More Wisdom from the Saints

The past few days (perhaps I should say months or years) I have been really thinking that I might have a slight--okay, maybe more than slight--attention deficit problem. Call it adult ADD, call it Mommy Brain, call it the everyday plight of a homeschooling Mom, but I'm taking multitasking a bit over the top these days.

And once again today Jen F. over at Conversion Diary has hit on another gem of a post that speaks perfectly to what I've been thinking. I'm running to the library to get the book she mentions by St. Francis de Sales.
Here's an excerpt:

We should not want to practice many exercises at the same time and all of a sudden. The enemy often tries to make us attempt and start many projects so that we will be overwhelmed with too many tasks, and therefore achieve nothing and leave everything unfinished. Sometimes he even suggests we undertake some excellent work that he foresees we will never accomplish. This is to distract us from the prosecution of some less excellent work that we would have easily completed. [...]

Very often...the evil one deludes us, and to distract us from achieving some good, he proposes another that seems better.

It's my age-old "good vs. best" dichotomy.
I can't WAIT to read this book; I'll give you a full report!

Book Report

I almost forgot to tell you about an INCREDIBLE audiobook that the kids and I listened to in the car on the way back from vacation last week. Maybe you know it: The Castle in the Attic by Elizabeth Winthrop. We all loved it--maybe even me the most! WWD had already read it a while ago; I said "HOW could you have read a book this good and not even told me about it?!" (Probably because he was in school, and I hardly ever got to talk to him because he was gone all day and running around to extracurricular activities all evening, but that's another story.)

Anyway, in this book, the boy--William--receives a magical castle and knight for a present from his beloved nanny. He and the knight go on an adventure together to save the knight's kingdom. I loved it because it was exciting, with rich, likable characters and vivid descriptions, and especially, because it absolutely championed the great values embodied in chivalry: honor, generosity, bravery, truth, etc. The book also fit in nicely with our history curriculum theme of the middle ages. (On the way to vacation, we listened to Jim Weiss' recording of the Knights of the Round Table, which we also liked quite a bit.)

Now we can't wait to read the sequel!

The Communion of Saints

As I mentioned, I have only gradually been learning the subtleties of how different the Catholic faith is from my former Protestantism.

Here's an example. I recently got "Woman After God's Own Heart" by Elizabeth George from the library. I read about it somewhere (probably on someone's blog), and it sounded good. It is, but--my goodness, how different from all the Catholic-mom reading I've been doing of late! One of the great points that Mrs. George strongly makes is about the importance and efficacy of prayer, including lots of amazing examples in which prayers have dramatically influenced people's lives. Here's one:

"The daughter of Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision, said of her grandparents: 'Within two years of Grammy's homegoing, God took both Papa and Grandma Pierce to be with Him also. All three had been powerful prayer warriors on my parents' behalf--praying through the various crises, supporting the ministry, and generally providing a consistent covering of prayer. It's significant to note that once those prayers were silenced all hell broke loose."

I found this idea--that someone's prayers were "silenced" after their death--quite startling, because I don't believe that anymore. I like the Catholic idea of "Communion of Saints"--they're still there, after death, still watching and loving us from Heaven, and their prayers are even more powerful, once they're on the inside! The book that first introduced me to this idea was the fabulous "The Story of a Family: The Home of St. Therese of Lisieux" by Stephane-Joseph Piat. My father-in-law gave the this book shortly after I became a mother (no pressure, right??? ha ha!).

It turns out that Bill Sr. has had a lot to teach me about the doctrine of the Communion of Saints. No kidding--since his death the summer of 2003, our family has been absolutely showered with blessings. And I don't just mean blessings that feel good or result in new cars and healthy babies. Blessings, after all, don't always feel good to us when we're getting them. "God never takes away anything that is good for us," I read recently (can't remember where--Scott Hahn, I think). That has been SO true for my family, but that's a story for another post.

But speaking of blessings that don't feel so good when we're getting them, my three babies who are already in heaven (lost to miscarriage in 1997, 2001, and 2007) have also proven to be incredible, powerful forces in heaven for my family still here on earth. I know this to be true; it really is. When we lost my precious Margaret (2007), who I actually got to hold, the immediate and amazing shower of grace and peace and blessings we received upon her arrival was truly awesome. No kidding--we're still truly feeling the power of her being up there in Heaven. I imagine her smiling down on us with love--along with her siblings and her grandpas and all the rest--and the grace we receive from her is much more than just some kind of warm feeling because of this wonderful mental picture I have of them all together. Saints really can intercede on our behalf, I just know it. This includes "saints" who we assume to be in heaven, as well as real, canonized-by-the-Church "Saints," who are officially decreed to for-sure-with-actual-proof be in Heaven.

It helped me to understand, by the way, that nobody is praying to any of these saints. It's more like just asking them to pray for us, just like we would do with a friend on earth. Their prayers are believed to be extra powerful, even more than our own from here on earth, because they're actually closer to God. (To me, this makes sense, given that I do actually believe that Heaven is real.) And that kinda broadly sums up my understanding of this notion of the "Communion of Saints," something which, though I professed to believe whenever I said the Nicene Creed in church as a Protestant, I never really thought about.

Book Report!

Okay, so I think I've found a new C.S. Lewis: Peter Kreeft. Before those of you who know much more than I do about either C.S. Lewis or Peter Kreeft think I'm a total nut, let me explain.

When I was a young adult (yikes--that sounds pretty much like I'm admitting that the words 'young adult' no longer describe me!), I was pretty much a C.S. Lewis fanatic. I read all his works that I could get my hands on. To me, and of course to many others, he can describe theological ideas in ways that are just, well, perfect. He's a genius. I haven't read through one of his books in ages, but I still think about the ideas in them all the time.

I've just discovered Peter Kreeft, and now that I've finished his Philosophy of Jesus, I can't wait to start working my way through his other works. This book is profound, witty, current, rich with many-layered ideas--just amazing.

Here are a few of my favorite excerpts.
Regarding John 1:38:

"...the very first words John records as coming from Jesus' lips: 'What do you seek?' The question may seem casual and common, but it is profound.
It is profound because it is a probe that goes into the depths of our hearts. It means, 'What do you love the most?' And this means, 'Who are you?' For we are what we love...Jesus says the same thing: 'Ask, and it shall be given to you. Seek, and you shall find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you. For all who ask, will receive, all who seek, will find, all who knock, will have the door opened.' (Matthew 7:7) In other words, what you love, you will get. So be careful what you love.
So this is a very dangerous thing, this loving-thing. It changes you. It changes your life. It's as objectively real as a large, hot rock thrown in your face. It's not just a thought or a feeling inside you; it really happens. We unite with what we love. We become what we love. The more you love chocolate, the more chocolate you become. The more you love cannibalism, the more cannibalistic you become. The more you love Christ, the more Christlike you become. Nothing is more scary than that. Look how scared the world was of Christ: they had to crucify Him."

On finding the truth:

"For God does not discover truth, as we do. He decrees it. He creates it. We do this too, partially, in the creative arts. There, we make truth: elsewhere, we discover it. It is true that elves are small and impish in the world of A Midsummer Night's Dream because Shakespeare made them that way, and it is true that elves are tall and awesome in The Lord of the Rings because Tolkien made them that way. The creation (the universe) is God's art and man's science. What is objective to us (e.g. tigers) is subjective to God. First He invents tigers, then we discover them, as first Tolkien invents hobbits, then we discover them. When we discover truth about the creation, we are reading the thoughts of the Creator."

So for man to deny the existence of God is as absurd as Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit denying the existence of Tolkien!

On man being "normal":

"Without knowing Christ, and thus knowing our 'abnormalism,' we must fall into the fundamental error of 'normalism.' All secular psychology, sociology, and anthropology is fundamentally askew at its very foundation because it assumes, wrongly, that its object, man, is in his natural state. All its data are its observations of 'normal' human behavior, just as in physics or astronomy all the data come from observations of how matter naturally behaves. Just imagine how radically physics would change if physicists came to believe that gravity was not inherent to matter at all but that matter had 'fallen' into this abnormal state at some time in the past. Imagine the radical shock astronomy would experience if astronomers came to believe that stars only started to shine at some point in past time called the 'fall.' Christianity reveals a shock as great as that in anthropology in its doctrine of the Fall, in its most basic interpretation of human history, in which the three great defining events are Creation, Fall, and Redemption."

On Jesus and politics:

"All political issues today are seen through the prism of Right vs. Left, the political 'us vs. them.'...The polarization is also harmful to society because it lets us be selectively moral, selectively idealistic--which means selectively immoral and pragmatic. If we take the high road on abortion, euthanasia, and sexuality, we can take the low road on war, poverty, and pollution; or vice versa. Even when we focus on a specific question like whether all human lives are intrinsically valuable, these categories allow us the moral schizophrenia to say yes when we address abortion and no to that same question when we address war and capital punishment--or vice versa. It's not just that we give wrong answers, it's that we have self-contradictory principles.
Only from the viewpoint of the straight can we judge the skewered. Christ is the straight, the plumb line--both when He is explicitly known, by divine revelation, and when He is implicitly known, by conscience and the natural law."

And finally, a quick one:

"The Church has only begun to unpack her holy luggage, her 'deposit of faith.' From the perspective of the year A.D. 5000, we will be 'the primitive Christians.'"

So is this guy great or what?

This weekend

...we did something cool. After reading my favorite book of the summer, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver, I have been--predictably--all nutso about eating local. Of course, to be a true "locavore" I would have to move to Atlanta so the Diet Coke factory would be nearby.
In the meantime, though, I'm feeling pretty blessed to live so close to such an abundance of wonderful farms. We really could eat local here, even though I myself don't grow anything but weeds. And right now we're just getting into corn-and-tomato heaven here in our beautiful midwestern paradise.
So, on Friday, on the way home from a far-from-home park, the kids and I saw our first sign announcing "fresh, sweet corn." Hooray! We followed the signs to a lovely farm, with that morning's harvest piled up in the barn. I wish I had a picture to share--it was quite idyllic, and the kids had a ball pretending to drive the tractor and shucking all our corn for me! We bought 36 ears of corn--enough for our dinner party that evening, and a bunch left over to freeze for non-corn season. It was absolutely delicious; here's the recipe.
Now we have six slim baggies of yummy fresh-from-the-farm corn in our freezer. I'm hoping to do more before corn time is over, but time and freezer space are limited (I did do a few strawberries back in June). We'll see.