The prayer of the butterfly

Lord!

Where was I?

Oh yes! This flower, this sun,

thank You! Your world is beautiful!

This scent of roses…

Where was I?

A drop of dew

rolls to sparkle in a lily’s heart.

I have to go…

Where? I do not know!

The wind has painted fancies

on my wings.

Fancies…

Where was I?

Oh yes! Lord,

I had something to tell you:

Amen.

[Carmen Bernos de Gasztold]

Home for the hol’s

I’ve been taking a bit of annual leave recently – to sit around hospitals and more recently to help my mother pack up all her belongings ready to move to a flat closer to my sister.  Someone at work asked me how I enjoyed my holiday. Well, for a given meaning of the word ‘holiday’, I suppose it was (and is – I’m immersed in the packing this week). It isn’t my idea of a holiday – but then some people do marathons in their holiday. Some camp in primitive tents on lakeshores. Some run the bulls in Pamplona. Some give their time to build houses in storm, earthquake, or flood-torn third world countries. Some ride horses over the mountains from Middlemore to Cromwell. A holiday is, I guess, what works for you.

All this is by way of introducing a post by Bad Catholic. I was going to yield to Toad’s request for a post on Heaven, and begin my post with a quote from Lewis’s Last Battle. But Bad Catholic did it first and better, and even quoted from the Last Battle - although not the quote I had in mind. I was thinking of Aslan’s welcome to Heaven: “The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”

Without further ado, I invite you to join Marc as he explains: “Why Modern Man Wouldn’t Like Heaven (If He Had the Balls to Get There)”

A fast that pleases God

Shout for all you are worth,

  raise your voice like a trumpet.

Proclaim their faults to my people,

  their sins to the House of Jacob.

They seek me day after day,

  they long to know my ways,

like a nation that wants to act with integrity

  and not ignore the law of its God.

They ask me for laws that are just,

  they long for God to draw near:

‘Why should we fast if you never see it,

  why do penance if you never notice?’

Look, you do business on your fast-days,

  you oppress all your workmen;

look, you quarrel and squabble when you fast

  and strike the poor man with your fist.

Fasting like yours today

  will never make your voice heard on high.

Is that the sort of fast that pleases me,

  a truly penitential day for men?

Hanging your head like a reed,

  lying down on sackcloth and ashes?

Is that what you call fasting,

  a day acceptable to the Lord?

Is not this the sort of fast that pleases me

– it is the Lord who speaks –

to break unjust fetters and

  undo the thongs of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free,

  and break every yoke,

to share your bread with the hungry,

  and shelter the homeless poor,

to clothe the man you see to be naked

  and not turn from your own kin?

Then will your light shine like the dawn

  and your wound be quickly healed over.

Your integrity will go before you

  and the glory of the Lord behind you.

Cry, and the Lord will answer;

  call, and he will say, ‘I am here.’

Today’s first Mass reading – a challenge for this penitential season

The Jellybean prayer

Red is for the blood Christ gave
Green is for the palm’s cool shade
Yellow is for God’s light so bright
Black is for sweet rest at night
White is for God’s gift of Grace
Orange for prayers before His face
Purple is for His days of sorrow
Pink is for each new tomorrow
A handful of jellybeans
Colourful and sweet
Is a prayer, a promise
A loved one’s treat

CatholicMom gives us this Lenten exercise for children. She starts on Ash Wednesday by giving each child an empty jar with the poem above printed on the label. Then, every day through Lent, she adds jellybeans to the jar as the children earn them. They can’t eat the jellybeans till Easter. They can earn every colour except white; white is for God’s grace, which is given freely. On the Vigil night of Easter, after the children are in bed, she tops their jars up with white jellybeans. Here’s how she interprets the colours:

• Red is for the blood Christ gave (each morning we chose something to sacrifice that day to earn the red jellybean.  It had to be something they would have had the opportunity to have or do on that day)
• Green is for the palm’s cool shade (green jellybeans were earned for good deeds.  It was a good dead to provide shade for Jesus with the palm)
• Yellow is for God’s light so bright (yellow jellybeans were earned for sharing God’s light through kindness to others)
• Black is for sweet rest at night (these were earned for going to bed good. we used blue though, as our kids are not fans of black jellybeans)
• White is for God’s gift of Grace (these we could not earn as mentioned above)
• Orange is for prayers before His face (orange jellybeans were earned for attentive behavior during bedtime prayer time and night time bible story)
• Purple is for His days of sorrow (we earned these through apologising to anyone we hurt with our words or deeds that day)
• Pink is for each new tomorrow (pink jellybeans were earned when we forgave those  who apologised to us for hurtful behavior).

(Note: I’ve changed the poem slightly, and updated CatholicMom’s text to reflect the change.)

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust

Today is Ash Wednesday – named for the ashes distributed at Mass. The ashes may be made by burning the blessed palms that were distributed the previous year on Palm Sunday. The congregation come forward one by one: the priest dips his right thumb in the ashes and makes the Sing of the Cross on each person’s forehead, and says, “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return” (or a variation on those words).

A Day of Repentance:
The distribution of ashes reminds us that no-one gets out of life alive, and calls us to repentance. The ashes that we receive are a reminder of our own sinfulness – an echo of the ancient practice of wearing sackcloth and ashes to show penitence.

Fasting and Abstinence:
The Church emphasises the penitential nature of Ash Wednesday by calling us to fast and abstain from meat. Catholics who are over the age of 18 and under the age of 60  must fast, which means that they can eat only one complete meal and two smaller ones during the day, with no food in between. Catholics who are over the age of 14 must refrain from eating any meat, or any food made with meat.

Goals for Lent:
This fasting and abstinence is not simply a form of penance; it is the start of the training season of Lent, when we set specific spiritual goals, decide how to pursue them, and work on them for nearly seven weeks. What are we giving up? What are we taking up? How will we use our Lenten observance to get closer to God through prayer, fasting, almsgiving, devotional reading, and the other spiritual and corporeal works of mercy?

Help Your Children Make Meaningful Lent Promises:
Ash Wednesday is a good time to talk to your children about Lent promises. Remind your children that if they make a promise like giving up broad beans when they don’t like broad beans in the first place, then their promise is not very meaningful, and won’t have much effect. Promising to give up playing with any toys is a huge promise, and will probably be broken. Giving up something they are not allowed to do, like promising not to fight with their brother ‘until after Easter,’ misses the point big time! Giving up their weekly sweet treat and donating the money to a charity that helps feed hungry children is a good Lent promise. Giving up Saturday morning cartoons to help the elderly neighbour next door work in the garden is another one.

The Easter Story

On Saturday, I helped with the afternoon tea and cleanup at one of the nicest book launches I’ve ever attended in a long career in publishing. More than 200 people came – from our local town, the greater Wellington area, and even further afield.

The place was our local ANZAC Hall (built by our town to hold dances and entertainments for the troops, when the Army training camp was a couple of kilometres down our main road). The occasion was the launch of The Easter Story, a book written by Joy Cowley – well known children’s writer and poet, and a fellow parishioner of mine – and illustrated by a little known artist and much loved parish priest, our own Fr Don Morrison.

The book tells the story behind the story – the theology of Easter in simple language for children. The illustrations are beautiful. The signing lines after the launch were so long that I don’t think Joy managed to get a cup of tea. The book retails for $19.99 and would make a great Easter present for a family with young children.

 

Celebrating compromise!

Some years ago, my beloved and I were involved in organising and chairing marriage preparation courses. One of the sessions was on managing and resolving conflict – and again and again, with group after group, we found real resistance to the term ‘compromise’. Compromise, according to some of the people on the course, meant nobody got what they wanted. And what was the point of that?

The underpinning concept that was conflict meant winners and losers. But in a marriage, it isn’t possible to have winners and losers. If either partner finishes the conflict unhappy with the resolution, both partners lose. Marriage is about two people becoming one; not about one person absorbing the other, but about each completing the other; making them better than they would be alone. Conflict in marriage is – or should be – simply a means for reaching an agreement that is good for both partners and for the marriage as a whole.

Simcha Fisher – in a post on the value of persistence in building strong, enduring relationships - says:

And they make our lives, day by day, more united so that my problems are his problems, and his problems are mine:  there is no such thing as being happy because I get what I want, even if it makes him unhappy; and vice versa.

Compromise in marriage is the art of finding what will make us both happy, and it works because it gives us what we both want – the happiness of our beloved.

Marriage in movies

Joseph Suzanka has posted his top picks for St Valentine’s Day movies for the saccharine-averse: six films that tell grown-up stories about marriage and its challenges. Me, I like a sugar-rush movie as part of a romantic evening with my dearly beloved – films like “The Notebook” and “Shall We Dance?” fit the bill nicely.

What are your picks?

7 secrets of a successful marriage

Research in psychology and sociology continues to affirm the Church’s timeless teaching. Thus, we offer the following suggestions based on scientific data and clinical wisdom:

Avoid cohabitation prior to marriage. Although about 50-80% of couples do it, research says they are 40-85% more likely to get divorced than those who don’t (Bumpas & Sweet, 1995; Hall & Zhao, 1995; Bracher, Santow, Morgan & Russell, 1993; DeMaris & Rao, 1992, and Glen, 1990).

Practice pre-martial and marital chastity. Couples who wait until after marriage to have sex are 29-47% more likely to enjoy sex during marriage, according to a study by Hering (1994). After the wedding, be faithful to your spouse. Major hurt and disruption to relationships is often caused by extramarital affairs, viewing of pornography, and “emotional affairs” (in which one spouse invests him/herself emotionally in someone else, rationalising the relationship because it is not a sexual one). While marriages in which these things happen usually are troubled prior to the affair, unfaithfulness can push the relationship to the breaking point, causing lasting wounds that may not heal.

Keep the faith! According to University of Wisconsin researcher Larry Bumpass, couples who attend church weekly are 35% less likely to divorce. In addition, according to a 1999 study by the Barna Research group, the divorce rate for Catholics is only 21% — tied with Lutherans for the lowest rate among all Christian groups, and far lower than the national average.

Spend time together in prayer. Pope John Paul II, in his Letter to Families, writes, “Prayer increases the strength and spiritual unity of the family, helping the family to partake of God’s own ‘strength’” (4). Sociologist Andrew Greely, in a 1991 study, found that only 1% of married couples who pray together regularly and report a high quality sexual relationship think that divorce is even possible for them.

Practice Natural Family Planning. A Michigan State University study (Tortorici, 1979) showed higher levels of marital satisfaction among couples who use NFP versus other methods of family planning, and some studies (e.g., Aquilar, 1980) have indicated that the rate of divorce for couples who practice NFP may be as low as 0.6%.

When you have a conflict, talk about it! A healthy marriage is not one that is free of conflict. In fact, researchers have found no relationship between the number or frequency of disagreements and marital dissatisfaction. Some happy couples have lots of conflicts, and some unhappy ones have very few. What
makes the difference between happy and unhappy couples is how conflicts are resolved once they occur. By using sensitive, healthy communication skills, a couple can work through conflicts and make their marriage stronger.

Practice empathy and forgiveness. When you are angry or dismayed by what your spouse is doing or saying, try to imagine yourself in his or her shoes. Work towards forgiveness and trust when hurts occur. Grudges can devastate a marriage, but choosing to let go of angry feelings gives us the freedom to go on.

[By William R. Cashion and Joseph D. White. Ph.D. from the website of the Diocese of Austin]

Weddings vs marriages

I’ve had a few people tell me that they’re living together until they can afford to get married. They need to wait, they say, till they can have the wedding they want.

In 2011, the median cost of a wedding was around 18,000 dollars in NZ and US, and 11,000 pounds in the UK (the average was quite a bit higher). That’s enough to put a 10% deposit on a flat everywhere except in the major metropolitan areas, and enough for a house deposit in many places. And I wonder how many couples, planning their big day, think about the opportunity cost of that money:

Your $18,000 wedding? It may really end up costing you between $90,000 and $200,000. That $2,000 dress? Think: $10,000 to $22,000. The $10,000 food bill for your guests? Try $50,000 to $110,000.

No, I am not kidding.

That’s because the biggest cost of every dollar you spend is invisible. It’s all the money you’d accumulate if you saved it instead. Over long periods, this cost dwarfs the mere sticker price, often by a factor of several times.

Do the math. The typical bride is just 26 at her first wedding, according to the U.S. Census. She has four decades or more to save.

If her savings earn 4% a year above inflation over the long haul, each dollar she spends now is actually taking $5—in today’s terms—out of her lifetime savings. If her money earns 6% a year above inflation, an estimate that is challenging but not ridiculous, she is taking out $11.

Per dollar spent.

Yes, this is real. Today millions are, of course, struggling to make ends meet. There is an unsung national crisis among those nearing retirement with very little set aside. Someone in their 50s today would have an extra $100,000 if they’d saved just $5,000 more 30 years ago.

Food for thought. [The Wall Street Journal: A Lavish Wedding Costs More Than You Think]

Some of the nicest weddings I’ve been to have been done on a shoe string budget, with family and friends pitching in to provide food, flowers, the wedding cake, photography, clothing for the bride and bridesmaids, and decorations for the church and hall. There’s something very special about a wedding that has been provided by a community for one of its own.

On the other hand, I’ve talked to couples whose total emphasis seems to be on the Big Day: the dress, the flowers, the table decorations.

Where should the emphasis be? On that one special day when you vow to love for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer… or on the life during which you follow through on those vows?

Last night on the news, they reported that the number of couples marrying has declined over the last forty years, and interviewed a young couple who said that they had no intention of marrying; they’d made their commitment and didn’t need a piece of paper. I have a great deal of sympathy for the view that the piece of paper is an irrelevance and – under modern conditions – an expensive irrelevance.

It all comes back to the question: what is a wedding; what is a marriage?

In Catholic theology, a marriage is a covenant relationship; a relationship in which the two parties become family – bound to each other (and to God) as if they had been born from the same blood. In marriage, the two become closer than siblings, or than parent and child; they become – so Genesis and Matthew say – one flesh; a unit; a single physical entity.

A wedding, then, is a public demonstration of the couple’s commitment to a covenant relationship.

There are three basic requirements for a valid Catholic wedding:

• The couple must be capable of being married—that is, they must be a woman and a man who are free of any impediment that would prevent marriage.
• The couple must give their consent to be married—that is, by an act of their will they irrevocably give and accept one another in order to establish marriage
• They must follow the canonical form for marriage—that is, they must be married according to the laws of the Church so that the Church and the wider community will be certain about the validity of their marriage (the canonical form includes certain specific vows, and specified witnesses).

Nothing there about the number of party favours or the colour of the dress!