Joyless Pragmatism

“I just wanted you to know that I won’t offer to pray in class because I’m not Catholic. If you want, you can email my parents and ask them about it. But when you look around the room for volunteers to pray, that’s why I’m not offering.”

A student had approached me after class one day and started our brief conversation with that explanation.

“Oh? That is fine that you aren’t Catholic. I assume your parents are not either, so I wouldn’t email them about it. I still expect you to answer questions and participate in class, though”
“No, they are Catholic.”
“They are, but you aren’t?”
“Yes.”

I’ve often wondered why some people remain faithful to the religion of their parents and others don’t. Considering that this student brought this conversation up in the first place, I figured I could try to ask some questions to get some bearing on the situation.

“Are you Christian?”
“No. I believe in God, because I think it is silly not to. I just believe he created the world but isn’t really active in it. I’m not against Christians or anything. I just think you do your thing and I’ll do mine.”

This student seemed so…pragmatic.

I think the thing that struck me the most was how reasonable the student was striving to be. Granted, I am grateful when students are reasonable, but I couldn’t help but sense an absence of joy in this system of belief. In many ways, I was impressed with the responses I received to my questions. Yet I also wondered if this lack of belief stemmed more from a desire to be intelligent rather than closely examining the issues.

The popular notion of ‘you do you, I’ll do me’ continues to baffle me. If there is any honest pursuit of the truth, then clearly you doing your own thing and me doing my own separate thing cannot both lead to the correct answer. Continual diversity in beliefs cannot lead to unity in the end. Continue reading “Joyless Pragmatism” →

When the Exciting Journey Becomes Tiring, Carry On

Over three years ago, I filled a hiking backpack, flew to Europe, and walked El Camino de Santiago. The first day on the Camino, though difficult, was exhilarating. We walked from the beautiful little town of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France, over the Pyrenees, and into Roncesvalles in Spain. The newness of the adventure combined with spectacular views made me excited nearly every step of the way.

The next morning, we were tired and sore, but eager to continue this 500-mile trek. So we set out again, walking for hours, taking in gorgeous scenery, and dining at little cafes or from our packed lunches.

Then we did that again. And again.

Sleep, rise, walk, eat, walk, Mass, eat, sleep. Repeat.

The tiredness soon was eclipsed by pain. My feet ached in a way they never had before. Blisters developed in tender places. The beginning of the day meant pressing my feet into my shoes and then starting the delicate process of walking. After a while, the pain dulled and seemed to fade into my subconscious. However, if we ever paused, my feet gave a fiery reminder to sit down or keep walking.

Yet even these blisters didn’t completely dampen my spirits. I knew they could happen and it was, in a way, part of the Camino adventure. Each day, I offered up my pain for different intentions and this made the journey a pilgrimage instead of a hiking trip.

One day, I no longer wanted to walk.

The intense desires to sleep in, be in the same place for more than 15 hours, or watch a movie were things I hadn’t anticipated when I started walking. There was a definite shift from “This is fun!” to “This is a pilgrimage.” Internally resistant to another day of plodding along, I realized that this adventure would require work and an embracing of the daily struggle.

And then I realized, this is a lot like life. Continue reading “When the Exciting Journey Becomes Tiring, Carry On” →

If We Understood the Mass

“I don’t think God would send someone who loves Him and follows Him to Hell.”

A conversation about exorcisms somehow veered into a free-for-all rapid fire of questions. As I’ve said before, though, if my students ask questions about the faith and they are interested, I have a difficult time telling them no.

“I don’t believe the Church teaches that,” I told the student.

“But if I don’t go to church on Sunday, the Church says that is a mortal sin. I don’t believe that if I love God and He loves me that He would send me to Hell for missing one Mass on Sunday.”

Understandably, this is a question I hear quite often. My students find it difficult to accept that missing Mass is a grave sin. They aren’t skipping it maliciously, I believe, and so I get where they are coming from with their confusion. Usually, it is out of laziness or boredom or busyness.

So I did what I generally do–I tried my best to explain why the Church teaches what she does.

“I think if we understood what the Mass was, then we wouldn’t ask this question. God is asking us to go to Mass to encounter Him and receive Him. He is offering His very self to us out of love. And if we love Him, I don’t think we would say that we aren’t able to come for one hour once a week. The bare minimum in having a relationship with the Lord is this one hour. We couldn’t say no to encountering the Lord and letting Him live in us if we truly loved Him.”

The answer seemed to touch a chord and we moved on to other questions.

Students are prone to question why we have to go to Mass and adults are more prone to critique the Mass itself. Continue reading “If We Understood the Mass” →

Honey, I love you, but being married to you is a burden

“Honey, I love you, really, I do. But being married to you is a burden.”

My students were asked to imagine that a husband came home and said this to his wife. Already, there was a bit of disdain in their eyes for the husband.

“Oh, I am? How am I so burdensome?”
“Well, I love you, but sometimes I want to do things and I can’t because of you.”
“Like what?”
“There are a lot of attractive and smart women I run into at work and I can’t date any of them. Sometimes I want to just catch a plane and fly to Florida for a week, but I would have to tell you first and you might want to come. You are interesting and wonderful and I love you, but sometimes marriage is restrictive.”

Each time I told this to my students, it worked. They did not think highly of the husband and were, rightfully so, annoyed with his list of burdens.

Wow, they gasp, he is the worst.

But aren’t these things true? I asked my students. He isn’t allowed to date other women, is he?

No, they reply.

Shouldn’t he talk to his wife about flying off to Florida for a week before he does it?

Yes, they say.

So what is wrong about what he is saying? Why shouldn’t he say these things when they are true?

After very little discussion, because it seems so obvious, they tell me that he has the wrong perspective. He isn’t focusing on his relationship with his wife, but simply all the things he cannot do because of his relationship with her.

Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.

Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI

You are correct, I tell them, the husband focuses only on the restrictions of this relationship instead of the love he has for her.

But isn’t this sometimes what we do with God? Continue reading “Honey, I love you, but being married to you is a burden” →

Avenues to My Heart

When I started college, I wanted to be a high school English teacher. I have loved reading since elementary school and I wanted to encourage others to love reading, too. Along with reading, I also enjoyed writing. With these two loves, I assumed teaching English would be a fitting career.

The second semester of my freshman year of college found me taking a Theology class. Since I had exclusively attended public school growing up, this was my first formal Theology class. Other students who had attended Catholic schools didn’t seem as impressed as I was with the class. Simply praying before a math class at college was an exciting concept for me. Reading encyclicals and Church documents? That was a complete thrill and I remember marveling at how accessible I found them.

After this introductory class, I was hooked.

I kept slipping extra Theology classes into my schedule. Until, finally, my adviser asked what I was doing. My heart wanted a Theology degree simply because it meant I could study more about what the Church thought and did. So I dropped my Education major and paired my English major with Theology. While I still loved reading and writing, I knew that I could never be quite as passionate about English as I could be about Theology.

Even with a Theology degree and a day full of teaching Theology classes, it still satisfies a desire of my heart when I can sit down and read good theological works. Whether they are more dogmatic or more spiritual, I find the truths they speak to be balm for my soul. I read Bishop Conley’s address to a group of Catholic school educators and administrators and I found myself underlining several points. Bishop Conley said, “If you want authentically Catholic culture, you need authentically Catholic schools.” This makes me applaud and then question, “How?” Hearing about the faith is enlightening and joyous for me. Learning about my role as a Catholic educator is inspiring. It fills me with truths I know to be solid.

Despite the length of time I have spent on Theology (the beauty and the teaching of it), the inspiration for this post is not Theology. Rather, it was in conversation with a co-worker that I realized that while theological reading is beautiful and soul-lifting, so is literature. Continue reading “Avenues to My Heart” →

Recurring Bad Dream Means School is Near

The start of the school year is just around the corner.

As if the date wasn’t enough of an indicator, several other factors have drawn my attention to this fact.
1. I’ve seen a steady uptick in emails from the school, including schedules for in-services and faculty information.
2. People have started beginning conversations with me by asking, “Are you ready for school?”
3. Finally, I had my first bad dream.

Dreams have a funny way of revealing our inner state to ourselves. I don’t remember many of my dreams, but I have a fairly consistent dream that happens as I approach a new school year. I dream that I am running late for school. The whole, restless dream consists of me waking up late, realizing I won’t get to school in time (while also being a bit confused because I didn’t think the school year had started yet), and the stressful experience of trying to figure out what to do. Usually, it is a short dream, but one that is replayed multiple times, giving me the feeling that I am in a constant state of panic and stress. When I pull myself out of the dream, I reassure myself that school hasn’t started and that it was all just a dream. Sometimes my heart is panic racing so fiercely that it is difficult to fall back asleep.

One summer, I had this running late for school dream in June and I was pretty annoyed. I had months of summer left and here I was, panicking in the middle of the night because dream Trish thought it was 7:50 on a school morning. This year, it held off a bit longer and the first dream came this past week. Continue reading “Recurring Bad Dream Means School is Near” →

Teaching: To Pursue The Truth Together

I’ve spent a great deal of the summer considering how this next school year will unfurl. Each fall, I start with the hopes that this will be the best year ever. And, in many ways, that has largely proven to be true. The more I teach, the more confident I feel teaching. The longer I am there and the more experiences I have, the more prepared I feel to handle future problems and situations. Yet despite all of my preparations and extra reading I do during the summer, one thing is certain: I will never be perfectly prepared for every question they ask me.

Honestly, I think I am able to answer most of the questions that arise in the classroom. If I have never considered the question or even heard the answer, I am surprised how often I am able to give an answer anyway. I’m not lying to them or just trying to look smart. I’ve come to realize that the longer one knows the Lord and studies His Church, the better one is able to think with the mind of the Church. So even if that question has never been posed to me before, I can often give a pretty confident answer because I have come to know and understand the Church to a degree.

There is, however, a lingering concern that I will be unable to answer a question. Or, worse yet, that my lack of knowledge will appear to mean that the Church has never considered that question or that her theology is found wanting. Regarding those fears, I think back to the summer before my first year of teaching. I was presenting these concerns to a trusted priest and he asked if I thought that a student could ask a question that the Church couldn’t answer or that would prove her wrong. I told him that I was certain the Church had answers and that I trusted her to be true in all things she affirmed as true. For him, that was the end of it. So what if I didn’t know the answer? I knew the Church had an answer and I was fairly confident I could find it if needed.

For the last five years, that is what I have sought to do. To a generation that I struggle to understand, I have striven to present truths they struggle to find relevant or accurate. I ask them to consider the truths of the Church and they echo Pilate by saying, “What is truth?” They question if it matters to know the truth. They ask if everything could be true. And I try to use logic and personal examples to show them the beauty of knowing and pursuing the truth. Continue reading “Teaching: To Pursue The Truth Together” →

Saints and Sinners: The Indelicate Reality of Christ’s Church

In college, I took a course called “Theology of the Church” and the professor made certain to cement a specific truth in my mind. He spoke frequently of how the Church is the spotless Bride of Christ, without blemish or error. Yet he spoke just as often about how the Church is stained and tarnished, filled with sin and weakness. Each Catholic must come to terms with this dichotomy if he or she desires to fully understand this living organism we call the Catholic Church.

The saints are beautiful models of following Christ and seeking holiness in the midst of a chaotic world. For most of the difficulties we face in life, we can turn to a specific saint who had similar struggles. There are saints who had difficult relationships with their parents or children, saints who were falsely accused, saints who had superiors who treated them unjustly, saints who lost loved ones, saints who experienced poverty, saints who struggled with drinking or drugs, saints who battled anger and violence, and saints who people thought were foolish or incapable.

Yet we know the Church is not merely comprised of saints. I belong to the Church and I am most definitely not a saint yet. So while it is easier to focus on the virtues and gifts of the saints, we also know we are a Church filled with sinners. We have sinners in the pews, in the choir, in the streets, at the altar, in the diocesan offices, in the Vatican, and in the chair of St. Peter. Each of us, on our journey to become the saints God desires, must fight our own battles as we acknowledge our sinfulness. The goal is not to make perfect masks that cover up our imperfections. Rather, we seek to let Christ into our deepest sins and allow Him to transform us.

It is with this knowledge of myself, as a sinner striving to be a saint, that I can recognize this reality within the Church herself. She is perfect: Christ instituted her, the Holy Spirit guides her, and the Father welcomes her members into Heaven, one by one. Yet she is us: flawed, broken, dragging our weary hearts to Calvary and to Heaven. All of the romantic notions I have about the Church and her beautiful, soul-shaking theology necessarily contrast painfully with the reality of the Church that I see around me. Reality is certainly not so romantic and not so obviously beautiful. Nonetheless, it is still the Church I love.

When we encounter scandal in the Church, it is helpful to remember this inherent dichotomy, one that existed from the beginning of the Church, yet one which will end when we are purified and in Heaven. While I love quite fiercely different humans within the Church, I also know that my love for the Church is not solely based on these humans. My spiritual director is wise and I find myself able to share the workings of my heart with him. My pastor leads me to a deeper understanding of how to encounter Christ in the daily moments. Yet even should these priests fail me, I would not stop loving the Church.
Continue reading “Saints and Sinners: The Indelicate Reality of Christ’s Church” →

The Deepest Longing of Our Hearts

“I guess I don’t like the argument from desire because I’ve never felt a desire for something that can’t be satisfied on earth.”

As a melancholic who has nearly always longed for something beyond this world, I was a bit surprised by this admission. My class was reviewing arguments for God’s existence and as we went over each one, I would ask a few students to share if they liked or disliked the argument. Then they needed to voice why, perhaps the most difficult part of it all for them.

I wanted them to reflect on the arguments and see which ones they found personally compelling. Each person is different and so I wasn’t too concerned if they liked all of the arguments or not. Yet it is always interesting to me which ones they dislike and why. Some other students voiced a dislike for the desire argument, but the declaration that they had never desired something beyond this world seemed foreign to me.

Melancholic that I am, I have always longed for perfection. Ever since high school and college, that has translated into a longing for Heaven. So as my students were voicing that they have never experienced this unfulfilled desire for something beyond this world, I was left wondering why they don’t have a longing that I never remember being without.

In my first year of teaching, I prayed frequently for death. Not in a morbid way, but in a longing-for-home-and-yet-knowing-everything-around-me-is-temporary way. The more I battled with my students over Church teaching, the more I wanted to be in a place of eternal Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. Yet that was far from the first time that I had felt an unfulfilled desire. Why are my students not experiencing this also? Continue reading “The Deepest Longing of Our Hearts” →

Attractive Misery

We feel…shame at seeing our misery and our baseness exposed. Yet this misery possesses the mysterious privilege of attracting our Lord. This is difficult to understand, yet it is an incontestable truth. Our nothingness and our misery constitute the force that attracts our Lord.

(Secrets of the Interior Life)

I’ve never really understood this idea of how our misery attracts the Lord to us. Generally, when I see my own miserableness, it is repulsive or something I want to hide. It isn’t something that is attractive or pleasant. When it comes to seeing the miserableness of others, I’m not much better. My personality is one that desires perfection. The people around me (including me) are continually letting me down because they don’t live up to my image of perfection.

Yet the Lord uses all things for good. The cheating incident I mentioned a couple posts back has really pushed my heart. It made me move from anger to forgiveness. A few days later when the individuals came back and we spoke, I found great freedom in being able to express how they had hurt me and to hear them apologize. The relief on their faces was incredible. It was though they walked into my room carrying a burden and then through the exchange of a few words, that burden was lifted. My burden was lifted, too.

Strangely, over the last couple weeks, I have found a special tenderness in my hearts toward those individuals. No longer angry, I am able to love them as they are: flawed human beings. The Lord knows I have difficulty loving people in their humanity and so I am beginning to be grateful for this incident. I don’t want to love them only when I think they are perfect, but for the beautiful complexity that is wrapped up within their hearts and souls. I know myself and so I know I do not want to be loved merely for my seeming perfection but rather in my entirety. In the midst of this, I experienced for the first time, at least consciously, the way that misery attracts my heart. Continue reading “Attractive Misery” →

Seeking After His Heart

A Blog Following the Quest of A Human Heart

Category: teaching