Shackles of Darkness: Temptation, Sin, and Despair

There are times when a Christian feels on top of the world, spiritually, and feels so at peace with the Christian way of life that it seems easy not to depart from it.  At times like this, one can go for months on end without any significant weakness rearing its ugly head, and it seems that holiness and the things of God are sweet to the taste.  Things come easily.  

Then there are times when that same believer scarcely seems to have picked himself up from one fall into sin's clutches before being tempted all over again, when he feels the pull of temptation--and is overwhelmed by its allure--practically before he has even received absolution in the confessional.  

Forgive me Father for I have sinned.
It's been two seconds since my last confession.

I've been going through that very trial, in recent weeks.  It may be anxieties about my son's impending birth, and the fears I've talked about in an earlier post.  Or perhaps Satan, knowing that I will need great energy in the coming weeks and months, is attacking me full force in the hopes of distracting me from the amazing duties of fatherhood and marriage.  Either way, I have gone from a period where I went weeks at a time without needing to go to confession to this period where I can scarcely make it one week.  Even if the only thing I have to confess are that I had the intention of some sin or the other, before "coming to my senses" and fortunately not doing anything "concrete," still something serious enough to warrant confession seems to come up at least once, if not more, within a seven day period lately.  And even when I'm not actually caving to temptation, the temptation can come about daily, so that I am tempted to despair.

Why do we chase the things that we know are not good for us?  Why, when I know that doing something wrong will ultimately make me unhappy, am I interested in it, sometimes obsessed?  

It's probably, to some extent, a way of withdrawing into myself when I'm stressed.  In sin, there can be a tantalizing refuge of "privacy."  It's "my own world," a place where I can feel cozy and comfortable, if only for a time.  There, no one can really follow me, because my sins are mine, or so I tell myself.  When everything has spiraled out of control, and life and people make demands on me, it's far too easy to feel, if only on some subconscious level, that sin is something I can do on my terms.  And I'm sure that anyone who's ever had family obligations can tell you, the chance to do something on one's own terms, for a change, can seem dangerously attractive.

Like eating the whole box of candy when you very well feel like it.
(But without the weight gain!  Sure, your soul could be lost, but details, details!)

But the problem is, of course, that sin isn't really something I do on my terms, it's not some nice treat to reward myself at the end of the day.  Sin is really only ever done on the evil one's terms.  And it always, always becomes clear eventually that giving into sin only makes things worse instead of better.  My mind is muddled, my connection with my loved ones--including God--becomes weak, and loneliness sets in.  What was an attempt at self indulgence becomes, instead, isolation.  I feel far from everything and everyone I ever loved, and that's when sin reveals to me that it was never my servant, but a slave master whose demands are far more callous than whatever demands or stresses of life I intended to escape.  For after leaving me feeling so cut off from all that's dear to me, sin whispers:  "Now that you're already all alone, thanks to what you have done, your only comfort is to take more of me into your soul!"

That's how sin invades.  It offers a promise of escapism, but when the escape proves too depressingly perfect, and you feel lost from the world you once knew, sin seems to be all you have left, all that offers any light.  All that is good and pure and true, the devil whispers, is beyond my reach.  I have tainted myself; "good" people are too pure for me, holy pursuits beyond me, so I may as well stick with the only thing that will have me:  Sin.  

It's all, of course, a wicked lie.  Even at my worst, those who love me want to reach me.  God most of all.  I am surrounded by such caring and wonderful people who, when I feel that I am unlovable because of my faults, want even more to hold me close to their hearts and tell me how much they value me.  And I have a God Who so loves sinners that He gave His only begotten Son to die for them.  

I don't know, yet, the answers to breaking out of the cycle of temptation, or avoiding it altogether.  If I did, it wouldn't happen anymore.  But I think that maybe a key to not losing myself when I stumble is to offer myself up to God and to my loved ones as I am.  Broken.  Spiritually clumsy.  Prone to sin and wickedness.  I must learn to serve God and love others even in the midst of my weakness, not only in the absence of it.  There is no excuse for me to be lazy, but I have to keep a better sense that even when I do fall, I am not beyond hope; the bonds that tie me to God and neighbor are not so hopelessly severed that "sin is all I have left."  That's a poisonous lie.  And, by God's Grace, may I one day be better at rejecting it.

To Belong to a Name

In the post before this one, I talked about the challenges I've faced, inwardly speaking, due to my having a unique last name in my family.  That is, nobody else in my whole entire family, shared my last name with me.  Not even my parents.  When my wife became my relative through marriage, she was the first relative to share my name, and our children are the first blood relatives to share it.  For the nearly three decades of my life up until then, I was alone in bearing my name.  

In the other post about this I ended up speaking more heavily about the anxieties about keeping the name alive, a name that began with me, at least insofar as it belonged in my family, and therefore a name that I didn't want to see die out as suddenly as it had begun.  And it led me into some theological territory about time and eternity.  It's a rich topic, and I'm glad to have had a personal subject from which to segue into it.  But there's more than that to the inner challenge I faced because of my having a name that no one else in my family did.  There's a topic more personal than that.

I felt, on some level, that I didn't fully belong to anyone.  I felt that I belonged with my family, so don't get me wrong, but I was not claimed by their identity.  There was no symbol--and a name is a very powerful symbol--to mark me as belonging to them.  If you'd asked me and my parents for our names, you would have no reason to think that my parents weren't just close relatives but not necessarily my parents.  

It also meant that I didn't feel like I had an identity that extended beyond me.  A family name can give a child a sense of connection with an entire world of relatives besides himself.  No, it's more than that.  I had the sense of connection.  But the child whose own surname is a family name can also grasp a sense of identification with those relatives in a way that I never could.   "Great Grandpa, from Dad's stories, was a Malone (I just like that name, it has no relation to me whatsoever)!  So am I!  I'm like him!"  Yes, there was none of that for me.  There is not one relative of mine, who was a relative prior to my marriage, of whom I could say, "he/she is an X, and so am I!"  

Perhaps this is taking my words too literally.

This was hard on me, even though it would take me years to realize how hard.  Looking back on it, it was a reminder, however subconsciously, that I didn't know my biological father the way other kids did. Nor did anyone ever even suggest to me that it might be nice to change my last name to that of either my Grandmother or the man who helped her raise me (these are folks I knew as "Mom and Dad," and if not for clarity's sake I'd be calling them that here too, and make no mistake they were wonderful to me), so in a sense no one put that legal "seal" on me that said "You're mine."  Now I'm not saying this in resentment.  In my family, not much stock was put into legal realities and things that might have been considered mere formalities.  I have no doubt that my parents sincerely believed it didn't matter what my name was, that I would feel a sense of belonging just because they loved me, even if I shared a name with no one.

And to some extent, they were right about that.  I did know, due to the love we all shared, that I belonged among these wonderful, caring, and loving people who were my parents.  But what they had overlooked--and I am open to the thought that anyone could have easily made the same oversight--is that a sense of belonging to people who love me and a sense of having an identity that belongs to and is shared by people who love me are two different things.  I had the former, in spades.  But the latter?  No.  I felt "special," but in a way that was somewhat lonely.  I was unlike any of my Grandmother's other grandchildren.  They all, down to the last, shared names in common with both of their parents.  Even those whose parents divorced, it just so happens that to this day (or in the case of my birth mother, until the day she died) their mothers have kept the names of their fathers, and both have shared these names with their children.

Now that I'm grown, it would feel artificial to get my name changed.  And besides, to what would I change it?  My Grandmother's last name?  The name of the man who raised me by her side?  The name of my birth mother?  The name of my biological father?  Whose name would I choose?  A very good case could be made for at least three of them (I'm not telling which three), but in each of those cases I could cause people on all sides to think that I wasn't being grateful enough to the people whose names I didn't choose, and this offense could be especially grave because all of my parents are dead, meaning their blessed memories have become rightly "sacred."

And even besides all that, my wife rather likes my last name, and is rather content to keep it.

Rule# 9428 of Happy Marriages:
Never spring a surprise last name onto your wife AFTER marrying her.
I'm sure people have tried to obtain annulments for less!

I don't really have any answers, here.  I know the "right" answer.  I generally do, after all:  I'm Catholic, and there's a right answer spelled out for me for precisely 989,824,932 different highly-complex and specific situations, including this one, because the Vatican is crazy-prepared that way...

...okay, but seriously:  I know that the "obvious" Christian answer would appear to be that I should find my identity and my sense of belonging with God, and with my brothers and sisters in Christ.  I also know that the obvious "hallmark special" type of answer would be to get over myself, climb up onto the nearest balcony, and declare, with dreamy eyes and a wistful tone, "What's in a name?!" and ever after insist that my having shared my last name with  no one in my family in no way diminished my sense of belonging or identity.  And both of those "obvious" answers may be true.  I don't deny the validity of those propositions, because I'm not prepared to reject them as unrealistic.  

But I am prepared to say that, for me, it's not that simple.  Maybe for my brain it is, maybe even for my soul it is, but not for my heart.  I don't know why.  I know that I belong to God, just as I know that I belong to my family, and I even know that I belong to my friends.  But for some reason, some reason that I cannot just wish away or write off, I can't help but look at those--many of my relatives among them--who share their names with their families of origin, with their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, and think to myself:  "Wouldn't it be nice?"

And maybe that's okay.  Because there's another Christian answer that's not always so obvious, but a great deal more "real" than any platitude:  I can entrust this vague-but-recurrent sorrow to my Lord and Savior, not out of some hope that He will magically make it disappear (He could, but that's often not how He operates) but knowing that He will hold me as I mourn it, as He holds us when we mourn all things that we cannot change, from the trivial to the enormous.

Amen, Lord.  My heart, soul, and identity, I commend them all to Thee.  As long as I am Thine, I belong...

An Everlasting Name: A Thread in the Tapestry of Eternity

When it comes to family names, I'm in a unique position.  It's kind of complicated to explain, but suffice it to say that, although I grew up surrounded by my biological relatives, until I was married I was the only person in my whole family, biological or otherwise, who had my last name.  That's right, it didn't come from my father or from my mother.  It's not even the last name of a step parent.  There was literally no relative of mine, by any definition of the word "relative," who shares my name with me.  None living, and none dead.  I was it.  And for as long as I could remember, I'd always been it.

This may not seem like a big deal, but throughout my life it has often made me feel like I didn't fully belong anywhere.  Don't get me wrong, I never felt like an "outsider" in my own family or anything like that.  However I never knew the experience of belonging to the "insert-last-name-here" family.  This was even more jarring because my own immediate family was eclectic when it came to surnames, with none of my parental figures (and I had five of them--long and complicated story, that) sharing a single last name in common either, not even the two who actually raised me.  

For a long time, not having known who my biological father was, I supposed that he probably shared my last name, but when my mother finally revealed his identity to me (at age twelve, if you can believe it took me that long to pry it out of anybody) it turned out that wasn't true either.  

Of course not silly!  That would make sense!

What does this mean for me?  Well, growing up it meant that I never had a sense of pride in any certain name.  I think, even among a lot of families that don't take "family pride" seriously, there's at least some sort of subconscious pride or loyalty in the family name, even if--for the more argumentative types of families--it's only the "I can talk badly about them but no one else had better!" sort of pride and loyalty.  One's last name evokes images and associations of family, origin, and heritage.  I had none of that.  My name evoked nothing except vague (completely imagined) visions of a man who, until I hit puberty, I thought might be my father.  Once I no longer had that illusion, my name evoked nothing at all...

I've met a few other people who share my name, over the course of my life.  They always assumed maybe we were related somehow.  The sad thing is, although I knew better, I too entertained this notion, which goes to show how desperate I was, on some level, to know that I was actually connected to somebody who bore my name.  

What it began to mean to me as I grew older, on the other hand, has proven even worse in some ways.  It means that, for all intents and purposes, I am the start of a new family name.  While the name pre-existed me, it's a whole different branch than any other family, and I'm the start of it.  Because the name belongs to no relatives who came before me, the only way I will ever know that my name belongs to a rich heritage and lasting family history is if I start it myself.  

It's probably already occurred to you:  That's no small amount of pressure!  My wife, despite how immediately blessed we've been so far, has fertility issues that could flare up at any time.  Due to health reasons, we're not even the best candidates to be considered for adoption.  We always have to face the possibility--which for us is very distinct, and not just the "well, technically everybody has to face it" sort--that whatever children we have at a given time might be "it" for us.  Right now, that would mean we have two children, one daughter and one son, and that could be all.

Let's say that were true.  Or let's say our son ended up being our only son, even if we have more children.  Who's to say he'll marry?  Perhaps he'll be a priest, or a monk, or simply be called to live out the vocation of being single.  He could get married yet have no children, or at least no sons.  Then, just like that, my name, insofar as it means anything to my family, totally ends, and I may be alive to see the writing on the wall.  Also consider how absolutely certain this end would be:  Many people in my shoes might at least entertain the notion that somewhere in their family, even if it's only an impossibly distant tenth cousin on the other side of the world, there is a relative carrying on the family in both blood and name.  That weight, the odds are, is not solely on their shoulders.  My wife's father, for instance, is seeing his own name die with himself in his particular branch, but he does have distant relatives somewhere carrying on the name.  I know that I don't have that, because my name is not traced back through a series of ancestors who might have branched off five generations ago so that, I dunno, in Germany or Africa or wherever the name still carries their legacies.  The name began with me.  If the name lasts, I am the ancestor from whom all my descendants will have inherited it.

I suppose you thought being a patriarch was easy, did you?

I realize I'd be jumping the gun to start planning what I want on the tombstone for my family name (1985-?), but it is a concern that I can't help but call to mind.  And if the worst case scenario does occur, I'd be lying to say it wouldn't bother me deeply.

Why does it bother me so much?  It's surely natural that it would bother a person, but when it does get on my mind, I get outright anxious about it!  

I'm convinced that some of this anxiety comes from having too much focus on seemingly fleeting moments and not enough on eternity.  You see, I'm looking at my name--and my life, for that matter--as something that takes place and finds existence for as long as it lasts on Earth, and then passes away when that time ends.  I don't mean that I think I won't exist for eternity; as a Catholic I'm deeply aware of that, but what I'm failing to consider is that, if God stands outside of time, then to Him each and every moment, down to the smallest instant, must be engraved into eternity, never to truly pass away.  There is no accomplishment, no triumph, no beauty, by the Grace of God, that will turn to dust, because even though it may become dust with the passage of time, the moments where it was not dust stand before the eyes of God for all eternity.  

Just as God could see the future before it happens, so too He will see the past even when countless aeons have seen it turn to dust from our vantage point.  And this is not merely because he will "remember" it in the human sense of the word, it is because to Him every single moment to have ever passed or that will ever come is present before Him, as real and concrete as "now" is to us.  When we are privileged to stand in eternity with Him, it will be the same for us.  That's what it is to live outside of time.  As scripture states, time does, indeed, pass away as something in which we are contained, but by the very nature of what eternity is--a constant now--it cannot be a place where what happened in the confines of time is truly obliterated.  Because that would mean eternity had changed, that once there was "time," which God could see from His vantage point outside of it, and then at some point there is no such thing.  Because change and eternity are incompatible, we can safely say that all of time is frozen in eternity, it's just that we will not be bound in it.

If, however, you find that in eternity time is frozen in the middle of a workday,
you may want to check your surroundings for agonizing flames and consult the nearest thermometer.

Therefore, whatever becomes of me on the "timeline," my name and my bloodline will exist forever, even in time, by virtue of the fact that those moments will exist forever.  It cannot die, it's just that there may be one point on the timeline in the future where it is no longer found.  But this moment, all moments where it is found, are set in stone.  Will always be.  In that way, it is impossible for anything to become lost to time, because time itself is never lost.  

I'm aware that this is going to sound horrible to many people.  If time is frozen in eternity, then doesn't that mean that all the terrible moments will stand for eternity too?  Will we be forced to relive agonizing, regrettable, or terrifying moments from our lives for all eternity?  No, it's not like that, and there are two reasons.  The first is that, as I said, we won't be bound by time; we will no longer exist in time, so we won't be "reliving" anything in the strict sense of the phrase.  

The second reason, and the more important one, is that we will see it from the perspective of the eternal.  Scripture tells us that "all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord."  We also know that all things will ultimately glorify God, no matter how terrible they seem in the moment.  I believe that in Heaven, all of time and material existence will be like something of a beautiful tapestry.  That tapestry, perhaps, will be like a story told in pictures, the history of humanity and of God's works.  And we know that, like any excellent story, the complete tapestry will be brilliant, beautiful, and awe inspiring.  But there will also be "moments" in the story, or "threads" in the tapestry which, if taken by themselves out of context of the whole, will appear ugly, and perhaps even which are ugly on their own.  But when these threads are woven into the overall tapestry, we will find that somehow the contrasts they create with all the beautiful and fine threads makes the tapestry just as beautiful as, if not more so than, it would have been without them.  

This, I think, is the balance between saying that nothing in this life matters next to eternity (if that's true, then why should it matter how we live our lives?!) and saying that what we do in this life has a chance of spoiling eternity (which would be a bleak and terrible idea!).  Yes, we should strive to add only the most beautiful of threads to the tapestry of "time," but we can also rest assured that when we stumble, or when others seem to introduce plain, unimpressive, or even outright atrocious threads to the tapestry, somehow God will see to it that these compliment the rest of the tapestry so that the final work we will behold in Heaven will be breathtakingly amazing.   Looked at this way, "time" and every single instant in it does have eternal significance, but cannot taint eternity for God nor those who remain faithful to Him.

And it's by that perfect, artistic tension that I may know that my name, as fragile and precarious as it seems to be, is in no danger of fading into obscurity.  Neither is yours, nor anyone else's.  

------
I actually intended to go somewhere else with this originally, but this is where it went instead!  There's an even more vital element to the anxiety I sometimes feel around this topic, so I do want to dive into it in a future post, perhaps the next one.  So be on the lookout for it!

Technical Difficulties and Some Housekeeping

When I write an entry here, I try to touch upon something deep, profound, insightful, or meaningful in some way.  I try to tap into something that will help the reader in some way, even if it's only to show those of you who walk a similar path "You're not alone."   I don't know how well I succeed, but it's my hope with each entry to have written something thought provoking or affirming.

This is not one of those entries.

This, folks, is a plain ol' practical entry.  Why?  Because I had to do some spring cleaning (in the late summer!) of the blog.  I wanted to enable my readers to follow me on Google+, but that brought about other technical difficulties, and to make a long story short I ended up staying up way too late (that's why this entry's gonna show a time stamp at a ridiculous hour) in order to replace every single entry on the blog, so far, with an identical entry, with an identical time-stamp, and an identical link.

It may look like the old entry, it may be written like the old entry,
It may even have an identical link to the old entry, but really its...
AN ALIEN ENTRY FROM THE PLANET MARS!!!

There are a couple of things this means:  One, for those of you who follow me by e-mail, I have no clue if your e-mail accounts just went wild saying that I've been publishing new entries like a madman, when in fact they're the same old entries (except-they're-actually-identical-doppleganger-entries-come-to-snatch-your-soul!) that you've already read.  For that waste of your time, I apologize.

Second, some of you had written some awesome comments on the old entries, and those have been totally lost to cyberspace now.  I extend a special apology to you, and I hope you'll contribute comments in the future, which I will do my best to avoid clumsily losing.  

All that said, a bland practical entry like this one is the perfect time to point your attention to some of the features of this blog.  As I said above, it's now possible to follow me by clicking "Follow" below my name in the "About Me" section.  That might be a little more direct a method to follow my posts than the e-mail option.  

Also, just to highlight the fact, I do have a Facebook page set up for the blog at https://www.facebook.com/bygraceandadream.  If you're on Facebook, be a pal, won't you, and "like" the page if you already haven't?  Besides being a really awesome thing to do, it'll make it easier for you to get the word out to your friends, by sharing the posts directly from the Facebook page.

Okay, that's all from me on this oh-so-exciting topic of technical difficulties and shameless advertising.  But there is one more thing...

Thanks to you, dear readers, I am very close to reaching the "1000 pageviews" mark before my blog has been active even a month.  That may not be much compared to some of the giants in the blogosphere, but to me it's huge.  I want to thank you all, from the bottom of my heart.  Without readers, a blog is just a glorified journal, but when the readers are actively following, a blog suddenly becomes one more way to feel like I'm making a contribution to a bigger world, however small an accomplishment a few words in cyberspace may be.  You guys  make it worth it.  For that, we should celebrate!  Bring cake!

I have officially made you want cake.  And now you hate me.

Blessings and prayers, and keep your eyes peeled for the next entry!

Confessions of a Once-Disgruntled Father

In less than two weeks, we're going to be celebrating the birth of our son.  It's set, actually, because we have a scheduled C-Section.  So it's certainly not going to happen later than we think.  We're both excited, and scared to death about this.

We have a sixteen-month old daughter, so our son isn't our first child.  But the experience of our daughter's birth was a hard and traumatic experience for both my wife and myself, and the memories are quite fresh.  The question looming in our minds is:  "Will this time be the same?"

You see, before our daughter was born, neither of us, who had lived as the only children in our households (I have brothers, but none of them ever lived with me), had been experienced with babies.  I'd held babies, but like my wife I'd not had to endure the real meat of the challenge that comes with actually living with a baby, and having a share in the real responsibilities that come with it.  I had spent time consoling my wife throughout the pregnancy, assuring her that things would be okay, because people have babies all the time, and raise them, and this is the way we were created and designed.

I knew that babies were demanding, and woke up at night, and required hours of energy and investment every single day.  But surely, things would fall into place.  We would adjust, just as naturally and surely as any other creature adjusts to rearing young, often without signs of complaint or undue distress.

There was only one problem with my high hopes:  I assumed that biology made some sort of rational sense.

Oh you poor, poor ignorant man.

You see, then our daughter was actually born, and I quickly discovered that biology made no sense at all.  I did NOT adjust to losing so much sleep at night.  I did NOT adjust to the baby's constant need of attention or care.  My brain did NOT flip on some sort of "instinct" that made these things come more naturally to me.  Rather, it seemed like the baby's biology, in every possible way, conflicted with adult biology, and there was no change, whatsoever, to the latter to make up for the demand.

I should preface the rest of this post by saying that I have since been diagnosed with clinical depression, and at that time in particular I was probably hit with the male equivalent of postpartum depression.  Be that as it may, I can't possibly exaggerate what a shock it all was to me.  I'm not kidding when I say it actually shook my religious faith, because I could see how blind evolution might make such a stupid mistake as to have the biology of the human parent be largely incompatible with the biology of the baby, but under no circumstances could I envision that such a thing would be true by intelligent design.  Frankly, there didn't seem, to me, to be anything "intelligent" about having such an important task as baby care be something that directly conflicted with the parent's instincts and needs.  The parental need for sleep does not magically subside when the baby is born.  I never experienced a "shift" that made it seem more natural, more bearable, to wake up every hour and a half to assist with breastfeeding and diaper changes.  It seemed to remain as forced, mentally unhealthy, and unnatural as it had ever been.  It's neither hyperbole nor a joke when I say I had doubts as to whether or not there was any intelligent design behind human biology after all.

The first couple of weeks after my daughter's birth, I will not say that I ever formally considered suicide as I did in the incident cited in this post, but it crossed my mind and lingered there very often, perhaps at least once an hour at the worst moments.  "I can't do this," I thought to myself, and I felt like a terrible father for it.  I actually hated the thought of "the rest of my life."  What sort of parent was I?  That this made things harder for my wife, also, only added to the feeling that I was no good to anyone and that no one would really lose anything if I were dead.  I was inwardly hostile, miserable, and saw no brightness left in life.  After all, I had wanted children since I was a thirteen year old boy, and if this beautiful thing to which I had aspired for more than half my life, was now so horrible to me, how would I ever be happy?

How uplifting; he speaks pure poetry!!

These are some of the fears both my wife and I have had about this upcoming birth.  Will it be the same as last time?  Will my depression get worse all over again as we are beset with the intense demands that come with the newborn phase?

I do have hope that this time will be different.  This hope is based in a number of things, and I'll list a few of them here.

1.  I wasn't diagnosed with depression yet, back then.  I now have both medication and counseling for the depression.  As I stated in my blog on suicide, there have been incidents which would have probably seen me dead, by my own hand, before the depression treatment, which have instead found me uncharacteristically resilient because, thank God, they have happened since I've found treatment.  I have hope that it'll be the same with the birth of our boy.

2.  I have a better grasp of baby care as redemptive suffering.  Any parent can tell you that baby's are hard work.  There's a lot of sacrifice.  Losing sleep and putting in energy you don't have does not, by some biological magic, cease to be suffering when you have a baby.  Unlike many other biologically imperative tasks, baby care doesn't come "naturally" for most of us, there is no "autopilot."  But that only means that our design is "unintelligent" if we think we are supposed to be "well oiled machines," working smoothly.  I've said before that in Christianity, and especially Catholicism, there is the belief that suffering is redemptive.  Suffering draws us out of ourselves, via sacrifice (whether bearing the suffering for God's sake or for others), so that we may be better people.  Seen through that lens, the way things work with babies seems less like evidence of blind, unintelligent evolution, and more like a sign of an utterly brilliant design.

3.  We're far better prepared for it.  I don't only mean that we've braced ourselves better, mentally and emotionally.  We have a lot of practical things in place, such as tangible support for the first few weeks postpartum, so that we can both relax a little better without bearing the burdens all alone.  As some childcare experts now agree, child care was never ever intended, especially at the newborn phase, to be a two person job.  Earlier generations had the aid of extended family, to such an extent that it's realistic to say that having to spend an entire twenty-four hour period during which the mother and father were exclusively responsible for the baby's needs was much rarer then.  We're taking even more measures now to see to it that we have that support.  We also know, due to actual medical opinions from my doctors regarding my depression, that I genuinely do significantly more poorly with little sleep than many others might, so in getting more outside help we're keeping my sleep needs in mind, rather than treating it as though I'm just "lazy" or something as I feared the first time.  This alone makes those first few weeks a lot less scary than the first time, when I felt like I was literally stretched beyond what I could give, yet I felt I could only "shut up and take it" because I feared I was just exaggerating and that everyone else--including my wife--would think so too.

4.  We can look forward to the fact that it gets easier.  Caring for our daughter is not nearly the same taxing beast of a workload as it was when she was a newborn.  Not even close.  But back in those early days, we were only able to look forward to this day based on pure faith.  We had never experienced it for ourselves.  It seemed to us, on a gut level, as if the difficulties of caring for a newborn would last forever.  Now we know, in a concrete way, that it gets better.  That in mere months, babies do tend to require less, significantly so, than they do at first.  Knowing that there's a light at the end of the tunnel is a major comfort for the both of us.

This too shall pass, son.  But first, it'll last for an eternity and
make you wish you were never born.

So I'm looking forward to the birth of my son.  I'm going at it with open eyes and a good deal more planning, using what we've learned from the first birth.  I have a more realistic expectation of how hard it's going to be.  This time, in spite of the hardship, I have hope that both my wife and I can find more of the joy in what's going on as we're going through it.  It may be a dry joy, a joy not unburdened by hardship and suffering.  But God willing it will be a joy that we can detect.  I'll never say that joy wasn't there with our daughter's birth, on some level, nor even that we were never for a moment aware of it back then.  But it often felt as though it was "choked by the cares of the world" so to speak.  This time, here's hoping that things are different, and that we can be more deeply aware of the joy even amid the struggle, and enjoy being parents to our newborn son the way we much better enjoy being the parents of our toddler daughter now.

But I'm not naive enough to miss this opportunity to ask for your prayers, dear readers, that this hope of mine will become a reality.

A Matter of Perspective: Rewards in Heaven

As I mentioned in my post on scrupulosity, one of the bizarre things that I've often fretted and worried about, spiritually, is the thought that in Heaven I'll end up with a lesser reward than I could have achieved and, since this reward is locked in for eternity, I will have suffered an eternal loss.

Sorry to sound like a broken record, but I feel--for the benefit of non-Catholic readers--that I should again explain this Catholic teaching, this time in more detail than I have before.  The Catholic Church teaches that in Heaven (and in hell for that matter) not everyone experiences it the same way.  Where some other faith traditions teach that everyone who goes to Heaven will have the same experience regardless, Catholicism holds that based upon how faithfully one cooperated with God's Grace in this life to produce good fruit, one's reward, which is to behold God clearly and face to Face, may be experienced to a fuller or lesser degree in Heaven.   In the Council of Florence the Church teaches that souls in Heaven "clearly behold the triune God as he is, yet one person more perfectly than another according to the difference of their merits."

This is because for us, Grace--although it is a gift which we do not earn or purchase--is not a gift in the way that a whatnot or a picture frame is a gift.  In other words, it's not just given and then our job is merely to "have" it.  It's an active gift, a gift of utility, one that you don't just "get" and then sit on your laurels.  Yes, we rely totally on the Grace being given to us without our earning it, and any good deeds we do flow from that Grace, and not our own power, but if we're spiritually and morally lazy, the transforming effect of that Grace in our lives will not be as great.

This doesn't mean that Christ's victory is less great, but rather it means that--just as with believing in the first place--God will not force us to reach the greatest heights of transformation against our will.  If He were willing to do that, common sense says every baptized Christian would instantly be living the fullest, most faith-filled, heroic life of virtue possible, because God would have forced this transformation.  We'd just be programmed to do whatever a "great Christian" should do from the moment we received Grace.

Meet Christian!!!  He comes pre-programmed with 2,341,313 perfectly devout behaviors;
if you're an omnipotent Deity in need of predictable devotion that never gets it wrong,
Christian is sure to please!

But if we are in some sense responsible for how well we cooperate with God's Grace, it is reasonable to assume that we will experience our heavenly reward differently according to that same response.  Even the scriptures point to this.  In that parable of the Ten Coins that I've mentioned no less than twice in this blog (Luke 19:11-27), Jesus tells the story of a a nobleman who left ten servants with one gold coin each.  When he returns, he finds that the servants have earned different numbers of coins, although they were each given the same.  And what does he do?  He says to the servant who has earned ten more coins, "take charge of ten cities."  He says to the servant who has earned five more coins "take charge of five cities."

Notice something.  The nobleman, obviously representing God, does not say to the two different servants, "Well done, but your different levels of work make no difference to me, so you will all have the same exact reward."  In the similar parable of the man who gave his servants "talents" (Matthew 25:14-30), it's true that the man rewards all the good servants equally despite their different earnings, but there's a significant difference there:  Each servant was given a different number of "talents" in the first place.  The one who earned ten talents had started out with five, and the one who earned four had started out with two.  So both have done the same amount of work with what he had:   Namely, each doubled it.  That's why no difference is made between them, and this is indeed a comforting reminder that God does not hold us responsible for doing the great deeds of another if we were not given as much to work with as the other.

Not so in the parable of the ten coins.  The servants each started out with the same means, so it's clear that the one who earned more had done more.  And so, the number of cities entrusted to these servants matches how many coins they have earned, with each servant being given one city for each coin he had added to his master's fortune.

So one of these...

...got one of these?

Man, inflation's ruined EVERYTHING since those days!

For my non-Catholic readers, I'm not trying to convince you, just showing that there's a case to be made for this, and that thinking this way isn't just something a random Pope made up to make life hard on scrupulous folks like myself.

With all that out of the way, as you know, I am scrupulous, and these thoughts have made my life hard at times.  Now that's no excuse for dumping the belief or saying it's bad.  The belief in morality makes one's life hard at times when one wants to do something wrong, yet I don't think any rational person ("rational" is a key word) would suggest we should go about eradicating morality of any kind on account of those "poor souls" who are troubled by it.  Still, I've often been anxious about the thought that I'll get to Heaven and find that I "should have done more" on Earth (by God's Grace, of course) so that I would have a fuller reward in eternity.

Some may say:  "How foolish!  If you get to Heaven at all, that should be good enough!  Why care about rewards?"  But remember that the reward in Heaven is not something like gold or possessions, something that's "nice to have, but it's just extra."  The reward is to directly experience presence, love, and glory of God.  The difference in one person's reward and another's, then, is not a matter of numbers, but of how fully they each experience God in Heaven.  I've heard it said, for example, that a person who cooperated with God's Grace more in this life increases the size of his spiritual heart, so that it can hold more, and broadens his spiritual mind so that it can contain more, so that a great saint would be capable of holding more of God's love and comprehending more of His glory in Heaven than someone who barely loved and served God well enough to just get his foot in the door.

Now, both of the hypothetical souls I just mentioned would be equally happy, because they would each be receiving all that they could possibly comprehend and contain, meaning from his own perspective, each soul is receiving all that it's possible to receive.  Somehow, though, that bit of consolation has failed to do its job with me.  The knowledge that, for all eternity, my capacity to contain God's love and to comprehend His glory might be more limited than is humanly possible has caused me a great deal of grief and loss.  I want to know God, in eternity, as intimately and as fully as it any human being could ever wish, so that there's nothing at all I could be said to be missing.  

Oh, is that all?  For a minute there,
 I thought you were gonna make lofty, cosmic demands.

But a couple of years ago, I began to envision a hope.  I still have no idea if it's a realistic hope, and I have no authority whatsoever to proclaim it as if it were a fact.  That said, if you're like me and you want to join me in entertaining this hope, or even if you're just curious, read on.

I got to thinking of some of the very things I posted about recently, namely the post about the unity of all souls with God and with one another in Heaven.  If it's true that in Heaven we will be so profoundly one with one another that, despite keeping our distinct identities and personalities, we might also know what it is to be (and experience reality as) each of our brethren in Heaven, then doesn't this say something about the way we will experience the Heavenly rewards?  If I get to Heaven and I am so very much at one with Brother Don from the monastery down the street (note:  No such monastery exists, and I'm sure I'm losing Heavenly merit by making up such a terrible lie) that I can "see Heaven through his eyes," as it were, does this mean that I will experience God through his capacity and comprehension (that is, his reward)?  And vice versa?

We're all one body, and according to Saint Paul, that's just how it works.  In 1 Corinthians 12:26, he writes:  "If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share in its joy."  To experience extreme suffering in one part of a body is enough to bring pain cancelling out whatever joys the rest of the body may feel.  To experience, on the other hand, extreme pleasure or joy in one part of the body is enough to send good feeling throughout the entire body.  I have hope that it's the same with the faithful in Heaven, then.  That whatever joy there will be for the greatest of saints will be experienced, to the full, by the least.  When Mother Teresa experiences great depths of God's presence, mystery, and love for her compassion and kindness on Earth, little plain old Joshua will feel her joy, will share in her experience, not in the detached sense that he's merely happy for her, but the same way that a great massage, though located in one part of the body, radiates real pleasure to the rest, so that the shoulders are not merely "happy for" the neck when it is massaged, they're experiencing that pleasure for themselves.

Does this sound unfair?  Why, after all should Saint Holy's-Her-Face, with her impressive barrage of good deeds and a heart that was, in life, positively bursting with love and compassion, have her same reward experienced--through unity with her--by Saint Mediocre's-His-Name, who let fear and anxiety keep him from doing all he could for God's glory in this life?  Won't the saints be like the workers in the parable of the vineyard, grumbling and complaining that average, mediocre folk should get to experience their rewards?!  I think not.

Sainthood has always been about two things:  First, the love of God, but secondly the love of neighbor.  You don't become a saint by putting your own happiness as the highest good.  Otherwise Ayn Rand would have been canonized by now.

Note how full the chairs are of people waiting for THAT announcement.

Saints, instead, delight and rejoice whenever, by their labors, they might bring happiness to others.  I think, as Catholics (or at least among the scrupulous) we sometimes get the idea that in Heaven the greatest saints will suddenly be content to rest easy, fat on some reward that is exclusively their own, while the "little people" in Heaven must make make due with lesser things.  Preposterous!  Do you remember that incident where Pope John Paul II tried to give Mother Teresa a car, but she raffled it off for money to help the unfortunate?  That same spirit will thrive among the saints in Heaven:  If God were to give them a reward and say "Now this is for YOU!  Don't share it with those who haven't earned it!" the reward would become a heavy chain around the necks of these holy men and women, whose chief delight has always been to share with others, especially the greatest treasure they had:  God Himself.

Even the aforementioned parable of the ten coins subtly hints at this:  The reward given to the servants is the responsibility over cities.  A holy servant in charge of a city doesn't have this reward simply for his own benefit and prestige, but to serve the citizens, to make the city as happy and prosperous a place, for all, as it is within his power to do.  Doesn't that sound like what the saints would also do with their heavenly reward?   If so, I would think the great saints will, in return, experience our reward, and experience God through our capacity for Him too.  Let's not think too little of that, either:  St. Therese mentioned how the smallest flowers in the field bring just as much glory to God as the larger, so it makes sense that the larger flowers would be just as honored to share in the glory of the smaller as the smaller would be to share in the glory of the larger.

So that is the hope I have held for some time now, that has helped me to go through life without scrupulously obsessing over this issue at every moment; the hope that, with as flawed and average as I am, I will not "miss the boat" of experiencing God as only some greater saint than I might experience Him, with no hope for a "do-over."  Instead, I might find that, while it's true that I will not, on my own, experience God in the same way that St. Joan of Arc or St. Francis of Assisi might experience Him, I will share their same experience because of my unity with them.  And in that way, I won't be missing a thing.

The Blood of the Just: Of violent persecution against Christians.

I can't overstate my pain and anguish at the deaths of the Christians who are being brutally persecuted throughout the world for their faith.  The latest news of persecution against Christians by the terrorist group calling themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, is only one such terrible trend, but it's a good representation of the worst of the worst.  We in the modern West think of persecution--by-force--committed against Christians as being a thing of the past, a relic from the days of Pagan Rome when Christians were hunted down and given the death penalty.  However, in other parts of the world, Christians are still very much persecuted, asked to renounce their faith under pain of imprisonment or death.

Now, let me say that I'm not the sort of person to undersell the difficulties we Christians face in the West.  I'm not one of those, at all, who will insist that because we're not being imprisoned or killed just for claiming Christianity as our religion that this means there isn't a more subtle--and spiritually quite deadly--persecution against us.  No, if anything I'm the opposite:  I emphasize that the Western spite for Christianity is in some ways more poisonous to Christians than outright violence because, to modify a phrase my grandmother always said, "You catch more bees with honey than you do with vinegar."  In the modern West, Christians are lured from their faith with the "honey" of prestige and media glorification, while scared from being fully Christian (that is, by espousing values deemed "backward" by the modern culture) with the "vinegar" of insult, spite, and legal sanctions.  Satan is quite crafty, and knows that the sword of mockery and the arrows of scorn can scare or entice as many Christians, if not more, into abandoning their faith than literal knives and guns.  And Christians in the modern West do not leave their faith shivering and regretful, but are often coaxed into leaving it proudly, never even realizing the spiritual doom to which they are now marching.

And let's make no mistake, Christians here are increasingly threatened with severe financial and legal repercussions if we refuse to compromise our values, even if we're allowed to technically profess our Christian faith (so long as we divorce ourselves from our morals and do as we're told in the public and business sphere, of course).  So as you can tell, I'm as far as you can imagine from the "Christians in the West have no right to think they're mistreated!" crowd.

But my recognition of the often-undersold threats Christianity faces in the western world by no means diminishes my sense or appreciation of the blatant horror faced by Christians in lands where Satan, for whatever reason, has chosen to be less crafty and more bold.  In these lands, the evil committed against us is obvious, cruel, and unambiguously evil.  It's true that when the enemy is coming after you with knives and guns, it's easy to know they are the bad guys at least, but that is a cold comfort when faced with the grim prospect of torture and death, or the even worse prospect of these things against your loved ones.  Unlike in the West, a Christian who abandons his faith under, say, the threat of Islamic jihadists might at least inwardly realize he's only doing a desperate act in order to escape a grizzly fate; but that does not diminish his pain or his guilty conscience.  If he evades the physical suffering, he is burdened with a fate worse than that of Saint Peter, who denied Christ, for unlike Saint Peter he will never hear--until his death--the comforting words of Jesus Christ in His obvious personal form to console him despite his moment of weakness.  He may spend the rest of his days feeling that he was a coward, if in fact he picks his shaken faith up again at all.

There can be no doubt:  The persecution levied against Christians in the more barbaric nations of the world is torture no matter what the Christian chooses.  If he does not abandon his faith, he is either imprisoned or he is tormented and killed.  If he does abandon his faith, then if he has any true faith at all he will live with mental and spiritual torment for the rest of his days over his decision, and wonder forever "Would I make the same decision if I had it to do over again?"  For a Christian, such uncertainty is also torture.  So he cannot escape torture no matter what he does or where he turns.  His third option, of course, is to permanently abandon his faith and never look back in regret, but with that option he loses his very soul, which is an even worse fate.  Cruel indeed is his list of available options.

I can only find solace in knowing that God holds the fates of those who are faithful--even those who only renew their faith after initially falling away in terror--in His hands.  He never fails to reward the suffering of His just ones.  Some great minds have said that even the smallest inconvenience, if suffered for God, will reap great treasure in Heaven; how much more then the profound suffering of our persecuted brethren!  Martyrdom and misery are the seeds of glory, for we serve a God to whom the blood of the Just--and I do dare to say "Just", for Christ justifies His flock--cries out for satisfaction.  That satisfaction shall come not in the form of petty vengeance (although, as Pope Francis himself has hinted, the use of force to STOP this violence has its legitimate place), but in a heavenly prize that far outstrips the horrors faced by the persecuted soul on the earth.

Let us pray for peace, and let us pray for both the victims and, perhaps even more so, the survivors of the barbaric and inexcusable deeds taking place even as you read this.