Browsing tag: children

  • Helpers For The Chef

    Household Chores

    If the community is rather large, he should be given helpers, that with their assistance he may calmly perform the duties of his office.  Necessary items are to be requested and given at the proper times, so that no one may be disquieted or distressed in the house of God. (Rule of St. Benedict 31.17-19)

    Who wants to do chores? Isn’t it demeaning, a waste of talent, for an educated person to pick up dirty socks off the floor? If there’s one thing that drives people away from domestic life, it’s the perception of household tasks as endless drudgery.

    Is the drudgery in the tasks themselves, or in the disdain with which people view them?

    A functioning household depends on these mundane, routine tasks. What happens when family members consider them unimportant and undesirable? Whoever does them receives not thanks but contempt. Someone who has worked hard without any recognition eventually from sheer discouragement gives out. Pride, resentment and humiliation damage the fabric of the family. When the members of the household despise the very things that hold it together, sooner or later it falls apart.

    So even if you can afford to hire outside helpers, everyone should still participate in chores, according to ability and opportunity, but not according to rank or privilege. Parents should lead by example to show that the household itself is worth maintaining. There is no formula except to aim for some balance of fairness intrinsic to the family. The willingness is all. Each person contributes cheerfully to a worthwhile enterprise.

    Children like to be helpers, and the problem when they’re little is that they so eagerly make all sorts of mistakes. It’s easier to do the thing yourself, but it’s important to take the time to include them. They need to learn not just the skills but the crucial principle of active participation.

    It’s true that most households have to manage limited resources. But ultimately those resources and the children themselves belong to God. Parents are not owners of their children but stewards of souls entrusted to them for formation. Children are not chattel, and parents are not at liberty to dispose of them like property. Parents who use their children like objects will answer to God for what they have done, and for what they have failed to do.

    Since everything that exists is sustained by God and belongs to him, we are all helpers accountable to him for what he has entrusted to us. But the steward of God is not a slave. Nor is God an employer who is just scraping by himself, squeezing everything he can get out of those he controls. God’s resources are limitless, and he promises to come alongside and be our Helper.

    When your home is a pleasant place to return to, glamor does not lure you. Home is your refuge. You can refrain from excess and be generous toward those in need.

    The trick is to be content. This is the whole end game of the domestic life and the thing that eludes so many unhappy people.

    Contentment is a spiritual state. But it’s also about managing your resources, so that you’re not constantly pushed to the very limits of your strength.

    Which is why, again, you need helpers. The goal is not to survive on your own without depending on anyone. The goal is to live happily together, sharing life’s burdens and joys.

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  • Character Of The Chef

    Temperate Definition

    There should be chosen from the community someone who is wise, mature in conduct, temperate…. If any brother happens to make an unreasonable demand of him, he should not reject him with disdain and cause him distress, but reasonably and humbly deny the improper request….knowing for certain that he will be held accountable for all of them on the day of judgment. (Rule of St. Benedict 31.1-9)

    The cellarer is the person in charge of the food. It may come as a surprise that St. Benedict required this person to possess such a long list of interior traits. We’re accustomed to discerning the qualities of the food, not the qualities of the chef.

    So, is the person in charge of the food really carrying out a moral task? Does this job matter to God?

    St. B decisively affirms that the tasks associated with food are intimately tied to principles of charity and hospitality. So, the person in charge of the food is nurturer and host. A community rests on these pillars.

    But such lofty qualities seem far removed from the experience of raising children. They are constantly making unreasonable demands as to what they want–or don’t want–to eat. If you always give in to their demands, you train them to be selfish. On the other hand, if you enforce rules angrily and impatiently, you drive them away from the family table. How does a human being get from the howling chaos of infancy to the temperate maturity of happy adulthood?

    If you want your children to develop good habits, you’ve got to work on your own habits. This means that you make wise choices about what you eat yourself. Think of yourself as the mature version of what your children will become. Do you need to correct your own behavior, for their sakes? Temperance is the virtue of refraining from excess. Too much food, but also too many restrictions are intemperate.

    So, Mom does not open a bottle of wine every afternoon just before the kids come home from school. Likewise, she does not eat excessively. She is not irritable or doctrinaire, not impatient or tyrannical. She is not lazy or wasteful, but views her stewardship of the food budget and meal planning as work done before God. In other words, she is a saint.

    In order even to want to aim for this standard, you must actually believe that there is a moral quality to the food habits of your household. It’s not that food has any moral value in itself. But food habits form the foundation early in life for all other forms of consumption.

    In short, the goal is for the children to internalize good principles so that they willingly make healthy choices and eventually become responsible adults. To get there, they have to learn to make temperate decisions. This is a project that takes years of effort and perseverance. If you can do this, you can do anything.

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  • Comfort The Wayward

    The abbot must exercise the utmost care and concern for wayward brothers . . . .  Therefore, he ought to use every skill of a wise physician and send in . . . mature and wise brothers who . . . may support the wavering brother, urge him to be humble as a way of making satisfaction, and console him lest he be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. Rather, as the Apostle also says: Let love for him be reaffirmed [2 Corinthians 2:7-8], and let all pray for him. (Rule of St. Benedict 27)

    Human beings are not born hard-hearted. They become hard-hearted when parents teach them a sense of impunity. We have to correct our children so that they will learn to distinguish right from wrong. When the child seems ungovernable, the parents need to pray for wisdom.

    But parents should not leave a child to figure out the next step alone. A parent should take care to intervene and to discuss the situation. You have to explain the punishment and point the way forward. A contrary child needs to hear explicitly what behavior the parent wants to see.

    If an older sibling steps up to take on the job of remonstrating with and comforting the wayward child, the parents should let the brother or sister handle the situation. Children can sometimes come up with wacky but effective solutions to domestic problems. Adolescents can at times be more insightful about the dynamics of a conflict than their parents are. It’s a good exercise for an older child to attempt to mediate. It also benefits the younger one to interact with a sibling who is taking on the role of intercessor and adviser.

    Ultimate responsibility of course rests with the parents. We must take care that no bitterness takes root to estrange siblings from each other or to alienate a child from father or mother.

     

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  • Choose Your Destination

    Choose your destination before you set out on a path.

    Their law is what they like to do, whatever strikes their fancy.  Anything they believe in and choose, they call holy; anything they dislike, they consider forbidden (Rule of St. Benedict, 1.8-9)

    So . . . if you’re thinking that this is a description of our culture today, actually it’s not.  This is St Benedict describing corrupt monks in the 6th century.  The mental outlook that surrounds us now was already an option then.  It has always been appealing to think that you can do whatever you want now and be fine in the end.  But a closer look at real experience shows that choices have consequences.  You’ve got to choose your destination in order to figure out the right path to get there.

    The monks that St Benedict approves of are the coenobitarum, which is Latin for koinos bios, which is Greek for common life, which is English for what I aim to discuss here. Life in community is the focus of St Benedict’s Rule.  He invites you to choose as your destination community with God and your fellow human beings.

    St. Benedict also refers to the eremitarum, which is the Latin transliteration of the Greek eremitēs, which means “one who lives in the desert” and gives us the English word hermit.  He himself lived as a hermit for three years.  He describes the hermit as ready with God’s help to grapple single-handed with the vices of body and mind (Rule of St. Benedict 1.5).

    When I first started to think of the housewife-mother as a domestic hermit, it was because of the experience of being overwhelmed by the demands of life in a family with children.  And yet I also felt isolated, grappling with all sorts of interior struggles.  I don’t think my experience is unusual.  I think that many people flee the domestic life exactly because of this combination of exterior harassment and interior aridity.

    My goal here is to provide some support for Christian families.  I’m going to write from the perspective of someone who finds goodness difficult and not always attractive.  If you’re very good already, I won’t be at your level.  If you’re hanging on by your fingernails and thinking of letting go, I have a few tips for how to claw your way to survival.

    Most people dislike philosophy, so I’ll just note that I would situate myself in the Existential Thomist line.  If you’re interested in pursuing this topic, I would suggest that you NOT try reading St. Thomas Aquinas on your own.  I would suggest that you read Jacques Maritain instead.  Start with his Christianity and Democracy. The difference between reading Maritain and reading Aquinas is like the difference between drinking a gin-and-tonic and chewing the bark of the cinchona tree to extract the quinine.  In the case of Aquinas, you really do want someone else to distill it for you.

    You don’t need to be a philosopher to notice how challenging it is for Jesus to say, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” John 14:6.  His way of life is a narrow path uphill, and that’s not where the crowd is heading.  Meanwhile, you have myriads of alternatives immediately available.  A lot of nice people are rushing off in other directions, and who can tell yet where they will end up?  But Jesus insists that only his path leads to life (Matthew 7:13-14).

    He didn’t say you have to climb quickly.  There’s no quota of miles you must get through in a day.  You can sit down every ten feet and rest, if you need to.  And you don’t have to get to the end to experience the life.  You just have to be on the path–or in the vicinity of the path, retrieving someone from the landscape.  You can backtrack and retrace your steps, again, because that’s just what you have to do to keep everyone together. And you may find that your children have more energy than you do for the challenge.  They hate to walk, but they love to run.  If you point them in the right direction, soon they’ll get far beyond you, and you’ll be calling to them to wait up.

    Choose your destination: are you aiming for eternal community with those you love and with your Creator?

     

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  • Hallow Your Speech Or Hollow Your Home

    Rid your heart of all deceit.  Never give a hollow greeting of peace or turn away when someone needs your love.  Bind yourself to no oath lest it prove false, but speak the truth with heart and tongue.  (Rule of St. Benedict 4. 24-28)

    Do not lie to your children.

    What about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy?

    When my first child asked me if Santa Claus was real, I told her quite frankly, “No.” She didn’t believe me. She argued with me. On Christmas morning she said, “See, Mommy! Look at all these presents. Where do you think these presents came from, if Santa isn’t real?”

    With the second child, I explained patiently that Santa is based on a real person, Saint Nicholas, who lived a long time ago and started the tradition of giving presents to poor children at Christmas. Then I got a phone call from my mother: “Do you realize that Anthony is going around telling people that Santa Claus is dead?”

    With the third child, I decided to let my husband handle this issue. He shamelessly played along with the whole charade. Not only Santa but the Tooth Fairy was real. He snuck presents under the tree and put excessive amounts of money under her pillow, inflating the value of teeth and provoking competition.

    With the fourth child, I avoided the whole problem. I told her the Tooth Fairy forgot about her tooth, but she might try selling it to her dad instead. I told her to ask her siblings about Santa.

    It seems to me that if children can’t trust you to tell the truth about something as inane as the Tooth Fairy, how can they trust you on more important topics? However, I realize that many people feel very strongly that a happy childhood includes belief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and other specialized proxies.

    It’s one thing to let Santa live on in everyone’s imagination. It’s another thing to lie to your children in order to manipulate them into doing something quickly and without protest. Ten years later, the little-white-lie parents are the ones complaining about how their teenagers (shock, horror) deceive and manipulate them. How nasty those teenagers are, and how sweet they were, back in the days when they still believed everything we told them….

    The difference between the tall-tale-teller and the deceitful-manipulator is that the tale-teller wants the children to grow up and learn to distinguish reality from fiction. Nothing tickles a tale-teller so much as the efforts of a knee-high pipsqueak to put one over on him. And sometimes the pipsqueak wins this game, to everyone’s delight. It’s a game that develops the wits just like pitching softballs in the back yard develops athletic skills. It’s quite different from the morbid nostalgia of adults who hate to see the children maturing, for murky reasons of their own.

    But what really harms children is that worst form of deceit, “the hollow greeting of peace.” This corresponds to the pretense of love on the part of a parent who is essentially selfish. The friendly father who abandons his family is hollow. The effusive mother who neglects her children is hollow.

    There’s no point in glancing around to see if other people are affected. It’s in the nature of the thing to be invisible from the outside. Right now everyone looks fine. It’s all good! But when the relationships collapse, and the hollow family splays out into the open, you get a sickening glimpse inside.

    What is the opposite of hollow? The opposite of hollow is to be truly, through and through, what you appear to be on the outside. It means actually taking care of your children. That job includes teaching them to distinguish truth from falsehood, in whatever way you do best. You aim for their ultimate good, not your immediate convenience. It’s possible that no one around you will acknowledge that you’re doing anything worthwhile at all. But in the long run, integrity stands.

     

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  • Rid Yourself Of Anger

    You are not to act in anger… (Rule of St. Benedict 4.22)

    It’s easy to be angry when interacting with children, because children are constantly doing things wrong. The more children you’re responsible for, the easier it is to remain in a state of perpetual irritation.  But just because it’s a chronic feeling doesn’t mean it’s acceptable.  Parents should take seriously what St. Benedict says here, which is also what Jesus himself insists on: “But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5: 22).

    Habitual anger is the result of ingrained dissatisfaction. If we constantly focus on the myriad disappointments of life, on the things that don’t live up to our standards, anger will always be at our elbow. It’s true that yearning for the thing that’s beyond our reach can be a powerful motive for action, and for good. But lots of things remain out of reach. There’s only so much we can do to achieve what we want, and anger is an instinctive response to frustration. If the frustration collapses into despair, we give up working toward the goal and are left with nothing but the chafing desire for something we don’t believe we’ll ever get.

    This simmering soup of dissatisfaction, disappointment and hopelessness is such a regular meal for so many people that it’s impossible to overstate the dangers of it. Left unattended, it can boil over suddenly into violence. The culture we live in keeps the heat on relentlessly. They can’t sell you what you don’t want, so they figure out how to make you want it. Not everyone gets to the explosion point, but many people do struggle constantly to keep themselves from blowing their lid.

    The antidote to anger is joy. You cannot enjoy something and simultaneously feel angry. Joy casts out anger.

    Joy in its ultimate form is a lofty mystery. But the pathway to joy begins here and now, in the tiny thing that we can actually enjoy in this moment. Don’t worry about the great saints who weirdly experienced joy in the midst of torture. You can experience joy simply by focusing on whatever good presents itself in the moment, and giving thanks for it.

    It can take a huge effort to haul your attention away from the disappointments you’ve been focusing on, but the benefits are enormous. As with physical medication, you have to give this practice some time to work. You know that if you swallow a couple of pills for your headache, it’s going to take at least half an hour for them to take effect. Similarly, begin to make the effort to thank God for what you can find to enjoy, and soon you’ll begin to feel relief from chronic anger. Only realize that this treatment is an ongoing therapy. Thankfulness has to build up in your system and maintain a certain level in your bloodstream to be effective.

    For Christians, thankfulness is not a vague, self-referential thing. It’s not that we work ourselves up to feeling thankful in general to nobody in particular. We believe that God is the originator of all good things. This is why we give thanks to God for the thing we enjoy. It’s important here to be completely honest. Maybe in your life almost everything is the opposite of enjoyable. You have to exert yourself to identify something—anything—that you can truly enjoy. Often this one thing is small and ordinary. Perhaps it’s just a cup of hot coffee that you’re able to enjoy in an otherwise miserable moment. So, give thanks to God for your cup of coffee.

    As Christians, we also recognize that human beings have their freedom and can choose to do evil or good. So when someone does a kind thing, that person truly deserves thanks. We practice saying thank you to specific people at specific moments not just as an automatic social reflex, but because of human freedom. The other person didn’t have to bring you that cup of coffee. So, say thank you to the person through whom you received the good thing that you enjoy.

     

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  • Contend Courteously

    The brothers, for their part, are to express their opinions with all humility, and not presume to defend their own views obstinately.…In the monastery no one is to follow his own heart’s desire.… (Rule of St. Benedict 3. 4-8)

    Sure, you have freedom of expression.  But is it going to be the expression of a war zone?  Because there’s another option.  You can choose to approach your messy zone as a construction site.  It’s true that injuries can still occur on construction sites, but the goal is to build something.  On the other hand, victories can be won on battlefields, but the devastated area remains uninhabitable afterwards for years.  Will you be a destroyer or a builder?

    You’re your own person.  But when you got married, you chose interdependence.  Does your pursuit of your goal disrupt your household?  Is your personal ambition undermining your family’s team spirit?  Is the thing you want placing an undue burden on everyone else?

    These are tricky questions.  Your self-assessment may be at odds with your spouse’s.  Maybe the two of you should figure that out first.

    It could be that there’s nothing antisocial about how you’re spending your time.  Maybe it’s the way you express yourself verbally that’s the problem.  Be polite, even to the person you sleep with.  Courtesy is the thing that counts.  Listen first, then speak.

    And be honest.

    How can you be both honest and polite?

    Only with a sense of humor.

    The goal is harmony.  For this, you need the grace of God.  But it also helps to check in with each other on a regular basis.  You can avoid a lot of conflicts if you anticipate difficulties and discuss them ahead of time, instead of always playing catch-up to poor communication.

    Remember that it’s on you to explain what you expect.  The marriage vow does not bestow psychic powers on your spouse.  Only you can figure out what is going through your own mind.  So, the more complicated it is, the more time you’re going to have to give it.

    Don’t assume that the underlying problem is that you are right, while the other person is wrong.  Maybe the other person knows you’re right but is tired of hearing you repeat it. Try a different approach: humor. Watch Monty Python’s The Argument Clinic and have a laugh together.

     

     

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  • Be A Good Model

    Therefore, the abbot must never teach or decree or command anything that would deviate from the Lord’s instructions (Rule of St. Benedict 2.4)

    Neither should parents. Maybe you fail to hit the bull’s eye, but at least you aim for the target. Your children will imitate whatever they see you do. This means that if your son sees you aiming for the bull’s eye, he’ll aim too. And sometimes he turns out to be a much better shot than you are. But you’re the one who points the way. Parents are role models for their children.

    Then at last the sheep that have rebelled against his care will be punished by the overwhelming power of death (RB 2.10).

    No! Not eternal death! As a parent, you’re responsible to turn away from the hot door with the smoke seeping around it. Don’t imagine that your children wouldn’t follow you through it. You no longer have the option to ruin only your own life. Even if there’s not always an exit marked FUN, your job is to find one marked POSSIBLE.  Sometimes it opens on a deep, daunting stairwell with many steps. But in this passageway are extraordinary people with far worse injuries than yours who still have the courage to go on. Follow them.

    Furthermore, anyone who receives the name of abbot is to lead his disciples by a twofold teaching: he must point out to them all that is good and holy more by example than by words, proposing the commandments of the Lord to receptive disciples with words, but demonstrating God’s instructions . . . by a living example.  Again, if he teaches his disciples that something is not to be done, then neither must he do it (RB 2.11-13).

    Mimetic human beings copy each other, even when they have no idea what’s going on (René Girard). Children especially copy their parents–maybe not now, but thirty years from now, when they face your situation and have no model for how to react except how you react today. If there’s a contradiction between what you tell your children and what you actually do, they will have to untangle your mess. So do everyone a favor and try to be consistent.

    How is it that you can see a splinter in your brother’s eye, and never notice the plank in your own? Matthew 7:3 (RB 2.15)

    Whatever else you aim for, realize that the most important model you offer your children is the marriage of their parents.  The hardest part of marriage is handing to God the defects of your spouse and focusing instead on fixing your own flaws.  Each one of us should work on prying out the stake impaled through our own eyeball, so that when our spouse needs help with a splinter, we’ll be half blind but mobile.  If spouses each have one functioning eye and a hygienic patch, together they’ll have the perspective they need to guide their children.

    And yet, we do want to find ways to encourage our spouse to change for the better… One tactic is to sit down for an explicit swap talk, when each spouse gets to pick one thing (only one thing!) that you want the other person to work on. This is tricky, because the unhappiest person is going to ask for a more difficult change. The other spouse can feel hurt at the criticism and may not have an equally painful request to swap with. But don’t worry: what goes around comes around. Today, you’re the one who must make a huge effort, because your spouse can’t stand to be around you anymore. In a few years, the roles will be reversed. Your turn will come to ask, and the fact that you did try will give you more influence.

    It makes all the difference in how you feel about someone if you can see that the person is trying. The thing that’s so infuriating is to feel that you’re stuck with someone whose defect is making your life miserable and who stubbornly refuses to do anything about it. You start to think that the only solution is to escape from the marriage itself. But if you see your spouse attempting to do what you asked, you can feel sympathy instead of disgust. You can hope that life will get better.  

    It’s up to you to decide whether the story of your family will be a comedy or a tragedy.

    Hint: movies about imperfect families finding ways to work things out are always comedies. Some classics worth revisiting: Overboard; Meet The Parents; Father of the Bride; It’s a Wonderful Life; Mr. Mom; About a Boy; Three Men and a Cradle; The Family Man.

     

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  • Live Up To Your Titles: Father And Mother

    To be worthy of the task of governing a monastery, the abbot must always remember what his title signifies and act as a superior should (Rule of St. Benedict, 2.1).

    The father and mother must also remember what their titles signify. Today this seems to require a vocabulary review, even for native speakers.  Never in the history of tautology has such a frisson of excitement run through the announcement that a father is a man, and a mother is a woman.  Who knew that it would become controversial to read a dictionary out loud ?

    A man who begets a child has the responsibility to act as a father to his child.  A woman who conceives a child has the responsibility to act as a mother to her child.  Father and mother should be married to each other. The sacrament of matrimony is a sign of the relationship between Christ and the Church. The husband represents Christ, and the wife represents the Church (Mark 10:6-9; Catechism of the Catholic Church Part II, Chapter 3, Article 7: “The Sacrament of Matrimony.”)

    For two thousand years the Church never had to defend the essential maleness and femaleness of humanity. The Church has, however had lots of experience standing for the essential humanity of human beings.  It’s clear that a Christian understanding of the human being includes a dynamic between male and female. The harmony of masculinity with maleness and femininity with femaleness has always been obvious to everyone in all cultures, notwithstanding the variations peculiar to time and place.

    From the earliest days of the Church, men and women have always been called to develop the same spiritual qualites.  St. Paul lists these explicitly: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).  This is not an exhaustive list. There are other qualities such as courage and truthfulness that the Holy Spirit cultivates in those who belong to him.

    Both the father and the mother in a household are called to imitate Christ. Far from flattening their respective personalities or erasing their sexual differences, the Holy Spirit will fulfill and develop them, both as man and woman and as specific individuals with unique characteristics.  (Two authors who write eloquently on the individuation of Christians are G.K.Chesterton in Orthodoxy and C.S.Lewis in The Screwtape Letters).  One of the most important Christian themes is that you fulfill yourself not by focusing on your own personality but by focusing on Christ’s personality.  It’s from within this tradition that I am writing, and so most of what I say will be for parents as parents relating to children as children, without a lot of gender-specific commentary.

    On the other hand, I’m not sold on gender-inclusive language.  Having studied a few other languages, it strikes me that only English speakers take personal pronouns so personally.  I don’t have a problem accepting “he” as representing human beings in general. The whole point of a pronoun is to save you the trouble of listing out everyone you’re referring to.

    Representation is essential to Christianity, never mind democracy.  The Apostle John tells us that Christ is the Word of God, and he emphasizes the creative acts of Christ, the Verb.  But as redeemer of the world Christ also becomes the Pronoun.  He is the atoning sacrifice who stands in for us before a holy God.  If you reject the power of “him” to represent you, don’t you reject the whole concept of redemption as well?

    But, since it’s impossible not to feel awkward in the third-person singular these days, I’ve decided just to collar the reader and address him or her as you, whoever you are.  I also refer to us, meaning we-the-people-who-are-still-making-an-effort.  My goal is to write succinctly, correctly and honestly.  If I write badly, I risk confusing you.  If I get something wrong, I risk misleading you.

    But if I say nothing at all, I risk offending the Master who reproached only the servant who refused to try (Matthew 25:14-30.)  I’ll do the best I can with the resources I’ve got.  Others are more than welcome to pitch in.  And in fact it’s necessary for each one to make an effort here.  Why would you yield your God-given sexuality to an atheist culture?  Be a man.  Be a woman.  Your choices will contribute to defining the terms.

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  • The Call: Awake!

    Let us get up then, at long last, for the Scriptures rouse us when they say: “It is high time for us to arise from sleep” Romans 13:11 (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue.8)

    This “sleep” is the spiritual stupor of ordinary people who imagine that the front line is somewhere else. They think that they themselves have no responsibility for the outcome of the battle. They presume that they will suffer no consequences for their complacent inaction.

    I myself had an experience of a call involving Scripture and a stirring up from physical sleep, on a particular occasion.  At about 2 a.m., the morning of June 19, 2012, I woke up with the urgent sense that I should post verses of Scripture online.  So I thought, “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

    But the urgency increased.  I felt that I must check what the readings for the day were–not in the Upper Room guide to prayer that I’d been using for twenty-two years, but in the Catholic Missal, which I had downloaded on my phone at some point but had never even opened before.  I fumbled with my phone in the middle of the night and read the readings: 1 Kings 21: 17-29 (the Lord sends Elijah to confront Ahab). Then there was Psalm 51 (“…in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense….). The Gospel was Matthew 5: 43-48 (“love your enemies“).  Then I checked the daily Bible verse and saw Acts 17:30-31:

    God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent, because he has established a day on which he will judge the world with justice through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.

    There was a “share” feature on the app to connect to Facebook.  It was urgent that I must do so immediately.  I signed in, and I posted the verse.

    This experience had never happened to me before.  It hasn’t happened again since.  Afterwards, trying to come to terms with it, I explained to God that this was the wrong message to the wrong person at the wrong time.

    First of all, these days God does not “demand” anything.  God is lucky if anyone condescends to acknowledge that he might exist.  Second, if God wants to get a message out to all people everywhere, my Facebook page is not the place to do it.  Third, people these days don’t repent.  A few religious people make a practice of repenting routinely, but the people who do most of the sinning aren’t interested in repentance at all.  There must have been some mistake.  The angel tapped the wrong person on the shoulder.  I don’t have the credentials, the platform, the authority, or the influence.

    But St. Benedict actually gives some insight into the call of God.  Seeking his workman in a multitude of people, the Lord calls out to him and lifts his voice again: “Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?” Psalm 34:12 (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue.14-15)

    There’s a promise here, and it’s not just pie in the sky bye ‘n bye.  The promise of God for those who will heed him is a good life beginning here and now.

    With this conclusion, the Lord waits for us daily to translate into action, as we should, his holy teachings.  Therefore our life span has been lengthened by way of a truce, that we may amend our misdeeds.  As the Apostle says, “Do you not know that the patience of God is leading you to repent?” Romans 2:4 (RB Prologue.35-37)

    The call to each of us is to translate into action daily the teachings that we believe to be true.  How do we live them out in ordinary life within a culture that has explicitly rejected them and that organizes itself along opposing principles?

    Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord’s service.  In drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome.  The good of all concerned, however, may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love.  Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation.  It is bound to be narrow at the outset. (RB Prologue.45-48)

    Every Christian home is such a school.  If the home is spiritually chaotic, then the child may emerge into adulthood unfit for any good purpose.  Discipline costs effort every day.  But the rejection of discipline costs far more. Everyone pays the price in illness, despair, loneliness and worse.  Rather than raging at evil in others elsewhere, let us combat it where we are.  The battle for good against evil will be won or lost in our own homes.

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