theROCK

Gaudette! Joy!

Gaudette! Joy! During the third week of Advent, we are so close to the return of Jesus at Christmas that we are to be joyful. When Jesus is present, peace will reign. That is why the fourth week of Advent, typically the week that Christmas occurs, is to be one of peace. If we do Advent “right,” there should be a calm in our hearts and in our heads to celebrate Christmas well. I pray you all find that joy and peace in these coming days as Christmas draws closer.

Heavenly Father, you have given us a model of life in the Holy Family of Nazareth. Help us, O loving Father, to make our family another Nazareth where love, peace, and joy reign. May it be deeply contemplative, intensely Eucharistic, and vibrant with joy. Help us to stay together in joy and sorrow through family prayer. Teach us to see Jesus in the members of our family, especially in their distressing disguise. May the Eucharistic heart of Jesus make our hearts meek and humble like his and help us to carry out our family duties in a holy way. May we love one another as God loves each one of us more and more each day, and forgive each others faults as you forgive our sins. Help us, O loving Father, to take whatever you give and to give whatever you take with a big smile.
Immaculate Heart of Mary, cause of our joy, pray for us.
St. Joseph, pray for us.
Holy Guardian Angels, be always with us, guide and protect us. Amen
- St. Therese of Calcutta

Perfection and Purification

I love being Catholic. I have gradually grown to appreciate so many of its teachings for how logical they are. I especially appreciate how it is built around the fact that we are not perfect, but spend our lives striving to reach perfection. Perfection in the sense of being what God has created us to be. What made me start to think about this occurred while reflecting on the whole concept of the Communion of Saints and the souls in purgatory. The whole concept is genius! Let me explain.

We are all created good. God does not create anything bad for He himself is good. Being good and gracious, He provided us with free will, which allows us to have choice. Because God wants us to remain in relationship with Him and to be good, He has given us so many gifts in order to keep us on that track toward holiness, but free will can lead us astray. The goal is goodness. We, the Catholic collective, work to help others achieve goodness. The Saints, those canonized through the Church, are examples of how ordinary people can be extraordinary through the grace of God and others championing them. We are all saints, those who have the propensity to become Saints. So when we speak of the Communion of Saints, that means every human being created by God who strives to know, love, and serve Him at all times. We lean on one another, both living and deceased, to fulfill that mission. How marvelous to know that we remain connected as family across time and place! An example of how we do this is when we pray for both the living and the dead. This is in recognition that not everyone is perfect and prayer helps us in the purification process. Our souls, the essence of who we are, carry within it the consequences of our actions. The soul carries the weight of our sins. Saints are purified. We don’t all pass away in a purified state, but because God loves us and wants us to be with Him for all eternity, there is a divine plan in place for us to help each other get to a place of purification. That is where we need one another as family. We, of course, are purified through the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. If we are not able to receive this sacrament upon the end of our lives, we have the Communion of Saints to help us. Assuming that an individual has worked to maintain a relationship with Jesus throughout their lives, praying for the deceased helps them gain purification as they “wait” in purgatory. “All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.”(CCC #1030). Purgatory is a place of purification. Even in death we are helping each other get to heaven. Therefore, as we honor all those who have gone on before us , remember them in your prayers. They are then praying for you. This is what we believe. This is what we can count on. This is why we work hard to have our children develop a strong relationship with Jesus. 
All you Saints and Angels pray for us.
All you holy men and women pray for us.

Choose Life

While in graduate school, I spent a year serving as a crisis pregnancy counselor at a Christian organization that seeks to provide women and couples with the resources necessary to choose life. I had always been anti-abortion, so I saw this as an opportunity to do hands-on pro-life work. What I experienced will forever change the way I understand what it means to be “pro-life.”

I’m not really sure what I was expecting to encounter when I agreed to the opportunity, but whatever it was, the actual experience was a completely different reality. I encountered women who lived with abusive husbands, but were dependent on them for financial support or had other children with these men that they had to consider. I encountered men and women who had been laid off from work and were unable to find gainful employment to support this new child. Families whose jobs didn’t provide medical coverage so they couldn’t even afford prenatal care, let alone the exorbitant cost of child birth. Teen mothers who were kicked out of their homes when their parents found out they were pregnant. Women whose husbands walked out on them when they found out, and left them to face the pregnancy alone. I walked these women and couples through the process of procuring government assistance and saw, time and again, how it failed to meet their needs, how it provided only a fraction of what it would take to raise their child to maturity, how the abundant requirements for assistance disqualified people who desperately needed help. For all that the center did to provide aid, most of this assistance only lasted until the age of two.

It is because of this experience that I came to understand the totality of the Christian call to be pro-life. It was in walking with these women and seeing the enormity of what they faced that I realized how much work needs to be done, starting with birth and every single day after. It was there that I realized I couldn’t simply pat myself on the back for changing a mother’s mind; I then had to do the even harder work of electing leaders, supporting policies, and donating to charities that would continue to give her and her child the assistance they needed.

So today, on Respect Life Sunday, let us of course pray for an end to abortion, pray for all of the children we have lost to abortion, and all those we still stand to lose. But let us also be sure to remember those parents who feel like they don’t have any other option. Let us pray for them and pray for the creation of a society that makes it possible for every family to unequivocally choose life.