At Considerable Cost

I did not give up Facebook for Lent, but I ended up nearly abandoning it during Holy Week.   I only glanced at notifications and "liked" all the beautiful family Easter photos that I found on my news feed late Sunday evening.   This evening, I found a notification that Marc at BadCatholic on the Patheos Catholic Channel had finally gotten back to writing.   And what a return!   It seems there's constantly a post churning in the back of my mind about what drew me to the Catholic Church, despite my anti-Catholic upbringing.   I loved novels set amongst devout Jewish families, with their calendar centered around festivals that even dictated the use of their time and foodstuffs.   Why had that disappeared with Christianity?   Liturgy?   And then I attended my first mass and felt the draw and the first pull for me to find that which my heart so desperately sought.   Now, I've read this, though, a...

Today is the feast day of one of my favorite saints, St. Therese, known as the Little Flower.   Along with St. Jeanne d'Arc, she is Co-Patroness of France and one of only three women officially given the title "Doctor of the Church" because of the profound truths and teachings contained in her spiritual writings and more importantly, in her life.   Her writings are few, memoirs of her life and spiritual journey she wrote under direction from her superior at the convent.   Her life was short, only 24 years, ended by tuberculosis.   However few and short her writings and years, the love, power, grace, and glory contained in them is limitless.   She is still teaching and touching lives today, 115 years after her death. I began a devotion to this great saint before the birth of our oldest daughter.   We gave her the middle name, Therese-Marie, when she was born so she would have the intercession of two powerful patrons, St. T...

Two books and a movie.  An author, a saint, and a fictional character.   They've all been tossing about in my mind over the past few weeks.   I recently completed two books, Lizzie's War and Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux .   Both books--one fiction, the other non-fiction--dovetailed to prompt pondering about vocation, love, and desire. Lizzie's War , by Tim Farrington, is beautiful in its rawness and reality.   Set in the late 1960s, the book alternates the story of Mike, a Marine in Vietnam, and his wife, Lizzie, left at home on her own battlefront, trying her best to run the family in his absence and to not lose herself in the process.   For the past few years, my reading has consisted of theology, especially apologetics, and classics, such as Dickens, Austen, and Shakespeare.   All good, but combined with the preoccupation of taking care of my father and dealing with estate matters, ...

from Chapter July, page 177, Coventry Patmore on a saint: "...he will mostly likely dwell with reiteration on commonplaces with which you were perfectly well acquainted before you were twelve years old; but you must make allowance for him, and remember that the knowledge which is to you a surface with no depth is to him a solid ..." "A solid"--firmness, foundation, support, unwavering, not prone to or dependent upon fashions or whims.   Something which I honestly have felt myself lacking for months now.  "Rock solid" is a cliche we often use, and the book Shirt of Flame has been a rock of sorts--a pebble-- in my life since it arrived on my doorstep.    Two forms of a pebble--the one-- that aggravating pebble in a shoe that makes its presence known with each step you take until you finally stop and deal with it.   And the other--a smooth, beautiful pebble, held in your palm, as you turn it over and stroke it, an aid to your contemplation, ...