Poverty Is My Greatest Gift

As we continue to rejoice in Christmas, I am delighted to offer this beautiful guest post by my Christmas Eve-born daughter, Kara.  She has some wonderful insights into the gift of poverty.  May the Lord bless you and yours this Christmas and coming year, and may your New Year be holy and filled with the love and awe of God.

Last Christmas Eve, on my 28^th birthday, in a little chapel in New Orleans, Louisiana, I sat before Jesus in the Eucharist and wept. Having been on a journey with the Lord for so many years I felt exceedingly frustrated that I still struggled with so many of the same issues, poverties, faults, and that I wasn’t where I wanted to be in my life.

I wanted to be strong and have it all together. I wanted to be valiant, virtuous, beautiful and saintly. And there I was, weak, dependent, fragile and in a nutshell, poor.

Crying out to the Lord, I asked Him bitterly, “Why did you make me like this? Why did you make so frail and needy, with so much brokenness? Why did you make me so dependent on you for every breath that I breathe? Why didn’t you make me strong and capable and beautiful in the ways I want to be? Why?”

Immediately with such tenderness and love I heard the voice of God the Father say to me in reply:

“Kara, I made you a Christmas child, and the gift of Christmas is poverty. And poverty is your greatest gift.”

Jesus was born into a dark, cold, empty cave. Into the barren blackness of the night. A King born for the poor, of the poor, as the poor. And how easy it is for we followers of Christ to hate poverty.

By poverty I don’t just mean the hungry in the soup kitchens, the homeless in the shelters, or the beggar on the street—I mean the beggar within our very own families, and most of all, the beggar within ourselves. We want to escape our emptiness, deny our addictions, shun our weaknesses and mask our faults. But as my mother always told me, “Kara, if you were perfect, why would you need a Savior?”

I think St. Therese was made a Doctor of the Church specifically in this time of history because in a society where we truly believe it is our job to be perfect, independent, need no one, and save ourselves, she reminds us that the way to the Lord is not a growing up but a growing down; that the way to freedom is not a figuring out but a letting go.

“What pleases God is to see me love my littleness and my poverty. It is the blind hope I have in His mercy. There is my only treasure,” she tells us.

All of our weakness and frailty, all of our poverty—yes, even our sin if we lay it at the foot of the manger—become that empty cave into which the Christ child may be born. To ransom the captive chained within our souls. To free us from the bondage of ourselves. To die and rise for us, and make us truly rich, that we might rejoice! All because we are poor.

Hope Answered: The Way of the Child

Unless you turn and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.                                  Matthew 18:3 

“God the Father is so pleased with you,” the old priest said with a broad smile on his face after praying over my husband, Bernie, just hours before his death. “Well done, Bernie. Well done!”

“It’s hard to miss the echo of God the Father’s thundering voice at Jesus’ Transfiguration saying: ‘This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased,’” I wrote about the experience in my book, Miracle Man. “It suddenly dawns on me that this is what Bernie Klein has been waiting for to die, and that this is precisely the gift that Our Heavenly Father wanted to give him so he can finally rest in peace,” I concluded.

The assurance of being God’s beloved son. A child of the Father. Isn’t that the identity that all human beings are called to discover?

Jesus enters this world as a little child precisely to teach us to say “Father,” says Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in his book of collected sermons entitled The God of Jesus Christ. His vulnerability as an infant and a child make it clear that humans are not meant to be self-sufficient, but that we are by our very nature relational, in need of others and in need of God.

He became a child. What does it mean to be a child? To begin with it means dependence, needing support and help from others...Being a child…means learning to say “Father.”*

Sounds simple enough. But human experience tells us that it is often very difficult to say “Father” from our hearts. It can be painfully hard to perceive God as a loving, merciful Father, as Abba, Papa, Daddy. We suffer from what could be called a collective father-wound in our culture, and the wound bleeds openly, even in the Church. We are facing a crisis in fatherhood itself, where the meaning and importance of fatherhood are called into question, and where more than half of the children in our country are growing up in homes that are absent a father’s presence.

Each Advent, we are invited to reconsider the infancy of Jesus, which points us to the truth that we, like Jesus, are God’s little children. And like Jesus, we are called to address God personally, intimately, familiarly—as our Father. The profundity of creatures assuming such a stance before Almighty God can hardly be overstated.

I recently noted with interest that the Church’s Advent readings contain a recurring theme. The Old Testament ends with a prophecy of the Messiah’s forerunner, John the Baptist, who will “turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.” (Malachi 3:24)

The Gospel of Luke begins Christ’s Infancy Narrative with a repetition of the same promise. There, the angel Gabriel declares to John the Baptist’s father that his son will go before the Savior to “turn the hearts of the fathers toward their children…to prepare a people fit for the Lord.” (Luke 1:17)

It seems that a major theme of Advent is the turning of heavenly and earthly hearts one to the other, anticipating the spiritual healing that God desires for each of us: becoming a child, becoming His child, becoming like the Christ-child. Healing of this sort makes us fit for a relationship with the Father, and retrofitted for membership in His family.

The babe in the manger is completely vulnerable and dependent, much the way the sick, the elderly and the dying are at the end of their lives. Just the way that my husband Bernie was when his earthly life came to a close. Such vulnerability is good and necessary if we are to shed our world-acquired illusions of autonomy and enter God’s kingdom—which admits of only one path—the way of the child.

*Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, The God of Jesus Christ, Meditations on the Triune God

Finding Advent Hope: The Pathway Through the Heart

God cut a highway right through Bernie Klein’s heart, an artery that could give him life. Not surprisingly, that’s where Love seeped in.

“I died and I clearly remember it,” Bernie told me after waking up from a six-week coma brought on by a massive heart attack and subsequent multiple organ failure. “I could see myself floating in the air, looking down at my body, and I could see my damaged heart.”

That vision was the start of a near-death experience six years ago that took my late husband Bernie to heaven and back, where he met God and encountered with great clarity both the profound love of God and the spiritual condition of his own heart. I share the entire true story in detail in my book, Miracle Man.

“It looked like my heart was torn in half, and half of my heart was a vivid color of blue that looked like ugly debris. I knew that represented all of things I had done in my life that were not pleasing to God,” Bernie shared soberly. “The other side was beautiful gold, and I knew it represented all of the things I’d done in my life that were pleasing to God.” Bernie was “sent back” by God to undergo what he called his “purification,” about which he emphatically stated: “And I NEED it.”

Bernie’s experience calls to mind a series of Advent sermons delivered by Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in 1964. Ratzinger called our lives “an enduring Advent” and said:

the borderline between "before Christ"and "after Christ"…runs through our own hearts.*

“Insofar as we are living on the basis of selfishness, of egoism, then even today we are ‘before Christ,’” said the man who would become Pope almost fifty years later. He explained that our vocation as Christians is “live with Christ and in Christ,” an ongoing event in our hearts that makes every day of every year Advent for us—for the rest of our lives.

To live with Christ and in Christ is the hope of Advent, and for Christ to live with us and in us is our hope for glory (Colossians 1:27). In Advent, we invite the God-man to be birthed anew in our hearts, asking Him to blur the dividing line in us of all that is “before Christ.” In Advent, we welcome the Lord and ask Him to occupy our hearts, much as He did the manger in Bethlehem. In doing so, all that is “before Christ” within us increasingly decreases.

“Judy, you have no idea how much God loves you,” Bernie said as he finished telling me his near-death account. “I will spend the rest of my life spreading the message of God’s love to others,” he concluded. “Nothing else matters.”

God’s incredible love. Nothing else matters. Bernie saw that clearly after meeting God.

Paralyzed from the neck down and completely dependent on life support, Bernie’s mantra for the last six weeks of his life became: “You have no idea how much God loves you.” He spent those last days enjoying what he called “fellowship with God,” allowing God to run a road from his once-divided heart straight to heaven, this time, to stay forever.

This Advent let us take the occasion to ask: Where is the line drawn in my own heart? How much of my heart does not yet belong to Christ? May His Divine Presence displace everything in us that is not of Him, and may His light dispel any darkness in our hearts.

*All quotes from Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, are from the book of Advent sermons entitled: What It Means To Be A Christian.

Cultivating Advent Hope: Healing Our Decembers

Tears flowed freely during the meeting with my spiritual director, Sandy, as I shared with her the pain I was feeling. “December is here,” I said. “I get such a wave of anxiety and grief at this time of year.” Somehow, I have a hunch I’m not alone in experiencing December this way.

December is the month that “our lives blew apart with more violence than we ever dreamed possible,” I wrote in my book Miracle Man. The month that my late husband, Bernie, suffered a massive heart attack—leaving my children fatherless and me a widow after 87 excruciating days in the ICU. Six years and a wonderful new marriage later, December still brings it all screeching back.

“Beg the Lord to heal the trauma of all your past Decembers,” Sandy wisely advised. “And ask him to fill you with the joy of his birth.”

For December is also the month when we celebrate our Savior’s presence penetrating Earth’s agonies, defying what human eyes behold as mere babe-flesh, disguising the God-man. This is the month that Hope is born, ushering in the time of fulfillment for the long-awaited healing of our crippled souls and lame lives. December is, indeed, the month of Advent hope.

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The hope of Advent lies in experiencing the reality of human frailty—and in believing that Someone, though fragile in appearance, is coming to heal us soon. The hope of Advent consists in a hearty cry for deliverance from the weight of sin and death—and in trusting that God’s glory-weight will pierce right through all of this world’s darkness. For we have all known the sorrow of “Decembers” during life’s winter months, times of shadows and suffering where we cry out for the Light to come.

Every year I’m reminded that December is a fitting backdrop for Advent, as it is the month that throws off the least amount of light in the calendar year. The days grow short and winter begins. The darkness brings with it a certain sense of vulnerability and disorientation, along with the knowledge that we need more Light, so we can see.

Advent hope has everything to do with vision. Advent hope is inexorably connected with eternal perspective. That’s because hope—Christian hope—is so much more than plain old wishful thinking. It is the theological virtue by which we order our lives toward heaven; the virtue that establishes trust in us that there is a heaven, and gives us the conviction that we’ll live there with God some day. Hope reminds us that this earth is not paradise, and it strengthens and sustains us as we travel toward the longed-for Promised Land. Hope gives us a new vision for our lives, enabling us to see that what may look like “disaster” to human senses is but a moment of time that God holds in his hands, shaping it for our good, while simultaneously, mysteriously molding us into good.

“Can you see your Decembers as a time when God reaches into your life to work miracles, instead of as a time of sorrow?” Sandy gently asked. “You saw that once,” she continued. “You wrote a book about it.”

Yes, I saw it clearly then. But somehow I go blind every December.

And maybe that’s as it should be. Since it is December’s darkness that beckons me to encounter my desperate need for a Savior. Along with my need for a divine infusion of Hope.

Thankfully, it is Advent. The season of so much blindness healed. The Church’s daily readings ring out promises of what the Messiah will bring, along with rich Gospel accounts of those promises being fulfilled:

On that day the deaf shall hear…and out of gloom and darkness, the eyes of the blind shall see. The lowly will ever find joy in the Lord, and the poor rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.               (Isaiah 29:18-19)

 And then we hear:

Two blind men followed him crying, “Son of David, have pity on us!” …Then he touched their eyes...And their eyes were opened. (Mt. 9:29-31)

Touch our eyes, Lord, and enable us to glimpse reality from heaven’s angle, through the lens of Advent hope. Heal all of our Decembers, and fill us anew with the joy of your birth.

Advent Hope: What Are We Longing For?

I was meditating on the theme of God surprising us, and I received the below reflection unexpectedly from my daughter Gabrielle Klein Hicks.  It was too beautiful not to share!  Gaby is a homeschooling mother of three young boys and she and her husband, Grayson, are expecting their first baby girl next April.  Enjoy!!!

Advent is my favorite season of the Liturgical year. The year begins anew as we quietly prepare for and anticipate the birth of a child. But not just any child… Emmanuel. God with us. In a total act of love and mercy (and with Mary’s “yes”), the Word is made flesh and dwells among us. God the Son is revealed so that He may ransom His people held captive by sin and darkness. The hope of salvation is born. The Light of the World has come. What a thing to rejoice!

I can remember as a child feeling a painful longing come over me in Mass during Advent, and then ecstatic hope during the Christmas celebration. I remember being moved to tears every year, not knowing quite why, since my relationship with God was immature and distant, at best. What was I longing for? Why was I so hopeful?

Now as a mother, I begin to understand Advent and Christmas in a new way each season. A priest said to me during my first pregnancy, “Well if you don’t get Advent now, you never will!” regarding the fact that my baby boy was born on Christmas Eve. But I didn’t get it then. These days, time and experience (and two more children with a fourth on the way!) have revealed to me what I felt then but did not yet understand. This year, as I reflect on the gift of a child and the hope of new life, I see how much God has taught me through my children.

Almost every day there is a moment where I gaze upon each child’s face. Whether I am putting them to sleep or checking on them in the back yard, I just watch them.  Their innocence and lack of self-consciousness never ceases to amaze me. Their hearts have faith in their own goodness as well as the goodness of others. They love so freely. This is particularly evident when they see themselves in the mirror. Every time they see their reflection, they greet themselves with the most genuine smile. They are pleased with what they see, because they see what God sees…A person beautifully and wonderfully made by their Creator. And His creation is good. They don’t see frizzy hair or an ugly nose.

And I often wonder, when does this joy and peace in the way God created us get lost? When do we become not only self-conscious, but honed in on every flaw?

Watching my children has taught me to rediscover the truth about myself. Something I lost during so many years of exile in sin and darkness. I have relearned what I once knew as a child, which is that God is good and God is love. God made me in His image and likeness, therefore I am good and made for love. God loves me. I am good.

I can see self-consciousness developing in my almost six year old. It hurts to watch. I want him to hold on to the truth about who he is in God forever. However, in my heart I know that all of my children will lose this truth to some degree as sin manifests itself in their lives. They will have their own story of how God reveals Himself to them and sets them free. I am sure it will be a beautiful thing for me to behold, but I wish I could spare them the pain of their sin. I know, of course, I can’t. Pain is so intimately intertwined with new life, evident in labor and birth. You can’t have one without the other. Plus, Christ came to save them just as He came to save me. I know I would not have learned these lessons without feeling the pain of my own sin and without the life experiences I’ve had so far. So I trust in God and in the stories He’s written for each of their lives.

As I realize all these things, I now understand what I was longing and hoping for in those days as a child. I longed to know God and to be in communion with Him. I longed for the Truth and to be saved from all the lies my sin led me to believe about myself. And the ecstatic hope? Well, that was the chance I saw to come alive again in Christ. A chance to be free like a child once more. An opportunity to see myself as good again and have peace with my flaws, just as my children do now.

Every Advent, we will continue to await this ecstatic hope. I will continue to tell my children that Jesus loves them so much that He came down to this earth to find them and eventually lead them home when It is finished. I will show them in my own clumsy way how to long for God, how to make room in our hearts to receive the King, and how to endure the pain until He reveals Himself. They will know that they have a chance for not only new life, but true life in Christ, and that alone is worth hoping for!

The story of the Incarnation is almost too much to behold. God becomes a man...We will finally be set free! But for now, we will be patient as we wait. We will dive deeper into the mystery of being brought from exile into new life. Hope for you and me and all mankind. Then we will rejoice alongside the heavens and earth when our Savior finally comes!

Is Christ My King?

“Jesus is the Lord of my life.” That was a common statement in the evangelical Christian church I attended 25 years ago, before I returned to the Catholic Church in 1988. Meditating on the Feast of Christ the King this past week, I wondered why Catholics don’t use that kind of language more often when we describe our relationship with Christ. After all, is making Jesus the Lord of one’s life only a Protestant concept?

Not according to Joseph Ratzinger, who says something very similar in his book of Advent sermons entitled, What It Means To Be A Christian:

Becoming a Christian…is just this: achieving a Copernican revolution and no longer seeing ourselves as the center of the universe, around which everything else must turn…instead of that we have begun to accept quite seriously that we are one of many among God’s creatures, all of which turn around God as their center.

My relationship with God is thus meant to cause a Copernican revolution in my life, where I awaken to the reality of a personal God and make Him the center of my universe, letting everything in my life orbit around Him. Such a revolution is called “faith,” which is not just an intellectual assent to articles of the Creed, but the full surrender of my entire self to the living God, including my mind, my will, and everything else in my life.

I underwent such a Copernican revolution in my early twenties, when I gave my life to Christ. But a recurring revolution occurs daily in my walk with God, as I offer my life and myself to Him and honestly examine what gods I am placing at the center of my world on any given day. So often, I fall prey to three “lords” that I must continually renounce: what I possess, what I can do and what people think of me.  Those are the gods this world prizes most, and, sadly, they are often the standard by which I measure both my own self worth and the value of others.

Thankfully, God’s ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts (Is. 55:8). While the world around us screams: “You’re not enough, you don’t have enough, you don’t do enough,” God whispers, “You are My beloved child, on you My favor rests.” While the world encourages us to compete frantically to fit in, buy in and measure up, God says: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest,” (Mt. 11:28).

I am increasingly aware of how tired I am of the world’s false measures, and how much I desire to be set free from the burden of carrying them. So I invite Jesus to come more deeply into my being, asking that more of His love inhabit my small temple. This process of ongoing conversion—a conscious, constant Christ uprising—turns me away from false gods toward the living God, who is Love. It places the one, true Lord on the throne of my heart, where He is anxious to lay His crown.

Interestingly, the word conversion, which means the change of a measuring system, also means changing one’s beliefs. Maybe that’s because our beliefs change when we change our measuring system. Conversion is a “radical reorientation of our lives toward God.”*  It recalibrates our entire understanding of reality, changing our measuring system from the world’s stifling scales to the infinite expanse of God's love, which knows no bounds. When that happens, I trust that my significance and meaning lies in God’s love for me and not in any manmade gauge of performance.

So let us ask today: Is Jesus the Lord of my life? Is He is the center of my life, around which everything turns and by which everything else is measured?   To live in such a stance is what it means to be a Christian.  To live in an opposing posture makes us a slave to the world's tyranny.  It's one or the other.

Let us pray:

Lord Jesus Christ, I surrender my life to you and I place my mind, my will, my heart and everything in my life under your Kingship and your authority. I give myself to you and ask you to take possession of me. Change me, that I may live in the truth of your love and reflect that love in our broken world. Thank you Lord for your love, mercy and kindness. Amen.

*Catechism of the Catholic Church, Glossary

Living Joy in a Culture of Death

I am delighted to post my first guest blog by my daughter, singer-songwriter Kara Klein. Kara will be posting here occasionally, when she's not on the road singing and ministering to the youth.   Enjoy!

“Good morning Holy Spirit! Good morning my life!” In Communita Cenacolo, a lay Catholic community in which I spent a year of my life, over 2,000 members in 65 houses around the world wake up every morning to these words.

Mother Elvira Petrozzi, a fiery, fearless, faith-filled nun, started this community 30 years ago when she began taking in addicts off the streets and bringing them to a dilapidated house in northern Italy. There she taught them to pray, depend on God’s Providence, and rebuild their lives. But more than anything else, in these three decades, amidst a culture death, this courageous nun has spread like wildfire to thousands of young people the joy of living.

“Life is a gift from God, born from His heart, which is love. No one can enter into the heart of our life for us. It is a personal journey,” she says. In the last five years of my journey with this community I have watched many people—young and old, children and parents—walk from darkness into light and rediscover the joy of living. Not because life suddenly went the way they wanted it to go, or they discovered some magical secret, but because they encountered Someone: Jesus Christ, who wants to set our hearts free.

The culture of death in which we live goes far beyond abortion, murder and war: at its heart is a generation that does want to live their own lives. And if we do not believe that our lives are truly worth living, how can we fight for the lives of those around us?

As I recently led worship for Cenacolo’s annual Festival of Life in St. Augustine, FL, a priest from Italy spoke of Mother Elvira. Even now, in her 80s, unable to talk or do much of anything, she is still smiling, in love with Jesus and those around her, and in love with her life. Life, in her eyes, is worth living until the day God takes her home, even if it means suffering, for she knows that the cross is the way to the resurrection.

Hearing this, I couldn’t help but think of Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old woman with terminal brain cancer, who recently took her own life so she could avoid suffering and “die with dignity.” When did suffering become undignified?

With the eyes of faith, suffering is so very precious, for it becomes the sacred space that God uses to work miracles in our lives, pour out His grace, and show us His goodness and mercy. As Mother Teresa says, “God cannot fill what is full.”

This community has changed my heart in so many ways, but perhaps more than anything, it has invited me to embrace the cross, as well as embrace the fullness of life, hand in hand. How do we do this? Through love. Love hurts, love sacrifices, but love fills our hearts with joy! May we become a generation unafraid to love, unafraid of the cross, unafraid of the beautiful resurrection to which it leads, and unafraid to live our own lives to the full.

Kara Klein is a six time award-winning Catholic recording artist, worship leader and inspirational speaker, who has released five original albums and appeared on four international television programs. For the past ten years Kara has traveled the globe, calling people of all ages to embrace, fall in love with and rediscover the joy of life in Christ, and to believe that life is a glorious gift from God that is truly worth living. For more information on her ministry, please visit her website, www.karaklein.com.

Thelma and Louise With Jesus

On the road again…

“Can you please help me bring my son to Communita Cenacolo?” I asked my friend, Mary Lou McCall, in desperation four and a half years ago. That request—and her unhesitating “yes”—took us on a road trip 600 miles away to St. Augustine, Florida, where we delivered my then-nineteen-year-old son, Christian, to a Catholic community founded to heal those in the grips of addiction.

That was the beginning of an amazing journey, wherein Mary Lou and I have driven thousands of miles together to over a dozen Community retreats, jokingly naming our selves “Thelma and Louise With Jesus” somewhere along the way. We hit the road one more time this past weekend to head to St. Augustine for the Cenacolo Fall Festival, where once again, we saw life, hope and profound transformation on the faces of formerly hopeless addicts and their families who, by God’s grace and love, have taken hold of their identities as beloved children of God.

With “Thelma and Louise” on my mind these past few years, I decided to watch the movie again recently. I was struck by the darkness of the story, and by the depth of injustice and despair that plagues the movie’s two heroines until the very end. Faced with the absurdity of their situation, Thelma and Louise opt to kill themselves, driving their Ford Thunderbird convertible off a cliff into the Grand Canyon.

Thanks be to God, that’s not the way our story went. Though Mary Lou and I both encountered darkness and even despair in our circumstances, we never considered going anywhere but in the direction of Jesus. After all, where else could we go? We believe and are convinced that He is the Holy One, and that He alone has the words of eternal life.

God, in His extreme mercy, met our belief with miracles. He has outdone Himself in generosity by granting us many incredible answers to prayer, starting with the way that Mary Lou and I reconnected in 2008 after losing contact for several years.

That reconnection happened during a dim time in my life, when I begged God to send me a friend. I didn’t just ask God for any friend, but specifically prayed for a friend who understood the devastation of addiction. Within twenty-four hours of that plea, Mary Lou McCall had left me both a voicemail and e-mail. She informed me that her son, Mackie, had recently met Christian at a rehab center, and that both of her oldest sons were struggling with addictions. She also shared that she, too, was in recovery. “Here’s my phone number,” she wrote. “I’m here if you need anything.” Blown away by the immediate answer to prayer, I called her that day. We’ve been joined at the heart ever since on this journey with our sons, as well as in the unfolding of own personal healings along the way.

It is difficult to articulate what God has done for us, but I pondered that reality with deep gratitude this weekend during the family retreat. Mary Lou and I sat together through talks, liturgies, praise and worship, dances, testimonials and plays, witnessing the transfiguration of not only poor, addicted souls, but their extended families as well. We heard story after story of people who showed up at Community just like we did—with their families torn asunder and their hope destroyed by the bondage of sin and addiction. And we saw in living color the power of the Resurrection, especially on the faces of the young men and women who have found not only deliverance from death, but true joy in discovering the love of God and the friendship of their brothers and sisters in Community.

Mary Lou’s eldest son Johnny entered Cenacolo in June of 2009 at “Our Lady of Hope” in Florida, one of sixty-five Community houses around the world. Exactly one year later in June 2010, Christian entered the same house. It was there that he and Johnny met for the first time, and there that they forged a deep bond of friendship. Though Johnny was transferred to a house in Italy five months after Christian’s arrival in Florida, Christian moved to Italy shortly thereafter. As God would have it, the two young men landed in the same house again, then slept side by side in adjacent beds for the next year. That experience made them closest of brothers.

The whole crew in Italy with Mother Elvira, Founder of Communita Cenacolo

Mary Lou and I just smiled and shook our heads. “Who but God could have possibly worked out our stories with such personal attention to detail?” we asked. Meanwhile, we kept driving twice a year to the retreats.

One year ago, Johnnie became a missionary in Liberia, where he lives in a Community-run orphanage that cares for twenty abandoned children. Neither the difficulty of the work nor the Ebola crisis has sent him packing, because he has learned the importance of sacrifice and keeping his commitments, no matter what the cost. Christian exited Community two months ago, moving to Wyoming to work on a youth ranch for troubled, addicted teenagers. “I know the work will be hard and they can’t pay much,” Christian said before he left. “But I want to give back for what I received in Community.” And off he went.

Our sons don’t want to be considered heroes and they don’t want any medals. They are struggling young men who found new life, and who want to give back to others what they have received gratuitously from God: faith, hope and love. Those are virtues that Thelma and Louise never quite got. Yet they are precisely the inherent qualities that give life meaning and call us to live with a purpose that is beyond ourselves—a purpose that drives us toward life, not head on into the valley of death.

As for Mary Lou and me, instead of letting the men in our lives drive us over the edge like the movie's protagonists, we presented our sons to "the man," Jesus.  He is the true man, the God-man, who has conquered sin and death and who alone can make all things new.

Drinking Mary's Cool Aid

Susan thought her Catholic friends had drunk the proverbial “Kool-Aid.” A staunch evangelical Christian, she was offended and angry after attending my sister-in-law Hedy’s Medjugorje Rosary group and witnessing what she considered to be “blasphemous” prayers being said to Mary. As Hedy continued to host Rosary groups, Susan felt obliged by conscience to end their friendship, convinced that Hedy was not only in idolatry, but was leading others astray through her devotion to Mary.

Susan and Hedy had become friends several years earlier through their children, as each had several kids attending the same school in the small coast town of Pass Christian, Mississippi. The two families had grown very close—even taking family vacations together. But their friendship hit a breaking point when Susan and Hedy both became more fervent in their respective faiths, causing Susan to take a stand against Hedy’s perceived “idolatry” that left the friends and their families estranged for five years.

Eventually, Susan hit a personal faith crisis wherein she recognized that she could “talk the talk” of Christianity, but was unable to “walk the walk” toward the personal holiness she desired. After seriously reflecting upon the people that she knew who truly “walked the walk” as Christians, Susan came to the humbling conclusion that it was the Catholic women she had encountered along the way who had unequivocally treated her with kindness, patience, love and mercy. Though she still questioned their theology, she simply could not deny the fruit their lives bore.

“How could their lives be so full of the fruits of the Holy Spirit,” she asked herself, “when their faith is so theologically compromised?”   That question led her to a massive interior dilemma about the authenticity of the Catholic faith, which she felt simultaneously drawn to and terrified by. After much prayer and wrestling with God, Susan made a decision not to be led by fear. She returned to the Catholic Church, which she had made a brief foray through a few years earlier when she was confirmed Catholic upon her marriage into a large, Catholic family. (Susan was baptized Episcopal and raised as “nothing,” and her husband had ultimately followed her into Protestantism.)

Susan began to attend Mass and pray the Rosary, while going to the people she had accused of “idolatry” to apologize to them. Surprising even herself, she developed a great love for the Catholic faith, spending the next few years making beautiful handmade Rosaries “in reparation for my blasphemies against the Blessed Mother,” as she tells it.

Fast forward to 2014, when Susan called to ask me where she could buy copies of my book, Miracle Man (which happens to be very Marian, by the way. I, too, had wrestled with Hedy about her devotion to Mary at the same time as Susan—a story I tell in detail in the book. Let’s just say Hedy and the Blessed Mother won.) After meeting me on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans to buy six copies of Miracle Man, Susan gave the book to her anti-Catholic sister Elizabeth. None of us could have guessed what would happen next.

Elizabeth’s first reaction was severe annoyance at the book’s Catholic overtones and references to Mary, which she found offensive and irritating. But she pressed on to the finish, wanting to know how the story ends. By the time she closed the book, Elizabeth was weeping profusely, and she couldn’t stop crying. She went to bed perplexed, wondering why she had been so profoundly affected by the story.

During the night, she dreamt about “the most beautiful Lady” she had ever seen, who was surrounded by light and filled with a depth of love that Elizabeth had never before encountered. Elizabeth began to follow her, recognizing the Lady as the Blessed Mother. When she awoke, it was clear to her for the first time in her life why Catholics love Our Lady so much, and why she is placed in such high esteem. That story to be continued.

I can happily say that I have indeed drunk deeply of Mary, and oh, how sweet it’s been. She has led me into the heart of the fruit of her womb, Jesus. And He has led me into the heart of the fruit of His sacrifice on the Cross, the Eucharist. Food and drink like I’ve never tasted; the Bread of Angels, the Cup of Eternal Life. I’ll drink that cool, sweet aid any day.

Dear Ann Voskamp: Why Women Need The Mother of Jesus For the Fluid Beauty of a One Piece Life

Author’s note: I have quoted and paraphrased liberally from Ann Voskamp’s blog at http://www.aholyexperience.com/2014/10/dear-daughters-why-women-dont-need-to-freeze-their-faces-or-their-reproductivity-the-fluid-beauty-of-a-one-piece-life/. All quotes not from the Bible are from Ann Voskamp.

Dear Ann, I like your work. I really like your work. You have a way with words that boggles the mind and settles the soul. Your insights can be astounding, and it’s clear as day they’re the ripe fruit of prayer. Thank you for that offering.

That’s why I was thinking when I read your blog the other day: “there’s no way this blog could fail to mention the mother.” I’m referring to the blog of October 24 entitled “Dear Daughters: Why Women Don’t Need to Freeze Their Faces or Their Reproductivity: The Fluid Beauty of a One-Piece Life.”

I kept thinking as I read your words that you’re leaving something out. More accurately, I thought, you’re leaving someone out.

You wax eloquently about womanhood and silvery splashes and white light, but you fail to mention the woman. The one who’s noted from beginning to end, and in between the spaces:

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers. He will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel.     Genesis 3:15

Dear Ann, you inspire high ideals, and I appreciate that. You tell us: “My life is going to be about being a bringer of water,” which I admire, too. But, there it is—the question. Which woman was the bearer of the water for which we thirst? Who brought forth the water that alone can satisfy? And how does she go unmentioned?

Dear sister in Christ, please let me say that when you write that our daughters “watch us wait and struggle and be broken and believe and not shirk back,” I want to tell you that you’re describing Mary, the mother of Jesus. And oh, how we need her now. More than ever, this world needs Mary’s example of womanhood. We crave the shining light of the most blessed woman ever (Luke 1:42).

She, too, walked up a hill in the sun, right before the world went dark at three, and she stood at the foot of the Cross. Yes, she stood—she did not abandon the Son of God—because He was her Son. She had grown the bones of His spine, and her blood ran like a river right through Him so she could live—so we can all live—“open, fluid and willing.” More open, fluid, willing than hers this world has never known. Just listen:

Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.   (Luke 1:38)

It was her willing that brought forth the universe’s greatest gift.

 And the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1:14)

Ann, your words pierce our hearts, dear sister, because they nail the truth. You’re spot on when you say that “every daughter needs to know that when she speaks her Father’s mind, His heart—she makes even now and this place into her Father’s world.” May I beg mention of our mother, who bore in her flesh the incarnation of the Father’s mind? Who birthed the Word Made Flesh into this world and made this place, at last, into the Father’s world? And the last thing we hear her say?

Do whatever he tells you. (John 2:5)

Because she’s that woman, whose concern affects Him so much that it begins to reveal His glory (John 2:4,11).

Dear Ann, how right you are when you say that we women fret and freeze and fragment, and this world scatters us hard.  And that we need the example of a One-piece Life where all is holy and, may I add, where it all flows together into One Seamless Body—to the One who came from her body. Child, please behold your mother.

I must ask: What wounds have made our faith so profoundly disconnected from her? What “has left us with (such) painfully disjointed and fragmented and compartmentalized” faith that we can talk of Christian motherhood without a mention of the mother.

Surely, it was not God’s idea to throw the mother out. Because she’s the woman, who “gave birth to a son, a male child, destined to rule all the nations.” It was the serpent that “pursued the woman…and spewed a torrent of water out of his mouth…to sweep her away with the current (Revelation 12:5,13,15). Lean in close, as you say. Can you see it? He’s the clown that emitted the current that ushered out our mother.

Dear sister, you summarize it perfectly: “Let us not tear apart the daughters from their mothers.” After all, His last instruction, just before it was finished:

    Behold, your mother. (John 19:27)

For each disciple whom He loves, the words are still the same. Behold, your mother. Take her into your home.   Welcome her into your heart. She is “wrenchingly beautiful…like an ageless offering into the light.” And she is not to be missed. Especially, dear sister, when the wounds of this world have left us bereft of a mother.

Behold the woman, dear Ann. And watch the current change directions.