Poetry Thursday

refreshing limeade
dancing over cool ice cubes
nectar of the gods

Monkey

Eifelheim Love Spreading

You may remember that Claw of the Conciliator gave it two thumbs up.

What if the first contact between humanity and an intelligent alien species occurred in the Year of Our Lord 1348?

Some sf authors would have taken this concept and written a cautionary tale in which benighted priests declare the aliens to be demons and whip mobs of superstitious peasants into a killing frenzy. After all, was that not the Age of Faith, an era of theocracy, ignorance, and fear?

What Flynn has done instead is marvelously refreshing. Eifelheim is a carefully researched depiction of Rhineland in the 14th century, showing both the bright and dark aspects of medieval civilization and the small renaissance that was underway before the Black Plague. He illuminates some of the roots of the Scientific Revolution among natural philosophers like William of Ockham, Jean Buridan, and Nicholas Oresme.

Thus when grasshopper-like aliens, the Krenken, crash near the small Black Forest village of Oberhochwald, it is in fact their good fortune to encounter the local priest. Father Dietrich is a thoughtful and discerning man, who studied under Buridan at the University of Paris, and is adept at inquiring into the natural causes of things. His somewhat cool rationality is combined with deep Christian faith, which motivates him to display charity and hospitality to the stranded travelers.

Now The Wine Dark Sea and The Curt Jester add their approving voices to the chorus.

Me?

I'm still waiting for the darned thing to get to the library near me.

Finding Holiness ... in Our Families

Love in the Little Things
by Mike Aquilina

... The family is the great catechism God has given the world. The work of our lifetime is to learn how to read it, and then study it prayerfully.

A couple in love will find many lessons to learn in the everyday events of their life together. Throw into the mix a child or two (or six or twelve), and the lessons increase by orders of magnitude. It’s all serious business, I suppose, but a sense of humor plays no small part in our spiritual development. Monks may learn humility by wearing a hair-shirt. We parents have our own means of mortification. We must, for example, sit helpless while our four-year-old daughter, patiently and with scientific rigor, enlightens a visiting priest — an elderly, saintly Franciscan — about the varieties of panties that Mattel affixes to its Barbie dolls. (I’m not making that one up.)...

Our family life is the sacrifice we offer to God every day. It rises like incense to heaven as we do very ordinary things: as we love our spouses, guide our kids, pay the bills, attend countless, endless scout meetings, and do our work. All this is our share in the common priesthood of the Church. It is our daily sacrifice, our “Mass.” God, for His part, gives back to us abundantly, from the treasury of His own perfect fatherhood.

This is a subject that Tom and I recently were talking about on a long car trip. It is easy to look at the family and see why God made that our basic core of life on earth. It is the means of sanctification for us all, as we learn to gracefully take up the many irritations and pinpricks of daily self-sacrifice. It is only in soldiering through many of these that we then see the other side, that the graces we receive are so much more than any sacrifice we make ... and the "self" that we become is so much holier than we would have been otherwise. (Not perfectly holy, just a little more holy ... and when you're like I am, then that means there is a long way to go on the holiness business ...)

I received this book last Friday and have to admit that I was so happy to see it looked lighter than Mike Aquilina's usual "Church Fathers" fare. He is brilliant at communicating their personalities and works but I had just finished his Fathers of the Church and am deep in the middle of a church history. (Of course, I just read about the new, expanded version of Mass of the Early Christians coming out soon and now am suddenly ready for the "deeper" reading again!) This book of short essays was just the ticket. He talks about something we all can relate to -- how family life and marriage give us endless opportunities to live a holy life and see God's touch everywhere. These essays range from short two-page works beginning with a family story, usually humorous, and then go to a simple reflection about a needed grace or lesson learned that the incident illustrates or sparks. These are the sorts of examples many of us need to see God's hand in the everyday and to remind us that everything we do is an opportunity to grow in a holiness that needn't be stuffy or holier-than-thou. It is all very real and down-t0-earth.

Some chapters are longer essays that are packed full of good reflections, also stemming from family interactions, that take us to deeper reflective depths. A favorite of mine is about the "Spousal Secret." In other words, what is the secret to being a good husband (or wife). As you'd guess, it is self sacrifice but it is examined from every angle in a very readable way.

I will finish by sharing one of my favorite chapters so you can get a feel for this charming and insightful book which would make an excellent Father's Day gift. It is simple but there's something about Grace that I just can't resist.

The State of Grace

A lone blonde in a crowd of brunettes, our Grace Marie early sensed her difference, her distinctiveness.

One October night the family poured out of the van and approached our favorite ice-cream parlor -- now decorated for the harvest season. Suddenly, three-year-old Gracie broke ranks and ran to a pair of scarecrows. "Look, Mom! Look, Mom! Look, Mom!" She jumped repeatedly in front of the flopsy couple. We all looked, but couldn't figure out what was so special. She pointed emphatically to the golden straw peeking out from the scarecrows' hats. "Look! Gracie dolls!"

Our peerless blonde had found her peers, or at least she thought so. I found them entirely too subdued to pass for "Gracie dolls."

Early in Gracie's life I decided that the word "irrepressible" must have been coined for her. From the time she could crawl, she's had boundless energy and an inquisitive mind. She could jump repeatedly while she asked a breathless series of questions: "What are eyelashes for? Why did God make dinosaurs? How do flowers know what colors to turn?"

In exhausted prayer I would suggest to our Lord that perhaps He should have sent Gracie when I was twenty-five rather than thirty-five.

But, if He had, I would now have even less muscle in my abdomen than the little I can claim. Gracie is extremely affectionate, and from toddlerhood onward her preferred display of affection has been the flying leap. (Ballet lessons have only made her more adept at this.) So I've grown accustomed to tensing my abdomen, just in case it should have to absorb a strong and sudden impact. I'd wager that, even as I sleep, my belly stays taut (well, as taut as it can), just in case Gracie should swoop down from the darkened eaves of the master bedroom.

When our family flew to Rome several years ago, Gracie was only five and she could barely contain her excitement. As our jetliner passed over the ocean, she bounced across the aisles, from sibling to sibling in the Aquilina dispersion, before bouncing to her parents, then back through the cycle.

Shortly after landing, through an unpredictable series of events, we found ourselves, jet-lagged, at Pope John Paul II’s regular Wednesday audience -- with passes to greet the pope personally afterward. Everyone in the family was awestruck by the presence of that great man, now stooped and partially paralyzed from age and ailments. One by one, we passed before him. He hugged each of the children. But none of us had the courage or presence of mind to say anything.

Except, of course, Gracie, who hugged him tight and said, "I love you very much." The flashing cameras captured his broad smile forever. And hers.

Later, back at the hotel, my wife and I felt the comedown from the excitement of meeting a pope and a saint. Factor in the time difference between Rome and Pittsburgh, and we were plummeting toward collapse. Everyone headed to one of the rooms and found a place on the beds, the comfy chairs, or the floor. I dropped to a mattress, so utterly exhausted that it never occurred to me that I was leaving my abdomen wide open.

Sure enough, as soon as I closed my eyes – crash, whoosh, and out went the breath from my lungs. And there was Gracie hovering over my face, smiling what her mother calls her "thousand-watt smile."

"Oh, honey," I groaned. "If you'll just let me sleep five minutes, I'll be a new man when I wake up."

And then I saw something I had never seen before. Gracie, looking frightened, jumped off me as suddenly as she'd landed. She turned to Terri: "Mommy, when Daddy's a new man ..."

"Yes?"

"When Daddy's a new man, what will he look like?"

All the kids erupted in laughter. But Terri just hugged our actual Grace and said: "Remember what the pope looked like?"

Gracie nodded.

"He'll look like that."

Gracie accepted this and let me have my forty winks. But no more.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines grace as our “participation in the life of God” (n. 1997).

What is God's life? Boundless joy. Boundless love. Limitless energy. Unceasing wonder.

God gives us the grace we need, when we need it. He gives us the children we need, just when we need them. He has given me Grace, amazing Grace, abundantly.

You Say Moslem. I Say Muslim. H.W. Crocker III Says BOTH.

The Perpetua & Felicity Book Club is reading Triumph and Susan, a history major and attentive reader, pointed out that the author uses both Muslim and Moslem. Naturally she wondered why and so did we. I can't find anything definitive on why one term would be different from another, least of all from the author himself. I'd ask him, except that I can't find contact info on him either.

Muslim? Moslem? Anyone have more than a guess on this?

UPDATE:
The question is not which word is correct. Or why we might have two spellings. (These things we already knew.)

The question is why H.W. Crocker III uses both spellings throughout Triumph. Obviously he is making some sort of distinction (or has the worst editor known to mankind).

All Things Work for Good ...

In the same way, the Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.

And the one who searches hearts knows what is the intention of the Spirit, because it intercedes for the holy ones according to God's will.

We know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.

Romans 8:26-28

God knows what we need before we do and provides in ways we couldn't imagine. Check out Penni's story from today.

Science Fiction and Faith LInks

It occurred to me that the ongoing listing of great sci-fi and fantasy novels with links to faith was sometime ago (as the blogosphere counts it anyway). Here are some wonderful resources. If anyone has any others I'll add them to the list.

• Speculative Catholic has a very good list of Catholicism in Science Fiction at The Catholic Wiki Project
• Elliott has a great series of discussions about science fiction, fantasy, and faith wherein he discusses different authors. It begins at the link and you can follow it from there.

Want to Know About the Pope in Pavia?

AmericanPapist is on the job. Check out the links there.

Moses: The Most Complete Prefigurement of Christ

Exodus centers on Moses, greatest of all Jewish prophets, the man who spoke with God face to face and lived. Moses is as prominent and primary in Judaism as Mohammed is in Islam or as Confucius is in Confucianism. Yet his deepest significance is beyond Judaism: Moses symbolizes and foreshadows Christ. Let's look at some of the ways he does, some of the parallels between Moses and Christ.

1. Both were outsiders (Ex 3:1-10; Jn 3:13)
2. Both received long training before their public ministry (Ex 2:10; Lk 3:23)
3. Both performed many miracles (Ex 7-14; Jn 3:2 and 21:25)
4. Both were preserved from an evil king's plot to murder them as babies (Ex 2:2-10; Mt 2:14-15; and Rev 12:1-6 and 13-17)
5. Both stood up against masters of evil (Ex 7:11; Mt 4:1)
6. Both fasted for forty days (Ex 34:28; Mt 4:2)
7. Both controlled the sea (Ex 14:21; Mt 8:26)
8. Both fed a multitude of people (Ex 16:15; Mt 14:20-21)
9. Both showed the light of God's glory on their faces (Ex 34:35; Mt 17:2)
10. Both endured rebellion from their people (Ex 15:24; Jn 5:45-47)
11. Both were scorned at home (num 21:1; Jn 7:5)
12. Both saved their people by intercessory prayer (Ex 32:32; Jn 17:9)
13. Both spoke as God's mouthpiece (Deut 18:18; Jn 7:16-17)
14. Both had seventy helpers (Num 11:16-17; Lk 10:1)
15. Both gave law from a mountain (Ex 20; Mt 5-7)
16. Both established memorials (Ex 12:14; Lk 22:19)
17. Both reappeared after death (Mt 17:8; Acts 1:3)
18. Both did the work of prophets, priests, and kings -- the three most important positions of authority in the ancient world
19. Both conquered the world, the flesh, and the devil
20. Both, finally brought their people from slavery tofreedom and to the Promised Land

Moses is the most complete symbol of prefigurement of Christ in the Bible.

You Can Understand the Bible
A Practical And Illuminating Guide To Each Book In The Bible
by Peter Kreeft

A God of Infinite Justice and Infinite Love

It's often said that the Old Testament, especially Genesis, teaches a God of justice, in stark contrast to Jesus, who teaches a God of forgiveness and love. It is a lie, of course. The God of the Old Testament does all that He does out of love; and the Father of Jesus needs to satisfy justice as well as love; that's why Jesus had to die. I used to think that only those who never read the Bible could fall for this fallacy. But experience has taught me otherwise. Why is it so common?

I think it comes partly from misunderstanding the literary style of Genesis. It is not meant to be psychology, either of God or humanity. The modern style of storytelling emphasizes psychological motive and scrutinizes inner consciousness. This is simply not the style of premodern writing. Augustine's Confessions is the only personal introspective autobiography in premodern literature.

Thus the "wrath of God" is not meant as a description of God's own private feelings, but of His public deeds, of how those deeds look to fallen, "wrathful" man. Psychologically, this is "projection." When God gave Lady Julian of Norwich a "showing" of His wrath, she said, "I saw no wrath but on man's part."

God is indeed a God of justice and thus of punishment, which is part of justice. But love is the motive behind all His deeds of discipline. "For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves. ... If you are left without discipline, then you are illegitimate children and not sons" (Heb 12:6-8).

You Can Understand the Bible
A Practical And Illuminating Guide To Each Book In The Bible
by Peter Kreeft

He Had Me At Kelvin ...

Pondering Evil

I really was resisting writing anything about this because I know that I can't match some of the very good pondering I have seen written already ... but the two columns I read this morning generated even more thinking on my part and it poured out here.

I already had been thinking about evil before the Virginia Tech massacre. After Rose and I watched the premiere of Drive, I was unsettled because of the cruel methods used to coerce some of the participants. The basic premise of the show is that it is an anonymously run, illegal cross country race with the winner receiving 32 million dollars. Although the race liaison, has informed them that there are other competitors, the group does not know exactly whom they’re racing against, or even where the finish line is. Some are participating sheerly for the cash while others have been forced to participate. In one case, Alex Tully is trying to save his wife who has been kidnapped. In another, a mother's newborn son is being held hostage. In a flashback we are shown a couple racing to save their young daughter, who watches them crash and die before her eyes. And so on ...

It is clear that Alex Tully (Nathan Fillion) will also be working toward uncovering whoever is running the race and stopping them from ever doing so again. What bothered me was the idea of such evil that would kidnap a wife or take a newborn from his mother without any reason other than the sport of motivating participants. It made me think of the villain from Daredevil who was sadistically and purposely evil at any opportunity. He bothered me so much that I forbade the girls to ever rent or buy the movie (and, believe me, that is something that I don't often do).

The evil in Drive may be further explained as the plot develops further, however, it provided food for thought all day long. Was evil worse because I didn't know about any motivation? It seemed so to me and that didn't seem right either. Evil is wrong no matter whether we understand the motivations or not. Truth to tell, I realized that knowing the motivation for evil is no excuse at all. Many, many people suffer what might be similar motivations but very few act upon them.

As we watched the next episode it became clear that Alex Tully had been a very bad person but that his wife had somehow redeemed him and helped him transform into a good and normal man. He is being required to revert to his more basic, bad-guy self in order to save his wife. In fact, a race representative was specifically sent to make sure that was clear to him. And revert he did. The sweet and pure seeming mother of the newborn was given an order to eliminate another racer, along with a loaded gun. She was able to find a solution that fulfilled the requirements without having to kill anyone, or even eliminate the other person from the race at all.

Again it seemed to me that a major theme of the show was evil. Some people are being lured to it with the reward, some are being forced by choices that seem unthinkable. Some people are showing their worst sides in response while others are managing to hold onto themselves while fulfilling the requirements. Still I pondered. Was it any more acceptable that Alex Tully was having to race now that we knew he was indirectly responsible for murders? That possibly the punishment for his past sins were being visited upon his innocent wife? I knew I would keep watching if only because it generated so much thought. Also, let's face it, I liked the show and because it is a television show I know there will be answers that will eventually fit into an acceptable moral guideline. That is what good stories are all about, after all.

That same evening I learned from Tom of the Virginia Tech massacre (I am unplugged from news, computer, and email once I leave work). Here was a real life example of evil for which we could not fathom any possible motivation. In our household, as in those across the country, we kept saying to each other, "Why? Why would someone do something like that?" I thought of Cho as a baby, a toddler, a little boy and my heart ached not only for the people whose lives he cut short but for the potential that somehow went terribly wrong in his own life.

We will never know.

As reports have surfaced it is clear that there were many warning signs. Debates will continue over what to do in such cases.

Rod Dreher wrote a "it could have been me" editorial for the Dallas Morning News today (free registration required).

So I was saved twice by friendship during my teenage years, and by having the grace to respond to lifelines when they were thrown.

Still, it's a little frightening to think about how things might have turned out for me had I continued drifting down that dark river, until I'd lost sight of the last human settlement. Was Cho ever thrown a lifeline? Was he too lost in a fog of self-pity and loneliness that he couldn't see it when it was thrown?

Along with my horror and sorrow over the massacre, I also had felt a profound tiredness from the beginning at the thought of the experts, the analyses, the "what if's," the "it could have been me" stories that we now would be subjected to ... all of which would solve exactly nothing.

It is not that the various solutions I have read about would do no good. Undoubtedly it would be a very good thing if we were nicer to that loner, reached out and fought harder to get help to a troubled person, tried through personal example to help our culture regain some of the social strictures that probably reduced these sorts of incidents in the past, or put a few sane controls on gun laws (I'm all for the right to bear arms, but semi-automatics? Let's get real here. And as for the Europeans clucking about violent American society ... Cho's guns were manufactured in Austria and Germany. How about taking a look at their contributions to our problem?). However, there will always be some people that these things will not help, no matter how well the solutions were applied.

My own thoughts (undoubtedly as lacking as everyone else's) coincide amazingly with Scott Blow's column in the Dallas Morning News this morning.

When I first began to educate myself about mental illness, 20 years ago or more, I repeatedly encountered a calming assurance:

"People with mental illness are no more dangerous than society at large, except perhaps to themselves."

That was part of the campaign to remove the stigma from mental illness. After all, hadn't pop culture always depicted "crazy people" with an ax in hand?

While I applaud the ongoing effort to erase that stigma, I wonder if we didn't let the safety assurance lull us into a certain complacency about mental illness.

For the moment, Cho Seung-Hui has blasted us from our complacency.

And though I would never want to go back to the days when "murder" and "mental illness" were synonymous, must we continue to shrug off these rampages by "misfits" and "loners" as inevitable?

They are not.

One thing about mental illness is known for sure: Treatment works. People with mental illnesses can be helped.

I see that NAMI – the National Alliance on Mental Illness – has slightly adjusted its basic statement. "People under treatment for mental illness are no more dangerous than society at large," NAMI legal director Ron Honberg told me yesterday.

"Under treatment" – a couple of very important added words.

Go read it all (free registration required).

As someone who has dealt with mental illness suffered by a family member, as have many people I have been surprised to find out), sometimes they are just sick. There is no rhyme or reason to their thoughts or feelings. They are sick. We would remove plague carriers from the general population to protect society and we should give serious consideration to doing the same to those with mental illness. It is no kindness to these tortured souls to let them suffer when they can be helped and sometimes they just can't see clearly that they need help. In our case, our family member did alert us and I thank God often for their clarity of thought that had them asking for immediate assistance.

Now I have fallen into the same trap as everyone else and given a solution ... which is no real solution at all. However, it might make life better for some people, and maybe not only for those who are the immediate sufferers.

As to the problem of evil, I still ponder it. Or rather my reactions to it. Knowing why evil has been committed should not make the evil seem less than that with no obvious motivation. But it does somehow, at least to me. I think that is a problem with my spiritual eyesight that I need to be aware of and ponder some more.

Poetry Thursday

Not only is it poetry month but Monkey reminds us that it is Grilled Cheese Month! Woohoo! Naturally Monkey makes sure we have some poetry available for this auspicious time.

UNTITLED
Low fat, no, fat, low carb fare
No salt, less salt, do we dare
No bland , flavorless, dry arse cheese
I prefer the kind that blocks arteries
So its fattening that’s for sure
Life is short as it were
Use any kind of bread you like
But sourdough is a gourmet delight
Pile some mayo on the side
Dip it in and open wide
So when I hit the pearly gates
I’ll pray a grilled cheese sandwich awaits.

by Kc

April is Poetry Month

The Common Room is reminding us of that fact. Not being a real poetry lover, I still do manage to find some examples that I enjoy. For instance, Will Duquette's splendid example ...

The horrible thing about Smeagols
Is Smeagols are horrible things.
Their eyes they are made out of lanterns (my Precious)
Their hair it is made out of strings.

Thievesie, Sneaksie, Tricksy, Precious,
Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine!

But the most horrible thing about Smeagols
Is their Precious for which they pine.

Well, that and the throttling, and the eating raw meat, and the treachery,
and….

– J.R.R. Milne, The Mount at Doom Corner
(a.k.a. Ian Hamet and Will Duquette)

Check out his comments box ... to paraphrase one commenter, "What has it gots in its commentses, precious? Not more of that horrid poetry?!

Words, words, words ...

Here I always thought that I was fairly well educated and knew quite a few seldom used words. However, pride goeth before a fall, as we should all know and The Common Room is proving just how little I really know in the way of words.

In the course of reviewing a book (yet another for my long list), a discussion begins about what a paucity of words the modern writers and readers know. The long list of words in the post had few that I had ever seen before.

This was followed later by a list of definitions which was enlightening.

This seems to have led to a trend of word-spotting as we see here.

Obviously I am reading books that are much too modern and suffer from lack of vocabulary.

Gone for the Weekend

It's Texas A&M Aggie Parent's Weekend so we are trekking down to College Station.

I leave you with a few good links for your weekend reading:

• Bloggers' Choice Awards: it looks as if St. Blog's Parish has dashed to the rescue, thanks to Father S's Paul Revere ride through the blogosphere yesterday. If you haven't swung by, do go and vote for as many blogs as you like. I found some great new ones by browsing the categories a bit.
  
  
• Finding Joy in the Darkest Night: The Divine Abandonment of Mother Teresa. David Scott, who wrote so beautifully and insightfully about Mother Teresa in Revolution of Love asks if Mother Teresa was faking her joy when she was suffering her dark night of the soul.
  
  
• Anniversary of a Catholic Victory Over a Dictator by John Allen tells the little known story of seven courageous bishops in Malawi who stood toe-to-toe, facing death, and made their country's dictator back down. Would that God gave us more bishops like that.
  
  
• Book Review: A Practical Commentary on Holy Scripture, by Bishop Knecht. I have had this book for some time but only recently picked it up and really perused it. Initially I was thinking of giving it away but after taking a good look, realized that it is a treasure, albeit one that I had unfairly discounted as being from too many years ago to be relevant. As I discovered, that was unfair. This review is spot on.

Three Basic Explanations for Evil

This is all fascinating but especially the definition of "knowledge" at the end. Don't miss that even if you don't usually read excerpts. It puts a whole new spin on original sin.

There are only three basic explanations for evil. It is to be blamed either on God above us, nature below us, or us. Genesis 3 rejects the two convenient excuses that either God or evolution made us this way. The message of Genesis 3 is that the buck stops here. The finger that points blame is curved one hundred and eighty degrees.

Jews, who have and believe this Scripture just as Christians do, say they do not believe in "original sin" because they think of that doctrine as Calvinism, as a denial of the goodness of God's creation even when defaced by sin. But Genesis 3 does not teach Calvinistic "total depravity" (except in the sense that we are totally unable to save ourselves without divine grace, which is also taught in Orthodox Judaism). Rather, the forbidden fruit was "the knowledge of good and evil," not pure evil. There's still a little good in the worst of us, but also a little bad in the best of us.

By the way, the word knowledge here means "experience." God wanted to keep us from the knowledge of good-and-evil that comes from experiencing and tasting it (thus the image of eating fruit), not from the knowledge that understands it. The same word is used in Genesis 4 for sexual intercourse: Adam "knew" Eve, and the result was not a book but a baby.

You Can Understand the Bible
A Practical And Illuminating Guide To Each Book In The Bible
by Peter Kreeft

First of All, Atheism Isn't a Religion: Bloggers' Choice Awards

Fr. Stephanos sent an email that an atheist blog is winning in the category of "Best Religion Blog"at the Bloggers Choice Awards.

Now that just ain't right. As the daughter of two atheists I can tell you that atheism is all about not having anything to do with religion ... especially blog about it!

So, let's set this straight. Get over there and vote for some blogger who has a real honest-to-goodness claim to the award. I see that there is pretty good representation from St. Blog's Parish over there.

Which brings me to another email I received. Dear Mrs. Darwin nominated Happy Catholic. I see that I have four votes (which puts it back on about page 8). Very exciting! So if you aren't sure who to vote for, remember where you read this! (Don't make me get out the Jamaican bobsledders and start kissing the egg, y'all! ha!)

Looking for Truth and Finding the Church: Two Conversion Stories

So as far as I can remember, I have always “known” that Catholics were in a false religion that was leading them straight to Hell as Catholics did not rely on Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

I wish I never had to repeat this because it is so painful and tragic, but it is true and indicative of how lost I thought the Church was. When both Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II died, I was saddened and I thought “Now they know they were wrong.” Forgive me Father.

You wouldn't believe that anyone could go from this to wearing a huge grin because she was confirmed in the Church last weekend. But people, and the way that God leads them, are endlessly surprising. This is a fascinating story about a family that converted from The Church of the Nazarene to Catholicism. It was especially interesting to me since I had a good friend in high school who was a member of The Church of the Nazarene and I went with her for about two years.

I found this fascinating in that they had anti-Catholicism drilled into them (if any Catholics were Christians it was in spite of being Catholic) and yet the woman had enough of a quest for truth to move beyond it and read herself into the church (and argue her husband there with her). I love someone who just won't quit looking until they have found the truthful answers to their questions. Her reading list is one that will be a good resource to anyone who wants to help Protestant friends who are looking into crossing the Tiber.

A few years later, a friend of mine became a Catholic. He’d grown up mostly Baptist, Reformed, or Reformed Baptist and had had his share of struggling with his faith. His family was mostly Baptist and his father worked at the school with me, so it was a pretty big shock. For many of his “Christian” friends, it meant that he’d abandoned his faith and was no better than a heretic or non-Christian. I wanted to give him, if not the benefit of the doubt, then at least some room to discuss why he’d chosen this spiritual route. Rather than just abandoning him because he’d “fallen away.”

That meant I needed to put away my anti-Catholic preconceptions and take a new look at what it was he said he believed. Which meant looking at what the Catholic Church says it teaches. Not what nominal Catholics believe or what I see in movies or hear antagonists say about it, but what the Catholic Church officially teaches. If you’re going to learn about a belief system, it’s a good idea to start with their own official teachings. THEN you can evaluate whether or not you think them credible or worthwhile. But you certainly can’t make an unbiased decision when your only information sources are biased against them.

I have never seen such a thorough, planned study as the one that Coffee Klatch outlines in this story. Just reading his list of items to research wore me out. Thank heavens I was into much more basic wrestling when I converted. I'd never have finished the reading. What makes this so interesting to me (besides the fact that any conversion story is an interesting story) is that one by one we are given the reasons why Scripture itself refutes anti-Catholic arguments. The author doesn't always specifically spell out all the Protestant beliefs that his studies refuted, however, to anyone who is used to the basic sort of arguments, it is very clear. Not only is this inspiring but it is a wonderful resource as well. (Note: apologies to Scott ... obviously I hadn't come across his name and so was writing "her" when it should have been "him.")

The God Who Creates Out of Nothing

Genesis begins not just with the beginning of something, but with the beginning of everything. Its first verse uses a word for which there is no equivalent in any other ancient language. The word is bara'. It means not just to make but to create, not just to re-form something new out of something old, but to create something wholly new that was simply not there before. Only God can create, for creation in the literal sense (out of nothing) requires infinite power, since there is an infinite gap between nothing and something. Startling as it may seem, no other people every had creation stories in the true sense of the word, only formation stories. The Jewish notion of creation is a radically distinctive notion in the history of human thought. When Jewish theologians like Philo and later Christian theologians (who learned it from the Jews) told the Greeks about it, they were often ridiculed.

Yet the consequences of this notion of creation are incomparable. They include radically new notions (1) of God, (2) of nature, and (3) of human beings and human life.

You Can Understand the Bible
A Practical And Illuminating Guide To Each Book In The Bible
by Peter Kreeft

This is right in line with what our priest spoke about in his Easter homily. He pointed out that the very fact that makes the resurrection so true is that the gospels repeatedly report that the apostles themselves didn't believe in it until Jesus showed up in person. Like any sensible person, they knew that in and of itself coming back from the dead is an unbelievable fact. The only thing that would make anyone go around proclaiming something so obviously ludicrous is if it is real.

So God has been doing the inexplicable since the very beginning. As always, Jesus showed us God up close and personal ... by doing the inexplicable in his resurrection.

Uncle

I just can't do it.

I know it's a classic.

I realize it's a fault in my intellect.

I have tried and tried ... and tried.

But I can't force myself to try any longer to read A Canticle for Leibowitz.

I give up.