Okay, one more.

A Facebook friend of mine commented on the whole Miley Cyrus VMAs thing:

How dare an adult woman show less skin then at a beach, gyrate like her male counterparts and own her own body. Let's stone her!

Well... okay. No.

The entire point of Cyrus' performance, and of "twerking" in general, is to strip a woman of all of her femininity and humanity, to reduce her to an object of raw animal sexuality, and nothing else. In the animal kingdom, this is basically the equivalent of "presenting". Even those who's entire lives have been dedicated to fighting for "woman's rights" in the destructive way modern feminism operates have a hard time swallowing this. So no, she is not owning her own body, she is giving it away and losing control of it in the worst way.

And also she is performing the mating ritual of a baboon.

As an aside...

I'm working on the follow up to my last post, but right now I want to just take a second to throw something out there that I was talking to some of my fellow Catechists about on Sunday. A lot of us wish we could evangelize more, spread the gospel to those who have a mistaken view on it. But then so many of us refuse to answer the door when Mormons and Jehova's Witnesses come around. Why? This is basically God's evangelism home delivery service. Can't get out to witness your faith? Order in!

Seriously, these are good, friendly, well meaning folks that are already in the mindset to talk about faith and they are knocking on your door. Why are we scared to answer? They might know one or two focused areas on how to overcome the beliefs of orthodox Christianity, but the moment you start talking about it in a broader sense, their knowledge pool falls away fairly quickly. So invite them in, have a talk (don't get angry), share the scriptures, and before they leave set a follow up. You're almost certainly not going to convert them then and there, but you can plant a seed.

Oh, but I guess that would entail knowing something about your own faith first.

In the Image and Likeness of God

I'm trying to post more, bear with me. I'm aware it's not going.. you know, all that well.

With the steam that advocates of same-sex marriage have been picking up recently in the public eye, I figured I should comment on it a bit. I've actually written and rewritten this post a few times, mostly focusing on why same-sex marriage isn't really a thing (the idea being that I am no more "against" homosexual marriage as I am "against" square circles), but to be honest, that's been done to death and, although it's a purely secular, sociological argument, the fact that this is a religious blog will discredit my motives in many people's minds.

So forget that noise.

Instead I'm going to address the issue from a slightly different point of view. Namely, why I hate the idea of identifying (or being identified by) people by sexual orientation. What I mean here is identifying yourselves or others through labels such as homosexual, heterosexual, bi, omni, whatever. By pushing these attributes through everything else and placing them at the forefront, you reduce the person they describe to the point of them effectively losing their humanity.

Anyways, the idea of someone being "attracted to men" or "attracted to women" is such a generalization to begin with. I dunno about you, but I'm attracted to individual women, not women as a whole. To their personalities, and looks, and style, and idiosyncrasies, and all the other millions of things that factor into a person being a person, and not an object that exists primarily for my own satisfaction. Are they all accessible? No, and rightfully so, but when you reduce yourself to a label that puts sex at the forefront, you cannot help but start viewing others through that lens of "how can this person fit in with the fact that I am a homosexual".

People like labels, there is something comforting about having a place for everything and having everything in its place. And that's fine for, oh I dunno, office supplies, but people don't work that way. The first and most important doctrine of the Church in regards to people is the idea of intrinsic human dignity. To put it simply, it means that every single human being to ever exist has a built-in worth that comes directly from the fact that they are created, sustained, and in the image of the creator God of the Universe. This worth cannot be taken away for any reason. But in modern society, people tend to hinge more and more of their worth on the things they do, the places they live, the people they know, the stuff they own. They begin to identify themselves by those things, and suddenly they are no longer people but simple walking lists of stuff.

This is an exhausting way to live, and unsurprisingly there has been a push-back on this in recent years as people try to shed those chains by turning to some form of spirituality or another (to varying degrees of success). But while people question the practicality of labeling themselves by their deeds and stuff, the fallacy of identifying ourselves by our sexuality goes strong and, infact, has become somewhat of a cultural taboo to even begin to question. But it's the most damaging of the reductionist labels because it tells us that, ultimately, we are slaves to our desires, that everything we do and identify with must be viewed through the framework of our sexuality and, to put it bluntly, what we want to rub our genitals against.

Guys, you are NOT your genitals.

An excellent quote:

The human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation. Every one living on the face of the earth has personal problems and difficulties, but challenges to growth, strengths, talents and gifts as well. Today, the Church provides a badly needed context for the care of the human person when she refuses to consider the person as a "heterosexual" or a "homosexual" and insists that every person has a fundamental Identity: the creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life.

 Read the entire pastoral letter here.

I'm going to follow up on this post soon with a discussion about how, while we are not our genitals, we most certainly are our bodies.

Graduating Christianity

So here's my thing. I'm all about the Sacraments. All seven of them, in fact. And I am all about their efficacy in delivering God's Grace into our lives. They're great at that! But where my issue happens is when they get treated like some sort of family rite of passage or a kind of graduation to (or from) Catholicism. More than this, while they serve to give us the Graces needed for salvation, they are not intrinsically salvific. Turns out, you still need Jesus. You still need that desire and belief. TRUTHFLASH.

So why do I bring this up? Well, another year of Religious Ed wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, another year of watching all the kids who got Confirmed stop coming to class right after the Easter Vigil. Oh, well, that's cool. I guess you got it now. It's been a few (16) years since my own Confirmation, so maybe I'm just misremembering, but I don't recall the Holy Spirit endowing me automatically with all the knowledge and belief necessary to go out and march, good and faithful Christian Soldier, march.

But of course the kids (in my class's case, high school age) can hardly be blamed, not fully at least. They are, in many ways, simply products of their environments. And while I do mean that in a "look at this secular culture we're immersed in!"kind of way, that's not specifically what I'm talking about. The environments in their homes reflect the general culture and, in many ways, amplify it.

I understand that kids have their own personalities and wants and needs and that they'll end up any way they dadgum please after all is said and done. But the fact remains that Christian homes overwhelmingly produce, gasp, Christians. The whole cliche of the kids rebelling against their hyperreligious stuffy conservative parents (here hyperreligious can simply mean attending a church service regularly and keeping a bible in plain view instead of stacked beneath a bunch of novels and TIME magazines gather dust) is just that. A grain of truth buried under a mountain of what basically amount to lies.

I know this is a bit of a blanket statement, but you know that friend who says something along the lines of "I was raised Catholic, but after I hit high school an college I started thinking for myself and I just realized that it's just not the church for me"? Yeah, what they really mean is "My parents, out of a misplaced sense of family obligation, signed me up for catechism class every year and made us go to Mass so I never got to sleep in on Sundays like my friends did, although usually we didn't bother going during the summers so that was nice, and so after I got confirmed they let me not go anymore because we made grandma happy" but, you know, that takes longer to say.

You know what comes out of devoutly Catholic households? Priests. You know what comes out of lackadaisically Catholic households? The same thing that comes out of totally secular households, except now they have a chip on their shoulder about the faith. The idea of holding back your faith and letting the kid grow up and "decide for themselves" is one of a huge pile of lies that most of us have swallowed. If you give someone without a fully formed conscious (like all kids, ever) the choice between a life of faithful discipline and one of no holds bared hedonistic relativism.. well, they'll choose the former approximately 0% of the time. It takes a serious gift of Faith for anything to happen otherwise.

Is it possible to raise actual Christian kids who don't become cafeteria converts, picking and choosing what they want to believe based on what gives them the most warm fuzzies? Absolutely. Is it possible to do it alone? Absolutely not. You need Christ, and you need His Church. You need to build an environment in your home that will effectively combat the one outside of it (this will never happen by accident). Does this mean locking your kids in their rooms and forcing them to read the bible or pray every time they do something you feel requires discipline? Well no. In fact, if you're using the graces and sacraments of the faith as disciplinary actions, you've got things pretty turned around as it is ("No, Mom, please don't make me love God! I promise I'll be good!" is not a thing you want to be grooming your child to say).

What it means is YOU need to be Christian. A real one too. Don't like a teaching? Tough, submit to Church Authority (this applies even if you're not Catholic. Instead of hopping to another denomination and teaching your kids to perpetuate the cycle of splitting churches from churches from other churches, or giving them a great visual example of how you believe doctrine is contingent on you agreeing with it, try submitting to it and seeing what happens in your life. You'll probably be surprised.) and maybe even give thanks for that hardship at the dinner table with your whole family present. Instead of moaning about how tough it is to live a Christian life, actually bother to live one and show some joy about it.

And for goodness sakes, if you send your kid to Sunday School, please realize that the teacher has them for about an hour a week. You have them a tad bit longer, I suspect. Act like you're the primary influence in your kid's life. Because if you're doing it right, you are.

PS - If this post seemed slightly more cynical than some in the past, blame the Lutherans.

HABEMUS PAPAM FRANCISCUM

It's true! We have a Pope! Buenos Aires Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected yesterday to succeed Benedict XVI to the Chair of Peter, and he has taken the regnal name of Francis. An exceedingly humble, simple man with a great love for evangelization and orthodoxy, who holds a Master's Degree in Chemistry. The first Jesuit, the first from the Americas, and the first Francis. What a great day! I'm excited!

So in such a big event, we find wonderful opportunities to evangelize to those who would usually not pay much attention to the workings, or the message, of the Church. And in doing so, of course, we also find many of the common "worldly hopes" rooted in misunderstandings of the fundamental teachings of the Church. You've heard them, or maybe even thought them, yourself.

"I hope this new Pope gives women a fair shake this time!"
"Maybe now we'll get female Priests!"
"I hear this Pope might allow condoms and say gay marriage is okay!"

Well alright. So what do you say to these types of comments? Outside of a snarky answer like "Saying the Vatican oppresses women because they can't be Priests makes as much sense as saying the hospital oppresses men because they can't give birth.", how do you handle situations where the person making the comment is well-intentioned albeit ignorant on how the Church works? Well, for starters, not like this wonderful conversation I had with someone the day the conclave began:

B: Pray for Pink Smoke!
Me: Why's it gotta be pink? Because girls like pink? Why can't girls like blue? People like you with antiquated notions of oppressive gender roles are putting feminism back 50 years.
B: Putting women back 50 years? Wrong notion. Want to find a place where women are oppressed....look in the direction of the Vatican. When you see pink smoke, you'll see a woman elected Pope.
Me: I know what "pink smoke" means, B. It means "fundamentally misunderstanding Catholicism on its most basic level". Because it's not like the most important figure in the religion, other than God Himself, is a woman. Oh wait. It is.
B: Oh, really? Then most the world misunderstand on its most basic level, man.
Me: ...yes? Luckily, for those who care to know what they're talking about, there are countless resources. Perhaps you could start with www.catholic.com, or pick up an easy to read copy of Catholicism for Dummies by the always eloquent Fr. John Trigilio. Remember, those who already know everything never learn anything.
Oh gosh, what am I thinking? You're also certainly welcome to sit in with my Sunday School kids some day.

So yeah, obviously this is something I struggle with on occasion myself. And hey, I "won" the argument! In the worst way possible, but there it is. So my first piece of advice is to be empathetic and understanding. Know where the person is coming from, and do your best to address there specific issue. Try to get them to understand that the Church and the Pope doesn't sit around making up arbitrary doctrines that change on the mood and view of the current pontiff. Make it clear the the new Pope can't make abortion same-sex "marriage", or women priests okay "okay" anymore than the President of the United States can repeal the law of gravity.

As a culture, the world tends to be obsessed with what it can test empirically. What it can touch, taste, smell, hear, and see. The philosophical tools of study and proof have been largely thrown aside, which has led to the sharp rise in "new atheism" and related movements. The idea that a spiritual change is as real and as objective as a physical change gets muddied in endless barrages of images to the contrary.

And this is where we can take a page from our new Vicar of Christ. Although a man of steadfast faith and belief, he remains humble and service-minded. At all times proclaim Christ through your actions and your love. Will they walk away convinced? Maybe not, but through your love they may begin to hear the whisper of truth.

Strike your foot against a stone

This Wednesday, the 13th of February, is Ash Wednesday. So remember to go to Mass! Oh, you're not Catholic? That's fine, now is a great time to convert!

Anyways, now that we've gotten that out of that way, let's talk about Lent a little bit. Well, sorta. We know what Lent is, the time of preparation leading up to Easter Sunday. It's a great time of penitential sorrow and joyful hope all wrapped up into one semi-confusing ball of ecclesiastical celebration. But this time of sacrifice and abounding Grace finds it's biblical roots in Christ's 40 days of fasting in the desert at the beginning of His ministry. And just as we end Lent with the celebration of Christ conquering death in Easter, Christ's preparation for the rest of His life ended with an event that foreshadowed Easter, namely His temptation by, and conquering of, Satan.

We tend to focus on this event somewhat one-dimensionally, seeing it (and rightfully so) as the New Adam succeeding where the original failed. But there's another, often overlooked, view to this. Namely, what can we learn about ourselves and our own concupiscence in the way the Devil chose to tempt the Son of Man? And what can it teach us about staying on guard against sin? To really understand this, let's pull out the biblical account and go through these temptations step-by-step.

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.

So we have Christ's frame of mind. Guided by the Holy Spirit to fast and grow in a spiritual way, much like many of us are day in and day out. And, being fully human, it wore Him out. Just as our journeys wear us down. And when we're at the beginning of something great, that's when the Devil takes notice and decides to step in.

The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’”

This is the first thing Satan goes after. Our own selfish desires. And there's a reason for this. It's simple, requires nearly zero effort on his part, and is incredibly effective. What do you want right now, this instant? What do you think you need? The Devil uses this rationalization with great delight and we are all too often eager to take the bait. But wait! Jesus has some advice for us! That guy, He's always got a nugget of wisdom. He retreats to the word of God, and reminds us that while temporal pleasures and even needs can sustain us and even please us for a time, it is He, the true Bread of Life, that we can sustain ourselves on. In many ways, He's saying "Don't worry about that right now. You've got me. So keep your eyes on the prize."

The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’”

Now this is where most of the "survivors" of temptation one get snagged. Turns out that the Devil is a smart guy, and he knows how to think long-term. People tend to think that once they overcome their carnal, directly selfish desires, they're home free. They see the reward for their piety and they grab it in all it's glory! Victory!

...right?

Christ is the King of Kings. His mission on this earth was to gather the people to Himself, to show them that He is the Lord. And here's His chance. Satan is fully aware of the goal here, and he's perfectly willing to help attain it. No fuss no muss, no bloodshed or suffering. Sure, it's kind of a cheat, it's kind of the "easy way out", but this is the whole reason He's here! This is exactly what He wants!

This is what our next temptation always is. If the Devil can't keep us from our mission, then he'll do exactly the opposite. He'll help us in it. He'll smooth out the wrinkles, cut out the work, help us justify the means to the end, because it's all for the greater glory. Except now we're here, at the top of the mountain, and everything is how we imagined it, but... not. Just a little skewed, a little warped. So what's wrong?

Have you ever thought about why God, in His infinite mercy, didn't just snap His fingers after the fall of man and make everything okay again? Maybe that's not the way He wants it to work. Have you ever thought that there was something to that old silly idea of the felix culpa? "O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer" isn't an accidental statement. God, for whatever reason in His wisdom, found it proper to work great good out of struggle and evil. We're called to that standard right alongside Jesus. And once again, He shows us the way.

Our actions need to be centered on the worship of God at all times. The old axiom "There's the easy way and there's the right way" holds true here. The moment you do something that doesn't glorify God, even in your pursuit to glorify Him, you've fallen into sin and temptation. And often you may not even realize it until it's too late. But we are often tempted with means to what we believe we want, with a path that seemingly lines up with our mission, but gets us there in a warped and disordered way. "Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only."

The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here. For it is written:

  ‘He will command his angels concerning you
    to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands,
    so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.'"

Jesus answered, “It is said: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’"

And here we go. You've proven that you're not going to give in to your desires, and you wont be fooled into gaining the whole world but losing your soul. You keep your eyes on God. And finally, Satan turns to his last refuge, the last place you'd expect him to strike. The pages of scripture itself. Twice has Christ rebuked the Devil, quoting scripture to prove him wrong. So now the Devil spouts scripture right back at him.

See, Satan knows the word of God too. Better, in fact, than we do. He knows what it means and, more importantly, he knows what it doesn't mean. And he turns it around on us, uses it in lockstep with our pride. "Yeah, you've got all the authority you need. You can see it all right here, plain as day on the page. You know what it means, and you don't need anyone else to push their man-made interpretations on you. The Spirit is guiding you."

I have a good idea that a number of you reading this will immediately know what I mean, not because you necessarily agree with me but because you'll feel a little attacked, as a few little strings of your pride are tugged, just a bit. And that's the point. This last temptation, this is the one that gets the last holdouts. This last temptation is the one that has caused more irreparable damage and splintering of Christendom than anything else. The right verse, mixed with carefully measured pride, will infect everything we do and say in pursuit of the Kingdom. This is the killer.

"It is said 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test'". Christ's words here resonate within us on every level. Pride is always putting God to the test. Boldly proclaiming "Let's see who's right." is what pride tricks us into doing every day. When we feel those string start to pull, and we feel the pride begin to well up in our hearts, that's when we must repeat the words of Jesus, the final words He said to drive off the Devil for good. "It is said 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test'".

When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.

Yikes. The point is, even after all this, he'll be back. This is why Lent is so important to us. It's a time to fall to our knees and feel the sorrow at what we've caused, and look forward joyfully at the hope He's created. There's a lot of Grace floating around during Lent. Please don't neglect to reach out and accept it.

Who do you Tweet that I am?

I'm sitting here writing this article out at my desk from home, on my computer that has two monitors. A few minutes ago, I was reading tweets by the Pope on my phone from the couch. I don't have one, but tomorrow morning millions of people will wake up and read the newspaper from their tablets. Who knows what will be happening a month from now, a year, a decade? When I graduated high school, I never would have thought ANY of that was ever going to be possible. Well, except the computer with two monitors, I'm not that old.

So what's my point? Technology is moving quickly, faster than anyone would have expected, and what people are realizing more and more readily is that it's all coming down to information, communication. This definitely has its downsides, as the more information we're inundated with on a daily basis can serve to blur the lines between solid truth and relativistic ambiguity, but it has so many potential upsides.

Christianity has a real opportunity here. Getting the gospel out to the masses is just a few clicks away. Through blogging, twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and countless other social media sites, we can share our faith with more people than every before, and I would encourage anyone who can to do so. I mean, like I said above, the Pope is on twitter. Guys, the Pope! And he posts from his iPad! His account is @pontifex, by the way. You should follow him if you don't.

But there are some pitfalls we need to watch out for in this brave new world. The flip side of the coin is that, while you can reach countless souls, they can reach right back. And take it from me, it can be a real challenge to not get sucked into a pointless internet debate.

I don't say that to try and stop people from evangelizing directly on the internet. I've been in plenty of debates over Instant Messenger, email, even Facebook that myself and my "opponent" have walked away from feeling at least a little more educated on the others perspective. But often times there are people who will insult you and your position with no intention of discussion, and for the smallest things. I once posted a Lenten reflection on Facebook for my Christian friends, and had the entire thing blow up when a few people started commenting how annoyed they are when people mention God on the internet like He actually exists. I don't normally, but I ended up having to deleted all the comments just to keep the spirit of the reflection intact.

So how do we get around this? Well, sometimes we can't. If you blog, you can think about filtering comments, or just shutting them off completely. I don't do that, but it's an option. On twitter, you simply can't keep people from reading, retweeting, and replying to your messages. You can lock down your Facebook page and configure certain posts to only be viewable by certain people. But you're not going to reach a whole lot of souls by doing that.

So what it comes down to is pure old fashioned discipline. Pick your battles, identify who wants actual dialogue and who wants to troll you in anonymity. But remember the saying that if you're not turning anybody off, you're not turning anybody on. And as you go forward, keep in mind the words of Christ in John 15:20:
Remember the words I spoke to you: 'No servant is greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.

So what now?
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