My house plays host to stacks of note-filled napkins, sticky notes, and random scribbled on notebooks. I also have 573 notes on my phone, a few hundred more articles in draft, and varied and disparate published social media rants. I try to make sense of it now and again. Here are a handful, from both buried and current piles…
WHAT DO WE LIVE FOR? FOR WHOM WOULD WE DIE?
For All Saints’ Day, my daughter dressed up as Polish Catholic wife and mother, Blessed Wiktoria Ulma. She was executed by the Nazis—along with her husband and 6 children—for hiding a groups of Jews. Her 7th baby was born during the ordeal and is considered to have died with “baptism by blood.” The children were murdered after the parents, which means her children (8, 7, 6, 4, 3, 2) witnessed the deaths of their parents.
The spirit of violence and horror which sweeps over the world is not of God and it isn’t new. Speaking to those who aren’t believers? I would say it’s not even human. In order to mutilate, desecrate, violate, and hunt down like a predator after prey, we must become less than human.
Perhaps we wouldn’t have done what the Ulmas did (a lot of people didn’t), but a world full of silence and abstention is not much to boast about. I doubt there will anyone in heaven who says “Oh, you laid down your life for a Jew? Well, you shouldn’t have done that.”
THOUGHTS ON THE TEARING DOWN OF VICTIM POSTERS
American kids are unmoved by images of real atrocities because they’ve grown up on horror movies, violent video games, porn, and internet. They’ve seen it all and their brains don’t know what’s real. Think of all the coping a kid has to do the first time he sees a bloody movie massacre. Or sexual assault. And then repeat that over and over again. Suppressing. Justifying. Laughing. Engaging. Killing empathy. Confusing morality. Cutting off relationship. With full consent of mind, will, body, and… parents. A perfect training ground for complicity with real evil.
I’m not saying a few video games are going to ruin our kids. It’s a bit more complex than that. Yet it’s worth pondering the perfect storm that makes the young so capable of what we’re seeing in the streets and universities. Tearing down the images of victim faces. What is real? What is right and good? They don’t know.
There were multiple stages in my conversion to being pro-life, but it wasn’t until I saw the image of an abortion victim—a tiny brutalized child—that I fell to my knees, wept, and begged God’s forgiveness for everything I had done to push this injustice against innocence. But…
I’d seen such images many times before without being moved. I was desensitized to the horror of it. And I was programmed, in a sense, to be triggered to rage against the people who hung the images. I was a true believer for an ideology, so devoted that I could not see humanity. I could not see the image of God in the children.
I called those posters propaganda. I wanted to tear them down.
LAUDATO NO.
I have not yet read Laudato Deum, the new apostolic exhortation by Pope Francis. It is a follow up to Laudato Si and I already know what I think about that one. I wrote about it back in 2016 before it was mainstream cool to question the Pope, and it fell flat within my community. Some called me out: That’s a little too negative, Melody. We’re obliged to greater charity. But mostly there was silence. Blogging moms were busy writing reflections and books based on the encyclical and I was sitting on my hands trying not to say too much about the distress I felt at the thought of United Nations propaganda within a Church document.
Anyway, I heard through headlines and commentary that Laudato Si 2.0 essentially took the worst elements (my take) of the original and elevated them. So I left it (and still it waits) but did revisit my original article to brush up. My first thought on rereading was “Wow. I was way too soft on this.” I was. Then I fell down some new rabbit holes.
One search brought me to a priest named Sean McDonagh, SSC, an Irish Columban missionary who is a self-described eco-activist. Apparently, the initial encyclical framework is partially his baby. In an NCR interview he said:
Well, I was asked by Cardinal Peter Turkson in November 2013 to write a document for the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and I wrote it up, like 30,000 words … now eventually, in 2014, that kind of morphed into the beginning of the encyclical itself. So that whole section, basically, on what’s happening in our world, those were issues I developed.
It is worth noting that McDonagh has been critical of the Church’s position on contraception and birth control. He is also highly critical of “Capitalist consumption” saying that the “sin of biocide” is generated by pursuit of capitalist goals. Unredeemed capitalism certainly has its problems, but McDonagh’s teachings come awfully close to sounding like the language of Marxism’s Metabolic Rift theory.
In a Vatican address, he stated that “We are moving to a new theology.” I can only assume that whatever it is will mesh nicely with the U.N.’s anti-life Sustainable Development Goals. My faith in Christ is strong. The U.N.? Not so much.
HEALING MARRIAGE
Happy book release week to my friend John Francis Clark! Betrayed Without a Kiss is a highly recommended read on marriage, what went wrong, and how to restore. (That’s my affiliate link, by the way. I’m required to disclose so there you go.)
The book has led to excellent discussions in my family and I pray the same for the Church. Big van homeschool photo is appropriate for the moment, I think!
Very nice hard cover. Great gift. Buying now for Christmas via Amazon will help John’s rankings and get this book shown to more people. But you can get 15% off if you use my code at TAN Books: MELODY15
CONVERSATIONS IN MY HOME…
How trending Catholic fixation on the demonic can lead to a practical form of dualism. The belief in the sovereignty, victory, and power of God is acknowledged but behaviors reflect something different. Fear-based faith teaches the heart that God is not trustworthy. At a time when exorcist=fame, this topic probably deserves some fleshing out.
ON SALVATION OF THE GENTILES AND THE JEWS
I have nothing to write on this but I have been reading and pondering Paul’s words in Romans 11: 17-32. My husband read it aloud last week and it took my breath away. Sometimes the Scriptures come alive as if I’ve never read them before…
But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, 18 do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you. 19 You will say, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” 20 That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast only through faith. So do not become proud, but stand in awe. 21 For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you. 22 Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise you too will be cut off. 23 And even the others, if they do not persist in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again. 24 For if you have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree.
All Israel Will Be Saved
25 Lest you be wise in your own conceits, I want you to understand this mystery, brethren: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, 26 and so all Israel will be saved; as it is written,
“The Deliverer will come from Zion,
he will banish ungodliness from Jacob”;
27 “and this will be my covenant with them
when I take away their sins.”28 As regards the gospel they are enemies of God, for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. 29 For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable. 30 Just as you were once disobedient to God but now have received mercy because of their disobedience, 31 so they have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may receive mercy. 32 For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all.
St. Kenneth, a lesser known Apostle of Ireland
Our week was full of feasting and the surprise of an All Saints’ Day snowfall. I enjoyed it all but am happy to put the costumes (and the mess that making the costumes produced) away for another year. The candy is a different story. We’ll be finding wrappers from now to Christmas.
God’s blessings on your weekend, friends! Give me a shout anytime with questions or topics you’d like to see addressed here. I’ll take any excuse to make more notes.
Melody
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