Brutally Honest

"I knew we had the perfect name for her - Isabella Rose"

Michelle at Catholic Sistas has put up a post that leaves one in wonder.  It's beautifully written and compelling and will leave you pondering:

I was 8 weeks pregnant when I took my 4 children and went on a trip to Iowa.  I was going to visit a friend at her house and then travel down to Kansas City, Missouri to visit my in-laws.  It was a long trip traveling from Georgia to Iowa but I felt up to the task.  I loaded our children, kissed my husband, and we headed off on first leg of our journey. Traveling alone with four children and being pregnant with the 5^thwas no easy task.  But, as we pulled into Billie Jo’s driveway I knew it was worth the effort.  We unloaded and settled in.

I can’t remember how long we had been there, perhaps only a day or two, but one evening I began to bleed.  I woke up Billie and told her I needed to go to the hospital.  She drove me there and after an exam the doctor handed me a plastic container and coldly said, “I can see tissue and I see blood, you are miscarrying.  Try to get us as much of the tissue as you can and bring it back to us.”  He also told me to stay off my feet for a couple days.  He left the room.  I cried.  Billie held my hand and cried with me.  She will never know how much her presence and love helped me.  She drove me back to her house and she tucked me into bed.

That night, crying alone, I got out my rosary and I began to pray.  I asked God to save my baby.  I pleaded that if He would let her live (and I only became convinced the baby was a girl as I was praying) that I would dedicate her to Him.  She was His and I would raise her for His glory.  In my desperation I asked God to send me a sign that she would be alright.  I asked that He send me one single rose.  I told no one of my prayer.

Several days had passed and I felt up to continuing on to Mike’s parents’ house in Kansas City.  Billie was worried and asked me to stay a little longer.  I assured her I would be ok.  We packed up and headed south to my in-laws.  I told them that I was supposed to stay off my feet because of the bleeding and probability of miscarrying the baby.  They were very helpful in making sure I could rest.  During my stay there I was scheduled to spend some time with my very best friend from high school.  She lived about 120 miles away and said she would drive to see me.  We had scheduled a day to go out to lunch.  She called and I told her what was going on.  She said she would come anyway and we could at least see each other.  My in-laws insisted that we still go out to lunch to have some quiet time to talk.

When Elizabeth rang the doorbell I got up to let her in.  As I opened the door I gasped.  I fought to keep the tears from trickling down my cheeks.  There my best friend stood with a single rose.  She said to me, “I know it seems weird for a girl to give a girl a rose but when I just kept hearing someone say, ‘Get her flowers’.  The ones I wanted were all gone but they had single roses.  I almost didn’t get one but something told me to get it.”  My heart skipped a beat and I told her thank you.  As we got in her car I told her that I had something to tell her.  Over lunch I relayed my entire story to her and told her that I had asked for a sign from God… a single rose.   I think she was as surprised as I was.  After lunch we went to her mother and told her what had happened too.  I knew from that moment my baby was going to live.

Don't stop there. The story doesn't stop there.  

Take a moment out of your busy-ness and read the rest.

Just do it.

You'll not regret it.

Mother Mary, pray for us.

Highs and lows in the Catholic Church

Anthony, a recent Southern Baptist seminiarian convert to Catholicism, has an interesting post up over at Devin Rose's place that ought to be read in its entirety.

Here he retells the ups and downs he's found in Catholicism in the last year:

When I was a freshman in college our Bible study leaders would gather us together at 7pm on Wednesdays and have us share “highs and lows” of the week. Here are my highs and lows in the Catholic Church over the last year.

High- Ecumenism. I still pray “off-the-cuff evangelical style,” read my Protestant ESV Bible, and have grown to appreciate men like Mark Driscoll and Lecrae for the clarity of their message and the courage to preach truth, especially to young men. I’ve stayed close to my evangelical friends too, and there is a mutual respect and trust between us.

Low- Cognitive dissonance. I was unprepared for the extent that basic Catholic truths would not be followed in the day-to-day life of the Catholic Church. It’s bizarre when church-going Catholics don’t consider Holy Days of Obligation obligatory, when virtually everyone in every Mass takes the Eucharist despite plain Catechism teaching against receiving when in mortal sin.

High- Pope Benedict and Pope Francis. What a blessing to live at the same time as these men. The papal conclave was a thrill and I have been pleasantly surprised by the positive reaction of so many non-Catholics to Francis.

Low- Media outreach. Discussions over whether to use social media, put homily audio/video online, or have a decent website are questions of the last decade. Pope Benedict has invited Christians to use the Internet for God’s glory, while still maintaining time for silence and reflection.

High- Mass. In a world where nothing is revered, where people tweet obscenities at the President and Pope, the Mass is a sanctuary of reverence, of focusing on Christ. The Mass is like a mustache—so counter-cultural it’s cool.

Low- Evangelism. It took me months before I could find a Catholic who sheepishly admitted we should want other people to be Catholic. The leaders have been talking about the New Evangelization for half a century, yet many look at their feet and quote something St. Francis never said.

High- The Catholic Church. For all of it’s weakness, the gates of Hell will not overcome the Church. I’m here because I love Jesus, and I believe this is where He wants me, taking in the fullness of the Christian faith.

I love these kinds of stories.

“Realizing that nuclear engineering would never satisfy the deepest desires of my heart, I began to discern a religious vocation”

Via Deacon Greg, one man's odd path to the Catholic Church and on to ordination:

The vocation stories of many priests begin with their families, where they were nurtured in the faith and early on considered that they, too, might stand at the altar someday.

Not Deacon Nathan Haverland. 

“I never thought about being a priest while I was growing up,” he said. “I didn’t know what a priest was.”

Both his mother and stepfather had been raised Catholic, but fell away from the faith early, so Deacon Haverland and his older sister didn’t have any religious upbringing. Sunday was just another day of the weekend.

Ah, but God cannot be denied.

French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every person, and it can never be filled by any created thing. It can only be filled by God, made known through Jesus Christ.”
Deacon Haverland was not immune to the pull of that vacuum.

“Everybody has that natural desire to know God, so I think I had that as well,” he said. “I remember asking and thinking questions about stuff like that, but I never had a means to learn.”

His path took a fateful turn when he decided to enroll in a small Catholic college in Atchison — Benedictine.
“They had a nice little physics and astronomy department, which is what I wanted to study,” said Deacon Haverland. “There are only two places in Kansas where you can study physics and astronomy. One was the University of Kansas, and the other was Benedictine.”

“I didn’t know anything about Benedictine, but I had a nice campus visit,” he continued. “I really liked their small department. It was a beautiful place, with beautiful people”

Deacon Haverland enrolled. But in the process of reaching for the stars, he discovered something better: theology. Theology courses were a required part of the college curriculum. 

Thanks to great teachers, he said, he began to learn about the Scriptures and  Christ. It all made sense. Gradually, his knowledge began to change him. He underwent a slow conversion of mind and heart.

“It was more of a gradual process, more than anything,” he said. “It wasn’t until after my sophomore year that I was having a conversation with someone, and I had to admit I wasn’t Catholic, and I was just kind of sad about it. That was the beginning of me starting to join the church.”

That summer, he resolved to enroll in a Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults class as soon as possible. That fall, he was walking down a hallway and saw a sign on the wall announcing RCIA classes.

“I took the sign down, ran back to my room and read it over a million times, and took that first leap of faith and tried the RCIA class,” he said.

He was a born-again Catholic at age 20, in his junior year of college.

After graduation from Benedictine in 2005 with a bachelor’s of science in astronomy and physics, Deacon Haverland went to the University of Michigan to study nuclear engineering.

“I began attending daily Mass at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish and started to get involved in the young adults group there,” he said.

“Realizing that nuclear engineering would never satisfy the deepest desires of my heart, I began to discern a religious vocation,” he continued. “The pastor at the time asked me if I would help start a men’s house of discernment and, with the help of the Knights of Columbus, [I] and three men began the Father McGivney House.”

There, he prayed, visited a spiritual director, and eventually visited various religious orders and seminaries. Although he wasn’t 100 percent certain, he decided to try the seminary — at least for a little while.

“Nobody in my family quite understood what was going on,” said Deacon Haverland. “They just wanted me to be happy, and they accepted it. Over the years, my family became very proud of me.”

Happily, one fruit of his vocation was that he inspired his mother to return to the practice of the Catholic faith. Sadly, she would not live to see him ordained. 

Deacon Haverland is looking forward to finally getting out of the classroom and getting on with his vocational mission. He looks forward to the joy of celebrating the Mass and being a spiritual father to others, and helping them to grow in the knowledge of the love of God, the way he had.

From a bachelor’s of science in astronomy and physics, to studying nuclear engineering, to being ordained a deacon and soon a priest.

Yea, faith in God is for the weak minded.

Gravity lessons

This, from Ben over at Two Catholic Men and a Blog, I found to be excellent:

Gravity pulls us down and we attune our life and safety around it. The law of gravity does not change regardless of our opinions of it or how well we understand it. It also does not change if [we] choose to ignore it. No matter what, it still keeps us stable on the ground. Living in harmony with the law of gravity allows us to live a joyful life. Disharmony with gravity will hurt us or even kill us. We really never break the law of gravity, it breaks us!!

I run through this pseudo dialog with the class between two fictitious people referring to our classroom window, up on the second floor:

Person A: If I jump out that window, I will fall UP.

Person B: No, you will fall down.

Person A: That may be true for you, but it is not true for me. I truly believe with all my heart that I will fall up; it’s what my conscience tells me.

Person B: I hear what you are saying, but there is something called gravity that is not controlled by your conscience, so when you jump out that window, you will fall down.

Person A: I know about gravity too and I can see that you are very closed-minded about gravity, thinking it goes only ONE way for EVERYONE. Gravity can move different people in different ways. 

Person B: I am open-minded. My mind is open to reality and if you jump out that window you willfall down.

Person A: You need to respect the beliefs of others. Not everyone sees gravity the way you do.

Person B: I do respect you, but you are wrong. Please do not jump out of that window and please do not lead others to jump out.

Person A: You had better change your “downward” way of thinking. You and your kind are on the wrong side of history about gravity and you are dragging down the rest of us.

Person B: Better to be on the wrong side of history than on the wrong side of reality.

It’s the same type of thing when we discuss God’s spiritual laws, which are inescapably linked to our faith and morals (and our joy). Whether it’s about respecting human life at the moment of conception to natural death or defining marriage as one man and one woman, God’s laws do not change regardless of human understanding or a lack thereof.

Another analogy the kids understand well revolves around sports. Let’s take basketball for instance; it has rules and officials. There are boundaries on the court as well. Does all this take the fun out of basketball? No, the rules, officials and boundaries make the game of basketball possible and make it exciting. Without them, no basketball player could ever fulfill his or her destiny as a basketball player. It’s the same with God's rules, God’s boundaries, and God’s officials (The Church). They make us free to find our destiny as human beings.

Spiritual laws are not meant to take the fun out of life; they are really laws of love and the boundaries are more like an embrace. The Good Shepherd tells us that if we live within these boundaries, He can protect us, guide us and love us; when we go outside of this embrace, He can't promise us these things. When we sin, we refuse God’s embrace in our life and then we wonder why we feel abandoned, depressed, prayers not answered, etc.....

Living within boundaries, meant not to constrain or limit us, but to free us and fill us with joy.

If only we had ears to hear.

Carry on.

"You do not have to be mad in a maddening world"

In what I believe to be one of the best pieces I've read in a very long time, Erick Erickson of RedState speaks, at a time when we all need to hear it, to hope in the darkness:

My life is not all peaches and roses. But I write this whole story and highlight the ups, not the downs, because I do not believe in coincidences. I do not believe in luck. I believe in an active Creator. I have experienced too much in my life to lead me to think this is all atoms and physics and chemistry and coincidence. I have experienced pain and misfortune and sadness, but as much as those things too define me it is the joys of life I dwell on.

There is a man upstairs. He has a plan. And while I do not know the mind of the Creator, I know this all works for the good of those who are called according to His purpose. I do not know His plan, but I have experienced enough in my life to know I should trust Him and that His plan, however confounding it may seem, is a good plan that will work out in the end for the best.

So I raise my head these last few days and see liberals salivating at the idea that it might be a right wing tea partier who blew up Boston while conservatives are convinced it is a Middle Eastern terrorist. I see the wailing and gnashing of teeth over gun control, the evil of Kermit Gosnell, and the politicization of everything. Then there is the destruction in Waco, the dead and injured — it is enough to make you want to sit in the mud while holding your child close and cry.

It should be hard to be optimistic, but I, a natural pessimist, I am optimistic. I have hope. I know that there is a higher purpose to it all. I know that there is not just the rudimentary day to day existence in which we live, but there is a master plan to it all. I know some of you do not believe that and you are entitled to reject that. But I have experienced too much in my life and see clearly in hindsight an active presence who leads me somewhere down a path I did not choose, but on which I walk.

Choosing to let your heart not be troubled is not easy. It is often hard. We see bombings in Boston, planes flying into tall buildings, random explosions killing many at one time in Texas, politicians and citizens at each others throats and it seems the whole world has gone mad. But the world has always been mad. We are just more aware of it these days with bold events that shock the conscience.

We are on a blue marble circling a giant ball of plasma that if we draw too close to we burn up as we and it hurtle around a black hole at the center of a galaxy scientists believe will one day collide with another galaxy. The world is a crappy, hostile place in a colder than ice dangerous expanse of vacuum, radiation, and sweet meteors of death. The thought that we exist as we do at all borders on absurdity.

And yet there is a one year old who, though she knows not why her father cries in the rain and mud, pats his face to tell him it is okay. There are strangers who, instead of running from the blast, turn to it to help those who have fallen. There is a President some of us care little for who chooses his words carefully to bind the wounds of dark days for all of us regardless of our votes.

The world is not meant to be fair. It is a maddening place filled with bad and evil. But the good shines through. The right overwhelms the wrong. The very real good slays the very real evil. The smiles break through the tears.

You do not have to be mad in a maddening world. You can choose to be happy. You can choose to be optimistic. You can choose to let not your heart be troubled.

You need to read the whole thing to understand the context, the back story.

You just do.

Then pass it on.

And carry on.

"The risk of allowing love is that we can use free will to hate"

Kathryn Jean Lopez is taking on the question many of us are asking, if only to ourselves - Why Does God Allow an Eight-Year-Old Boy to be Killed Waiting for His Dad at the Finish Line?

From a summary of a conversation on The Good Catholic Life, a Boston-area radio program yesterday:

God never wants evil to happen in the world. When a modern Cain kills his brother, God grieves. We can’t imagine what it’s like to lose one child like three families did yesterday. God lost three children. The only way to stop what happened yesterday was for God to eliminate human freedom. The risk of allowing love is that we can use free will to hate. Jesus changed even our suffering into opportunities for goodness.
He noted that God’s direct will is that every single one of us become a saint in heaven, but he permits things as a result of our freedom in order to prevent a greater evil. This is God’s permissive will. God will bring good out of this evil.

And how about this in response to evil? Work as hard or harder that those who work in law enforcement, medicine, and Homeland Security in the wake of the Boston marathon attack, taking up prayer as our weapons and armor. 

She's not quite done... finish with her.

The line that sticks out for me is the line I used in the title.  

We each have choices to make... do we love... or do we hate.

Of course, that choice requires an understanding of what love and hate are, and what they are not.

The world is quick to confuse the two.  

We are not, however, of this world.

We are called to do something that matters and it is my strong belief and opinion that Christ, through His body The Church, gives us the best guidance as to what that something is.

Carry on.

A meaningful National Anthem at TD Garden in Boston

This one damned near choked me up:

Good amongst the evil

The following image has gone viral, and rightly so:

And there were plenty of helpers:

First responders (Photo: Kylie Atwood/CBS News) twitter.com/pourmecoffee/s…

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) April 15, 2013

Reports of Marathon Runners that crossed finish line and continued to run to Mass General Hospital to give blood to victims #PrayforBoston

— NBC Sports Network (@NBCSN) April 15, 2013

More at the link... check them out, be filled with hope, be inspired to do and be good amongst the evil.

Father Emil Kapaun, a person you should know (UPDATED)

Hats off to the Washington Post for this one:

They are all in their 80s now — these former POWs during the Korean War.

One recalls in rapid-fire bursts how Father Emil Kapaun sneaked out of the barracks at night, risking his life to bring back morsels of food for his fellow prisoners.

Another remembers seeing the young American priest use a rock and a piece of metal to form a pan and then collect water to wash the hands and faces of the wounded.

A third chokes up when he tells of being injured and having an enemy soldier standing over him, rifle pointed; Kapaun walked up, pushed aside the muzzle and carried off the wounded man.

The military chaplain did not carry a gun or grenades. He did not storm hills or take beaches. He picked lice off of men too weak to do it themselves and stole grain from the Korean and Chinese guards who took the American soldiers as prisoners of war in late 1950.

Kapaun did not survive the prisoner camps, dying in Pyoktong in 1951. The man originally from tiny Pilsen, Kan., has been declared a “servant of God” — often a precursor to sainthood in the Catholic Church. And on Thursday, President Obama will posthumously award Kapaun a Medal of Honor. On hand will be Mike Dowe, 85; Robert Wood, 86; and Herbert Miller, 86.

“People had lost a great deal of their civility,” Wood says of life in the POW compound. “We were stacking the bodies outside where they were frozen like cordwood and here is this one man — in all of this chaos — who has kept . . . principles.”

Kapaun (pronounced Ka-PAWN) was so beloved that U.S. prisoners of war who knew him began calling for him to receive the military’s highest honor on the day they were released from their North Korean POW camp 60 years ago.

“The first prisoners out of that camp are carrying a wooden crucifix, and they tell the story at length,” says Roy Wenzel, a reporter at the Wichita Eagle who wrote an eight-part series and a book about Kapaun. “He was internationally famous and made the front page of newspapers.”

But Kapaun’s story soon faded from all but the memories of the men whom he served and the small church in rural Kansas that he had pastored.

“POWs come and tell stories of him,” said Father John Hotze, who serves in Wichita, an hour south of Kapaun’s home town. “They talked about how they would never have been able to survive had it not been for Father Kapaun, who gave them hope and the courage to live.”

In the heart of the battle

In the memories of his comrades, the chaplain is stuck in time, 34 years old and slight, with an angular chin that jutted out from the helmet he wore pushed down over his ears. At the sound of gunfire, GIs saw Kapaun heading in the direction of front-line troops in the 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry, on an old bicycle, his only form of transportation after his Jeep was lost.

He spoke with a Midwestern lilt and shared the lessons he learned on the 80-acre central Kansas farm where he was raised in a community of Czech immigrants. Family members recall a story Kapaun’s mother loved to tell involving her son, an old bonnet and a cow. It was usually her chore to milk the family’s only cow — but on this day it fell to young Emil. The cow kicked and fidgeted and wouldn’t let him get near. That is, until Emil went back into the farmhouse and put on one of his mother’s bonnets and a dress. He walked back to the barn, mimicking his mother’s walk. The cow obliged, and the chore got done.

Kapaun grew up to be a quiet man and was ordained a priest when he was 24.

Soon after the news broke in the summer of 1950 that North Korea had invaded the Republic of Korea, Kapaun was among the 300,000 U.S. servicemen called to war. He was initially sent to the fighting on the Pusan perimeter and marched north with the troops, celebrating Mass from the hood of his Jeep.

Two months after the war began, Kapaun was awarded a Bronze Star for running through enemy fire to drag wounded soldiers to safety. It was a brutal conflict with little information getting through to troops on the ground, some of whom did not know that the Chinese military had entered the war alongside North Korea.

“The Army was in terrible shape,” Wood said. “Our weapons didn’t work. Our men weren’t physically conditioned. We had malaria and dysentery. Father Kapaun was a constant example.”

On the front lines, the priest would “drop in a shallow hole beside a nervous rifleman, crack a joke or two, hand him a peach, say a little prayer with him and move on to the next hole,” Dowe recalled.

On Nov. 2, 1950, the 8th Cavalry was encircled by Chinese and North Korean troops at Unsan. The men had thought they would be home by Christmas. They did not have winter clothes, Wood said. Now they were prisoners.

On that day, Kapaun performed an act of heroism commemorated in a bronze sculpture that stands in front of the church in Pilsen. The other man in the statue, which depicts Kapaun helping a wounded soldier, is Herbert Miller.

Miller, a platoon leader, found himself standing under a small bridge in a dry creek encircled by enemy troops on a dark night.

“You could reach right out and touch them. The bullets was flying,” Miller recalled in an interview. “I moved 30 feet and I got hit with a hand grenade.”

The blast broke Miller’s ankle; he lay in the ditch until daylight, unable to escape. When he saw enemy troops coming up the nearby mountain, he tried to hide by pulling the body of a Korean soldier on top of him. But he was spotted and soon found himself being held at gunpoint.

“About that time, I saw this soldier coming across the road. He pushed that man’s rifle aside and he picked me up,” Miller said.

For a time, Kapaun carried Miller on his back.

That was the first time he met Kapaun. Both men began what would become known as the Tiger Death March, a trek of more than 80 miles to the North Korean POW camp.

Go read the rest.

You will not be disappointed.

UPDATE: I had forgotten that I had covered Fr. Kapaun's story about a year ago.  Check it out.

"Why is the whole world so moved by images of this embrace?"

The father of Dominic Gondreau writes of his son's encounter with Pope Francis:

“Small acts with great love,” Mother Teresa was fond of saying. Yesterday, Pope Francis bestowed an extraordinary Easter blessing upon my family when he performed such an act in embracing my son, Dominic, who has cerebral palsy. The embrace occurred when the Pope spied my son while touring the Square, packed with a quarter million pilgrims, in the “pope mobile” after Mass. This tender moment, an encounter of a modern Francis with a modern Dominic (as most know, tradition holds that St. Francis and St. Dominic enjoyed an historic encounter), moved not only my family (we were all moved to tears), not only those in the immediate vicinity (many of whom were also brought to tears by it), not only by thousands who were watching on the big screens in the Square, but by the entire world. Images of this embrace quickly went viral, and by Easter Sunday afternoon it was the lead picture on the Drudge Report, with the caption, “Change Hatred into Love” (a paraphrase of Pope Francis’ Urbi et Orbi message that followed shortly thereafter),

where it remains even as I write this. Fox News, NBC Nightly News, ABC Nightly News, and CNN all showed clips of it. Lead pictures of it were found in Le Figaro, the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, inter alia.

It is often difficult to try to express to people who do not have special needs children what kind of untold sacrifices are demanded of us each and every day. And as for Dominic, he has already shared in Christ’s Cross more than I have throughout my entire life multiplied a thousand times over. What is the purpose in all this, I ask? Furthermore, I often tend to see my relationship with Dominic in a one-sided manner. Yes, he suffers more than me, but it’s constantly ME who must help HIM. Which is how our culture often looks upon the disabled: as weak, needy individuals who depend so much upon others, and who contribute little, if anything, to those around them.

Pope Francis’ embrace of my son yesterday turns this logic completely on its head and, in its own small yet powerful way, shows once again how the wisdom of the Cross confounds human wisdom. 

Beautiful piece... and he's not quite done yet.

Finish with him.

Be changed.