Persecution Can Lead to Joy

I'm feeling validated today. Several websites I follow are finally starting to post articles about the abuse of the First amendment and persecution of the Catholic and Christian faiths.  They waited until the puss was oozing out of the sore to talk about it, but at least the USCCB via the leadership of Archbishop Dolan, and the bishops in Illinois are finally starting to fight back.  Checkout Our Sunday Visitor for a brief review.  Of course they speak of persecution as just starting.  Talk about having a head in the sand.

Nobody likes to whine, and nobody wants to argue the slippery slope.  But you see, thoughts become words, words become actions...  When I think, "Hey, consenting adults can do what they want,"  what I'm saying is that actions don't have consequences.  That is obviously a false statement. 

If I say, "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,"  I'm failing to see the imminent threat.   This is why oppressors will claim that expressing our religious beliefs is hate speech.  Bullying programs now focus on acceptance of GLBTG agenda.  People have been bullied for a long time.  Are you a bully if you tell a lesbian parent that painting her son's toenails pink is a bad thing to do?  (www.foxnews.com)

How do we combat persecution?  One, pray. Two, call it what it is.  Three, be joyful in faith, and expect others believe as well.  I've spoken before about the inherent discrimination that is encourage by the separatist thinking of diversity trainers and multicultural enthusiasts.  Their primary goal seems to be to tell Catholics and Christians to shut up and take it.  Even Catholic University is being sued by Muslim students who expect to be given a Christ-free place to pray.  On a Catholic campus.  With Catholic in the name of the school.  If they wanted a Christ-free place to worship, perhaps they should not have chosen a Catholic school.

Since I teach at a state run university, I used to be silent and kind of apologetic about my beliefs.  Now, in conversations with my students, I will make natural references to my life, and sometimes these include a reference to something religious.  For example, when a student asked how my weekend was, I said, " There's this beautiful little girl named Molly who colored a picture for me during Mass on Sunday.  Here, I have it in my purse."

This is not an in your face defense of religion.  It is simply a statement that it is a part of my life, and gives me joy. My students know I'm a baby stalker.  (That's what my son calls me.)  I see a baby, and I am immediately on a mission to get that child to give me a smile.  I have the same mission with the young adults I teach.  I want them to smile.  I want them to laugh.  I don't want them sitting in my class trying to figure out what my agenda is.  I want them to know I accept them, warts and all, and pray for their well-being.

I can do all of that with out checking my faith at the door. In fact, I do it better when I don't check my faith at the door. Pope Benedict XVI once said, "Each of us is the result of a thought of God.  Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary."  Sometimes when faced with a troubled student, or a difficult colleague, I may ask God, "What were you thinking?" But they are probably asking the same question about me.

I accept them, but I don't want to celebrate their warts.  We are all fallen creatures, but legislating and protecting and glorifying sin only hurts the sinner.  So I intend to be joyful in this time of persecution.  I will love the sinner and hate the sin.  God willing, and with God's help.

A Slow and Steady Apocalypse

I have friends and relatives who think that the world is facing a minor chastisement by God.  In the course of this minor chastisement, at least a third of the world's population will disappear.  I know that many people would be bothered that 1/3 of the population dying would be considered a 'minor' chastisement.  But for these believers, it is significantly fewer people than, say, were killed when Noah and his family were the only survivors.

The who, what, and where of such punishment is the subject of news stories and private blogs all over the place.  So is the why.  We will be punished for failing to follow God's word, for a lack of faith, for tinkering with life to preserve the breath of those who are ready to die, and killing those who are ready to breathe.  We will be punished for our pettiness in dealing with others.  We will be punished for thinking about our hatred of others, rather than our love of neighbor, and our need for mercy.  We will be punished, and should be for all of the above, as well as our sins of omission.  I see a man or woman walking down the street, carrying groceries, children, or simply struggling to walk, and I keep driving with my empty minivan, because, you know, they could hurt me.  My lack of care for my fellow man is at the center for why I will be punished.  I deserve it.  I can take it.

It's the HOW of this that is my center of speculation.  Sometimes I read blogs and articles that seem to reflect a notion that the coming chastisement, which I do not doubt is coming, will come in some big way.  Comets will crash to earth.  Earthquakes will devour rivers and mountains and whole populations.  Storms will get wild and kill willy-nilly.  Fire, floods, hail, plagues...

It seems to me more likely that God will try to show us, in his mercy, that our punishments will be consummate with our crimes.  We didn't fall into sin over night.  We will descend into our punishment with an equal pace.  ---Disclaimer:  I am no prophet.  I am simply talking about what I believe, knowing God in His mercy will give us as much time as possible to turn ourselves toward Him.

My last post was about parish festivals and paranoia, but it was also about an expectation of vain self-centeredness.  If you, like me, have always been a bit preoccupied with how white your teeth are, how tan you skin is, how perfect your hair color, how skillfully applied your make-up, then you know that the perfect punishment would be the slowly apparent inability to counteract the aging process.  You may even find that the remedies you've used to preserve youth will accelerate your aging.  Wouldn't that be a perfect punishment?

What if you have always allowed abortion to continue through omission?  What if you never spoke up when you encountered a friend or colleague who was about to have an abortion?  What if you were a politician who voted for abortion rights, while being 'personally pro-life'?  Your slow, quiet, legislative support would be matched by what kind of punishment?  Maybe you would simply find yourself sterile.  Maybe you would have no grandchildren.  Maybe you would be lied to about your culpability in the culture of death as you blithely assumed you were being saved by the prayers and counseling of a priest who wanted to use your influence, rather than save your immortal soul.

I think we are in the midst of a slow drip of chastisement.  We didn't get here with 50,000,000 babies killed in a single nuclear attack.  We got here with one woman at a time choosing to quietly go to a clinic and convince herself that the baby didn't really exist yet, and her finances were inadequate to raise the child anyway.  It's been a slow drip of sin.  It will be a slow drip of punishment.

We are seeing it now.  Good faithful people are finding themselves infertile.  Because they are strong, prayerful, and faithful believers, God steers them to adopt the children who would be otherwise killed.  In this respect, God's mercy is both painful and healing.

Maybe that is what we can expect.  God's mercy will be painful and healing.  Kind of like when you get a bad burn, you will hurt for a while.  It may even hurt to the point that you can't imagine being able to tolerate the pain much longer.  In the end, you will survive the pain, live with the scars, and know that you shouldn't play with fire.

Can't Stop the Rant

If you don't want to share a dark moment, don't read this post.

My candidate of choice for president, Thaddeus McCotter,  pulled out this week.  And he endorsed ROMNEY.  Blech. I put my yard sign away.

A student in my university class gave a great Christian witness in his first speech, and it was received well.  Then for the second speech, a different student will be speaking on how to conjure demons.  Blech. I'm packing my holy water and rosary.

My family is arguing over who will host a combined birthday party for my brother and my mother.  I want to do it, but apparently the conventional wisdom is that I don't have enough furniture.  Blech.  We'll probably go out to eat.

Blech. Blech, Blech.  That's about all I can manage.

Underlying all of this blech is deep feeling that we can no longer stop God from punishing us for our sins.  I fast.  I pray.  I receive the sacraments.  But even in saying that, I know that what I'm talking about is what I do, not what God does.  I expect He's near the end of his patience.

How else could God react when we fund abortions with our tax dollars, force people of faith to pay for contraception and sterilizations, treat pregnancy as a disease, take asthma inhalers off the market to save the ozone layer, take companies to court for daring to build a factory that would hire people who don't pay bloated union bosses, raise the debt ceiling so we can borrow more money than has ever been made in the history of mankind (Does anyone remember the sin of usury anymore?), use math tricks to pretend unemployment isn't as bad as it really is, pay people to not work, and then wonder why they stop looking for jobs, ignore our local priests in favor of rock-star preachers and then wonder how they could betray us...

We are foolish people.  May God forgive us all.

Children Behaving Badly: Traditional Ways to Act Up at Mass

I'm not going to pile-on here about cell phone games and loud and/or garish toys at Mass.  I know there are serious issues about what people think is acceptable in church.  When I picked up the Red Bull can that I found under the pew in front of me at Mass, the amount of lipstick on the rim told me there had been a wedding the day before.  I don't want to add to the list of misbehavior and sacrilege.

This is a celebration of youthful exuberance that is a time honored source of consternation to parents, and discrete smiles from those whose children are too old to do it anymore.

1.  The first family I want to tell you about has 5 boys and one girl.  The oldest can't be more than 7.  None of the children have made their first communion.  The parents make sure the girl wears a dress and the boys wear suits and ties.  The parents of this swarming mass of youthful energy are calm, devout, and do not pander to the children with toys during Mass.  Still, you can regularly witness one brother turning a bulletin into a telescope or megaphone so his brother can hear him whisper, "I'm watching you."  I know I did this with my 11 siblings growing up.

2.  A toddler has just learned to take her offering up to the priest by herself.  The parents wait, beaming with pride for her return up the aisle.  She comes walking solemnly back towards their pew.  She smiles, and pauses.  Then she makes a mad dash for the door, parents chasing her with chagrin.

3.  Once again, children are walking up to make offerings to the priest at offertory.   The family that is bringing up the gifts have told their children to dress-up for Mass.  For their three-year-old daughter, this means accessories.  She proudly walks ahead of her family with her pink sparkly dress, purple sparkly mary-janes, matching handbag, hat and sunglasses.  She looks like a movie-star incognito.  The parents smile sheepishly, but the congregation is in love.

4.  A toddler is being held by a parent during the Eucharistic Prayer.  The parent is kneeling, the toddler is balanced on the back of the pew in front of the kneeling parent.  In the first scenario, the toddler, using all of the strength of high-pressure vise grips, holds the parent's face in her hands and starts kissing the parent's face.  When the parent tries to stop the child, the child becomes boneless and flops into the pews in front.  Crying ensues, but the congregation is torn between sympathy for the parent and child.

5.  The contagious sibling poking-fest.

6.  After getting caught by the parents as the one instigating the sibling poking-fest,  the children engage in the ancient meditative chant of, "Mom, he's touching me."  This chant is frequently performed as a round.

7.  Contagious laughter of no discernible cause.

8.  Contagious snorts, coughs and bathroom trips caused by laughter of no discernible cause.

9.  Toddler and pre-school aged children have scoped out the soft-hearted-adults-for-whom-they-can-do-no-wrong.  These children will make faces at said adults, talk to them about their plans for the day, show off new items of apparel, and generally be too cute to be denied.

10.  A young girl or boy is making her/his first communion.  The younger brothers and sisters spend the Mass trying to sit closest to this impressive family member.  They crawl over each other, squishing themselves into a bare inch of space, just to be able to share the moment with their older sibling.

These behaviors were a problem when my son did them, or when I did them as a child.  Now, I'm part of the loving congregation that finds God and the Joy of his many gifts made real to me by these simple pleasures.  I hope you won't mind if I make a face and poke your child back.  

Why I Hate the Main Stream Media's Coverage of Candidates

1.  Because they have limited time and resources, news outlets try to pick a winner in a political race as early as possible.  They have to follow the money in order to pay the bills, so only rich candidates or good fundraisers get on the news.  Tonight, there's another lotto drawing.  If I bought a ticket, and won, I would give half of the winnings to the person I thought was the best candidate regardless of name recognition.  But in our current world, I don't buy lottery tickets, and people who win spend their money foolishly, and those who have money go where money is already going.  It's like a dog chasing its tail.  When I see relatively small websites like Creative Minority Report backing Perry and asking who his running mate should be...  AAAAARGH!

2.  Polls are for suckers.  I want you, dear reader to consider how many times you have been polled about your political thoughts.  Do you take the call?  Do you, being a good conservative with children and a job  have time to respond to their questions?  Polls are skewed by the people who have the time to answer the questions.  An unemployed man or woman who receives benefits from the state is far more available to answer questions while they T.VO. the latest about the Kardashians on V-H1.

3.  News outlets feed the entertainment arms of their media monstrosities.   So you settle in to watch a nice crime show at the end of the day, and you see the criminals are all priests, white people, men, Christians, republicans, whatever the demonic flavor of the month is.  Adding the fantasy story-telling to the MSM news scheme reinforces the beliefs of those sitting on couches around the country.

4.  If you are a really good candidate with a real plan, but no money, how do you get the coverage necessary to get your name in the public consciousness?  You probably have to have a ridiculous gaff, or say something really scathing.  A scandal might help too.  But if you have a scandal, you lose the votes of the very people who wanted you to succeed.  If you are a good, honest person like McCotter or Santorum or Cain, what could you possibly do to get some press?  McCotter or Santorum could let one of their children have a child out of wedlock, or go on dancing with the stars, but that hasn't helped Palin.  Maybe they should all state forthrightly and with conviction in plain and even base language what they really think of our current president.  If they think he's a narcissistic jerk with a hidden past and dangerous ties to and ideas from people who hate America, then say so.  It's working for Perry.

5.  I want a boycott of any media show that pushes frontrunners this early in a presidential race.  Be fair.  Be balanced.  Or we won't watch you anymore.