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Slideshow in Sidebar

I updated the slideshow in the sidebar with pics of brother Noah.

The First Day of Spring

Noah Christopher: 6:45 p.m. 20.5 inches. 7 pounds, 11 ounces. Photos to follow.

Mama and baby doing fine.

Mad as a Hatter

I've had very little sleep this week. I'm just warning you is all. The following may not be entirely coherent.

The baby is going to be here very soon. Last night was a contender for the birth date, but Laura feels better today. We'll see how she feels tonight. According to the doctor the due date is the 22nd, though the Ides of March was the original due date. It got shoved back. I am partial to the 15th simply for its Shakespearean value, but that may have little bearing on the date of the actual birth. Either way, the baby is full term and we've had other babies weeks early before. I suppose we'll wait to see.

We are expecting a boy, as that is what the ultrasound technician told us, and we have a name chosen, though it is not written in stone - it seems to change every couple of weeks. (To think that the name you so identify with, which is so much part of who you think you are, came down to the will of two very tired people who forget things constantly and dress rather badly can numb one's mind.) We think his name will be Samuel David, though it very well might not be.

Seven children. Who'd have ever thunk it? Lord, have mercy.

Speaking of Lent, it has become one of my favorite seasons in the Church Calendar - this call to come home is a precious, needful thing, and I am so very thankful for it. The call is year-round, of course, a silent presence behind the noise of our lives. It says, "I am here. I will wait for you." Patient Lover, who can resist your graces?

I've been writing some articles on poverty over at Tyndale's NLT site, and the early Church Fathers have been speaking quite loudly to me (they always seem to when you give them their say), Saint John Chrysostom in particular. I give too little thought about so much of what I do, about so much of how I live. My life, after all, is not lived terribly different than most Americans' lives. And yet so much of what I do is avaricious. Like having a full pantry and fuller closets. Like being isolated from the needs of my neighbors. I could go on. I probably should. Read Chrysostom's Homily 6 on Titus sometime to get a feel for what I'm thinking about these days. At one point in his homily, he talks about the impediment that riches are and the liberty that poverty brings - as illustration he talks about a nekkid man and a fully clothed man (think flowing garments and robes). Who is easier to catch, he asks? Homecoming and greased pigs is all I could think of, but it's pertinent, isn't it? I also thought of Mark, running off nekkid from the soldiers. Perhaps such is what Chrysostom had in mind. "Almsgiving," he says, "is the mother of love." And I'll stop with the following quote from another saint:

"The Lord's mercies are innumerable. Look at all the earth supplies in summer and in autumn! Every Christian ... ought to imitate God's bountifulness. Let your table be open to everybody, like the table of the Lord. The avaricious is God's enemy" (St. John of Kronstadt, from My Life in Christ, Pt. 1).

Live Jesus. Practice Poverty. Give alms.

Hans Urs von Balthasar's Threefold Garland

If you have not read this little book, let me highly recommend it. I am slowly reading and re-reading the chapters covering the sorrowful mysteries during Lent and am amazed at the depth of Balthasar's thought. The book considers the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary - meditations on Christ's birth, death, and resurrection; and meditations on the Mother of God - and, while approachable, is theological meat from beginning to end. (Licit even on a Friday in Lent.) More later, I hope.

I Am More Guilty Than These

The latest news of pedophilia in the Catholic Church in Ireland has left me broken. I make the kids' lunch, sweep my floor, and listen to the interviews on the radio; and in my mind I play out that on-going argument with Protestant family and friends on how this terrible sin could occur within a "holy" Church and why sin by members of the Church, even heinous sin, does not rob her of her holiness. And after I have done with my mental arguments, I sweep them into the trash. What argument is there to make? Who am I to be concerned with arguments at moments such as these?

Remember, O man, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.

The sin of pedophilia committed by these men and the sin of hiding their sins and passing the men on to other parishes by other men, these are my sins. And I am more guilty yet.

" 'And I shall also tell you, dear mother, that each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all.' At that mother even smiled, she wept and smiled: 'How can it be,' she said, 'that you are the most guilty before everyone? There are murderers and robbers, and how have you managed to sin so that you should accuse yourself most of all?' 'Dear mother, heart of my heart,' he said (he had then begun saying such unexpected, endearing words), 'heart of my heart, my joyful one, you must know that verily each of us us guilty before everyone, for everyone and everything. I do not know how to explain it to you, but I feel it so strongly that it pains me. And how could we have lived before, getting angry, and not knowing anything?' Thus he awoke every day with more and more tenderness, rejoicing and all atremble with love."

- "From the Life of the Elder Zosima," The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

A Post-Valentine Post That Has Nothing to Do With Valentine's Day

So my pictures are old. My blog is somewhat in disrepair, to be sure, ungroomed by its master, unfed. Kicked around some. But that's just where I am. Why should I post my thoughts online when I can do the job with pen and paper, just as well? The answer, I suppose, is family and friends more than anything - those who bother, those who are interested in the latest details of my quiet, quiet life (other than the screaming children, of course). But I stand guilty of negligence - I don't deny it is true. The slideshow, by the way, is entirely outdated. My daughter Cate, the baby in the slides, is now taking steps and exploring her world. So I need an update. But before I get to it, which may take a while, let me get to updating all y'all.

This weekend started with two inches of snow. I had to drive twenty minutes up the road to the nearest toy dispensary (the evil Wal-mart) to buy toys for Jack Henry, who turned three years old on Saturday. The highway was a sheet of ice and 4WD is not much help in such scenarios. But I persisted and made it safely, with very little drifting across lanes, and acquired the toys. I had Anna, Avery and Will with me and we ate breakfast at the in-store eatery (the evil McDonald's). By the time we came home, the ice was completely gone, leaving only some spotty slush along turn lanes.

Yesterday, in case you missed it, was Valentine's Day. I went to early Mass, taught Faith Formation, and then attended a catechist meeting. My family stayed home because my wife was not about to troll around Lexington for three hours with a truck full of loud children and a belly full of a 9-month-large boy. (Our seventh child is ominously due around the Ides of March.) I got home and we had a new cat. The same cat/kitten that has been driving me nutso for over a week with his crying outside my doors, begging to be fed and let in. The crying arose after my wife fed him and because my children, when home, are outside loving on him. My wife even said a prayer to St. Francis of Assisi about the cat - and she is not in the habit of praying to saints - so while I was gone, my newly-three-year-old boy, let the cat in. And in he stayed. I named him Francis because I figured the good saint deserved it. I honestly don't know if the cat will make it, as all he does is sleep. Laura will have to take him out to the vet one of these days. (We only have one functional vehicle at the moment, if you haven't yet caught up.) But Francis is quiet and seemingly content. And he seems entirely unphased by all the hissing and spitting from our 7-year-old cat, Talullah. He just stares at her, like he would a log. So he has some chutzpah, which is laudable, I suppose. Though he could be too sick to care if an older cat rips him apart. However, he will need "tutoring" if he remains, in the Larsonian sense of the word, if you know what I mean.

Lastly, I am currently struggling through a particular teaching of the Church. Pray for me, if you will. I feel as if the Church demands something of me and is unwilling to help with the burden she lays on my shoulders. Of course, I also understand that the Church expects things of me for my salvation. But I am confused at the moment. And there are also times I feel as if God has kicked me to the curb over this one, since the issue is far thornier due to the abnormal arrangement of my life. I am weak and often find it difficult to trust. So this is a matter I am taking to prayer over Lent, which begins Wednesday. The Orthodox seem more reasonable on this issue, more in line with the spirit of the law in question, than does my own Church. Alas, I am not Orthodox. Which may be a good thing as I would not be eating any meat or dairy for the next few weeks if I were.

Perhaps in the days to come, it will be something I feel I can more freely divulge here, but I'd rather talk to flesh-and-blood people about it first. Including God. Lord, have mercy. Right now it's not a conversation so much as it is a personal struggle.

Accidie: The Bad Thought

I don't know how many of you are prone to accidie, or acedia. I am. It is the bad thought of the monastic life, and other than leaving my family and becoming a monk, there is no place more monastic than being a stay-at-home parent (especially those of us who are relatively homebound). Accidie is not quite apathy. It is not quite sloth, though the two are related. Accidie, how I experience it, is a kind of weariness. It's something other than depression that is caused by real, physical changes within our bodies and the chemistry of our brains, but the two are interrelated. I have been sick for over a month now - nothing serious, just a persistent cough that often leaves me with a headache. It's physically wearisome and spiritually as well. After an extended illness (last year it was headaches that ate up at least one half of January), I begin pondering death - not suicide, but death. I wonder whether "This is the big one!" (a la Fred Sanford) and I listen to stories of this one or that one who died around my age. I feel hopeless and purposeless and weary. It is the edge of despair; it is the erosion of trust.

And then I buy a book on the sayings of the Desert Fathers and as I am browsing through the index, the word accidie jumps out at me. I'm familiar with it. I've written about it. I know that it is a bad thought that I am prone to and I realize that I have succumbed once again to this demon of weariness. Let me share a story told by Amma Theodora about accidie, or acedia:

"It is good to live in peace, for the wise man practices perpetual prayer. It is truly a great thing for a virgin or a monk to live in peace, especially for the younger ones. However, you should realize that as soon as you intend to live in peace, at once evil comes and weighs down your soul through accidie, faintheartedness, and evil thoughts. It also attacks your body through sickness, debility, weakening of the knees, and all the members. It dissipates the strength of soul and body, so that one believes one is ill and no longer able to pray.

But if we are vigilant, all these temptations fall away. There was, in fact a monk who was seized by cold and fever every time he began to pray, and he suffered from headaches, too. In this condition, he said to himself, 'I am ill, and near to death; so now I will get up before I die and pray.' By reasoning in this way, he did violence to himself and prayed, When he had finished, the fever abated also. So, by reasoning in this way, the brother resisted, and prayed and was able to conquer his thoughts."

It sounds so morbid, but it resonated so clearly within me: Well, if I'm about to die, I had better start praying. And then one does violence to him or herself in prayer and, through the suffering, resists the bad thought of accidie.

Pray always. And sometimes, pray for me.

No Need of That Hypothesis

I was smitten with the flu on Wednesday and am currently at the tail end of it (Lord willing). I don't know if it is/was porcine or not, but then I don't care much about the variety for my own sake. The good that came out of it was that my entire family was able to find and receive swine flu vaccinations this week (not fully immunized for two weeks, but it's done). The school kids have all gotten the seasonal flu vaccinations at school, so they're as ready as possible for the rest of the season. We hope. I would still like Laura (who is expecting our seventh baby, if you don't already know - a boy, mid-March), Jack and Cate to get immunized against the seasonal flu, but maybe we can work something out this week. Though fever free all day yesterday, a low-grade fever popped up again last night, so I hope I'll be fever free all day today. I'm still tired and weak, but doing fine. The irony of it all is that of the entire family, I get out the least - I'm around the fewest people. On the other hand, my family is around hundreds of others every day and so I was easy pickings.

My parents rent the house across the street from us, though they are not there all the time - maybe one week per month. And so I quarantined myself over there. It was boring and miserable and I missed my family terribly, even though we were only apart for three days and only across the street and still got to talk to each other through storm doors. I had some books that I had requested from the library come in and so I spent most of my time reading - something I rarely get the chance to do. So on Friday I read - and you'll like this - God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens and on Saturday I read, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I had been wanting to read the two books eventually for a character in my book, though a sympathetic protagonist, lest you get the wrong idea. The books, if you haven't read them, are, well, interesting. Hitchens' book seems more hostile than Dawkins' book, but both are, as you can gather from the titles, not friendly to religion. Hitchens casts his net out broadly and blames all religions with fairly equal robust, while Dawkins turns more toward Christianity, as it is that with which he is most familiar. Both would be gladly rid of any kind of religion, but neither would fight, other than with words, for them to be expunged from the earth. Both seem like fairly friendly gentlemen, as a matter of fact, they just think the majority of evil in our world originates out of our religious impulse. They both often receive charitable Christian mail from charitable Christians who would like nothing better than to see them burn in hell - so perhaps you can understand some of their push back. Ah, the charity of Christians - it does the heart good, does it not?

I am not, after reading both books, an atheist. But I do think they each make excellent cases for atheism and point, in some places, painfully clearly at our sins as Christians. (Here we can only say, as we always say, "Lord, have mercy.") They each have a bevy of narratives that inform their views, just as you and me - though ours are often opposing stories. Both of them seem, at times, arrogant - though I suppose critics often do. I thought it a flaw in their books. Both of them seem, to me, to have missed the point of evil in it all: We are sinners, all of us, of which I am the chief, the first, the foremost, the greatest - the worst. And that it is not the problem of religion, but the problem of evil itself within the heart of all people. And because of religion's ubiquity in our world, and its power, religion is often the greater vehicle. And because of its teachings, its hypocrisy is certainly highlighted. So I think they need to go deeper for their problem - to see that heaven and hell are in every human heart. But overall, and other than their hostility, they seem like decent, well-meaning chaps, and I wouldn't mind sitting down and discussing with them further why they see no possible synthesis between science and faith.

Nevertheless, I had my moments of disagreements with both men. They both seem to - excuse my French - wear shit-colored glasses when it comes to Christianity - and fail to see the wheat for the tares. They pick and choose among denominations and faiths as it suits them - and invariably someone of some faith is erring somewhere in some manner. So while it sounds as if religion does indeed poison everything, they ignore that there are other people of faith (sometimes the same faith) working to stop the same evil. (Dawkins, who tends to be fairer, does point out several minor examples of this.) One of their shared "concerns" about religion was the possibility of faith education as abuse of children - not in a pedophiliac sense, though there is that - but in simply raising children as Christian or Muslim or Hindu or what-you-will. They both thought parents - being parents - rearing their children in their own faith egregious. That children are children and are not Catholic children or Muslim children, but children of parents of those faiths. Now there is something to what they say and it is not simply as crackpot as it sounds. For instance, who would disagree that it is abuse to raise your child to hate a group of people so much that you strap fake bombs to him, making him out to be a suicide bomber, and parade him around? Who would disagree that it is abuse to dress your little ones in white sheets and take them out to a gathering and burn a cross or two? And there are other examples - unfortunately, many other examples, some of which fall in our own laps. And yet, even when I hear, and know of, some of these crazy examples of environments in which children are being raised, I have to stop and wonder about it. No parent is perfect. Many times parents are not even good. Yet the people I know who are people of faith, do a fair job - their best - at raising their children - even while they teach them doctrines that I disagree with, or inadvertently teach them to be racist or elitist or scientifically ignorant. But none of us are perfectly functional; we all fail our children. I imagine that even Mr. Dawkins has failed his children. (Though I also imagine he would be the first to admit it.) I do not think, from the examples he gives in his book, he would have much to say about how I, or many like me, raise my children, if he really knew how we do so - nothing with which he could point a disapproving finger at faith, other than that they are being raised with faith. But it was an interesting charge to read about; a charge I've heard before from other Christians when converting to Catholicism as a matter of fact. But here are my children, even now, out my window, running and playing among golden leaves. Just children. Red-nosed. Laughing. Imagining. Enjoying one another. They do not cower behind closed bedroom doors when I am around. They write notes to me, when I am sick and absent, of how they cannot live without me. They bring me flowers. They share their stories. They love other people. They seem, for the most part, reasonably well children. They do all right. And when they are older, they will choose for themselves whether they will assent to share the faith of our Church, and I will give them the freedom to do so. Of course I hope they choose to share our faith, but even if they choose to become atheists - oh, how I will love them still. Can I do any less?

A Month Later

Cars is still watched daily in my house. A month ago I was ready to blow my brains out, but I've gotten past it. I've gotten past putting hits out on Steve Jobs (God forbid!) and the entire Pixar staff. I've come to some uncertain peace with it - it is just part of the background for me and Jack - who, while he insists that it sometimes be on, no longer sits to watch it much anymore. He plays with his own cars while it plays behind him.

The pecan tree is golden. I have to mow the lawn this weekend, but then that obligation can be set aside for three months.

I am just beginning to read Gogol's Dead Souls and Cardinal Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua.

I am still writing, but it appears I only managed an average of two pages per day, five days a week, this past month. Strange how quickly it moves at some points and how it trudges at others. Regardless I'm halfway done with my first draft, if the story cooperates. This morning during my walk I was able to get through some obstacles in the plot and am excited to get that down on paper. Before, the story seemed to be converging on some premature closure, since I didn't see the next move, and now it has opened up before me again. Sigh. The most important thing as a writer, I have discovered, is simply to write. It is in being faithful. How's that for an elementary truth that has taken me entirely too long to learn? Apparently my slowness in learning (and, even still, knowing) is due to my abhorrence of having to wait (as a story slowly develops on the best of days), and my distaste for discipline. As well as my neurotic fear of failure. Other than that, I'm golden.