Offer it up

I've been a Catholic a little over five years now (and had been essentially living as a Catholic for about 18 months before that). I'm happy and grateful to have found the Church fairly late in life relatively late in the game (we were received into the Church at the age of 40). In terms of both doctrine and practice, some things came very easily to me, others required some work and study to begin to feel comfortable with, and still others are a work in progress. I guess I'm not really alone in that; the Church's call for a lifelong, ongoing conversion really means that one should never feel completely settled in the faith. To a large extent, comfort and stagnation end up being the same thing.

Here's one area I'm still working on:

1505 Moved by so much suffering Christ not only allows himself to be touched by the sick, but he makes their miseries his own: "He took our infirmities and bore our diseases." But he did not heal all the sick. His healings were signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God. They announced a more radical healing: the victory over sin and death through his Passover. On the cross Christ took upon himself the whole weight of evil and took away the "sin of the world," of which illness is only a consequence. By his passion and death on the cross Christ has given a new meaning to suffering: it can henceforth configure us to him and unite us with his redemptive Passion.

I mention it because I had an opportunity to put this into practice today. I think one of the areas I stumble when it comes to offering up suffering to God is the notion (completely my notion) that it has to be something big (death, disease, assorted mayhem). Most of the time, we're not dealing with the big stuff, but with mountains of little stuff. Work stuff, home stuff, family stuff, commuting stuff--it's all there, every day, just waiting for us to do something more positive than merely complaining about it.

My daughter has had some kind of bug for almost two weeks. It's one of those things that seems to come and go. It's affected her appetite (and without getting to graphic, it's had a major gastric component to its unpleasantness) and her sleep patterns, which in turn has affected our sleep patterns. Last night was the third night out of five that she had awakened around two in the morning. Unfortunately, last night she woke us up to tell us she'd gotten sick. I helped clean things up and went back to bed; my wife stayed up with her for several hours. She got sick again, and Stacey had to go through the whole cleanup routine a second time.

Julie came into our room around 7:00 this morning. I got up with her because Stacey was desperately sleep-deprived. Stacey got up a while later and we had breakfast; she went back to bed and I spent some time trying to help Julie feel better.

Oh, did I mention the bathroom sink thing? No? The bathroom sink got clogged for the umpteenth time (it's a 40 year old house, and the pipes are in a somewhat fragile state). When this happens it actually takes both upstairs bathroom sinks out of commission, because they share a common drain pipe. the downstairs bathroom is currently gutted, so it left us with only one working sink in the entire house (the kitchen).

I plunged for a good half-hour, but to no avail. I was trying to avoid using drain cleaner (the plumber had said to stay away from it), so I went to Home Depot and got an auger. The instructions indicated that I could use it without taking the trap off (even though I knew the clog was past the trap). While I was trying to get the head of the auger past the trap, it punched a hole in the pipe (it was corroded pretty much all the way through, so it didn't take much). I took off the trap and tried to use the auger to get at the clog. I'm pretty sure I didn't punch another hole in the pipe for which I'm grateful, but I also didn't get anywhere near the clog. Two more trips to Home Depot later (one for the new trap, and another one to get a second trap, since the first one I bought was the wrong size), I ended up duct-taping the old trap and putting it back on (since neither of the ones I bought actually fit). The old one now leaks from the fitting because the gaskets are so old. I finally surrendered and used drain cleaner, which took care of the clog in about 20 minutes.

While I was walking out of Home Depot for the third time, I took a moment to offer up my fatigue, my frustration, and my concern for my daughter. It didn't make me less tired or plumbing-weary, but that wasn't the point of doing it. The idea isn't to make it go away, but to use it positively--more importantly, to ask Jesus to use it.

Before I became a Catholic, suffering was mostly something to be avoided, and I was taught as a child that it was actually a sign of God's displeasure or one's own lack of faith. As a Catholic I've come to understand that suffering of all kinds (large and small, profound and trivial) is an invitation to enter into Christ's suffering, and thereby to know him better and participate in some wonderful mystical way with his own act of redemption. It's what Paul talks about in Colossians 1:24:

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church...

Clearly there is nothing lacking in Christ's suffering in terms ofsomething being deficient or missing. St. Paul is talking about the Lord giving us the opportunity--the privilege--of participating in his suffering by uniting it with our own.

There's a nifty explanation of the concept here, at http://www.scripturecatholic.com/.

Gifts of Passage

I'm in the middle of reading a remarkable book, Gifts of Passage by Amy Hollingsworth. I'm not just saying that because a blurb from me is featured on the first page (although I'm delighted and somewhat mystified that I'd be considered blurb-worthy); Amy has done a beautiful job of talking about the gifts the dying leave us in the form of life lessons, final gestures, and other gifts we might have a harder time recognizing.

She mentions that if you're supposed to be with someone when they die, it seems to have a way of working itself out; she cites hospice workers who talk about people literally delaying their own deaths until a relative can arrive. Other times, someone will keep vigil for days at the bedside of a loved one, only to have them slip away in the brief span when the person goes out to stretch their legs or get a cup of coffee. I found that immensely comforting, as well as extremely sensible. My stepfather died completely alone (he was already gone when a nurse came around to check on him).

My wife and I were moving the day it happened, and we had no reason to think he was going to die in the hospital. Dad was sick, but it was seen as more of a chronic, long-term thing that would eventually spell his death (but not right away, and certainly not that day). The thing that weighed on my mind was having to tell him that he wasn't coming home, but going to a nursing home. I knew that conversation was going to fall to me, and I dreaded it. Around lunchtime, my mom came to our house to tell me that Dad had died in the hospital. She wasn't there, either; she had gone home to get some rest.

I haven't thought about this in a long time (Dad died in 1988), but it's always bothered me that I wasn't there when he died, and that I didn't get to say goodbye. It makes sense, though. Dad wouldn't have wanted to have us there, and he definitely wouldn't have wanted to say goodbye. It just wasn't his way. Dad died the way he would have wanted to--quietly, without fanfare, and without the awkwardness of having Mom and me say things he didn't really want to hear.

I don't know what his last moments were like, but I know that he rejected faith of any kind up to the end. He scrawled out instructions that there be no funeral and no clergy of any kind. My mom reluctantly carried out his wishes, even though she wanted a funeral (it would have been small; just the two of us, my wife, and a few of my mom's friends...he didn't have any). I told her that there wouldn't be much he could do if she decided to go ahead and have a memorial service, but she followed his instructions to the letter. I said goodbye to him at the funeral home before he was cremated; they ushered me into a viewing room where he was lying on a gurney, covered up to his chest with a sheet, his head resting on a block of wood. You know how they always try to make the loved one look like they're asleep? He definitely wasn't asleep. Still, I'm glad I got to say goodbye, even if it wasn't how I'd have wanted to do it.

I still pray for his soul, and I take tremendous comfort in it. I don't know what happened at the moment he died, but I know that even then it wasn't too late for him to reach out to God and seek his love and forgiveness. My prayers for my dad transcend time and space in a way I can't begin to understand. The Church says that I can pray for God to have mercy on his soul; the Church also says that at the moment of death, every person goes through a particular judgment in which his eternal fate is sealed. I know that both those things are true.

It is a paradox that I can pray for God to have mercy on my dad at a point 20 years in the past, but he does really well with paradoxes. He invented them, actually. A virgin conceiving a child, a God who is three persons and yet one God, God becoming a man--and a little thing like having mercy on a man in 1988 because his son is asking for it in 2008? That's barely even a warm up.

Dad had free will, and ultimately he ended up where he chose to be. If he persisted in turning away from God, I won't see him again, and that will have been his choice. God's will is a beautiful and terrible thing; if my dad persisted in his choice to use the gift of his free will to spurn the greater gifts, it was ultimately what he wanted.

God is truly merciful, and our free will is truly free. It's a paradox, but not a contradiction.

Blade: Penitentiary

In a stunning turn of events, he-man half-vampire* actor Wesley Snipes was sentenced yesterday to three years in federal prison. Snipes hasn't filed a tax return since 1999, which apparently is seen as a "problem." Actually, as it turns out, it's more along the lines of a "crime." He had been convicted of three misdemeanor counts for willfully refusing to file returns. Prosecutors argued (successfully) that the judge should throw the book at him, since he spent the better part of ten years alternately evading and antagonizing the authorities, and his acquittal on felony charges was seen by some as a vindication of his tactics.

There's a definite "Render unto Caesar" aspect to all this, as well as a powerful reminder that the IRS should be at the top of any one's list of people not to have miffed at you. Having had a run-in with IRS myself (about 20 years ago, and driven by ignorance rather than protest), I can attest to the fact that you really don't want to mess around with this stuff. It mystifies me that anyone could engage them the way Snipes and his advisers did, and expect an outcome other than several years spent eating your meals from a metal tray.

*Just for the sake of clarification, Snipes played a half-vampire in the Blade series. There is no credible evidence that he is half-vampire in real life.

Thank heavens the Pope finally went home!

Now the news media can concentrate on really important stuff like whether Ashley Simpson is pregnant, or what Jamie Lynn Spears is doing these days. I think we can all agree there wasn't nearly enough of that kind of coverage last week, since everyone was distracted by things like the Holy Father's comments on the importance of human dignity and his efforts at providing hope, comfort, and reconciliation.

Just another one of life's bitter disappointments

Yesterday at some point I saw an online ad promising that my life would never be the same if I watched Jessie L. Martin's final "Law and Order" episode. I watched it, and a full 24 hours later, I find that my life is the same. I don't watch a ton of TV these days ("30 Rock" is my guilty pleasure; that, and watching "Lost" with my wife, is about the extent of my TV viewing), and after watching something like last night's "Law and Order," I kind of remember why.

I'm certainly no stranger to time-wasting--I could cut down on my computer usage and western civilization would find a way to continue--but I'm finding more and more that television is just this huge black hole from which no intelligence can escape. It sucks your brainpower like some kind of, um, brainpower-sucking electronic device.

You know what I'm trying to say.

Blogging like it's 1999

A few months ago I decided to shut down Meet Joe Convert, the blog I've been keeping since 2003. I started it as a chronicle of my journey into Catholicism, and now that I've been Catholic a few years, it seemed like the whole "convert" thing was getting kind of redundant. Don't get me wrong--I'm happy to be Catholic, and my conversion will always be integral to my experience as a Catholic (in the same way that an immigrant's story is integral to their being an American). These days I spend more time thinking about being in the Church than how I got here.

After I said my goodbyes on the blog (to a largely non-existent audience, as my output has been very sporadic the past couple years), I had major second thoughts about it and decided to keep it running. Since then, I've found that that same issues (lack of focus and lack of posts) have continued to dog the blog. Nobody much cares about this but me, but I wanted to continue (or rather restart) blogging on a regular basis, but not have any particular expectations of myself about what I'd be saying. So, here I am.

The Joe Convert blog will remain up and accessible; people seem interested in how I became Catholic, and the story is pretty much all there. I've been asked fairly often over the past few years if I've thought about turning the blog into a book. The answer is yes, and I'm inching ever closer to actually doing that. The blog would be source material for the book rather than make up the bulk of it; I think it would be difficult to try to make something cohesive out of posts that are intended to stand alone. If and when I get going on that, I'll certainly let you know.

In the meantime, for what it's worth, this is my new home on The Internets.