Video: St. Nicholas

Here is my second video, dedicated to today's saint, St. Nicholas. Also check out my post on St. Nicholas from last year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK4fPXUbBsA&feature=youtu.be

Video: The Season of Advent

I am very pleased to announce my first ever YouTube video! It's on this beautiful season of Advent. More to come, enjoy!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ73CcMBg3s&feature=youtu.be

Divided We Fall

So. Donald Trump is our new president. Now what are we to do? I say, let’s all just take a deep breath. There are two extremes which trouble me that currently seem to be in vogue. The one that is getting the most attention is the protesting. Putting aside the violent outbreaks that have happened within these protests, let us simply take the protests themselves at face value. Let me begin by saying this: I understand. Really, I do. I understand the anger, I understand the fear, I understand the hurt. 

But here’s what I’m having a hard time with: the biggest “fruit” of this whole election has been one of division. Everywhere, division. Friends, families, communities, countries even. To which I can’t help but ask, “Is it really worth all that?” Are Trump and Clinton really worthy of all the discord we’ve suffered over them? I’d like to posit that what we need now as a country, and as citizens of that country, is unity. And on that note, I further can’t help but wonder what good comes from protesting an election that has already happened? To my mind, it serves no purpose but to continue the division, which is precisely what we don’t need right now. The cold, hard fact is that according to our method of voting, Donald Trump is the president-elect. We can move on and try to heal, or we can keep sowing seeds of division.

Having said all that, there is another camp, perhaps less obvious but very prevalent in the world of Catholic media, which celebrates the results of this election with a certain kind of triumphalism, as though we have all just won a great victory for the Pro-Life cause. Ummmmm.....really? Have we? At the very least, I think we need to wait and see. Now I certainly don’t want to mitigate the significance and weight of the abortion issue in this election, particularly for us as Catholics. However, I’m just not entirely sure that Donald Trump has presented himself in such a way that should make us as Catholics say, “Thank God, our hero has emerged victorious!”  Particularly in light of the fact that there are those who are genuinely shaken by the thought of Donald Trump as president. Again, it is a question of division versus unity. Which do we actually need?

Bottom-line: I feel as though there are two fundamental truths of which this election has made us lose sight. Number One: Hate is not good. I honestly feel as though this is something we have all forgotten, myself included. We hate Trump, we hate Clinton, we hate people who support one or the other. Wait, what? Why, in heaven’s name, is that necessary? Yes, this election was significant, and yes, we should care who the president is. But are we so attached to the world of politics that we allow hate to disrupt our daily lives? It is truly amazing how sensitive and even outraged we can be at another person’s hate and yet totally blind to our own. This is the point I’m trying to make about division. We don’t need hate; we don’t need division. And yes, even as I write this, I am painfully aware of how embarrassingly cliched this sounds, but the answer can only be love. Not the overly-sentimentalized version of love which just made you sick to your stomach when I used the word. The kind that is never trite or cliched. The kind that says, “I love you even when you don’t deserve it. Even when it hurts.” The kind of love with which Christ loves us.

Which brings me to Fundamental Truth Number Two: God is in charge. Worry, fear, anxiety-none of these are fruitful. This whole Chicken Little, “the world is over!”, type of mentality is not from God and does nothing for us as a country or a Church, not to mention our own peace of mind. Our faith is not in our politicians (thank God!). Our faith is in the God Who loves us even when we don’t deserve it, even when it hurts. I think this especially bears remembering in light of the feast of Christ the King of the Universe, which we have just celebrated. Donald Trump is only the President of the United States. Jesus Christ is King of the Universe. It’s all going to be okay.

Pax Vobiscum

Turn Me Over, I'm Done on This Side...

Well first of all, I really must apologize yet again for my gross negligence. I was inspired to emerge once again from my blog-guilt by today's saint, St. Lawrence.

St. Lawrence was one of the first deacons and was brutally martyred by being roasted alive. But this is why I love him: while he's being roasted, as legend has it, he taunted his torturers with the words, "Turn me over, I'm done on this side." WHILE HE'S BEING ROASTED ALIVE. You see what I'm saying? How can you not love this guy?

I dare say, I think we could use a good dose of the spirit of St. Lawrence in our own day and age. This type of in-your-face/do-your-worst/does-it-look-like-I-care? approach to suffering is something that could do us all good (myself foremost!).

I recently heard a talk by an exorcist in which he describes the ways in which certain demons affect certain generations. Previous generations knew what it was like to truly suffer, just to stay alive and earn a daily living. Nowadays, we are so embarrassingly spoiled that when our phone reception is bad, we think it's the end of the world. This type of habitual self-indulgence, so the exorcist says, makes it easier for us to move away from God. And moving away from God makes it easier for demons to move in.

The remedy? To embrace suffering and self-denial. This doesn't mean that we become masochists or go through life with rose-colored glasses, naively oblivious to the reality of pain and suffering. But only by uniting our suffering to that of Christ can we find any meaning or peace in it at all. I dare say there were probably many people who looked at this man dying on a cross and thought, "What a sad and pointless death." We can go through life approaching our own suffering in the same way. And that's when the suffering can overwhelm us.

But through His suffering and death, the entire world is saved and the joy of humanity is restored. It is only when we unite our suffering to His that we can find our own salvation from the suffering, our own joy from the pain. If we surrender our suffering to God, rather than run from it, it loses it's power. The more we try to control it or run from it, the more it rules us. No, its not going to magically go away as soon as you turn to Jesus. But you can still have peace despite the suffering. It can lose its grip on you, as indeed it had no grip at all over St. Lawrence.

So stop running from pain (or even mild discomfort). Jesus wants to meet you in your suffering, to remind you that you are never alone. So don't be afraid. Be like St. Lawrence. And when suffering comes your way, tell it to turn you over.

Pax Vobiscum

Holy Week

There is a reason way this entire week is called “Holy Week”. This is the week in which we walk with Our Lord through the absolute most important moments in His Life (and ours, for that matter). From the triumphant entrance of Christ on Palm Sunday, to the celebration of the Eucharist and the Priesthood on Holy Thursday, to the mournful solemnity of Good Friday, and finally to the glorious culmination of the most beautiful night of the entire year: the Easter Vigil, when we celebrate the victory of Christ over sin and death and the new life He has won for us.

This year, do no let this week go by unnoticed, for it is indeed the holiest of weeks. This is the week in which we enter into the most important mysteries of our faith. The whole reason why we are Catholic is that Christ has saved us from sin and death, the most crucial and most beautiful thing that anyone could ever do for us. This week is an opportunity not just to remember these mysteries, but even better, to enter into them with Christ, to walk with Christ Himself through His suffering, through His death, and finally through His triumph. 

That is why I cannot say enough to encourage everyone to take advantage of these beautiful celebrations, particularly if you have not experienced them before. Or even if you can’t, don’t just go through the week as usual, waiting for Easter Sunday to roll around like any other Sunday. Ask Jesus for the privilege of walking with Him through this time. Throw yourself into the beauty of our faith at it’s most dramatically pivotal moments. 

After all, there are 52 weeks in a year, but there is only one Holy Week.

Pax Vobiscum

On Prayer

During Lent, the Church calls to take up three traditional practices, all of which are mentioned in the Gospel for Ash Wednesday: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Today, I’d like to focus on prayer.

Too often we tend to think of prayer as a chore or obligation, and one that we are not particularly good at keeping. Like flossing. You know, like when you go to the dentist and he asks if you’ve been flossing and so you feel guilty for not flossing, which inspires you to be better at flossing, but unfortunately it only lasts about two days and then the incentive wears off? Sometimes prayer can feel like that too.

And yet at the same time, we tend to wonder where God is in our lives and why He doesn’t make Himself known more. But how can we encounter God in our lives if we never make time for Him? That’s like expecting someone, to whom we never even talk, to solve all of our life problems. Perhaps we would take prayer more seriously if we understood it for what it truly is: our own personal time with the One Who alone can speak the words we so desperately need to hear, Who alone can answer the deepest questions of our hearts. 

This Lent, may we try to see prayer not as one more item on our already over-crowded to-do list, but as the place we go to find strength and peace from our over-crowded to-do list. Not as another thing in our lives, but as the one thing our lives cannot be without. Basically, as something just a little more important than flossing...

Pax Vobiscum

Four-Letter Words That Begin with "L"...

I hate Lent. No, I’m serious. I really hate Lent. I hate Lent because it forces me to say “no” to myself. And that hurts. It really hurts. And I don’t like it.

And that, I’m afraid, is kind of the point. I don’t mean to say that the whole point of Lent is pure misery and suffering for the sake of misery and suffering, but the whole point of Lent is to re-direct our love back to Christ. What do we really love? I mean really. I don’t mean “to what do we pay lip-service because we know we have to?”.  I mean what do we really love? What are the things in life that make us say, “I can’t live without...”(fill in the blank). Lent is simply the time to re-examine that question, and to remove those things in our life that perhaps fight for our love, for the place in our life that only God is meant to have.

The Collect (the Opening Prayer) for Mass today (Ash Wednesday) says, "Grant, O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting this campaign of Christian service, so that, as we take up battle against spiritual evils, we may be armed with weapons of self-restraint." When was the last time we approached Lent as a "campaign of Christian service" or a "battle against spiritual evils"? Furthermore, how often do we think of self-restraint as a weapon with which to arm ourselves agains the Enemy? Yet that is the reality we live in. We live in a world at war, a war between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan. And the fight is over our hearts. Lent is a time to take that fight seriously and to exercise our spiritual muscles so that our allegiance to God is made all the stronger. And one of the greatest weapons we have is the ability to say "no" to ourselves, for that is exactly the opposite of Satan's strategy. 

Saying “Yes” to something (or Someone) means saying “no” to other things. Loving someone, truly loving them, means at some point saying “no” to ourselves. Loving Christ means saying “no” to ourselves. And that’s the part that hurts. But anything in life worth doing is almost always going to cost us something. Anyone worth the loving is worth the hurting. And that’s okay. Because we are made for more than just creature comforts and guilty pleasures. We are made for love, and not just love, but the highest love. The kind that can can only be found when Jesus is truly the one thing in our life that we can’t live without.

So you don’t have to love Lent. You just have to love Jesus.

Pax Vobiscum