Parenting is not unlike rock climbing in that initially we can be intimidated by the expansiveness of it all, and by more the experienced “super parents” whose juggling skills are already honed, making the complexities of family life look like no big deal.  After a few short years, however, we grow confident in our roles, the intimidation factor fades, and it is actually pretty easy to forget the eternal, life-and-death responsibility God has place in our hands with the delivery of each individual child.

To help rock climbers keep from getting complacent about the risks of climbing, there is one firm rule at the gym.  That rule is a type of buddy system that mandates that before each climb, both climber and belayer (the person working the safety ropes) must get duplicate safety checks of all their climbing equipment from another belayer.  At first, this rule drove me crazy.  Often there is not another belayer anywhere around when I am belaying the kids by myself.  This means that for an hour’s worth of climbing, I have to shout across the gym requesting multiple safety checks from multiple complete strangers.

Now the last thing I want to do is draw any more attention to myself by shouting, because nowadays I have our 15-month-old baby in a backpack babbling away and pulling my hair while I belay the older children.  I can’t even pretend to look like the serious rock climber I was in my 20s, and so, at first, the buddy rule really chafed at my ego.  Thankfully, I didn’t give in to my pride, and soon discovered that requesting and giving safety checks actually helps to create a protective community of climbers out of complete strangers.  Best of all, the rule kept me craning my neck up those 65-foot, man-made climbing cliffs and remembering the life-and-death responsibility of being properly connected to my Spiderman-like children, while safely working the ropes down on the floor.

To help every Catholic parent remain aware of the eternal responsibilities of parenting, Jesus has given us one firm rule.  That rule is found in John 13:34, “Love one another.  As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”  Viewed properly, this rule is a buddy check with Jesus.  It’s a call to know the Bible and Catholic teaching in order to know how Jesus loved.  It’s a call to know other Catholics with whom we can double check our parenting, family style, and individual children to be sure that as a unit we are properly connected to each other, and to the one true faith which will safely lead us to eternal life.  I’m certain Jesus knew that we’d need buddy checks when he sent his disciples out two-by-two instead of all alone (Luke 10:1).

Few of us want to draw attention to ourselves by shouting out for a spiritual buddy check, especially if we are divorced, have troubled teens, or for some reason just feel outside the norm of the parish community, like I felt at the gym when belaying with a baby on my back.  As it turns out, buddy checks create a protective community within the church, just like they do in the climbing gym.  Best of all, they remind us to cast our eyes up to heaven and remember the eternal responsibility of parenting faithfully down here on earth.  It may chafe at our egos, but shouting out to the Lord and to fellow Catholics for spiritual buddy checks will make us better parents and will increase the chances of our kids making it safely to heaven, even if there are a few slips along the way.

I was not braving two hours of rush hour traffic to visit Minute Man National Park, however, nor to pay my respects to everything that Lexington represents.  No, I was headed to a Lexington soccer field for my daughter’s game that evening.  As I exited the highway, I found myself heading straight for the Park.  Before reaching it, I turned left and headed to the soccer field instead.  Waiting for the game to begin, I had to laugh at the absurdity of my situation.

I have lived in New England for over 18 years, and have wanted to visit this historically important place all along, but have never found the time to do so.  How absurd was it that I would finally get to this hub of history not by careful planning, but by docilely following my child’s soccer schedule into rush hour traffic?   It was an example of how, as legitimately busy people, we habitually jump to take care of urgent things (answering the phone), but often indefinitely neglect things of more lasting importance (enjoying a phone-free, family dinner).

The situation brought to mind a similarly absurd choice I had made earlier that day.   Back in late spring I had scheduled my teenagers’ mid-summer, orthodontic appointments for seven in the morning, so that after the appointments we could still get to the beach before my two-year old would need an afternoon nap.  Unfortunately, the appointments took nearly two hours instead of the usual 20 minutes.  By the time we drove away from orthodontist’s office, it was nearly nine o’clock.

Now, the road from the orthodontic office to my house runs straight toward our church, where daily Mass would be starting at nine o’clock.  Through no careful planning, I found myself headed straight toward the one place that morning where I could meet “He who takes away the sins of the world.”  In short, I was headed to where the spiritual epicenter of all human history would be celebrated that morning.

So what did I do?  I pulled a U-turn and headed to the grocery store instead.  The forecast said that it was going to be in the 100s by noon, so I decided that we urgently needed some popsicles for the beach (We were still going to the beach!), and Gatorade for the soccer game in Lexington.  Looking back, I have to laugh.  I chose to purchase popsicles and Gatorade over partaking of the Eucharist?  How absurd!

Now, I know it’s not realistic for me, nor for most busy parents, to get to Mass every day, but if I can routinely schedule things like orthodontic appointments at 7 a.m. and driving to soccer games during rush hour traffic, then why not recurrent daily mass?  Really, why not?

Minute Man National Park is still one among the many, equally awesome historical sites I want to visit, but here is where my parallel experiences of getting there and getting to daily Mass break down.  Being in communion with God is not just one among many equal things to which I should aspire.  Regular communion with God, whether it be at Mass or during a set time of prayer at home, should to be the spiritual epicenter of my entire earthly existence.   If I could get this straight, no turning left, right, or making a U-turn from it, is it possible that the shot of grace I would receive could reignite my spiritual life and perhaps even fan worldwide flames of spiritual renewal?  I know.  I know.  It’s an absurd and grandiose thought.  Right up there with a rag tag group of Minutemen thinking they could defeat the entire British Empire.

I find this problem to be somewhat common when I am attempting to learn anything new about how to live a more authentically Catholic life.  I need time not only to take in the new information, but also to digest it and to figure out how to properly integrate it into my life.  As a busy parent, however, it’s challenging enough for me to find the time to take in new information, let alone to digest and integrate it.  Many parents I talk with express the same frustration about continuing to be formed in their faith as adults.

Although there are obstacles, I am convinced that as Catholic parents each of these three tasks — gathering, processing, and integrating information about our Catholic faith — is vital to the health of our personal faith.  They are vital to the corporate health of our families, parishes and our culture at large, too, because keeping our faith alive and current is a prerequisite to fulfilling Jesus’ command to share God’s love with all the world (Matthew 28:16-20).  An illustration from athletics would be that just because I ran a half marathon 23 years ago, this does not mean that without ongoing training I could wake up today and run another one expecting the same or better results.  In fact, I could definitely expect worse results, if I even came close to finishing!

Similarly, just because we may have attended Catholic school or CCD classes during our youth, this does not mean that we could wake up today and breezily explain to our teenager what he is supposed to be getting out of Mass, the difference between a Christian denomination and a cult, or why the Church teaches that being in love is not a good enough reason for being sexual intimate before marriage.  And these aren’t even the most pointed questions an astute teen is likely to spring on us!  Even though I assumed it would, being a cradle Catholic didn’t guarantee that I had been taught or had obtained a solid grasp of basic Catholic principles.  As a young mom I knew very little about the Bible, the importance of the Magisterium, or where to find authentically Catholic answers to the increasingly complex questions confronting us in the contemporary world.  And yet, learning about just these three things while becoming a more experienced mom has been a huge help in my quest to give accurate, reasonable, and faith-filled answers to the real-life questions posed by my own astute children.

Returning to my athletic analogy, just like our bodies, our faith needs to be fed new nutrients and exercised regularly in order to retain the strength and capability necessary to engage in the spiritual marathon we call parenting.  We simply can’t answer, “But why, Mommy?” or “But why, Daddy?” based on what we think we once knew, especially if we never actually learned it in the first place.

In his book Cardinal George highlighted this scripture as a reason to take ongoing faith formation very seriously; “But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. (1 Peter 3:15).”  If you are a parent like me, then the “everyone” asking you questions is most likely going to be your child, and explaining the hope that is within you to him or her is going to be a big part of your life’s spiritual mission.

There are times when being a Catholic parent stirs up feelings of unprepared panic.  We want to be brilliant parents.  We’re egotistically sure that we actually are brilliant parents because of how precious our two-year-old is.  But then, Miss Precious morphs into Ms. Precocious teen, and between mouthfuls of pizza asks something like, “Hey, Dad, we’re Catholic, right?  Well, Dr. Harrington down the street said Catholics don’t believe in birth control?  Is he right?”

Well, Dad, forget having a 2-minute warning.  Do you, right now, know what the Church actually teaches?  If so, can you summarize it in a three-second, teen-friendly sound bite?  And, if after listening to you — big if — Ms. Precocious squints her eyes and asks how you know this, how will you back yourself up?

Okay, parents reading this, remain calm.  This was only a simulation exercise to illustrate why, with regard to the effective sharing of our faith, St. Peter instructs us in the New Testament to, “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks us to give the reason for the hope that we have. (1 Peter 3:15).”  We must always be prepared because we never know when our number will be called and if we fail to adequately teach our child the Catholic faith, it may compromise their eternal life.

Perhaps you are like me and were convicted by the verse from St. Peter of your need to become a better-prepared Catholic parent by learning more about your faith, but you are also just too busy to wedge even one more thing into your calendar.  If this is the case, then here are a few bite-size ways to get ongoing adult faith formation into your life anyway.  Forget reading Cooking Light in the doctor’s office and get in the habit of bringing a Catholic magazine, newspaper, or the Bible around with you instead.   Skip night school classes in wok cookery, and join a church prayer or support or service group instead.  Turn off the morning or evening news and tune into EWTN instead or get out of the house and go to daily mass.  You’ll be amazed at how little actions like these add up in no time.  You see, finding time and opportunities for faith formation is not the real problem.  There are enough opportunities out there to fill a million directories, and we actually are in charge of our own time.  The real problem is finding the resolve to replace all that stuff that seems so very worldly-urgent with that which we know to be so much more heavenly-important.

When I have more excuses than resolve in this area, I have found that the only thing to do is to pray.  Seriously, I just pray.  I pray a two-second prayer every day that the Holy Spirit would replace my sloth with resolve, and my sense of what is urgent with what is important, until I am once again convicted that, yes, I am willing to do the work needed to stay prepared for the honor of being a Top Catholic Parent for my children.  So, how about you?  Parenthood is calling.  Got resolve?

I was so captivated by the clarity of this ultrasound profile, however, that I positioned Jesse’s head at the same angle and took pictures of him as a newborn baby, at 6 months and then at 20 months after his birth, respectively.  Each profile is unmistakably Jesse’s, and the sequence of images wordlessly confirms that the adorable toddler we now love to snuggle and smother with kisses was and is the same little boy whose heart beat below mine for the first nine months of his childhood.

I know that involvement in the Pro-Life movement can sometimes feel like swimming in mud. When I was pregnant with Jesse at age 41, the only way the medical establishment would refer to my son was as “my pregnancy.”  The most common phrase I heard from people after announcing our good news was, “Well, I hope you know what you’re getting yourself into,” as if they still thought of the enormous bump in me that was him, just some kind of “choice”!  It was so discouraging to see how hard people’s hearts were toward this new little life, and what an alarmingly different experience this pregnancy was from when I was expecting my first daughter, 18 years earlier.  Truthfully, though, I am not disheartened.  I am certain that even the big icons of other civil rights movements, like Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King, Jr. had muddy moments in their own counter-cultural quests, and yet they pressed on to victory, and so will we.

Thanks to amazing advances in ultrasound technology, no one except the most willfully uninformed can honestly believe that an unborn child is just a “blob” of tissue.  Because of an ultrasound’s ability to open the eyes and ears, and therefore the heart of an unprepared mother to the sight and sound of the real child developing within her, it is estimated that twice as many woman “choose” to keep their babies alive when they see in an ultrasound than when they are only given verbal counseling about the life within them.  For just these reasons, ultrasounds of unborn children have become, to my mind, the ultimate example of a picture being worth a thousand words, so I guess I could have also titled my photo essay “Life in 4,000 Words”!

Please join my family and me in the 2010 “40 Days for Life” campaign as we fast and pray that the parents of all unborn children would have the courage and love to let their baby live.  During the days of this campaign it is my personal prayer that God would strengthen and encourage each and every person involved in the Pro-Life quest as we press on to victory for the rights of the unborn.

When we only read Holy Scripture in snippets or summaries, we miss some contextual words that can help us better understand God’s love.  For example, it wasn’t until I read the 10 Commandments straight from Deuteronomy 5:1-21 that I gained an insight into God’s nature that has dramatically improved my faith life.

The first half of Deuteronomy 5:9 reads:  "You shall not bow down to them (false idols) or worship them…"  But there’s more.  "…for I the Lord your God am a jealous God."  In that context the word "jealous" puzzled me.  Why would God be jealous?  I mean, really, he owns everything!  It intrigued me enough that I grabbed my Bible concordance and looked up the word ‘jealous’.  I found God described as jealous in at least 11 more places in the Old Testament, all in conjunction with warnings against idol worship.  In one place his jealousy is even described as all consuming fire!

Well, okay.  The first thing I had to accept is that, along with everything else he has created, I belong to God.  Got it; I am God’s beloved child, as are all people ever conceived.  It made sense then that God would be jealous of the Israelites worshipping false idols that could not actually love them back.  I could also see that our modern worship of pop stars and sports heroes would make God jealous.  It didn’t stretch my imagination much to add bad things like drugs and alcohol, obsessive Internet use, or compulsive materialism to my list of American idols, either.  I have seen how these straw idols stealthily usurp every bit of our time, energy, and money, leaving us nothing for God but an obligatory 45 minutes a week in church, and maybe a token George Washington to toss in the collection basket.  Yes, having thought it over, I could understand God’s getting burned up over humankind’s penchant for bad and false idols.

The Bible verses I read, however, didn’t say that God’s jealousy stopped at things that were bad.  I had to consider, therefore, that anything that topped God in the pyramid of our affections, even good things like a strong marriage, good jobs, and healthy children, were not exempt from God’s jealousy.  But why would God be jealous of things that are good?  That was a puzzle to me until last August when my second child headed 942 miles away to college.

In July my son received an e-mail saying that his roommate would be from a town about an hour from their university.  The comment was made that this was really great, because it would give my son somewhere nearby to go for a home-cooked meal if he were ever homesick.  Flames of jealousy positively ripped through my heart.  Of course I would want a good roommate situation for my son, but at the expense of my being replaced by some other mother and her home cooking?  I think not!  And then a light bulb went off in my brain.  God is the same.  God does want good for us, but not at the expense of his being replaced.

Now, I repented of my jealousy, because I know that my children do not belong to me in the same way that God’s children belong to him, however being able to empathize with the jealous nature of God has been a great help to my faith.  It has made it easier for me to accept that anything, be it good or bad, that would replace God in my life is something that I should not desire.  It has also helped me see that very often good desires replace God more easily than do bad ones, therefore even when my prayers for good are not answered in the ways I want, I can cling to the truth that what our divinely jealous God wants for each of his beloved children is not merely temporal good, but eternal good.

God is passionate about our going to heaven, and without a doubt, everything he has done, is doing, and will do is to help us get there.  Now that’s a love worthy of our complete devotion.  A Happy, if early, Valentine’s Day to all.

At one point during their visit, we took a snowy walk to a nearby country store for penny candy.  As we prepared to go, I brought out a modest, but distinctly decorated clay pitcher full of loose change.  Usually there are only pennies in this pitcher, very rarely a hidden nickel or dime, but with the going price of candy at the country store being four cents per piece, a handful of coins per child would be plenty for the event at hand.

While the children were each taking some coins my friend exclaimed, “My, what a brilliant use for that lovely little pitcher!”   I was about to dismiss her compliment by saying I had no idea where the pitcher had come from, when she continued by saying, “I remember bringing it straight back from Ireland for ye some 15 years ago!  How nice ‘tis to see it again.”

Gulp.  I had innocently lost track of the pitcher’s origin, but if my foot had been allowed to continue its trajectory toward my mouth, my forgetfulness would most likely have been heard as ingratitude instead of poor memory.

The event started me looking around, eyeing other items in our home, recalling who had given them to us and under what circumstances.  It was an astonishingly emotional journey through many special times, friendships, and places from our past.  It revealed in a powerful way that “my” home is not strictly “mine”, but more like a mosaic of gifts from many people who have loved me and my family.  The event got me thinking further about my faith, and how in a general sweeping sense, “yes,” my Catholic faith is mine, but just like my physical home, it’s really anything but.

My faith is really a mosaic of the gifts from many people who have loved God and taught me to do the same.  As I had lost track of the history of my Irish pitcher and its source, I am sure most of us have lost track of the history of our personal faith, and specifically of the many priests who have contributed to it over the years.

In this, the Year of the Priest, I think it would be a remarkable journey for each of us to peruse our faith history with an eye to rediscovering the many priests who have contributed so generously to it.  Maybe a priest friend has moved out of our life or we out of his, but I’ll bet the gifts he gave remain.  One special priest taught me to love scripture.  Another’s gift was a hunger for truth.  A third’s was the sheer joy of his vocation, and the gift of many has been time spent around our dinner table.

All of us can begin recounting the priests who celebrated our family’s sacraments, and the priests who were our pastors and chaplains, but we can dig deeper, too.  Did we have a grandparent who always listened to Bishop Fulton Sheen’s broadcasts and passed the wisdom on to us?  Or maybe the grace poured into us from an individual priest was just a drop; a simple smile or the tousling of a toddler’s hair.  Maybe it was a larger outpouring such as a confessor’s ear for an incredibly complex situation.  Of course the ultimate gift a priest offers to us all is his daily consecration of the Eucharist.

The thing is that like pennies in a pitcher of loose change, single drops of grace add up and have a way of being the exact amount we need for the life situation at hand.  As we continue celebrating the Year of the Priest, let us recount old memories of our faith lives and make new ones by remembering our priests in prayer, by thanking them personally for their service to God, and by honoring them for so generously pouring from their spiritual pitchers into ours the rich deposits of the Catholic faith.

Truthfully my mother’s gift was not so much her present – the beautifully wrapped and professionally mounted photographs – but her magnificent insight into the fact that photography would be an excellent vehicle for someone, like myself, who had a intrinsically visual mindset.  She saw that I had an intuitive knack for pairing abstract concepts with physical forms in order to gain insights into the abstract, and understood rightly that photography could help me satisfactorily express and share my insights.  I would later come to appreciate that words, both spoken and written, held the same satisfactory power.

College, marriage, and beginning a family represented a 10-year detour from professional photography, but during that time three other passions of mine came to light; my personal love for Jesus, a strong desire to teach my children and other families about his love, and the admiration for the power of words that I already mentioned.  Little did I realize that these passions would be as important as photography when I first felt the call to join in John Paul the Great’s “new springtime of evangelization” about fifteen years ago.

Now, at that time I was the usual sort of Catholic who thought that evangelizing could only be done by priests and nuns who trekked to the farthest reaches of Africa, built concrete-block churches, and fed orphans.  When I, therefore, began to consider how to join in the new springtime while already having three children and a husband who was enrolled in a doctoral program, it seemed that my options were fairly limited.  But then I looked around at what was available to parents trying to pass the Christian faith on to their children right at home, and I saw a literary Sahara Desert where it seemed there should be a flowering Garden of Eden of catechetical materials.  It was in that moment that I saw my passion for photography not only as a gift from my mother, but also as a talent from God which I could put to use by writing and photo-illustrating Christian children’s books for the domestic church.

I saw that by tucking a simple lesson of faith into beautifully photo-illustrated children’s books I could nourish the faith of the two audiences, the child and the parent reading together, and thereby help to transform the domestic church into the flourishing garden of faith that God designed it to be.  The true test of my inspiration, and my willingness to persevere for it, would come in the two years it took to develop the books and to get my first publisher.

Into this time period stepped my husband and children with some unwrappable gifts to further change my life.  From my husband I received relentless encouragement, technical support, and enough time away from parenting and home schooling to write and take photographs.  From my children and many of their friends I received the boundless willingness to say “cheese” just about a million times.  Sometimes the greatest gifts just can’t be wrapped.

It is my fervent hope that as my six children grow I can help each one of them uncover their own passions and God-given talents as my mom helped me.  What greater, earthly joy could there be as parents than to see our children come to appreciate their own giftedness, to see them offer this giftedness back to God, and thereby become useful in his Kingdom?

It is also my fervent hope to multiple the goodness of the life-changing gifts given to me by sharing that goodness with to others.  This Christmas I will have four new Christian children’s books, the Celebrate series of board books, going into print.  Aside from sending my mom physical copies of the new books — a present that I will wrap as beautifully as I can imagine — I will also be giving her, my husband, my children and so many others the gift of joyful gratitude for their help in the inspiration, creation, and launching of the books, and the most beautiful way I can think to wrap the gift of gratitude is in a great big hug!

Yesterday, for example, I was tuned into K-Love and singing along to Michael Card’s upbeat worship song, “You are the Light of the World.” Without warning, a monotone NPR reporter with a clipped British accent interrupted my singing by introducing a new author for teenagers who he said “has become a symbol of rebellion because she does not hold back on the violence in her books and does not apologize for it. ‘Violence is a part of the cauldron of their lives,’” said the reporter quoting the supposedly rebellious author. Before I could get the author’s name in order to avoid her work, Card’s worship song was back. It was like there was this airwave battle between hope and despair going on right inside my car radio.

Now, I wouldn’t say this if I weren’t guilty of the charge myself sometimes, but when it comes to being a hopeful, evangelistic voice of authentic faith in the real world of NPR-style monologues trying to mollify our standards, we Catholics can be such wimps and wallflowers. We’re too polite. In fact, it would seem that we’re more concerned about temporarily offending people than we are about their eternal salvation. Who among us hasn’t shrunk away from that really verbal Christian at the company party or skirted around the one passing out flyers on the street corner?

Now, I’m not suggesting that we need to drop God’s name into every sentence possible, nor that each of us needs to get a soapbox and pick a street corner, however, fulfilling the Great Commission means that the name of Jesus should pass over our lips more often than it probably does. In the same way that around my house K-Love and NPR share the same radio frequency, we Catholics living in the United States share with non-Catholics the same constitutional right to freedom of speech. The question is, do we love Jesus enough to exercise that right prudently, frequently, and out of love for those who have not understood Jesus message of salvation?

More importantly as Catholic parents, do we realize that our children are listening to our silence and learning how not important our faith is when we, oh, so politely allow everyone else to broadcast neutral or anti-Catholic opinions 24/7 without interruption? It is time to speak up for and about our faith in public, not just for the sake of others, but also as a matter of good Catholic parenting. As we learn to speak up, the Gospels give us three helpful images of what we are to be in our world. These images are salt, light, and leaven. Remembering these can help us determine positive ways to be authentic voices for God.

Salt. Salt is from the earth. Salt enhances flavor. We can be salt by empathizing with the earthy, bland, or yucky parts of life, at the same time that we also emphasize that despite our human condition here, God truly loves us and the Holy Spirit’s presence here on earth really does enhance our lives and give them “flavor”.

Light. Light illuminates. We are light when we shine a verbal spotlight on the positive aspects of something instead of joining in a pity party, and when we highlight love and truth instead of violence and lies. We can let more verbal light in by eliminating the darkness of foul language and crass or racist humor.

Leaven. Leaven elevates everything around itself. We are leaven when we greet others with uplifting terms of endearment and encouraging words, and when we offer to pray with and for them. Good, clean humor lightens any conversation.

When it comes to becoming more vocal about God’s love, it doesn’t matter if we get interrupted or are only heard in snippets. It’s only natural because we share the same world with non-believers just like K-Love and NPR share the same radio frequency near my house. If, however, we will be salt, light, and leaven in our shared world, I believe non-believers and our own children alike will fiddle with their moral dials, looking more and more often to tune into our frequency, which is in fact God’s frequency broadcasting his love for them 24/7.

I was stunned.  I could see this guy’s questioning an existing dating relationship, my sister-in-law is a very attractive young woman, but to completely brush off an existing marriage?!  The guy’s question was outright vulgar, but it got me thinking.  What if all married people asked this brazen question of themselves on a regular basis? When we have an argument with our spouses, what if you and I were to ask ourselves, “How serious is my marriage?”  Are our marriages worth the humbling work needed to reconcile as quickly as possible, or are we going to pout or shout or talk behind our spouse’s back until we “win” this one?  When someone other than our spouses flirts with us, what if we were to ask, “How serious is my marriage?”  Would we still entertain this so-called innocent banter, or would we turn away and purposefully refocus our romantic thoughts on the one to whom we said, “I do”?

Really, why is it that we willingly work 40 to 70 hours a week to further our careers, or bury ourselves in 30 years’ worth of debt in order to own a home, but think that a marriage ought to be capable of running on cruise control?  Is it because there is no entity out there bestowing awards or promotions on us for having the Best Marriage of the Year?  Perhaps.  Personally, I think we are also flat out lazy and easily distracted from any pursuit that requires a long-term, personal investment, but especially from one offering no material reward.

Frankly, I think we’re a bunch of suburban cowboys living in a gas grill world. We want the flames of love, ignited with just one sparkling courtship and wedding, to keep leaping high while we go off and grab a beer.  But marriage is not even remotely like a gas grill.  Marriage, by its very nature, requires a long-term, personal investment, and not even on eBay will we find a bottomless tank of pressurized love to keep our marriage sizzling in our physical or emotional absence.

Marriage is, however, the grandest adventure for which two lovers could ever sign up.  To find an activity parallel to the true adventure of marriage, we’d need to step away from our gas grills on our electrically-lit decks, hike over our automated sprinkler systems in our chemically green lawns, and envision “just the two of us” on the wide-open prairie surrounded by tumble weeds, lowing cattle, baying wolves, and outlaws.  Under such a vast and starry sky, building a modest campfire and simply staying alive would require our complete and shared attention.  We’d stay the warmest if we slept on the same side of the flames sharing bodily warmth and taking turns tending the embers and listening for the wolves and the outlaws.  Remember that guy who flirted with my sister-in-law?  He was an outlaw, trying to steal from my brother-in-law, and our gas-grill world has made his job all too easy.

On this point a shout-out has to be given to the Catholic Church for teaching Natural Family Planning as the only morally acceptable way of determining family size.  Where artificial birth control and sterilization foster an always-available, gas-grill mind-set about sex, there is nothing quite as adventurous as NFP where spouses have to work together closely to keep both the love- and the life-giving elements of sex burning brightly.  Thank you, Catholic Magisterium, for pointing married couples toward the campfire mindset.

If we will tend to our marriages like real cowboys tend their campfires, then our marriages will be infinitely more capable of keeping the chill of apathy, affairs, and divorce at bay, and of allowing the warmth of Christ’s love to fill both of our hearts. So from one married person to another, “Just how serious is your marriage, anyway?”

On the last day of school, for instance, I had a teacher congratulate my daughter for “going green” because she reclaimed some high-quality, three-ring binders that had been left in the hall as garbage. I could have hugged that teacher right then and there, but I also had a good chuckle because her remark, which appropriately tied in the environmentally-positive dimension of my daughter’s resourcefulness, made my daughter feel like she was on the cutting edge of societal good for doing what anyone who lived through the Great Depression or World War II would have done as a matter of common sense. The greatest thing this teacher did was exemplify for my daughter the Bible verse that says, “ Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as you also are doing” (I Thessalonians 5:11) .

On top of continuing to share our resources with those who are less fortunate, I believe we can help each other through this financially stressful time, by encouraging one another to rethink and to act differently toward our newly uncertain and more limited resources. Viewed in the right light, the economic downturn has given us a great opportunity to teach our children a truly Catholic and critical life lesson from the writings of St. Paul. “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:12-13).

If, because of the uncertain economy, we begin to live and to impart to our children St. Paul’s secret of contentment, then we will have given them a treasure a thousand times more valuable than an inexhaustible trust fund. By turning to God’s word we learn that all along we should have been focusing on trusting God rather than on “building bigger barns” for amassing earthly fortunes (Luke 12:16-21), on not being slaves to fashion or food or any other human appetites (Romans 16:17-19), and on believing the promise that “God will meet all our needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19). These are not easy things. They run counter to our human nature. And, because we each have different resources and ambitions, it’s nearly impossible to come up with any universal ideas about making or saving money that apply to all of our unique family situations.

Speaking as one in charge of plugging holes and stretching pennies, however, I know that saying “No” to excessive spending is almost always a good thing. It’s like putting a thumb over the nozzle of a hose. By reducing and purposefully directing the outflow of the same amount of water, one can water a much wider area of lawn. It’s the same with the outflow of money from a budget. By reducing and purposefully directing the outflow of the same amount of money, one can spread it over a much broader range of financial needs.

Before the economic downturn, the metaphorical pressure behind our thumbs was pretty high, daring us to just let go and overspend. Today the societal pressure is turning in the opposite direction, challenging us to reduce, reuse, and recycle not only for the good of our planet, but for the good of our personal finances as well. Let’s continue to encourage one another and our children to follow this “new” trend, and to use today’s struggles as opportunities not to despair, but to place our trust more fully and intentionally in God, the true source of all we have and are.