Beatitudes for Young Mothers

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Bruce Allen

Of the eight beatitudes from The Sermon on the Mount, several can be applied to our marriages and to each of us in our roles as parents. When we fail to respond to Christ’s calls to these heavenly blessings, we not only tarnish our hopes of seeing heaven, but we can damage our relationships with our families. When we turn some of our worries over to God, we are better able to handle those that remain.

I am going to assume that, all other things being equal, in the early part of the 21^st century, American women, young and not-so-young, do more parenting than their men. That WAY more of the burdens of caring, planning, packing, arranging, scheduling, and doctoring, are borne by our wives, no matter how liberated we husbands claim to be. (As for playing with our kids, that may be a draw.) I infer, then, that way more of the pressures of parenthood end up on the moms. This vestige of the days when we lived in caves seems almost universal. Therefore, I suggest that two of the three Beatitudes discussed here are more relevant for mothers. (Men are welcome to shoulder the other five, and will probably become better fathers in the process.)

As I see it, from the perspective of 38 years of marriage and three children, the most important of the Beatitudes for young parents tells us that the merciful will be shown mercy. As the speed of life increases, as our families grow, and as the demands upon us from one another, our children, our parents and our siblings continue to build, we often reach a point at which we must release pressure. How we release this pressure is important.

Although I routinely confess to having cursed A LOT when I go to reconciliation, I do everything I can to avoid cursing at Nancy. In the worst of our arguments, over almost four decades we have used next to NO profanity. If cursing one another is a regular feature of your lives, whether you’re fighting or not, you are chipping away at the foundation of trust, respect and intimacy at the core of your marriage. And over long periods of time, a damaged foundation will be prone to collapse when under stress. Agree not to curse at one another. Ever. It’s not that hard.

To me, it’s not surprising that so many working mothers are stressed out. To me, the wonder is that not ALL working mothers are stressed out, followed in short order by mothers, period. (Heck, maybe they are, and I’m just too old and out of touch to realize it.) Raising children takes more out of people than almost anything else I can think of. I applaud our readers who are doing everything they can to be good parents. During Lent especially, I pray that mothers everywhere can find it in themselves to show their children, and their defective, fallen husbands, mercy. Even when they don’t deserve it. For the fathers, I pray that you fully grasp the mental and physical challenges involved in being a mother, and that you not only appreciate her efforts, but do all you can to lighten them.

Earlier, Christ tells us that the meek shall inherit the earth. Today, for many of us, the meek are, in fact, our own children. They are the ones depending upon us for all of their needs–physical, emotional, intellectual. When we release our pressure on them, we probably cause harm. We may instill doubt in their hearts, doubt that we truly love them, and this can be a corrosive concern for a kid growing up. Our children need have no doubts that they are loved by their parents, even on the worst of days. Shielding them from our impatience is a grace from God, received through prayer. Short, momentary bursts of prayer during the day, staying in touch with God, staying cool, staying in tune with the universe. 🙂

Most of us know people, women generally, who like the idea of being surrounded all day by five kids under the age of six. At our bible study last fall, one of the young women at my table, working as a nanny to put herself through school, asked God for forgiveness for having had all three of her charges in tears that day at the same time. This latter person is, I believe, far more common than the former, although most of us know women like this, and some of us have been blessed to have them look after our own kids at times. But if this isn’t you, it doesn’t mean you can’t be an effective and loving mother. It just means you need to pray harder. You’re already doing all you can. So get help–invite the Holy Spirit to lend a hand when doing it all alone seems to be too much.

I wrote a witness for bible study this week in which I observed that I never really got along very well with my own mother. She was something of a perfectionist, I was anything but perfect, and an only child, to boot, and her continuous disappointment with me colored our relationship until the day she died. If you’re a young mother, and you’re struggling, you may want to pray about how your child will remember his or her childhood. If, during times of stress, you remember that we are called by God to be gentle, that the meek shall inherit the earth, it may be easier to maintain your composure and allow the rough moments to pass, so that they easily recall good times growing up.

Finally, it is the peacemakers who shall be called children of God. This, thankfully, applies to husbands and wives, mothers and fathers. If our children grow up amidst chaos, they will seek it as adults, and will find themselves in tumultuous relationships. Our home should be our refuge, and all of us crave the comfort and security that comes from a home that is one of warmth, love, understanding and acceptance.

Sure, things get wild, maybe every day, and hopefully on purpose; our homes are not meant to be tombs. But they are, at some point, and on some level, where we rest our heads and our hearts. Couples willing to spend half an hour together after the kids are in bed putting their homes back together for the next day’s festivities are, again, sharing God’s grace.

There will be more basketball games on TV. There will be more IMs on Facebook. But there will never again be a time when you can have this much positive influence over your kids and the adults they will one day become; their peers are gaining on you. The world is filled with people who regret not having been more engaged parents. There are relatively few people out there who, looking back over their lives, regret not having watched more basketball.

So, during this Lent, let us all promise to do more to promote peace, love and understanding in our own homes. Husbands, fathers, let us support our wives in their roles as mothers, and let us all show mercy to our own families first, and the rest of the world in its turn. While it’s not as good as having been there for The Sermon on the Mount, we will be integrating the word of God into our daily lives. He will be pleased with us.

5 Reasons to Speak Positively about your Spouse at Work

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Bruce Allen

This is a nice short piece explaining why it’s a good idea not to speak badly about your spouse at work, by Kevin Lowry at The Integrated Catholic Life.org. Like me, Kevin is a convert. Unlike me, he is devoting his life to evangelization and bringing Protestants into the Catholic faith. Here’s his post from earlier this week:

“Sorry, I can’t do it tonight. The old ball and chain gets ticked off if I’m out late.”

How many times have we heard derogatory comments like this about spouses in the workplace? Even worse, snide remarks can give way to all-out whining: “My husband is such a jerk sometimes” or “My wife completely lost interest in me after we began having kids.”

Sacramental marriage should be in a different league than this, but we all live in a culture that hasn’t done the greatest job honoring the institution. In reality, we also know that even the strongest sacramental marriages sometimes go through serious challenges.

So what’s a good Catholic spouse to do?

Well, brace yourself for some good news. There are things we can do to honor our spouses in the workplace, and not be swayed by the cultural winds that sometime blow all around us. How about this one: always speak positively about your spouse at work. Why? Here are five reasons – and they just scratch the surface.

Complaining about your spouse lacks class. Oh, maybe it’s fashionable to gripe and assume an attitude of superiority over your spouse. But does that make it right, and does it really make you happy? Probably not. Besides, if your spouse is such an idiot, what does that say about you, the person who made sacred vows to him or her?
How you speak can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Have you ever noticed how good spouses make each other winners, and bad spouses make each other losers? Words matter. Speaking with honor is part of acting with honor – even when your spouse isn’t around.
It protects your marriage. Even when things are rough at home, airing your grievances at work is the wrong venue. Co-workers who complain about their spouses open up an avenue for support from other co-workers, including those of the opposite sex. This can progress to inappropriate emotional intimacy, and worse.
It’s good for your career. Many of the virtues that make for a faithful spouse also make for a great employee or co-worker. Besides, getting in the habit of speaking positively about others (including your spouse) behind their backs helps build a better culture for everyone in your workplace.
It’s good for your co-workers. We are affected, for better or worse, by the attitudes and behaviors of our co-workers. Demonstrating charity and understanding towards our spouse might just inspire others to do the same.

We can’t single-handedly change the state of marriage in the world, but we can do our best to honor our own marriage vows – and our spouse. Speaking positively about our spouse in the workplace is a great way to improve our marriage, our workplace, and our walk with Christ.

Valentine’s Day Revisited

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Bruce Allen

Thanks to WikiPedia for the following introduction:

February 14 is celebrated as St Valentine’s Day in various Christian denominations; it has, for example, the rank of ‘commemoration’ in the calendar of saints in the Anglican Communion. In addition, the feast day of Saint Valentine is also given in the calendar of saints of the Lutheran Church. However, in the 1969 revision of the Roman Catholic Calendar of Saints, the feast day of Saint Valentine on February 14 was removed from the General Roman Calendar and relegated to particular (local or even national) calendars for the following reason: “Though the memorial of Saint Valentine is ancient, it is left to particular calendars, since, apart from his name, nothing is known of Saint Valentine except that he was buried on the Via Flaminia on February 14.”

Seems there may have been several St. Valentines, at least one of whom was of some low character. The Church, choosing safe over sorry, has given St. Valentine, all three of him, the boot. Not damaging in any way the onslaught of red-colored confections and fru-fru parked in the center aisles of better discount, drug and department stores near you.

Once again, we Christians have managed to turn what was once a religious feast day into a secular selling opportunity. In the process, we routinely substitute grasping for short-term pleasure for seeking lasting happiness. Marketing types endeavor to raise everyone’s expectations, and we approach February 14th with credit cards extended, to ward off any hint of mediocrity or penury in outward displays of monetized affection we tend not to duplicate for another 365 days. Your basic flash in the pan.

Whether it’s on the calendar or not, Valentine’s Day is, in my opinion, another opportunity to affirm for your spouse that you will love him or her forever, that you are glad you married him or her, and that you would happily marry him or her again on most days.

Heading toward our 38th anniversary, Nancy and I don’t go overboard in celebrating most holidays. We are staring retirement in the face, and big displays of what is fairly obvious anyway only serve to put the day when we no longer have to make the daily trudge that much farther away. Christmas and Easter are still big, but Labor Day–not so much.

On most holidays, a bunch of roses from Costco is received as nicely as an FTD delivery and at a third of the price. A plate of salmon on Friday night is virtually indistinguishable from one on Thursday night when we’re busy anyway. Any intra-marital competition is limited to who can find the funnier card. With joint bank accounts, ostentatious gift-giving is a little silly anyway. “Here’s your fabulous gift, darling, and here’s the bill!! Happy Valentine’s Day!”

My new favorite cliche is, “The best things in life aren’t things.” If you want to talk about gifts that keep on giving, talk about the spouse who keeps The Four Horsemen out of your marriage. The spouse who offers to get up early with the kids while you sleep in on a Saturday. The spouse who shows your son how to ride a two-wheeler and your daughter how to bait a hook. The spouse who does so many things around the house without being asked, or expecting to be thanked. The spouse who cleaved to you to create a family, with whom you can be Nanny and PopPop, watching your kids building families of their own, and who will join with you again to envision the families those grandchildren will have someday. All linked inexorably to two people–in our case, a couple of old hippies who met by accident and quickly sensed a connection that will ultimately have led to generations of descendants. Many of whom will have myopia and teenage acne.

In accordance with God’s will.

Though it saddens me to see how a number of my bad qualities have passed on to my children, and are likely to get passed along again, it is a gift to see them working to be effective parents and good wives, as all three of ours are girls. They all married well, and that, too, is a gift from God. These gifts–gifts of serenity, gifts of progeny, gifts of patience and affection and comfort–these are the gifts that experienced Valentine’s Day celebrants look for.

The fru-fru and chocolates can stay right where they are.

Why Did Paul Write about Love?

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Gary Galvin

The second reading from last Sunday (Feb 3, 2013) was from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians about love. This is the common reading we often hear at weddings, including mine and Sarah’s. I decided to dig a bit deeper into this reading and visited various websites to do my research. I was truly intrigued by what I learned and just how powerful love truly is.

Why did Paul even write to the Corinthians?

Corinth was a bustling port city in ancient Greece where Paul established an early Christian church. Corinth was a tough community for Paul to convert. The Corinthians seemed to have been stubborn and set in their own ways; after 18 months of evangelizing and establishing a Christian community, Paul felt it was time to leave. But many issues quickly arose, and people in Corinth were not living up to the Christian values about which Paul preached. With so many travelers in the area came sexual immorality; the citizens of Corinth were fighting and suing each other, people were drunk, and ultimately everyone was treating each other poorly. The Church in Corinth was in trouble.

In that era, congregations did not gather in assemblies or halls but, rather, in homes. Chloe was a Christian woman, the head of one of these homes. Chloe wrote a letter to Paul informing him about the corruption in Corinth and the fledgling Christian Church there, and asked him for advice and direction.

Paul’s response was detailed in his first letter to the Corinthians that we find in the New Testament. One of the first teachings that Paul brings up is that our body is sacred and a temple of the Holy Spirit. He reminded the Corinthians about the importance of marriage and being loyal and faithful to your spouse. If someone was unmarried, he taught that they were to remain celibate and to refrain from sexual permissiveness.

Paul began to encourage the Corinthians to live as new persons in Christ. To treat people with kindness, help the poor, and respect others – to live a life of metanoia, which is the conscientious turning away from an old life (of paganism) to new life in Jesus Christ.

And so here we are today.

As one reads the First Letter to the Corinthians, we as Christians need to bring the same message to our present day world. Between the conflicts across the globe, sexual immorality, hatred and other sins, we must still heed Paul’s message and apply it to our own situations. But it’s Paul’s big finish that sums it up for all of us – the gift of love. Paul emphasizes that what people want is love, and that love is the greatest gift God has given to us. He wanted the Corinthians to love one other and to make love the reason for everything they did and said. As Jesus taught.

Like most of us, each time I hear the reading about faith, hope and love–“and the greatest of these is love”–I immediately think about weddings and marriage. But after studying more about Paul’s letter to the Corinthians I am convinced that love is everything. And that The Beatles, though perhaps not great examples of how to live one’s life, had it right when they sang, “All you need is love.”

Glimpsing Heaven

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Bruce Allen

Posted by Christine Burrows

Genesis 2:18 The Lord God said: It is not good for man to be alone: let us make his complement.

I am a woman. My husband is a man. Simple observations regarding the profound reality of God’s plan for humanity.

As a woman, I have my ways… emotional, nurturing, verbal, inquiring, sensitive.

And, he has his…dutiful, strong, honorable, protective, resourceful.

In marriage, these attributes complement one another. Where one is weak, the other is strong. Where one is needy, the other is helpful…. at least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

What is the reality of the male/female partnership? Living with these differences is not always easy. It can be especially difficult at times to balance and integrate them in lives lived at the speed of light. When we are prideful, contentious or harried they can be downright frustrating and painful. But, just as the male and female bodies are different AND complementary, so are our natures, our characters.

When we come together with our very different bodies to create something greater than ourselves, so, too, should we seek ways to integrate our psychological, spiritual, and emotional differences to create something far better than each of us individually – a marriage! A symbiotic relationship, in which the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Just as sexual union involves submission, so, too, does relational union. In God’s plan, both unions are glimpses of heaven. In our mutual submission to one another, we fulfill the divine directive to be fruitful, multiply, and subdue the earth as stewards of our faith and the word of God.

In the reality of our fallen-ness, we don’t always get a full view of this heavenly union. We are humans–prideful, vain, and prone to anger. Thankfully, we are forgiven through reconciliation, and blessed with opportunities to experience this piece of heaven. And, each time we do, we want it more. With great hope, I pray for each of us to savor those glimpses, and to do all we can to sustain them.

An Evening with Vicki Thorn

Posted on February 2, 2013 by Bruce Allen

Vicki Thorn

Our Lady of Mt. Carmel welcomed Mrs. Vicki Thorn to our parish on Thursday, January 31, 2013 for a talk on the biochemistry of sex, which she refers to as “the biology behind the Theology of the Body.” Vicki has devoted her career to raising awareness, especially among teens, of the consequences of the so-called Sexual Revolution as they relate to the physical health of all involved. Vicki is the Founder of Project Rachel and the Executive Director of the National Office of Post-Abortion Reconciliation & Healing located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

During her 90 minute talk, Vicki revealed a theme about God’s world and plan for humanity. The theme was inter-connectedness, and the message was that God’s power, as it pertains to procreation, is immense beyond our understanding, and we mess with it at our peril. Looking at my notes, I came away with a number of ideas worthy of future discussion:

I learned about “menstrual synchronicity” and the biological significance of the “alpha female.” (And here I thought “alpha female” meant only that she maintained the checkbook.)
How we, as a society, have become “disembodied”, such that we make decisions regarding our behaviors without full awareness of what those decisions mean to our health. In Vicki’s words, we are “stone age people living in a high tech society.”
That my mother’s observation–“before you marry some gal, check out her mother”–was dead on, as Vicki gave a great segment on mitochondria, how women carry the genes from seven generations of their mothers. And how the Y chromosome that men carry has 72 genes, compared to the 3500-6000 genes on EACH of the two XX chromosomes in women., explaining in part why women are so much more complicated than we men are.
That the whirlpools you find attached to the swimming pool in cheap motels, which I refer to as “DNA swap meets”, have nothing on the real world. That women carry in their bodies the genes of their parents, their older siblings, their children, and children they may have conceived but not borne, as well as residual DNA from every man they’ve ever had sex with. Reset, for me anyway, the concept of a person’s sexual “dance card” and how it’s actually even longer than we might have thought.
That what I had heard previously about the presence of estrogen in public water supplies, and what that means for the health of both men and women, is true. A great example of how we, as a community, suffer from the actions, sinful or otherwise, of our neighbors.
That chemical contraception alter’s a woman’s subconscious biologic assessment of potential mates. That the blocking of her reproductive hormones causes her to seek a mate with a higher level of testosterone than she otherwise would. And that men with high testosterone levels are more likely to hit, cheat on, and leave women. She suggested, too, that birth control pills lower a woman’s libido. And, to make things worse, when the woman goes off the pill, she doesn’t like him anymore! Message: that when we play God, which is what we do when we practice chemical contraception, the spiritual prohibition is now supported by the biology behind it.

There was plenty of other good stuff involving immune system issues, pheromones, micro-chimerism, testosterone, cellular communication (biological, not iPhone), and the health benefits of seminal fluid. All of which you can find discussed at length at the sites listed below. This is a brief video of Vicki speaking on biochemistry and God:

Here’s more of Vicki’s stuff : Come Holy Spirit Conferences Healing after Abortion Vicki’s Facebook page “What They Didn’t Tell You in Sex Ed” video

Love for the Long Haul, by Susan Vogt

Posted on January 26, 2013 by Bruce Allen

This is a find from Gary Galvin, who posted the link to this nice article on Twitter yesterday.

Susan Vogt is a freelance speaker and writer on marriage, parenting and spirituality (www.SusanVogt.net). She and her husband of 35+ years, Jim, live in Covington, Kentucky. They have four adult children. She is the author of Raising Kids Who Will Make a Difference and Just Family Nights. Susan advised the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Marriage and Family (2000-2002) and is content editor for their For Your Marriage Web site.

Enjoy these ten tips for a long, loving marriage. Here’s a taste:

“Successful marriage is not so much a matter of finding the right person but being the right person. There are probably quite a few potential partners with whom an individual could be happy. The challenge is knowing when to bend and change yourself versus when to stand up for yourself. It takes a pretty flexible pair of people to make this dance work. Love is essential but not sufficient.”

Love's Sacred Embrace

Exploring God's Will in Relationships

Category Archives: For New Visitors