Tiny Houses and God-Men

Wow, the Lenten season is almost upon us again. This year is already going by way too quickly.

For those of you who don't know, the season of Lent in the Catholic Church is a six-week trial-by-fire in the early springtime of heavy spiritual lifting (fasting, abstaining from meat, giving up our daily pleasures as sacrifices, praying.) It is a sort of boot camp for the soul, especially for those who will be baptized on Easter. In the end it becomes a time to scrap everything in your life that you really don't need, to dig until you find the real naked you underneath, to detach yourself from all that you thought important in order to rearrange your priorities. 

It is very cathartic, to say the least.

It is a season that begins with a reminder of death, when ashes are applied to the forehead with the words "Remember, man, that thou art dust, and to dust you shall return." It is also a season that nearly ends with a re-imagining of one of the most brutal kinds of deaths, being nailed with iron spikes through the hands and feet to a cross and left to asphyxiate/bleed to death. But in the very end, Lent is preparation for a miniature heaven, that of the remembrance of the resurrection from the dead of a man who was also God.

This year I think is going to host a very good Lent. My wife and I have already resolved on our own special sacrifices and my children are getting old enough to understand what is going on this time around. Also, on a more national level, our country is gearing up for what looks like a showdown between God and government, between the laws of men and the laws of the Almighty. It will separate the mediocre from the fervent, the true from the false. It will be a trial by fire.

But more importantly I think is the small, individual purifying struggles that will be the arbiter of the quality of this Lent. An example of this: I was recently inspired by secular sources on YouTube concerning the Tiny House movement, in which people realize that their big mortgage, big square-footage houses are not providing happiness and so downsize to very small homes. They in many ways unconsciously express the great truth of being poor in spirit, of being happy with fewer things, of ridding themselves of excess and unnecessary clutter. My wife and I have become inspired to do the same thing, but infused with a Christian sense of poverty of spirit, and it has yielded amazing results so far (we aren't nearly done yet...) Our tiny apartment seems so much larger now that we got rid of a few things and rearranged others and generally dealt with the mindless junk that we have kept for so long. It is freeing.

So next week, when Lent begins in earnest with that very long hungry Wednesday, be of good cheer. We are about to decompress and declutter for 2013. We are about to become more free, more ourselves, and more good, as long as we let the God-man in to do His work.

Photo by LemosaCorel, via Wikipedia.

There And Back Again

I'm back.

I will try to explain my absence as well as I possibly can. It could possibly be chalked up to being busy, which I have been. Life, job, other extracurricular activities that required my attention. Or it could be attributed to being sick, which I most certainly was around Christmas. Or having a new baby in the house, or any other of a thousand reasons.

But none of them would be quite completely true. Because they aren't the real, deep, underlying reason. The real reason is pretty simple. I suppose you could call it literary despair. Let me explain.

2012 had been a pretty eventful year, packed from one end to the other with intellectual, emotional, political, and religious happenings of every size and shape, from the HHS mandate to the Supreme Court's decision to uphold Obamacare. It was a year of a certain kind of hope, that maybe finally, the long four-year drudgery of Obama's presidency was finally reaching its end. That maybe the country would turn a corner, make a real change, demand a good leader. I hoped and prayed along with everyone else who hoped and prayed the same thing. I begged that God's will be done with America (a double-edged sword of a prayer, I know.)

I wrote to convince, I wrote to persuade, to possibly add a modicum of sense that had not existed in the argument before. I wrote from my heart about things I thought people should hear. I linked to other people's writings that were more eloquent than my own.

And then I allowed myself, to some degree, to get plowed under. Obama got reelected, bad policy became firmly cemented in place, the attacks on my religion and my church increased. The heavy hand of a faraway tyrant became more ever-present: on this New Year when my taxes went up, for the past couple weeks with all this asinine "discussion" concerning guns and gun control, the constant din of divisive and dangerous rhetoric from both sides of a dysfunctional government.

I honestly despaired that my writing had any effect whatsoever on the discussion, any purpose other than to occupy my time. I am a person who likes to see the results, and I was not seeing them. So I stopped.

And I realize that stopping was an enormous mistake on my part. For all honest dialogue, all honestly considered and honestly spoken thought, is worth hearing. Maybe I get things wrong, or nobody listens, or my words drown in the sea of other voices saying sort of the same thing as me. But it shouldn't matter. Because, as my wife so eloquently posted on the wall over my computer, "I am a writer, I will write." God gave me the gift of putting words together in a way that makes some amount of sense. You will be the judge of how much sense I make, I am sure. But I will be damned if I don't use that gift anyways, for my own benefit if not for yours too.

So my New Year's resolution, if I have one at all (I honestly hate New Year's resolutions) is to keep pouring out some part of my soul onto this corner of cyberspace and not worry so much about the concrete results it may or may not have. Because, if I speak truth, and I hope that I do more often than not, then it benefits somebody out there.

So as I like to say, Be Aware. And God bless. I promise to stick around. Will you?

The Church's Contraceptive Position Explained

I was fortunate enough to run across this article about the HHS mandate and the Church's teaching, fortunate in that not only was it written by a friend of mine, but the professor being interviewed was a professor of mine back in the day. His mind is as sharp as a tack and he handles this question with his usual wit. Enjoy!

Intellectual Aid

While we were still on the topic of the Department of Health and Human Services and its clash with the Catholic Church, I thought it might be helpful for anyone who doesn't know the Church's real position to read this article. It serves to help eliminate the rampant guesswork and slander being tossed about concerning the Church's real position on the mandate.

Tax Time and Religious Freedom

I apologize for the lapse in posting recently, I have been Doing My Taxes.

Drumroll, please... And I have finally finished them and all paperwork is out the door and to the IRS. Yay!

With that out of the way, I may actually be able to get something meaningful written and posted here in a day or two, especially continuing on the topic of distributism. Sorry to leave all of you hanging. But for the moment, I feel the need to report something about this news story circulating recently, about the new Health and Human Services mandate to Catholic institutions that they provide abortion and contraceptive services as part of their health care plans. It is important to understand that, whether you agree with the Church's position on reproductive matters or not, this decision is an opening for the administration to meddle with whatever religion and matter of conscience they choose. Even if you're not Catholic, you could still be next.

The Truth and Its Shadow

There is a funny line in the film The Trouble with Angels, where the generous donor of band uniforms to a Catholic girl's school is scolded by the mother superior for the immodesty of the uniforms' cut. The mother superior proclaims indignantly that she runs a Catholic school, to which the donor replies without even blinking, "Band uniforms are non-sectarian."

Besides the belly laugh I got out of the line, it actually got me to thinking. The word "Catholic" really only means one thing: universal. In its application to the Catholic Church, the word encompasses the universality of both its message, its scope, and most importantly, its truth.

The humor of the line for me comes from the oxymoron of the Catholic Church being a sect. A sect would suggest a splinter group, an organization possessing a certain truth, rather than all of the truth. A sect requires comparison to some other thing for its identity. The Catholic Church has no such need.

But I will let someone far more eloquent than I expound further on this topic, mainly because he has captured precisely what I have always thought but could never verbalize. This article is extraordinarily moving in its beautiful defense of the truth and in what way the truth must be understood.