There's nothing like a good shepherd

Bishop Robert Baker of Charleston (rumored to be soon moved to the long-vacant diocese of Birmingham) has written a diocesan pastoral letter on the application of Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body.

The I've found the Theology of the Body to be incredibly rich, both in my growth into union with my new husband and as a framework within which Christ's full donation of himself to his Bride, and ours back to him, can gleam with light and depth.

Here's a taste. If you like it, you can read the whole thing here.

A central tenet of the Theology of the Body is that faithful, self-donative love, and the communion which results from the giving and receiving of that gift, is the creative dynamic which reflects the inner life of the Holy Trinity. Self-donative love is the gift of self on behalf of another person. It is the life-giving love of the Trinity at creation. It is the love of Jesus Christ, especially at Calvary. It is the love which inspired the martyrs of the Church, and it is the love which is the heart of the marriage covenant. From this generous gift of self for the other flows the whole of the Gospel.

Dog-eared in the waiting room

My dentist is a prince among men. Unlike any other professional's waiting room in my experience, he has current copies of interesting magazines lying around to help me pass the interval between my appointment time and the time the professional's assistant moves me into an inner room to hide the fact that I'm still waiting. I bless my dentist. I would bless him even more if he tended to run behind schedule, because no sooner do I get engrossed in an interesting article in the New Yorker or U.S. News and World Report but I am summoned to the reclining chair to offer penance for my sins of gum neglect.

As you may have noticed, Exultet can tend to get a bit creased and dog-eared between posts. Therese is neck deep in professional demands, and I have been likewise absorbed with work projects. However, that's no reason we should neglect you. We are sorry.

While we restart our literary engines, here are some tidbits for you, all nice and glossy:

• End of an era. If you haven't noticed, the fabled Amy Welborn is abandoning her landmark blog in which she did all the legwork and looking-into so we wouldn't have to. Thank you, Amy. The Catholic online world is in your debt. Her more personal and informal musings will continue at Charlotte Was Both.
  
  
• Seminarian videos are the new black. I admit, it's videos like this as much as reports of the recent tendency of solid, holy young men to flock to seminaries that give me hope for the future of the Catholic Church in America. This one parodies the PC vs. Mac commercials in a treatment of contraception and Natural Family Planning. See all four.
  
  
• Things I wouldn't have considered unless Julie told me to.
  
  
• Madonna, call your office. Straight from the fantasy lives of all priests, deacons and choral directors, here's Deacon Greg Kandra's recommendation for the church bulletin announcement to end all bulletin announcements. An excerpt:
  
  "CELL PHONES CAUSE HEAD INJURIES! New research indicates that people who bring cell phones to church are more likely to suffer serious head trauma, usually caused by the priest throwing the lectionary at them."

Thank you for listening. We now return you to your regularly scheduled web cruising.

A Matter of Focus

Can you remember looking out the car window from the back seat as a kid? You could make your eyes focus on the raindrops running down the window, or change and focus outside, past the raindrops. Get bored enough, it was mild fun to make your eyes focus close, then far, then close. (ah, the days before DVD players in cars....)

I have been busy at work lately - we provide budgets for our clients, and my mind is already deep in 2008. Sorry for the silence. My focus is primarily on work, and on car buying and home repairs. One or another of those topics is usually on the top and front of my mind, and concentrating and being serene about prayer and worship is getting slightly short shrift from me.

What struck me the other day is how faith focuses your eyes. I was driving to work and realized that without many extra miles, I can pass an abortion clinic, an off-track betting parlor, an "adult toys and lingerie" store with vulgar clothes and things right in the window and a bar and restaurant that "everybody knows" is mobbed up.

The preset buttons on my car radio could be set to any number of Chicago "morning zoo" radio stations, where the smut level continues to rise. I could easily install satellite radio in my car and listen to Howard Stern not just push the envelope on lewdness, but knock that envelope down and pin it to the mat.

I could go to any number of movie theaters showing movies whose "R" ratings don't mean just a little too much violence and a little dirty talk, but needless nudity, a calm acceptance of sexual promiscuity, active denigration of the Gospel, and intellectual shallowness deluxe. I could go to a clean, brightly lit, safe-looking place and get tattooed or pierced or branded or implanted, with no limits to the choice of inked words or pictures or the vulgarity of the final effect.

But I also pass a crisis pregnancy center. I know where the Catholic churches are between home and work, including mine, where I go to Mass weekdays and Sundays as well as other devotions, Confession, and family-oriented social events. I drive past my favorite crafts stores, a wonderful family-owned butcher shop where the staff is always laughing and joking, a Panera Bread where the counter lady gives me my coffee free most days, the pleasant and helpful public library, the high school where I vote, two religious bookstores who are always raising money for small and loving local charities, a car dealer who has quietly given cars to struggling immigrant families, and so on and on.

I listen to Morning Air, the morning drive-time Catholic radio program (Jesus and weather and catechesis and traffic and history and sports and heart and humor, it's great!) or play a tape of Christian music, with an occasional visit to the local newsradio station. I find myself uninterested in most movies, and I gave up buying the great-fitting underwear at Victoria's Secret because they depict women in ways that aren't healthy for society. I stopped meeting friends at a local bar that persists in showcasing "Jagermeister Girls" pushing too many drinks on customers, and I managed (only with the help of two other Christians, men, on the staff) to persuade our majority-female staff that going to Hooters for a department lunch was a bad idea.

Because I am easily tempted to "observe" the steamier side of life, I block a few channels, and watch Catholic television like EWTN's The Journey Home (love those convert stories!) or happy shows like Dirty Jobs.

It's not that *I'm* righteous, that's not it. My tastes changed as my faith grew, and my focus is different, and I am grateful to God and His Church for the education and growth in His Peace in my life.

But I worry that, by guarding my eyes and concentrating on other, holier things, I've made a Happy Land for myself and become essentially oblivious to the pain and sin around me. Should I be fiercely praying as I pass the sad places, instead of merely avoiding them? Should I be listening to the smutty channels or checking out the insulting TV shows, and writing in polite protest, or contacting public officials about the location of the OTB or the abortion clinic? (I did join the protest against the clinic, but we lost that round.)

How should we live? Seeing only the good and holy in the middle of the ugly and dying? Sure, I pray for all the lost and damaged and suffering, but have I made it too easy on myself?

I remember hearing about some saintly person who literally couldn't see sin in others, he saw Christ instead. I would LOVE to be that kind of person. But I don't think my unfocusing on the hard and sharp edges around me is the same thing, it's being sort of a holy ostrich.

What to do?

An interesting apostolate

Through some young people I know, I've become familiar with a site called "Christian Forums" and the related "Conservative Christian Forums" which is newer and much smaller. I'm finding it an opportunity to learn a lot about how much Christians, especially younger people, are struggling out there. And, of course, I'm seeing lots of dogmatic arguments as well. Each have lively denominational areas as well as places for inter-denominational discussion, requests for advice or support, etc.

I've been able to talk with a number of women from my rather unique perspective of long-time-happily-married, then-widowed-then-courting-chastely, now-a-newlywed. I'm also finding opportunities to clarify Catholic understandings and teachings in layman's language. I've been thinking of putting some of my outside writing here on the blog, so I'll start by sharing some of what I've written on those forums (fora? forae?).

A current hot topic is the recent Vatican statement on the nature of the Church. It is frequently misunderstood, of course. Here's how I responded to one such discussion with the topic "Only Catholic Church is a proper Church says Pope":

I'm sorry this recent statement has been causing so much confusion. I'll try to explain a bit.

The starting point is that the church that Christ established is his Church. Everyone who belongs to Jesus is part of it. The Catholic Church's believes that Jesus wanted to give his body gifts of a kind that would empower them and equip them so that indeed, as he said, it would be "better for you that I go away." Those would be the sacraments, which are outward expressions of God's inward work. The Eucharist (Communion) is one of them, Baptism, and several others.

Many bodies of Christians do not have this understanding of the sacraments, either holding them to be wholly symbolic rather than both fully spiritual and fully physical events (think of the way Jesus was both God and man -- it's the same principle); or else they believe in some subset of the sacraments, but they aren't in the line of the original elders => anointing other elders => anointing other elders all in union with one another. That's related to what Catholics call "apostolic succession". Of course, other churches wouldn't agree that those issues are critical, but that's the basis for the Pope's recent statement that they aren't fully "churches" but rather ecclesial communions. It would help if there were more words available to make the distinctions clear.

So, according to this, more of the things that are part of making God's saving grace available to the world are resident in the Catholic Church than elsewhere, but the other bodies have authentic portions, certainly enough to effect salvation (as you'll see if you just look around at the wonderful spirituality and vibrant life in many congregations). The Pope would also say that the Catholic Church doesn't have everything that Jesus really wanted to give his people, and for that "shame on us", so to speak. If Catholics really realized that, in the Eucharist, Jesus is genuinely (sacramentally) present, and if we encountered him as fully as he wants us to, we would be way more transformed into His likeness than we are.

Update: The KC Catholic says it so much better than I do. (HT Amy)

I'm not fighting you....

Today's first reading is Genesis 32:23-33, where Jacob (soon to be Israel), wrestles all night with "some man." The man can't prevail over Jacob until he belts him in the hip. Here's the passage:

In the course of the night, Jacob arose, took his two wives,
with the two maidservants and his eleven children,
and crossed the ford of the Jabbok.
After he had taken them across the stream
and had brought over all his possessions,
Jacob was left there alone.
Then some man wrestled with him until the break of dawn.
When the man saw that he could not prevail over him,
he struck Jacob’s hip at its socket,
so that the hip socket was wrenched as they wrestled.
The man then said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”
But Jacob said, “I will not let you go until you bless me.”
The man asked, “What is your name?”
He answered, “Jacob.”
Then the man said,
“You shall no longer be spoken of as Jacob, but as Israel,
because you have contended with divine and human beings
and have prevailed.”
Jacob then asked him, “Do tell me your name, please.”
He answered, “Why should you want to know my name?”
With that, he bade him farewell.
Jacob named the place Peniel,
“Because I have seen God face to face,” he said,
“yet my life has been spared.”

At sunrise, as he left Penuel,
Jacob limped along because of his hip.
That is why, to this day, the children of Israel do not eat
the sciatic muscle that is on the hip socket,
inasmuch as Jacob’s hip socket was struck at the sciatic muscle.

We can see the whole episode as a struggle with sin. I've been haunted by my sins lately, both those I have left far behind, sunk in the ocean of God's Mercy by the Sacrament of Confession, and more painfully, those I carry around with me and commit over and over and over again.

I'm afraid that if I was Jacob and some man wrestled with me, I'd just say the hell with it and walk away. If he pursued me, I'd probably try a little diplomacy, get his mind on something else, get my mind on something else. If he yet persisted, get angry and feel picked on. Lastly, I'd run. The battle would never have been fought and he could find me and wrestle with me another day.

God grant me the courage to accept the wrestling matches you send! To be brave in the face of sin!