Do it for the Kids

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Bruce Allen

Written by Christine Burrows

In this age of divorce, we hear lots of talk about staying together (or not) for the kids. I say we not only stay together, but work on making our marriages true sacraments for our kids’ sake. Each generation deserves an opportunity to be better at Christian living and growing in God’s favor.

So, why not use our own marriages to help our kids make it to heaven? Just as we try to advance a culture of marriage in the wake of a rising tide of divorce and casual sex, we owe it to our children to establish this culture at home so that they see strong marriage as the norm, aspire to enter into a holy marriage one day, and see such a blessed union as a step toward heaven.

How do we do this? While I’m certainly not a pro, I’ll throw out some ideas to ponder:

Make your faith part of your family identity. Go to mass as a family. Regularly receive the sacraments together. Pray together. Read about saints and discuss the mass readings. Make sure your children know what it means to be a Catholic Christian so that they can explain it. And, just as importantly, try to help them see the marriage and the family as the core unit of their faith, and part of the larger community of the Church. This will help them begin to see faith as a central characteristic of their future spouse.
Talk to your children about sex and the church’s teachings on sex. Do not leave this up to others – educators, friends, or the media. You will earn major points with your children even if you simply share with them the biology of their bodies BEFORE they learn it in health class. But, don’t stop there. Teach them about the beauty of marital sexuality so that they don’t become lured by extramarital sex and view birth control as normal. You don’t have to answer personal questions about your own sexuality, but do spin marital sex and the creation of babies as a true gift from God.
Be physically affectionate with one another in front of the children. I’m not suggesting groping in the kitchen and then running upstairs while the kids sit down to eat dinner. But, it’s certainly good for kids to see their parents hug, kiss, touch as a healthy way of being affectionate – versus witnessing on TV or in movies non-married people, sometimes even strangers, jumping into bed with one another and calling that affection or love.
Encourage your children to think about their calling. It’s important to think of marriage (or religious life) as a vocation–something God has a say in– not just an event they get to participate in. Speak openly with your children about why you got married to one another, and on what part of that decision you consulted God. If they think of marriage as a calling (not just a wedding day), they may begin to view dates and crushes as potential spouses who they might want to run by God before moving forward.
Surround yourselves with other married friends. Do this not only for yourselves, but for your children. Feed the culture of marriage so that you feel bolstered in being part of a community of people who believe in marriage and want to see marriages survive. As far as the kids go, they should see that there are plenty of married people whose marriage might look different from their parents, but are still clinging to one another. They also need to believe that marriage doesn’t put an end to friendship and fun.

I have great hope for my children and their generation. While statistics don’t favor their ability to get married and stay married, I see a beautiful trend among them as they seek to find more meaning in their lives. They crave true intimacy and are beginning to see that casual sex isn’t the way to get there. So, let’s all join forces and give them some real inspiration – some hope in marriage that can reflect God’s true love for us through the gift of our spouses.

Let’s do it for the kids!

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.”

Theology of the Body & Some Thoughts on Contraception

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Sarah Galvin

It’s a difficult thing to talk about – theology of the body. For one thing, it’s very complicated and rooted in a deep theological understanding of the Church’s teaching on love and marriage. But really it is so much more. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface and honestly, I dream of the day when I can really study and absorb this beautiful theology.

One of the big challenges with TOB is pretty basic – how do we live TOB in our day-to-day lives? I attended the Vicki Thorn talk (which Bruce summarized in his most recent blog post) and I left there with a lot of questions. She talked a lot about contraception. This is most definitely a hot button issue these days, especially as it relates to the HHS mandate. What exactly does it mean to be open to life? What really are the consequences of not answering Christ’s call to this openness? I thought a lot about the latter after Vicki’s talk last week. She talked of course about the biological consequences of contraception, but it’s the spiritual and emotional effects, the unquantifiable realities, that got me thinking.

When we were first married, Gary and I didn’t understand the Church’s teaching about contraception. Sure, I knew Catholics had big families and obviously didn’t use birth control but I had no idea why. It wasn’t until I started studying TOB that I even heard the term “openness to life” and it was then that I began to slowly appreciate what that actually means.

As Catholics haven’t we struggled with the “why” for years now? Isn’t that, in part, the reason behind this New Evangelization that we hear so much about. Generally speaking, I think we could all agree that Catholics as a whole haven’t done the best job in communicating the “why” behind much of our faith. Perhaps that’s because we don’t know it? Or at least we don’t know it well enough to feel like we can talk about it with any sense of authority. As I reflect on my own formation as a young Catholic, I don’t think I really paid attention to the little details of my faith. No doubt that we’ve realized that those details matter – a lot.

We live in a secular world full of deviated sexual attitudes that are so far removed from TOB that they pretty much are antithesis to the Church’s teachings on sexual love. What are the consequences, as a culture – even a civilization, for our failure to understand what God intended about sexual love. Most importantly what it IS and what it IS NOT. How do we as Catholic Christians cloaked with the knowledge of TOB communicate this beautiful teaching to a world that doesn’t want to hear it? A world in fact that believes that this teaching is bigoted and sexist. When a friend (or acquaintance) tells me that she’s taking the pill, how do I communicate TOB without sounding like I’m judging her or her husband for the decision they made.

The million dollar question right? A good place to start is just to talk about it I guess, or at least not be afraid to talk about it. Those taboo topics. Politics and religion are always off-limits right? Well – not anymore. We can’t justify glossing over the “details” of our faith anymore. Sure it’s a lot easier and certainly more comfortable to blend in but we are called to do more. It’s always been cool to be counter-cultural right? Well, here’s our chance. Guided by the power of the Holy Spirit, let’s not be afraid to talk about it. But when we do let’s communicate in a way that reflects an underlying sense of love. For that is what TOB is about really. Love. God’s love for us. As we were reminded in the second reading yesterday, “Faith, hope and love remain, but the greatest of these is love.” 1 Corinthians 13:13

Marriage on Tap February 9 7-10pm

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Bruce Allen

OLMC Marriage Enrichment

Just a quick reminder that Second Saturdays: Marriage on Tap is having our February dinner party this coming Saturday. While it may be too late to sign up for February, we hope you will join us on March 9 at Greek Tony’s Pizza on West Main St. in Carmel for a night of fun and games. Pizza buffet, cash bar, and a casual atmosphere in which to celebrate our marriages, as couples and as a community. We’ll eat, drink, tell some stories, maybe play 20 Questions, Marriage Trivia, stuff like that. We had 50+ couples in January, are expecting a full house this month, and have room for perhaps 80 couples in March. Father Mark is threatening to come. While you’re planning this (get a sitter), please visit our Facebook page and give us a shout. For more details, turn the page.

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's Sacred Embrace

Exploring God's Will in Relationships

Category Archives: Theology of the Body