the parts of Judeo-Christian history that don’t line up with their worldly values. Because values of low taxes and small government are not, in fact, Judeo Christian at all, but secular ones.
In her lifetime, Dorothy Day called out capitalism AND communism, because they’re both fundamentally in conflict with Christian world view.
Fires in the west. The slow and inevitable draining of the Colorado River. Floods in Mississippi and in Pakistan.
These are just a few of the effects of climate change in very recent history.
By now I think most of us recognize that human-caused climate change is not some made up thing. The frequency and severity of natural disasters are becoming so much worse, it’s hard to cling to denial anymore.
But the question is, what do we do about it?
Environmental stewardship has been a passion of my Christian life since my husband and I discovered that half of our long battle with infertility was caused by poor male fertility numbers stemming from diazanon, alachlor, and atrazine in the water supply. In case there are doubters here, we discovered this in backwards order. My husband encountered the study about the connection between low fertility numbers and these chemicals through his work as a science writer; then he went through testing and found he was the classic case; then we got a water filter and conceived within three months.
So I’m really tuned in to how we interact with creation. To be intentional about an area of faith means you have to examine how your actions do (or don’t) reflect what you think you believe. We wash and reuse plastic Ziploc bags. Watch the weather so we can pull the house temperature down to 65 on cool mornings and then close it up, thus minimizing the need for the air conditioner. Etc.
What makes me want to pull my hair out is the thoughtlessness surrounding creation that I see around me.
Every time I pull into Jazzercise, or Ace Hardware, or Target, or church, I see someone sitting in their car with the car running while they’re scrolling their phone. Every time. Sometimes I have even seen people get INTO their car, turn it on, and THEN pull their phones out. Why? It has nothing to do with the weather, because it happens in perfect weather as well as bad.
School pickup is even worse. People queue up beginning 25 minutes before school dismissal, and they will sit there running their cars the entire time. Not everyone—it’s improved over the years, thank God—but it’s still pretty bad. I used to go over to school after noon Jazzercise and wait until school let out—a deliberate choice, made to combine trips and reduce gas consumption. I’d bring my laptop and work remotely.
But every afternoon, when I pulled into a shady spot at 1:30 p.m., there was a guy in a huge white pickup truck who LEFT IT RUNNING FOR HOUR AND A HALF. This is a person who is ostensibly Catholic, a religion that values stewardship of creation.
None of these people are horrible human beings who care nothing for the earth and the life and health of future generations. Chances are, it’s just never occurred to people to examine what they’re doing. We are creatures of habit.
And yet the wellness and dignity of future generations—not to mention ourselves—is compromised by such ongoing and habitual abuse of the earth. How much carbon could we cut if we just turned off the cars when they don’t need to be running?
So this is my invitation for today. First, turn your car off! At long stoplights (you know where they are), while you’re at soccer practices or piano lessons, and above all when all you’re doing is checking your phone.
And second, to examine your days and routines for small but concrete ways you can show more reverence for creation through the way you use and interact with the things of the earth.
And feel free to share any of those here. I always like to get new ideas.
* All the photos in this post are pictures I took on my nature rambles in the last 6 weeks. This is the earth we are trying to protect, because it is how we live, and because look at the gift it is to us!
I woke up early on Sunday morning to the sound of a much-needed long, soaking rain. I laid in bed a long time, alternating prayers of gratitude with wrestling something that is probably going to get me in trouble.
Sunday, of course, was 9/11. At my parish on any national commemoration, it’s become tradition to sing America the Beautiful as a recessional. I’ve been in a leadership role in music for twenty-two years now, and in that time my feelings on this have gone back and forth multiple times. I’ve led the song PLENTY of times.
America the Beautiful is a beautiful song. It’s an aspirational song—in other words, it describes what America is meant to be.
But I’m not sure it belongs at Mass.
For a long time, the single phrase, “God mend thine every flaw” has saved it for me in a liturgical context. But Sunday morning, lying in bed, I thought:
We have a strong contingent of Americans who are systematically trying to erase America’s flaws from history books. They don’t think we need to know them. They think it’s unpatriotic to name America’s national sins… even though this same philosophy calls America to “get back to its Christian values,” which would include the reality that acknowledging our failures is intrinsic to the practice of Christianity.
In contemplative circles lately, I have been encountering the idea of holding conflicting ideas in tension. America has been a place of great freedom, innovation, and human achievement. It has also been, in the same places and the same times, a place of great oppression, injustice, and hedonism and the pursuit of money without concern for the good of others. (A modern example: Regulation is looked at as bad because people perceive it as stymying economic growth. By our national actions, then, we demonstrate that we believe money is more important than safety, health, and the dignity of human beings made in God’s image. Theology of the Body in action: it is through our bodies that we do–or don’t–make God’s image visible in the world.)
I love America the Beautiful. But I think when we tear up singing it, it’s not because of what America COULD be or SHOULD be, but because of a false sense that this is what America IS.
Christian life—for Catholics especially—is supposed to embrace the tension between what we aspire to be and the ways we fall short. We have penitential seasons. We are supposed to go to confession often.
But most of us don’t, and even those of us who do (full disclosure: I am not one of them, by default of busy-ness, and I recognize that’s just an excuse) don’t recognize the flaws in the way we view patriotism.
In recent years, a large segment of Christianity has wrapped up the cross in the flag. A lot of people have pursued, and more have justified, or at least winked at, some pretty heinous things in pursuit of that false worship. False, because God and patriotism are not the same thing. God comes first. Way, WAY before country.
There is no question that it is appropriate to sing America the Beautiful at patriotic events.
But at church?
Doesn’t singing America the Beautiful put things in the wrong order? Like, we put the nation in first place, highlighting its ideals and ignoring its failures, and then, as an afterthought, ask God to bless it?
I’m asking this as a legit question. I’m willing to listen to another perspective on this, for sure. Because of COURSE, it is totally appropriate to ask God to bless America. But what purpose does it serve to ignore the divided, toxic reality in which America exists right now and substitute an idealized version of America that never has really existed except in our hopes and prayers? Not a Godly one.
A lot of people died on 9/11. They deserve to be remembered. They deserve to be prayed for. They deserve to be remembered and prayed for at Mass. But America the Beautiful doesn’t do any of that. It shifts the focus away from the victims and substitutes rah-rah patriotism. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to sing, for instance, “On Eagle’s Wings” or “Be Not Afraid”?
If we want to show a proper priority of God and country, wouldn’t it be better to observe national holiday weekends with “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” or “This Is My Song, O God of All The Nations”?
Basically, we use America the Beautiful because it’s beloved on a secular level. We do it because of the “pastoral” judgment. But I’m not convinced it actually IS pastoral in impact.
As I said, I am willing to be convinced, but I ask that if you respond, please do so courteously and respectfully, and with prayer, as I prayed through the discernment of this post. I am putting this out there for respectful discussion in the spirit of Jesus Christ.
For the last several years, the concept of “feeling God’s love for you” has been swirling around my life and times.
First, it was because I was reading Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved in my small faith group. Some of my friends were wrestling with feelings of unworthiness. I could not identify with this. Certainly I have had moments—plenty of them—in which I am deeply aware of my failures. But to have a global sense of unworthiness is one cross I have not been asked to bear. (Yet, at least.)
At the same time, I didn’t feel “beloved,” either. Or IN love, for that matter, as so many people like to say. I have, in my lifetime, oscillated between jealousy of such a feeling and a jaded suspicion that such things are more for show than reality.
After Nouwen, I started doing contemplative/centering prayer, and Fr. Richard Rohr, as well as William Meninger, talk again and again about how it’s in the dark emptiness of centering prayer that you encounter and experience the love of God.
Well, I experience God’s presence, but I don’t feel anything that feels like love.
This theme keeps popping up, because I have an ongoing connection with the Center for Action & Contemplation, and every time it does, a little cognitive/spiritual dissonance comes up. Not troubling, exactly—just puzzling. Puzzle is a good word. It’s like a liturgical song text, when I’m working on it. I work on it for a while and then I have to walk away for a while, because I need some distance. And every so often I return to it to see if a fresh perspective has emerged.
Friday morning, I believe it might have done just that. I think.
I was out on one of my rambles, and I landed on an abandoned concrete bridge over a creek—one of my favorite spots to sit and be still, and sometimes to work. This particular morning it was a song text, in fact—one for Advent. I was scribbling in the dappled shade and I glanced up, and my whole consciousness lit up, because the transition between near-illegible scratches on a page and the sheer, heart-stopping beauty before me was so striking.
I set my pen down and said, “Thank you, God. This is You I’m seeing here. This is your gift to me.”
And this quiet thought whispered: This is how God loves me. This is what it feels like to be loved by God.
It doesn’t look or feel like what I assumed it would look or feel like, but it’s 100% me, and maybe that’s the point.
There once was a little girl who had a red dress she loved. It was a long red sundress and, for a farm girl in the 1980s, it was the closest thing to a princess dress she was ever going to get.
That little girl was me. And as an aside… my classmates in primary school pulled me aside and told me Santa wasn’t real, in the tone of: “I’m about to destroy your world.” I knew I had to play it cool, but I wasn’t really upset. I’d seen what the other girls got for Christmas compared to what I got, and it made way more sense to think that my parents, who’d just been through a devastating drought year followed by a devastating flood year, were the ones in charge of my Christmas, rather than thinking some benevolent fairy liked the other girls better. It made me feel better about the whole thing.
I shared that aside because unless you understand what it was like growing up on a farm in the 80s, there’s no way you can understand the importance of this red dress to me.
But at some point, my conscience twinged me. I saw those kids in Africa. I felt I was called to give this dress away to some girl who was much poorer than me. Because after all, we had cattle and hogs and chickens and a big garden I had to work for two hours every day all summer, and we never, EVER went hungry. I wasn’t comparing myself to the girls whose Christmas haul was so much bigger than mine. I was thinking of those who had it harder than I did.
So I wore the dress one last time and asked my mom to give it away. Years later I found it in a pile in the utility room, and I was pretty mad at her. Ha! Don’t you know how much that cost me??? As a mom I totally get it… that is called “I have four kids and too much to do and how do you send a dress to Africa, anyway?”
I tell this story because I’ve been thinking lately that maybe my daughter’s arrival really didn’t change everything for me, after all. Maybe it just forced me to face the misalignment between what I believed about living the faith–as a set of concrete actions taken in a concrete world–and how I was actually applying it.
A year or two after that Red Dress story, I was going to Confession—still pretty young—no older then ten—and I confessed to the priest, “I don’t FEEL anything about God.” I was really, really worried about this, worried about my soul.
The priest said to me, “If you see a guy with no coat and you FEEL bad for him, your FEELING does nothing at all for him. He needs a coat. It doesn’t matter if you FEEL compassion. It matters that you give him a coat.”
I walked out of that confessional feeling free and very empowered, because man, DOING things is within my control!
The question that invites reflection is this: what happened in between those two formative experiences and the arrival of my daughter to cause me to embrace a world view that blamed others for their mistakes and their bad luck alike, and refused to see that the systems under which we live are structurally skewed toward people like me and against others?
That’s a big question, and probably the answer is less important to you reading this than it is to answer similar questions for ourselves individually. But I thought I would share, because I am reading Eric Clayton’s Cannonball Moments, and the first question in that book is an invitation to reflect on the moments when we recognize the conflict between what we think we are, or want to be, and what we are living in our bodies. The first insight I gained was that when I was young, there wasn’t one. The misalignment he highlights, for me, happened later.
I’ve been listening to the Bible in a Year, and the long exploration of the prophets, where I am now, has been quite illuminating. First of all, I never really processed that a whole lot of the prophetic books don’t mean “Israel” as the nation of Israel, but the northern kingdom. It clarified for me that Judah is in fact what I spent most of my life thinking of as Israel. I just figured prophets were speaking to the whole nation of Israel all the time, but that’s not actually true. That’s why we hear so much about Judah. Not every prophet is speaking to everyone. They have specific crowds they are called to talk to, to address specific problems in those communities.
I have been wrestling with the idea of the prophetic call for quite some time. Priest, prophet, king: through baptism, we are all called to all these things. Prophets, by definition, have the task of saying what the considers-ourselves-religious crowd doesn’t want to hear, because it is inconvenient and uncomfortable. Occasionally they talk to the pagans (the unchurched), but mostly they’re talking to people who think they are God’s chosen and are not living it.
As I listen to Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Ezekiel et al rail against their various audiences, what strikes me is how blatant the idolatry seems. If people were burning incense and sacrificing children on mountains and building “gods” out of wood and gilding them with gold, that’s pretty flagrant!
And yet I feel that most of the charges being leveled against God’s people in ancient times still ring heartbreakingly true today. But our idols are more subtle. Money is a big one. I struggle with its influence in my own life and household. Politics is HUGE, and individual political figures & issues, in particular. Idolatry. No one who professes Christianity wants to acknowledge that, but I do not see how anyone could argue that I am wrong. I’ve never had anyone do so. When I point it out, they just pretend I didn’t say it and move on. If you can’t answer the charge, it seems to me, that’s an invitation to examine one’s conscience. It certainly has been in my life. That’s how I’ve ended up where I am.
The last few weeks, I have also been listening to Fr. Richard Rohr’s series of talks on the Sermon On the Mount. It was recorded shortly after the fall of Communism, and his references to Communism versus capitalism (isn’t it odd how we capitalize one, to demonize it, and not the other?) are startling both because they are so out of context and still so right on point, because 30-odd years later we, the Christian capitalists, are still arguing about communism.
This series of talks was really eye-opening. I highly recommend it. To break open what the Kingdom really is, and what it means to live in the Kingdom—to acknowledge how far off our so-called Christian culture is from what Jesus actually called us to do—to be challenged in our judgments both as liberals and conservatives… it’s a very Christ-centered, radical approach to the intersection of faith and the real world. It is giving me a lot to think about. I don’t have it worked out; I’m just beginning to process. In fact, I think I might go back to the beginning and start again. (FYI, it is on Hoopla for audio download, which is how I am listening, so check your library.)
So that’s what my spiritual life looks like at present. I’m not sure how valuable any of this is to anyone out there—I feel like effective blog posts are supposed to present a problem and solve it, and I’m more just faith sharing here—but who knows? There has to be some reason I felt compelled to write all out, right?
Last winter I wrote several posts about celiac disease and the Eucharist. I thought I’d share the letter I sent to Pope Francis and which, now, I am in the process of sending to the U.S. bishops. (Incidentally, this is not an easy task. You can’t email blast it, and you can’t get a list of addresses easy to toss into printable labels, either. I am handwriting every envelope.)
My sweet chromosomally-gifted girly-girl on her First Communion day, 6 years before we learned what wheat did to the inside of her digestive tract. 🙂
Dear Pope Francis and the bishops of the Catholic Church of the United States,
I am writing to you as a lifelong Catholic, formed and active in liturgical music ministry and committed to living and deepening my faith. I am writing to ask during this Synod on Synodality, that you and the bishops of the world reconsider the prohibition on gluten-free Communion hosts.
Last November, my teenage daughter, who has Down syndrome, was diagnosed with celiac disease.
As we began transitioning her to a gluten-free diet, I was astonished, and then angry, to discover that although gluten-free hosts are readily available, they have been specifically disallowed by canon law.
Online resources and priests I have talked to have told me that the reason gluten is “required” is because our sacraments must follow the form in which Jesus gave them to us.
However, the Gospels say nothing about wheat or gluten. Scripture says only that Jesus took bread and wine and said “do this in memory of me.”
There are many forms of bread, including those without gluten. In fact, as I searched online for Passover regulations, I found that, at least in modern times, Passover bread may be any one of five grains: wheat, spelt, rye, barley, or oats. Oats are gluten free.
Even if we accept the assumption that Jesus’ last supper bread was wheat, the wheat used today is not what he used. Modern varieties are vastly different. If we have to use what Jesus used, why aren’t we limited to a variety that at least existed at the time of the Last Supper?
The answer, of course, is that it is impractical. It would be an undue burden to insist upon using varieties that are no longer grown. Whatever kind of bread Jesus used, he used because it was what was practical in the place and time where he was.
The Church has already made this and other adaptations to what Jesus did at the Last Supper. Individual hosts, reduced to two ingredients only, have been declared the norm for Catholic liturgies. Substantial or “real” bread, such as Jesus would have shared with his disciples, is also impractical for use in large assemblies.
But if these adaptations to Jesus’ practice have already been made without jeopardizing the validity of the sacrament, the Church should be able to accommodate celiacs as well.
I appreciate the allowances made in the letter from then-Cardinal Ratzinger for extremely low-gluten hosts. I am aware that regulations also allow for a separate cup to be offered to those with celiac disease.
But when many places (especially post-pandemic) only offer the host, a cup-only solution serves to separate a person with celiac disease from all his or her fellow worshipers. It serves to divide, rather than unite, the Body of Christ.
If we truly believe that the Eucharist is the source and summit, and our spiritual food for the work of discipleship, then we should not be putting obstacles in the way of people receiving it.
This is why I am reaching out during this time of preparation for the National Eucharistic Congress in the U.S.—to ask the leaders of our Church to go back to the base assumption upon which the law concerning gluten is based. I beg you to consider: Is this really a necessary burden to impose?
I’ve been pretty quiet lately. First of all, this summer has been something like… I don’t know… imagine that a glitter bomb went off on your lawn and you HAD to pick up every individual piece of glitter. You wouldn’t have much mental space for, well, anything else.
That’s how I feel lately. But that’s not the whole reason I’ve been quiet. A few weeks ago, Claire Swinarski posted to Substack a piece called “Maybe Jesus Shouldn’t Be Your Job.” Intentional Catholic is definitely not a job. Let’s be frank: Barely anybody even reads this. I certainly don’t make money off it.
But a comment she made in that link really pierced my conscience. She said it’s way easier to write a lyrical, poetic spiritual blast that goes to 10,000 people* than it is to witness Jesus to your family, friends, and children. (*Liberally reworded.)
I thought: Ouch. That is SO true. And it is SO me.
And then I thought: Maybe I need to focus on witnessing Jesus to my children for a little while.
My youngest two children are in that stage of life where they pick at each other all.the.time. In the immediate wake of this revelation, I learned a new response to it. As things are escalating, I say to each of them, “Even now, even in this moment, you are called to be a follower of Jesus.” I need to work on how to make the line clearer. Subtlety is not a hallmark of teen and almost-tween boys. But it’s awkward simply to say that.
So that, in addition to “picking up glitter,” is where I have been lately. But I have laid out a few posts, so I should be back to semi-regular posting.
Intentional Catholic 