1. Reflect on Mary as Mother of God. Read up on Marian theology. There are also many beautiful spiritual reflections on Mary’s role in salvation history.
2. Meditate on the Incarnation. Aside from the romantic image of the baby Jesus born in a stable, what does it mean for God to take on human nature, to become a baby and a child with human parents, to have to grow up, to live a human life? What does this Mystery do for human nature?
3. Meditate on the theological virtue of Love. Read, for example, Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, God is Love
4. Turn your prayer toward praise and worship. Praise is giving God love and glory for the good things He does – like the Incarnation. Worship is giving God love and glory just because He is God. Praise & worship music is a great help in this kind of prayer. With or without music, just lift your heart to God filled with love. Of course, books such as Beginning Contemplative Prayer can also help train you in this beautiful form of prayer.
5. Speaking of praise and worship, attend Eucharistic Adoration! What a perfect way to give praise and worship to God Among Us (Emmanuel)!
6. Study the lyrics and origins of Christmas carols! Many of them – Oh Holy Night (my favorite), It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, Silent Night, etc. – have deep theological significance worthy of prayerful reflection. What a beautiful way to pray!
7. As a New Year’s Resolution you can actually keep, take an easy step to increasing your knowledge about your faith. The Lighthouse Catholic Media CD of the Month Club brings some of the best Catholic teachers right to your mailbox every month for just $5 a month. Even if you don’t have time to read a book or take a class, you can just pop a CD into a player in the car, at work or at home and listen while you’re on the go.

So what are you going to do to make Christmas beautiful? Add to the list – share your ideas below!

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It’s Not Over on Christmas Day – It’s Just Getting Started!

It’s the fourth week of Advent. How are you doing on your Advent observation? Many Catholics use Advent as a time for spiritual reading and reflection, which is great! I love that From the Abbey has played a role in that for some of you by providing your spiritual reading material.

A good temperature reading is to ask yourself what your attitude toward Christmas is right now. Are you getting excited? I know, it’s been a long time since you’ve had the excitement of a child for Christmas day. But as we mature in our faith, that excitement should be growing deeper rather than getting weaker as we come to an ever-greater understanding of the significance of the Incarnation. However, if you’re like most of us (including me most years), you’re probably more exhausted than excited. While the the worldly preparations of Christmas and the shopping season are good as far as they go, when we let them overwhelm our spiritual preparation, the excitement we should have for the coming of Christ dies.

Whether or not you were able to take the time this year for some extra prayer and reflection, the end of Advent doesn’t end your opportunity! Did you know that Christmas is also a great time to deepen your spiritual life? Most of us know that Christmas is not just a single feast day in the Church calendar, but a season. However, too often we think of the Christmas season as beginning on the first day of Advent and ending on Christmas day. Christmas is actually the beginning of the Christmas season! In fact Christmas “day” – the feast of Christmas – is actually an octave! That’s right – eight days of full-fledged celebration! What a shame if by Christmas day we’re sick of celebrating and consider ourselves done. But that’s not all! The Christmas season spreads beyond the octave of Christmas through the Feast of the Presentation, giving us over two weeks of actual Christmas.

So, how are you doing this Advent season? Are you excited, or just plain exhausted? Leave your comments below!

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The Incarnation of Christ is such a great sign of love that it has transformed an entire season of the year in to a season of joy, even for those who don’t know Jesus. In the Incarnation, Jesus so completely emptied Himself of His rightful glory as the Second Person of the Trinity that when He took on human nature, He came to earth as a tiny, helpless baby in a poor family. Imagine the creator of the universe stripping Himself of every form of dignity and power. He could have taken on human nature as a fully-grown human, with at least some station in life. Instead, He puts Himself at the complete mercy of human parents.

True love is sacrificing yourself for the good of another person in order to ensure they receive all that is good. The only better example of love we have is Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross.

That’s why gift-giving is such an appropriate expression of the Christmas season. In giving gifts to one another, we offer a piece of ourselves (our money representing our labor and time) as an expression of love. Yes, our crazy culture has warped this beautiful expression of love into a materialistic expression of our right to have stuff. But that doesn’t erase the potential of the powerful potential that gift-giving has to point our minds and hearts to the true sacrifice of love made by Jesus.

One way to preserve the true meaning of gift-giving is to include gifts that point your loved ones directly to Christ. As you know, the mission of From the Abbey is to promote Catholic literacy and to lead people to the Joy of the Truth. Gaudete Sunday and the third week of Advent is such a perfect time for you to explore how From the Abbey can help your loved ones find the Joy that comes from knowing the awesome love of God.

Are you ready to get started spreading the Joy of the Truth to your loved ones? Click here to find out how From the Abbey can help!

What else are you doing to point your loved ones to the love of Christ and the Joy of the Truth this Christmas? Please leave your comments below!

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You may have heard (perhaps even from me) that the family meal has become and endangered species, despite the fact that studies show very strongly that eating together as a family is an important way to keep children actively engaged in family life (and therefore away from risky behaviors). Along with the family meal, the virtue of hospitality is also disappearing. It only makes sense. After all, hospitality is simply extending the goodness and comfort of your home to other people. So, if the home ceases to be a place of family community, it also ceases to be a welcome place for others.

While both losses are something to lament concerning our culture, family meals and hospitality are more importantly values that we need to recapture in our own lives.

Evangelizing Through Hospitality

Hospitality can be a key element of Catholic evangelization. The goal of Catholic evangelization is to invite people into the Family of God. What better way to do this than to first invite them into your family?

The family is a sacramental sign of the Family of God. As a sacramental sign, family not only signifies God’s love, it brings that love into the world. The virtue of hospitality invites the “stranger” to partake in your family’s love. The family love that he or she experiences can act powerfully to dispose his or her heart to the love of God’s family.

Exercising the Virtue of Hospitality

So, how do we exercise the virtue of hospitality? There is no real formula. However, here are some general guidelines that you might find helpful:

1. The first step is to build up your own family. Make sure you’re spending time together, eating together, and growing in family love. Of course, every family can use some help growing stronger. I want to recommend a website that I had a hand in creating. It’s called The Parent’s Place. It has a ton of resources for parents at all stages of parenting.
2. Use your gifts. You don’t have to be an amazing entertainer to have a strong virtue of hospitality. The most important thing to share is your time and love. However, we all have individual talents that can boost our hospitality to others. Sharpen those talents. Do you like to cook? Sharpening your cooking skills is easy with resources like Rouxbe, an online cooking school for everyday cooks! Are you a decorator? Get some fresh ideas and beautify your home and your table. Faith and Family Magazine is a great resource for Catholic entertainment ideas.
3. Whatever you do, make it fun and keep it simple. Hospitality does require some level of sacrifice, but it should also be a labor of love. Love makes the work easier and enjoyable. Don’t make it more toil than it needs to be.
4. Take time. The next e-mail will be about giving the gift of “carefree timelessness.” We’ll talk more about the importance of time then. But, the Italians have the right idea. Their dinners can last for hours. Dining is an event for them, not a routine.
5. Remember that it’s all about relationship. The food, the setting, the entertainment is all backdrop for the main event — building relationship. Hospitality is all about invitation, spending time, and building relationship.

The Charism of Hospitality

God considers hospitality (relationships) so important, the Holy Spirit actually gives a special charism to some people for it! Some people have a Spirit-led talent for hospitality, and having people come and enjoy the fruits of their labor is a source of great fulfillment for them. The Church especially needs these people to discern their gift and to step up and evangelize. If you are somebody who really enjoys “entertaining’ guests and who often gets praised despite feeling like what you do is “nothing,” you just may have this special charism from the Holy Spirit. All charisms are for the purpose of serving the Church. How can you use your charism to serve the Family of God?

The Virtue of Hospitality is for Everyone — Just Do It!

Even if you dont’ have the charism – even if frozen pizza and beer is the extent of your cooking skill – we can all grow in the virtue of hospitality – the virtue of reaching out to other people and inviting them to share in the love of family and home. Taking advantage of the hospitality of a restaurant or other public place is fine once in a while, but the hospitality of the home is much more powerful in evangelization.

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No, the people in real danger from abortion are those who reject love. The mothers who put their own needs, desires and convenience before the life of their children. The doctors who are willing to turn a blind eye to what they are really doing because of the great profits to be made. The politicians who refuse to see the truth about the death of babies because being champions of “choice” keeps them in power. These people have rejected love. These are the people who need our help.

And as Christians we believe that this rejection of love is not simple sentiment. Marital love is sacramental. It is a sign of God’s love for humanity, and as a sacramental sign is also effects what it signifies. Marital love brings God’s love to humanity. A husband and wife become one flesh in the marital embrace and conceive new life. They bring this life into the world and they nurture and love this life, bringing their children to the love of God through their own love. To reject new life is to reject God’s love. This is not just a crime. It is a tragedy. People who reject love are the most in need of our help.
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Long lay the world
in sin and error pining
’til He appeared
and the soul felt its worth.

Since the Fall, the world has been covered by the darkness of sin and error (ignorance). Humanity wears itself out seeking happiness in what can never satisfy. Without Christ there would be no hope to find rest in true happiness. Exhausted and hopeless, the world lies panting and dreaming of a better way. From the Fall, the desire for true happiness beat in our hearts, but there was no way to fulfill that desire. Then Jesus took on human nature and showed us how much God loves us. The Creator of the Universe places Himself helpless and vulnerable in the hands of human beings. The great Law-Giver becomes obedient to human parents. The Incarnate Word works the greatest miracle through the body of a human woman. Humanity catches its first glimpse since Eden of the perfect happiness of loving God and being loved by Him.

A thrill of hope,
a weary world rejoices.
Yonder springs
a new and glorious morn.

Christ’s birth thrilled through the entire world, and continues to do so. Humanity now has the hope of gaining that for which it was created — covenant with God. Even before we fully understood the redemption Jesus offered, we felt the seeds of that redemption in the closeness of our God. The sun has arrived, the darkness flees before it. Noontime has yet to come (in the Resurrection), but we catch a glimpse of the light and heat it promises and we are filled with hope. This hope is felt by the shepherds greeted by the angels, and also by the magi who see the hope in the changes of the universe and follow a star to the God-King. It is the hope we celebrate every Christmas.
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The obvious answer to the above question is yes. Certainly someone who adopts a child with the intention of molesting or selling him or her would be committing an evil act in adopting. However, what about the everyday family who adopts out of a desire to have another child? I may not go so far as calling such an adoption evil. However, shallow or selfish intentions can certainly creep into a decision to adopt a child that can tarnish this awesome act of love.

In the January/February 2007 issue of Adoptive Families Theresa Reid, Ph.D. discusses the difficult decision whether or not to adopt a second time in her article “Adopts Again?” She explains,

Like biological parents considering a second child, adopters need to weigh many considerations – whether we’ll be able to love another child as much as we love our first, our ages, the expense – all the questions biological parents weigh, and then some. But what pushes most second-time adopters past all uncertainty is the desire to raise another child.” I so was determined to do it again as soon as I could,” says Emily Breeden, of Oregon. Susan Olson, of Colorado, and her husband agree. Despite qualms about their ages – Susan is 44 and her husband is 57 – they’re planning a second adoption. “For us, the overriding reason is the joy we get from parenting” (31).

Much of this statement is very legitimate. Couples thinking of expanding their families do have a lot to think about. Ages of the parents and the expense of adoption and of raising a child may be morally legitimate reasons for choosing not to adopt another child. However, they can also be selfish intentions not to adopt. If the expense is a road block because you want to use your financial blessings for self-pampering, using your money to adopt another child would certainly be better use of it. If your consideration of age is that you are not healthy enough to chase after another child, it can be a morally legitimate reason for considering your family large enough. However, if your consideration of age is because you want enough retirement years to take your cruise around the world, perhaps using your time would be better used raising another child. What’s the big deal? Why shouldn’t a couple decide to use their time and money to enjoy themselves? Because we are called to love, we will only find our fulfillment in giving ourselves to others as a gift. What better way to offer yourself as a gift of love than to invest yourself in the life and eternal destiny of another human being as a mother or father? In the long run, what will make our lives more fulfilled? Buying a new car? Taking a long cruise? Or will you find your fulfillment in the investment of life and love into the life of a child?

What do you make of statements like, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to love another child like I love my first”? I find such statements perplexing. There seems to be a bit of confusion about what exactly love is. My guess is that most people, if they really though about it, would define love as an emotional state of bonding or closeness. Dr. Reid confirms my suspicion as she explains, “They worry that it won’t be as easy to bond with a second child, or that the relationship they have with their first might be upset by a new addition to the family” (31). What is love, though? Love has many levels or dimensions to it. Emotional love, as is being described here, is the emotional recognition of something good. This kind of love is not sufficient to constitute familial love, or even true human love. First of all, emotional love (also called “erotic love” – not necessarily sexual) is selfish. It looks toward how the good can benefit me. I think this is the main problem I have with basing a family planning decision on this kind of love. Is parenthood really about feeling good as a parent? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the warm fuzzy feeling I get when my 10 month old daughter cuddles into my shoulder. But is such a feeling really a good reason to have children? Ask yourself, “Can a selfish parent be a good parent?” The second reason emotional love is insufficient is because it is temporary. Like all emotions, love waxes and wanes with our circumstances, energy levels, and attitudes. If I adopt a child in the hopes of gaining warm fuzzy loving feelings, what happens when parenting two children becomes more stressful than enjoyable? Do I stop loving my children? Finally, emotional love can be deceiving. It is possible not to feel emotional about something that is objectively good. It is also possible to feel emotional love for something that is objectively bad. I may feel like I could love another child despite the fact that my circumstances would make it impossible. I may not feel like I could love another child, even though having another child would be very good. We cannot rely on our emotions. A much better understanding of love is “To will the good of another.” This is the kind of love families are founded on. We become parents, not for our benefit, but because we want to share the goodness that has grown in our marriage and in our home. We want another life to benefit from the goodness that we have gained. The best understanding of love is the definition of love that Christ gave us. “No greater love is there than this: to lay down one’s life for a friend.” To give ourselves to others as a total gift is what Christian love is all about. We are called by Christ to be completely selfless, to give away our very lives. This kind of love is not altruism. We are able to give ourselves away completely because we know that the reward for doing so will be great. Love has great rewards, the greatest of which is participation in God’s divine life. Pope John Paul II, borrowing from the Second Vatican Council, says, “Man comes to fully know himself only by making a gift of himself to others.”

Dr. Reid handled the issues she brought up with a great deal of grace. I was impressed with most of her answers, and placid about the rest. She was not writing from a Christian point-of-view in her article. Adoptive Families is not a Christian publication. So, while her answers reflected my thoughts in this blog entry pretty closely, she seemed to accept that the fear of not being able to love another child as much as the first child as a legitimate concern. To me, it is a sign of a culture that needs to learn what true love really is.

Rampage time: the most odious statement in this article came from the author’s mother-in-law. Dr. Reid used this quotation to open her article:

“Oh, you guys,’ my mother-in-law fretted when she learned that my husband, Marc, and I had started out to adopt a second child. ‘Look what you have! You’ll never get another child as wonderful as Natalie! Why not just be happy?”

Yikes! What exactly is this woman saying! I can’t even begin to understand where such a statement comes from. It just screams “It’s all about me!” You see, the nature of love is to expand. If we are really loving like families should, our love should grow to encompass as many people as it can. It’s not about getting wonderful children. It’s about participating in the life and eternal destiny of a human person. It’s not about enjoying parenthood (not saying that you can’t or shouldn’t enjoy parenthood, just don’t make that your reason for doing it), it’s about making yourself a gift of love!

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Have we really fallen so far as a culture, or is this just a loud voice from a decrepit minority? Have we forgotten what family is all about? Are children and family really about the pleasures outweighing the burdens? Since when have children and family been about me?

Planned Parenthood has forgotten, and perhaps wants us to forget, that children are noisy, smelly, and burdensome whether you want them or not. That’s not the point at all. The point is that they are human persons. Precious human persons are worthy of our self-sacrifice to love. As a father, I put up with the noisiness, smelliness, and burdensomeness of my daughter, not because the pleasures outweigh the burdens, but because she is worthy of love and care. She is worthy of love and care simply because she is a human person.

What about the desire for every child to be a wanted child? This is a beautiful sentiment, if it meant that our hearts would expand in love to accept and care for every child. However, when it means that we demand the right to kill any child that isn’t “wanted,” this statement becomes ugly and evil. What does it mean for a child to be wanted? Planned Parenthood’s main concern is ostensibly that no child be born outside of a loving family environment. Again, this sentiment has the potential to be beautiful, if it meant that we would set aside our desire for sexual pleasure until it could be enjoyed in the context of marriage for the creation of family. Unfortunately, self-sacrifice does not seem to be in Planned Parenthood’s plan. When we as a culture decide to put the enjoyment of sexual pleasure above human dignity and human life, we become shallow, ugly, and selfish. The sentiment that no child should be born outside of a loving family environment paired with the sentiment that sexual pleasure should be pursued on a hedonistic, narcissistic level creates a dark, evil sentiment indeed. Let the children die that I may have my orgasm.

I pray that the billboard posted by Planned Parenthood is a minority voice. I would like to think that people passing by this billboard were as disgusted by it as I was just hearing about it. However, I fear that we may have been lulled into acceptance of such nonsense. We have been inundated with propaganda about “reproductive rights” and “sexual freedom.” Now that we are struck with the idea that a child is useless unless it is “wanted,” do we even bat an eye? We are being drawn along slowly, imperceptibly toward a public acceptance of narcissism, hedonism, and death. Do we really want to go there?

In the love of Christ,

Jeff

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One of the worse Christmas clichés is the “Frenzied Christmas” cliché. It is actually just an extension of the larger cultural cliché – the busy life. “Everyone is so busy.” To me, it’s not a question of how “busy” we are. After all, isn’t every moment of life filled with activity of some kind? If I’m not “busy” with my projects and commitments to our parish, I’m “busy” raising my daughter. If I’m not “busy” raising my daughter, I’m “busy” playing video games. Life isn’t “busy” in the sense that it could ever not be busy. I think that when people say, “I’m so busy,” they are really saying, “I’m not using my time in the way that I find most fulfilling.”

The December 25, 2006 issue of the Marshfield News Herald, our local news paper included an article by Matt Crenson from the Associated Press entitled “Christmas has been frenzied for centuries, history shows.” The link for the article is below, under a different title. Matt Crenson bases his article on a book by Stephen Nissenbaum called The Battle for Christmas. Of course, Nissenbaum begins his examination of Christmas with the Roman festival of Saturnalia. Saturnalia was apparently a topsy-turvy free-for-all filled with drinking, gambling and sex. Nissenbaum points out that Saturnalia was not unique for winter solstice celebrations in the pre-industrial era. Indeed, as a United States History teacher (and amateur scholar) I have discovered Catholic feast days in pre-industrial England were very often excuses for drinking and carousing. The vision of a peaceful, domestic, Norman Rockwell painted Christmas was nothing more than crowd control imposed by entrepreneurs of 1820s America (specifically, New York City) to keep their unruly labor force in line. And, hey, why not make a few bucks off the poor slobs in the process? Let’s sell them the ideal of buying gifts for everyone and his brother. Matt Crenson offers a comment from Russel Belk, “Christmas and America’s consumer culture have fed off one another ever since.”

The ideas expressed in this article and in the book that it is based on are interesting and, as far as I can discern, historically accurate. However, as are most secular commentaries on Christian customs, these ideas are incomplete. You see, there is a fundamental difference between the pagan celebrations of the winter solstice and the Christian celebration of Christmas. While winter solstice celebrations were narcissistic, hedonistic escapes from harsh reality, the celebration of Christmas is a celebration of love. Specifically, it is the celebration of God’s gift of Himself when the Second Person of the Holy Trinity united Himself to humanity by taking on human nature. What we commonly call the “Christmas Spirit” is the realization that such love from God demands a response from us. We are called to give the gift of ourselves to others.

Michael Medved, a Jewish radio commentator, put this all in perspective for me in an interview on Catholic radio. Is Christmas “frenzied” and busy? Sure, for most people it adds a number of responsibilities to our normal daily business. However, as I said at the beginning of this post, what are we busy with for Christmas? All of that frenzied activity is done for the sake of others! We are busy during Christmas making ourselves a gift for others! All of the food we cook, all of the gifts we purchase, all of the time we spend cleaning and decorating the home is for other people to enjoy. Christmas is rarely the peaceful, idyllic season that we expect it to be. But it is a Christian holiday. It is a season of love. I agree with Michael Medved – a Jew who says, “how wonderful!”

In the love of Christ,

Jeff

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