the Holy Eucharist

Participating at Mass and receiving Holy Communion every day is so awesome, I don't think I can describe it well. I can say one thing about it. It is a gift of enormous proportion! Through it, I am granted tremendous grace. I believe it helps me to resist temptation, it strengthens my resolve to do God's will, it gives me courage to fight the good fight. It is an opportunity to grow in holiness. It brings me closer to God.

Oh, how I hunger for this spiritual food! There are times when I leave Mass totally exhausted but always exhilarated. I'm exhausted because I have so many people to pray for during Mass but mostly I think about what it all means...Our Lord dying for me, for my sins, in the most excruciating way possible. It is difficult to comprehend who would do that for me...ME? Yet, Jesus did so willingly and He forgave me of my sins in the process...and continues to forgive me, over and over again. I get overwhelmed, just thinking about all of it.

Here is an interesting piece from this year's The Little Black Book: Six-minute meditations on the Passion of Mark: "At every Mass, when the bread and wine are placed on the altar, we are saying in effect to God, 'This is my body...my blood...my whole life, with all its joys and sorrows. I offer to you as Jesus offered his life on the cross, trusting that in your hands, all will be well.' The Eucharist is not something we are only watching; it is something we are doing together. When you go to Mass and the bread and wine are placed on the altar, say something like the words printed above to God."

My day is not complete without participating in Mass. God knows how much I long to be with Him there, how much I wish I could stay there, wrapped in the glory of His great love for me. There have been days that I thought it would be impossible for me to get to daily Mass...and something happened that allowed me to go. Once, when I was babysitting Liam and Ellie from Thursday after work through Monday, I could see that it was not going to be possible for me to go to Mass on that Friday or Monday. I went to Mass as usual that Thursday morning, playing for Mass at the Sisters'. (I was to start babysitting after my work at the center that evening and overnight.) On Friday, I was scheduled to watch them until noon and then go teach piano lessons until which time I would go back and relieve their other grandma for the night. As I was driving to my first lesson, one of my students canceled his lesson which allowed me to go to Mass before I had to be back to babysit! Saturday was no problem because of my usual playing for Mass that afternoon (and Grandma Gail covering the afternoon shift). Sunday, their Grandpa Mike relieved me so I could play for Mass. Monday would be another matter...I could see no way to get to Mass. They were too little to take to Mass and, besides, the latest Mass was too early to get them up and ready to go. I resolved to be okay with not going to Mass that day. Then, I received a call to play for a funeral on Monday morning. I called my son Evan who told me he'd be delighted to take a half day off to play with Liam and Ellie. He said he had a lot of vacation days and he hadn't seen them for a little while. I was able to go to Mass! And, this has happened, time and again. Whenever it looks like I won't be able to go to Mass on a given day, I no longer worry about it. God will somehow open up an opportunity for me to get there! How very, very, very blessed I am to be loved by God so much!

temptations

I have been thinking about Satan tempting Jesus while He was fasting in the desert for 40 days. If Satan thought he could make Our Lord fall, how easy does he think it is to tempt us to sin and to do his dirty work of tempting others? If I think about it long enough, I get intensely sad. I think about how many times I took the bait...and how many times I, though inadvertently, urged others into sin. (I always thought I had good intentions...I would have been horrified had someone pointed out that I was tempting someone to sin.) Satan is much more present in the world than any of us realize and he has a myriad devious ways to sway us away from our dear Lord.

I have a friend whom I met online a couple years ago through an online match service. When we met, we agreed that, since he was still married in the eyes of the Church (no annulment in sight...he hadn't even turned in the necessary documents and questionnaire), we wouldn't get romantically involved. Over time, I learned that he was "romancing" others online. In fact, he met someone quite a distance from his hometown and she had visited him for 5 days and then had invited--she used her daughter to do the asking--to her daughter's wedding to be her escort at the wedding in HER hometown! After learning of this, his parish priest told him never to bring any woman that wasn't his wife back to the parish. (They'd gone there for Mass while she was in town.) His response, when I asked him about it: "we'll simply go to another parish when she comes to town". Shortly after all this, he sent an e-blast to everyone in his life, telling us that he'd asked the woman to marry him and she'd accepted. He said they were praying that he would get an annulment and that what they were doing was of God. Watching it all unfold, I was horrified. When I tried to remind him of the Church teaching regarding marriage and dating/adultery and the scandal they had caused at the wedding (the priest there told him it would be an honor to preside at THEIR wedding!), he screamed at me, calling me bitter and judgmental. (His paramour even wrote me a letter, telling me how it was with me along these lines...as IF she really knew what I was about--great audacity and arrogance there! She wrote it anonymously through him so I couldn't reply directly to her.) I was neither of those things. However, I WAS horrified that my friend had been tempted into grievous sin and he'd taken the bait. I was trying to help him see what he was doing was against God's law (which he already knew, given our many discussions on the subject, so I should have realized my attempts were going to be fruitless). We've since parted company--well, he threw me out of his life by telling me NEVER to contact him again in any form. He didn't want to hear the truth. He wanted what HE wanted when he wanted it. He called sin good. I am still so very sad for him and I continue to pray for him, hoping that he will one day see the light of Truth and be willing to live in it once again.

This example reminds me of my own sinfulness. Truly, how many times have any of us taken the bait? And, isn't it amazing the lengths to which we will go to deny Christ? I believe pride is at the root of our response to temptation. We think we know better. The Church has reasons for all of Her teachings--and they are all for our good. They are designed to help us glorify God, to bring us closer to Him so that we might enjoy eternal life with Him. Yet, in a given moment in time, we don't care. We want to do what we want to do when we want to do it, denying that it's really sin we are committing. I can't tell you how much I hate that I have done this many times in my life. I think about how my sins helped nail Our Lord's precious hands to the cross--hands that healed, hands that touched little children, hands that broke Bread and gave us life...and I weep and weep and weep in remorse. In those moments, I think about St. Peter's three-time denial of Jesus and how he wept when he realized what he'd done. I believe I know just how he felt. Yet, the fact that Peter is now a saint fills me with great hope.

This season of Lent can be an opportunity to look at where we go wrong and to work at correcting ourselves. Through prayer, fasting, alms-giving and other sacrificing, we can find our way back to the road that leads us to God. When you consider the sacrifice HE made for our sins, anything we might think to do seems like a tiny sacrifice! However, I know in my heart that Our Lord appreciates what we have to offer and so I continue to try. It isn't always easy when temptation comes so beautifully packaged and desirable.

a great sadness

Yesterday, Ash Wednesday, I learned that a very young client was taken by her mother out of state to have an abortion. She was at least 25 weeks pregnant. I am praying for them...and for all of us. O Lord, have mercy on this country for allowing the heinous acts of slaughtering Your innocent people. We deserve Your wrath but please, please, have mercy on us!

I am contemplating what to do. I have been calling the mother every week. For the past 2 weeks, she has not taken my calls. I learned about the abortion from the sonographer who did an ultrasound on the girl about a month ago but the sonographer is from another center. Should I call her and act as though I didn't know about the abortion? I'm not sure I want her to know that we've been talking about her. I think the better thing to do is to call her, telling her I know about the abortion and offer to help them find good counseling, OR I could not call her...Lord, give me wisdom.

Sometimes, the work we do at the center creates great sadness in the hearts of those of us who are trying so very hard to help people understand the sacredness of each life...

a letter of complaint on behalf of life

This is a letter I sent last night to the management of a local radio station. The general manager called this morning right away and left a message for me to call him. (It spoke well of him that he tried calling me first thing...He did not ignore this "squeaky wheel". ..) I left another message...

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Dear Sir,

This evening, I was driving along, listening to the soothing music being broadcast on your station when all was interrupted by an ad for Planned Parenthood (PP), proclaiming the organization cares about women's health care. I'm trying to understand why you would promote such a lie. Maybe you don't know what I know. Every single day, at the pregnancy resource center where I work, I listen to women's "after abortion" stories. From hearing their stories, I know without a single doubt that abortion does terrible things to women. PP is the largest purveyor of abortions in Minnesota. If the people who work there really cared about women's health, they wouldn't be doing abortions because abortion causes terrible devastation to women's spiritual, psychological, emotional and physical health.

Women tell me they will never get over their abortions. They are tormented by thoughts of suicide, what their babies would have been (boy or girl), what they would have looked like, how old they would be now. They are depressed. They have usually miscarried a succeeding pregnancy (a proven side effect of abortion). Their sex partners have left them after their abortions, even though the men were probably the ones who coerced them into having them in the first place. They know, in their hearts, that what they did was wrong. The folks at PP told them it was good to kill their unborn children but they know that isn't true, for it was written on their hearts, inherent in their human nature as mothers, that they were to protect their children from harm, not kill them. They acted against their natural instinct and it doesn't feel right. And, now their lives are shattered and they are permanently scarred. If you don't believe me, just ask a woman who has had an abortion how the experience went for her. She may say she's just fine but, then, query her further. Ask her if she'd do it again. She'll say NEVER. When asked why, she'll tell you she thinks about it all the time. I've talked with hundreds...probably thousands; I've been doing this work for over 12 years...and the answers are the same, with very little deviation.

There's another part to this. What about the unborn female children who are aborted? It's obvious the people at PP don't care about THEIR health. So, they don't care about the health of the women who allowed them to kill their babies and they don't care about the health of the unborn female babies. I wonder. About which women do they care? There are only two kinds of women: unborn and born and, as we all know, these are the people PP targets to do abortions.

I encourage you to spend a little time googling the artificial birth control PP promotes. You will find terrible side effects from those, too. And, what about all the sexually transmitted infections that are running rampant? PP is responsible for those by touting their message of sexual freedom by using contraception. What's so freeing about AIDS or gonorrhea or chlamydia or herpes or the myriad other sexually transmitted infections that are being diagnosed every day?

I hope and pray that you will stop airing this ad. It is offensive and an assault on the truth. The reality is PP does nothing good for a woman's health.

Sincerely,

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I just talked to him and he said he agreed with every word I wrote. He said this spot should never have happened. How it came to be is his advertising sales rep sold a 60 second spot to a company who used 30 seconds for their company (a sex toy store...ugh!) and tagged PP on the last 30 seconds. He said they had to honor the contract, which runs through next week and then, "no more...it will be done forever". He said he talked to the sales rep and he promised him it will never happen again. He said he's with us in our mission. I asked him to pray for us and he said he would because he knew it was a spiritual battle. He thanked me for calling this to his attention because he hadn't been aware of what had happened before I wrote. He said I could contact him any time...I asked for free advertising for our centers. He didn't bite, dang it!

He sounded sincere--I felt at peace, believing what he told me.

Sometimes, we must make a loud noise on behalf of the truth. May God be with us, as we do!

doing our own jobs

When I went to congratulate our auxiliary bishop after last year's announcement came from Rome that he was going to be our new bishop, he taught me something. He said that, back in the early days of the Church, the entire earth was divided up into little dioceses. Some could be under oceans or in deserts. Others were under actual official dioceses. Every bishop, upon ordination, is assigned one of these dioceses. (I think his is in Tanzania but I may not be remembering correctly.) He said the bishop is not to go to that diocese in an official capacity because it might look like he is trying to usurp the reigning (if there is one) bishop's authority.

I have pondered what he said and it has begun to turn into a life lesson for me. I wonder...how many times in our lives have we, inadvertently or otherwise, usurped another person's authority? If someone is hired to do a job, then he or she is given the responsibility to do it. It's not appropriate for someone else to come along and try to do what falls under his or her duties. It's not appropriate for the person overseeing that job to micro-manage the person doing it. (Trust is key!) It is entirely possible those people could do the job better than the person doing it, or at least differently, but they weren't given the job to do. The person responsible for carrying out the job's duties must do them. Certainly, to welcome their input is only prudent because no one can perfectly execute his or her job. However, the point remains that the person hired to do the job, not someone else, must do the job.

I think I usurped power that wasn't mine in my former marriage. I perceived my husband as not doing his duties as a husband and a father and so I did them. I thought, erroneously, that I had to pick up the slack. In effect, I rendered him powerless because it was my way that seemed to always prevail. I wonder what might have happened had I not been so quick to do this and had I respected his position in our family. Perhaps he would have stepped up and done what should have been done in this role...or maybe not. I didn't give him a chance to fail. I didn't give him a chance to succeed either. I was arrogant, thinking I knew best. I thought my way was the only way to do things. In essence, I thought I could be a better father to our children than their father was. I was gravely mistaken in this.

One lesson I learned about this was when we took our kids to Disney World. The first day was COMPLETELY orchestrated by me. I had every second planned out--where we were to go, what we were to do, etc. We rushed from here to there, trying to get my list of rides accomplished. (In my defense, I'd been there before and I knew how long the lines could be; I also wanted to get the most for our money...it was expensive for 6 people! Not to mention that I was quite an overachiever...) The second day, my husband said he had been really stressed out, trying to get to everything, and proposed we do it HIS way that day. Well, I had to admit we had way more fun the second day, meandering about the park with no destination goals in mind. It didn't seem to matter what we accomplished; we'd all had lots of fun doing it. From this somewhat trite example, I could finally see how children need both their mother's and their father's gifts, and to think that one can replace the other is a very misguided idea.

My son and I were talking tonight about roles. He said he and his wife each have taken on different roles. They both know what their roles are and they try not to cross over into the other's. He said it's working very well. They each respect one another because of what they have figured out: that they are different, given their talents and gifts. (He's not convinced it's a gender thing.) He said it isn't about equality...He said it never comes out fair if one looks at it superficially. He said they both give 100%, not just 50. They try not to consider that they might be getting the short end of the deal because they are both actively working as a team.

I find all of this very interesting because I came of age when feminism was coming to the forefront of our culture. Feminist leaders tried to blur the lines of demarcation between the sexes and their roles. I don't think it worked very well--with the exception of things like equal pay for equal work (a basic justice issue anyway). They tried to obliterate the differences between men and women. The problem (if it could be called a problem!) was men and women are inherently different and it's impossible to overlook that fact--nor should we.

I'm still pondering this whole thing. I have a feeling there is much to it and I've only scratched the surface. And, if you ask me, the whole diocese thing is just another example of the great wisdom of the Church regarding human nature.