List of Best Posts

Just a quick note today to point out the new feature in the side bar. It's the list of "Best Posts." I've seen similar lists on other blogs and thought I'd give it a try. What do you think? Should different posts be on the lists, or did I choose well?

Prayer for the dead

As I drove home from work today I took a slightly different route than ususal. This route took me past a couple of cemeteries. There were two, one on either side of the road. One was a Catholic cemetery and the other was not. I made the sign of the cross as I approached them and as I drove past each section of each cemetery I extended my hand in prayer and said a Hail Mary for the repose of the souls that had belonged to the bodies in all the graves that I was passing. A Hail Mary is a short prayer so it goes very quickly, I had time to say four before I was pass each cemetery. I concluded with a Glory Be to the Father as I drove away.

One of the many aspect of the Catholic faith that I love is our communion with the Church Triumphant and the Church Suffering, souls in Heaven and souls in Purgatory. Those who have left this early life in friendship of Christ remain in our friendship as well, if we too are Christ's friends. As a Protestant, I believed that there was no point in praying for those who passed away. When someone died, I would pray for the bereaved family and friends the had left behind, but the deceased was beyond our Realm of influence.

Catholics know better. Death does not separate from God those who inherit eternal life, nor does it seperate from the Church her members. I love that we can pray for those who have passed from this life in order to assist them as they complete their sanctification to enter into the fullness of life eternal. To pray for them is a blessing, for it reminds us of our mortality and the need to pursue holiness in this life. The prayers we receive from them once they have, when they are Saints, are a blessing beyond all measure.

Catholics who read this, say a Hail Mary or an Our Father for the souls in Purgatory... or both.

God is love.

I still haven’t worked full time for very long now, but I have been working full time long enough that I live for the weekends. Every week is a count down, 5-4-3-2-1 weekend! Most weekends fly by and I end them exhausted and dissatisfied. I ask myself, “where did the time go?”

I tend to jam-pack my weekends. There are things I want to do, places I want go, and people I want to see. I’m a people-person, so the people I want to see tend to be the top priority. My girlfriend is at the top of my list usually, followed by my roommates, other guy friends, my family lives in another town so I don’t see them that often, and my “old friends” I find hard to catch up with most of the time.

Each week, I usually feel torn between all the different people I want to see and spend time with.

This past weekend was totally different.

Alison and I have been making a concerted effort the last few months not to obsessively spend all our time together, so it was really nice this weekend to be able to spend more time together again but not feel as if we were neglecting our other friends.

We had a wonderful, enjoyable weekend that was very relaxing. Despite the fact that we went to a parish mission and an out of town party Friday, had dinner and a game night with another couple Saturday, attended a nearly 2 hour long Mass, went to an out of town group lunch, and then spent several hours in a store on Sunday.

We still took time to relax and just enjoy one another’s company. We retained our focus that we were going to share the weekend together all the way through, and things were just great.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it makes me think of how our life with the Lord should be. He should be our top priority, our focus should be on Him. We shouldn’t be divided in our attention or affections. If we purposefully share our whole lives with Him and take the time to enjoy His presence, things go much more smoothly and pleasantly, especially when there’s a lot to do.

I find that I always understand our life with God so much more easily when I compare it to loving relationships. After all, God is love.

Refuge In His Presence

“God is our refuge and our strength, an ever-present help in distress.” Psalm 46:1

For several days, the people of southeast Michigan had been warned: a big snowstorm would hit us in the arly morning hours on the Friday before Christmas. We were to expect 6-10 inches of snow to fall in less than half a day. Thursday night I parked my car so I wouldn’t have to back it up in the morning, and I set my alarm clock for extra early.

Sure enough, when I got up at 6am there were several inches of snow on the ground and the snow was coming down faster and faster each minute. I had to go to work, I couldn’t call off. My job involves helping save the lives of the elderly each day, I had to be there.

Suddenly, I felt keenly the fact that I had been putting off going to confession all week long. By “felt very keenly,” I mean I shed some tears and said an act of contrition and begged God to consider it good enough should I not be able to ever make it to reconciliation again. Then I bundled up and went and clear the snow off my little, old ‘92 Saturn.

My front-wheel drive car pulled out of the snow no problem, thankfully. The real problem was that my car’s windshield was covered with moisture because it wasn’t warm enough yet for the heater to take care of it. I had very little visibility. Thankfully, after a little while, the heater was going enough to clear the windshield. In the meantime, I kept wiping my windows off with a glove I had placed on the handle end of my ice scraper - the long arm helped get the whole windshield and the front side windows wiped off. Once the heat cleared up the windows things were a bit better, but still, the conditions were harrowing as I made my way to the highway, but not impossible.

Even though I didn’t have the greatest car for winter, I’m a pretty decent driver. I went 25mph and concentrated very closely to the 3 feet of road in front of my car that my bright-headlights managed to reveal to be totally snowy white. Anything further away was completely dark other than the taillights of the next car in front of me. I think there was usually just barely a car length between me and the ever-so-dim set of taillights ahead.

The snow started coming down faster and faster and I said a few Hail Marys for safety. Suddenly my car swerved to the left of onto the shoulder. I called out “Hail Mary,” tried to stop skidding, and laid on my horn hoping that the cars behind me wouldn’t hit me. Miraculously they didn’t. I also somehow managed to have my car pointing to the right, towards the road, even though I had swung left off of it.

Glad to be pointing in the right directions, I turned on my flashers and stepped on the gas and tried to get on the road again. My car didn’t move. After briefly fearing I would be stuck there for hours, I asked Jesus to help me and floored it. My car moved about half an inch and then stopped. Then about three cars whipped past me just a few inshes away. Over the next several minutes, I floored it whenever a sizable gap between sets of oncoming headlights appeared. After quite a few times of moving no more than an inch, I managed to get back on the road.

After that I drove even more cautiously. My experience earlier and the increasingly bleak and difficult conditions on the road were nerve wracking. I kept praying, but the whole “hour of our death” part of the Hail Mary was a bit unnerving at the time (remember I needed to go to confession). Eventually I decided the highway was too bad and that I should give the surface streets a try. I began looking for an exit-ramp and couldn’t find one. I wasn’t sure I’d see one even if I went passed it. The roads were very, very bad at this point. Much too bad for someone in a small front-wheel drive car with only a couple of winters of driving under his belt.

Honestly, I was very scared at this point because the roads were so terrible and I couldn’t find a way off the highway. I began to cry pretty hard and begged Jesus to help me find an exit. Then a sign for the Beck Road exit appeared and I gratefully tried to desperately figure out where the exit veered away from the right lane of the highway. I was still unsure if I was on the exit ramp yet or not when my car again spun sideats to the left. Miraculously, it stopped and that’s when I realized I was indeed on the exit ramp. I didn’t even think about it at the time, but I now realize that I spun around on an exit ramp but didn’t spin off of it. I was very fortunate.

I made my way onto Beck Road and headed south on it. The conditions were very slightly better on the surface streets. Sort of how the conditions were slightly better on the Titanic than on the Lusitania because it took a couple of hours to go down rather than 18 minutes. I realized, as I crawled down Beck Road towrds N. Territorial, that I was very close to Our Lady of Good Counsel (OLGC) Catholic Church, a large parish that I had visited a few times before. I knew that OLGC had 2 weekday morning masses each day, and that the first one was quite early. I thanked God that Catholic churches are almost always open, and went to OLGC where I could park and go inside.

Inside OLGC, I immediately bumped into the one parishioner there I know, a friend’s father, who happened to be there still after the early mass, about to leave himself. He told me that the Blessed Sacrament was exposed for Adoration in the sanctuary, like every morning. I called work and told them I wasn’t going to try to make it again until after it got light outside, and then I went and slipped into a pew and gratefully sat in my Savior’s presence, thanking Him for safelty bringing me there before Him.

After it got light outside and Jesus assured me I would be okay I went out and got on the road again. It being light outside made a huge difference and I made it to work safely, albeit very slowly, and very lately. I am very thankful to Jesus for keeping me safe, and I also have to chuckle a bit about how obvious He made it that He was watching out for me by making my place of refuge that morning be in His Eucharistic Presence.

I’m also going to Confession in the morning.

Conversion: it messes with your head.

My friends say I'm a little obsessed with my identity as a convert to Catholicism, they might be right. What do you think? Consider this:

Last night I had a dream that I had to go to the Pentecostal church I used to attend for some sort of religious service. For some reason, I had to go, it was for some sort of milestone event that somehow effected my status in the (Catholic) Church. All my closest Catholic friends were there with me, but they had to sit somewhere else, I had to sit in a different area. I was rather uncomfortable, I didn't really want to be there.

Then I spotted my friend Paul sitting in a pew a few aisles behind me by himself. I was elated to see him, because he is a a seminarian currently spending a semester in Rome, and I hadn't seen him in some time. We made eye contact, and then I went to greet him, but after I made it through the crowd he was gone and I was very disappointed, I even went out to the vestibule looking for him, but he was no where to be seen.

Also in the dream they had communion, which was strange because my Pentecostal church very rarely had communion, apparently I can no longer really even dream of a church service without communion. What was stranger yet was that everyone processed forward, Catholic-style, to receive their wafer; which wasn't how we did communion, once again, apparently my dreams no longer conceive of another way.

I remember that in my dream I was horrified that some of my Catholic friends went forward to receive the Pentecostal communion wafers. I was unable to reach them to stop them before they had received, I was unable to tell them that it is gravely sinful to take communion outside of the Catholic Church until after they had done it. The friends in my dream (no one specific, they were just "good Catholic friends") were not well catechized, so they hadn't known.

So what's the verdict? Crazy obsessive Catholic-convert?

Disgusted

I just want to say that I am disgusted by how I take for granted the abundance of wealth that I enjoy as a young lower-income modern American.

I was putting away laundry today and I did some quick counting: I own 44 shirts that I store on hangers in my closet. This is not counting the shirts I own that I keep folded in dresser drawers, T-shirts and undershirts mostly. I don't want to know what the total is when I count those, at least not today, it's too much to handle all at once. It's enough to realize that I own 44 shirts that I consider too nice to get wrinkled by folding them to store them. I own 15 long-sleeved button-up shirts alone, and I consider myself more of a polo-shirt guy.

To add insult to injury, when I moved last May, I made a serious effort to reduce the amount of clothes I own. I tossed or donated several large bags of clothes then.

Part of why I realized this today is because I hate putting away my laundry. I am terrible about it. It often sits in laundry baskets, not even folded, for day after day after I wash it, getting horribly wrinkled, because I don't want to put it away. I realized that part of my problem (beyond my laziness) is that I have too many clothes - and yet I really don't think that I have a ton of them. My half of the closet is not especially large, and is by no means bursting.

It's unbelieveable. Not too many years ago in this country, and in much of the world still today, a large family probably wouldn't have owned as many shirts as I do.

Reverence and romance

I cannot emphasize enough how important I find it to pray regularly with my girlfriend. Without fail, whenever we go too many days without praying together, we have an argument. Usually the arguments are about little things, but because we're both more sensitive people, they seem very big to us, and can be very painful.

Also without fail, whenever we pray together after having had such an argument, it dramatically heals our relationship. It is truly miraculous, in my opinion, how consistent this pattern seems to be. You would think that we would learn and not let very many - if any - days pass without praying together, though.

I particularly enjoy "affectionate prayer," with my girlfriend. Meaning simply that we sit close, hold hand, or I put my arm around her, or we are in a hugging position more or less. As Catholics we know that posture sends a spiritual message, that's why it's so important when we celebrate the Mass. Kneeling with clasped hands is good, but it's not the only way to go.

I find that a "affectionate" prayer posture is really good for my girlfriend and I. The spiritual message it sends, in my opinion, is that we are comfortable bring God fully into our relationship with each other, and that we are comfortable bring each other into our relationship with God. It also send the message that we want our emotional and physical intimacy to reflect our spiritual intimacy, and vice versa. Obviously, this "intimacy," in all its forms, needs to be kept appropriate to our state in life (not married) - and it is.

I also find it important that we be ourselves, spiritually speaking, in prayer. We are both devout Catholics, of course, but we have different backgrounds and different dominant spiritualities. I'm a convert, and she's a cradle-Catholic who has always had a strong faith. My beliefs are much more in my head, wheareas hers are more so in her heart (which I tremendously admire). Also, I'm charismatic, and more conservatively traditional than she is.

It's an interesting mix, but it works well for us because we both have the same foundation of Catholic orthodoxy, have a similar level of committment to our faith, and respect the difference of the other person.

It's a bit hard to describe how it is that we let one another be ourselves spiritually together, The only example I can really think of is that she is okay when I want to pray in tongues. Indeed, she encourages me to do so with her because she knows that when I don't, there's a good chance I'm not really entering more deeply into prayer. I guess the chief way I support her is not presuring her to become who and what I am spiritually. There are other things, but they are either hard to put in to words, or are a touch too private for the internet.

This post has become a bit wider in scope than I originally anticipated, but I'll go for it.

Attending Mass together regularly is extremely important for us. This may be a better example of my supporting her in who she is. Most weeks, I would probably prefer to attend Mass at the nearby charismatic parish, whreas my girlfriend would rather attend Mass at our student parish at our university - and that's where we go most weeks. Sometimes I go to the other parish, and she does go with me many of those times, though sometimes I go by myself.

We are also both leaders in a student Bible study group at our student parish, and there are tons of opportunities for spiritual growth in that. Leading together can be a challenge at times, we usually don't directly lead together one-on-one, but sometimes we do. I really think that we have improved in our ability to lead together as time has gone by, and can imagine our team-leading in some parish ministry or lay apostolate someday, perhaps a religious education class for children, or an informal adult bible study group or something.

Anyways, it's great to have a relationship with a girl that is part of my relationship with Jesus, and vice versa. Prayer is absolutely key though, I cannot emphasize that enough.