Book Review - A Grace Given

A Grace Given: A Father’s Love for a Dying Child

A Book Review by Kristine Cranley

“In the years that we have lived with Elie’s terminal illness, I have often sensed in other people the belief that it would be better if Elie were to die sooner rather than later.  It always remains unspoken, but the way they frame their thoughts or prognosticate our future, I feel certain that they assume God’s blessing to us would be for Elie to die soon and without pain.  For whatever reason, these people feel she is a hardship, that it would make our lives easier or steadier if she were gone, that it would strengthen our marriage by giving us more time together, less stress. … but these people are fools …My children are the greatest gifts I have known but Elie is particularly special.  She makes my life far richer, more contemplative and more full of joy than it ever would have been without her."  A Grace Given p. 41, 45

This week I had the great joy of reading A Grace Given, the testimony of a father’s love for his dying daughter.  It is a privileged look into the soul of a father and his journey toward self-discovery through relation to his firstborn daughter, rendered handicapped in her battle with a brain tumor.  It is a love story.    

In the wee hours, when she has lain stiff in the nurse’s arms since midnight and even Liz cannot put her to sleep, I will take her in my lap, hold her hand in mine, wrap the blanket around her and she will soften slowly, then bat her eyelids heavily, and within moments drift off into a deep sleep.  She is waiting for me to come to her, but had no way of telling the nurse or Liz other than by stiffening out.  (p. 47)

Elie’s illness sets her father on a journey of faith.  While his wife Liz leans on her Catholic faith to carry her through their crises, Kent Gilges speaks honestly of his own struggles and questions regarding faith and meaning and suffering.  In the end it is Elie herself, in her utter vulnerability and neediness, who unlocks the door to communion with God for her father. 

The truth is that God brings suffering into our lives because suffering brings us closer to Him.  This is the beauty hidden in a brain tumor.  It is a key that unlocks the box filled with love, hope, generosity, beauty, care, gentleness… Why did God give my daughter a brain tumor?  I do not know.  I cannot hope to know.  But He did, and it has brought a blessedness to our home and our lives that never would have entered there otherwise. (p. 107, 109)

John Paul II, in his play The Radiation of Fatherhoodspeaks about how God the Father desires His Fatherly love to radiate out through human fatherhood.  A Grace Given is a word picture of this radiation.  It is the story of how the vulnerability of a daughter gives birth to a father’s heart.  Through his decision to stand the entire six hours of his daughter’s surgery in solidarity with her, his turmoil over how best to love and provide for his daughter, his grief at being separated from her, and most of all his utter delight in her, he gives us a tiny glimpse of God the Father’s solicitude for us.  This is poignantly portrayed in a passage in which Gilges speculates on his daughters thoughts as he bathes her.

You might wonder what I think about when I’m floating in the bathtub with my eyes closed.  That’s the best part of the story.  I think about God.  I try to imagine what it will be like when God holds me … They say that when I visit God, I will sit on His lap and talk to Him for a long time, and when I fall asleep, He’s going to give me to the angels to hold while I wait for Mommy and Daddy.  I like to think about that in the bathtub because I think being held by God is a lot like being held by Daddy, except better.  (p. 72)

Through revealing his own ‘father’s heart’, Gilges gives us a telling glimpse into the heart of God which theological speculation can never achieve.  I am grateful for his vulnerability in this and I am delighted to recommend his book.

Fr. Barron Reviews "The Hobbit" Movie

WARNING - SPOILERS!

Porn & Support For Same-Sex Marriage

An interesting article on the correlation, in men, of frequency of using porn and support for same-sex marriage. A snip:

But of the men who view pornographic material “every day or almost every day,” 54 percent “strongly agreed” that gay and lesbian marriage should be legal, compared with around 13 percent of those whose porn-use patterns were either monthly or less often than that. Statistical tests confirmed that porn use is a (very) significant predictor of men’s support for same-sex marriage, even after controlling for other obvious factors that might influence one’s perspective, such as political affiliation, religiosity, marital status, age, education, and sexual orientation.

The same pattern emerges for the statement, “Gay and lesbian couples do just as good a job raising children as heterosexual couples.” Only 26 percent of the lightest porn users concurred, compared to 63 percent of the heaviest consumers. It’s a linear association for men: the more porn they consume, the more they affirm this statement. More rigorous statistical tests confirmed that this association too is a very robust one.

Theoretically, the same pattern should hold when considering support for marriage in general. And it does, though not quite as distinctively. The less time spent viewing porn, the less critical men are of the institution of marriage. Forty-nine (49) percent of the lightest porn users “strongly disagreed” with a statement suggesting that “marriage is an outdated institution” (and an additional 26 percent simply “disagreed” with it), compared with 14 percent of the heaviest porn users.

Of course, correlation doesn’t mean causation, and I’m not suggesting causation here. But I’m also pretty confident the “causal arrow” wouldn’t run in the other direction. (Why would supporting same-sex marriage encourage you to look at porn?) Still, we should consider alternative explanations. What might predict both porn use and support for new family forms? Religion? Politics? While religiosity indeed matters for perceiving marriage as outdated, it does little to alter the stable link between porn use and same-sex marriage support. The same is true of political affiliation. It matters. It just doesn’t weaken the association between porn use and supporting nontraditional family forms.

In the end, contrary to what we might wish to think, young adult men’s support for redefining marriage may not be entirely the product of ideals about expansive freedoms, rights, liberties, and a noble commitment to fairness. It may be, at least in part, a byproduct of regular exposure to diverse and graphic sex acts.
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Fr. Barron on The Tragedy at Newtown

Fear Not - Christ Is Coming!

The best moment of any animated Christmas special is by far when Linus delivers his reason for Christmas message. We should remember that Linus always carries his security blanket panics even when his mom has to wash it. Yet there is one time he does not need it. It is during this scene when he drops it after saying "fear not". Linus does not need a security blanket, he has Christ.

Take a look:

Archbishop Chaput: Advent, Suffering, and Joy

A wonderful reflection from Archbishop Chaput, of Philadelphia:

Scripture is a love story, the story of God’s love for humanity. But it’s a real story filled with real people. It’s not a fairytale. In Scripture, as in the real world, evil things happen to innocent persons. The wicked seem to thrive. Cruelty and suffering are common.

The Psalmist cries out to heaven again and again for justice; Job is crushed by misfortune; Herod murders blameless infants; Jesus is nailed to a cross. God is good, but we human beings are free, and being free, we help fashion the nature of our world with the choices we make.

This is why evil is frightening, but it’s not incomprehensible. We know it from intimate experience. What we never quite expect is for our private sins, multiplied and fermented by millions of lives with the same or similar “little” sins, to somehow feed the kind of evil that walks into a Connecticut school and guns down 26 innocent lives, 20 of them children.

Thirteen years ago, as archbishop of Denver, I helped bury some of the victims of the Columbine High School massacre. Nothing is more helpless or heart-breaking than to sit with parents who kissed their children goodbye in the morning and will never see them alive again in this world. The pain of loss is excruciating. Words of comfort all sound empty.

The victims in the Sandy Hook massacre were even younger and more numerous than those at Columbine, and if such intense sorrow could be measured, the suffering of the Connecticut family members left behind might easily be worse.

With such young lives cut so short, every parental memory of an absent child will be precious — compounded by a hunger for more time and more memories that will never happen. This is why we need to keep the grieving families so urgently in our hearts and prayers.

People will ask, “How could a loving God allow such wickedness?” Every life lost in Connecticut was unique, precious and irreplaceable. But the evil was routine; every human generation is rich with it. Why does God allow war? Why does God allow hunger? Why does God allow the kind of poverty that strips away the dignity of millions of people in countries around the world?

All of these questions sound reasonable, and yet they’re all evasions. We might as well ask, “Why does God allow us to be free?” We have the gift of being loved by a Creator who seeks our love in return; and being loved, we will never be coerced by the One who loves us. God gives us the dignity of freedom – freedom to choose between right and wrong, a path of life or a path of death.

We are not the inevitable products of history or economics or any other determinist equation. We’re free, and therefore we’re responsible for both the beauty and the suffering we help make. Why does God allow wickedness? He allows it because we – or others just like us – choose it. The only effective antidote to the wickedness around us is to live differently from this moment forward. We make the future beginning now.
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Turning Tragedy Into Politics

Rahm Emmanuel is currently the mayor of Chicago and previously was White House Chief of Staff. In 2008, he said:

"Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."

This has become a powerful way of thinking for most politicians. They use tragedies, crises, and evil acts of others to advance their own political agendas. This has been evident in the reaction to the horrible evil that happened just a few short days ago. Within hours, both sides of the gun-control issue started to make arguments for and against gun control. I won't get into it here, but suffice it to say that I find such reactions remarkably callous, shallow, sad, and especially significant.

Why "significant"?

It shows just how much modern culture believes the solution to our problems can be fixed through political policies. It assumes we have the "power" to prevent evil (by either having more guns available for law-abiding citizens or getting rid of them all together).

Both sides of the argument miss the point. Evil is senseless.

To make sense = "to have meaning."
Yet, evil is not a thing and therefore has no meaning. In fact, it is a lack of something. Evil is a lack of goodness. Just as darkness is a lack of light, so evil is a lack of goodness. When we think of it this way, we see that God, who is good by His nature, did not "create" of "invent" evil. Rather, it is God's creatures' failure to be good which allowed evil to enter into existence.

So, political solutions may provide an illusion of meaning, but ultimately they fail. There is no meaning to evil outside of the cross. From the cross Jesus screams out to us:

"I know it hurts, I too have suffered. But, suffering is my way of salvation for you and for many others. Combine your suffering with mine and great good will come of it.
I hear your cry to heaven and I am with you still.
Do not lose hope, but believe and be saved.
Your suffering is only for a short time.
Soon you can rest with me.
Believe. Love. Hope.
I am with you."

But, when we interject a political solution into such tragedies, even before the bodies of the slain are laid to rest, we give a much different kind of answer to the problems:

"There is nothing good that can come of this. There is nothing except evil here. Thuse, there is nothing which can help us except making sure it never happens again. If you would only believe in the almighty political solutions, then we can eradicate evil and create a world without such tragedies."

Ultimately, it is an exercise in nihilism and is a statement that our culture has forgotten the crucified Christ. It is a belief that there is no higher power than the government. Thus, it shuns hope.

I say "no" to such politics.
I say "no" to such lies.

This is not to say there is never a time for political debates, but the right time is not while the wounds are so fresh. Not unless you believe you should "never let a serious crisis go to waste."

Christ is coming to meet us once more in a few short days as a little baby who, as a man, will suffer just as the children in Newtown, CT did. He is not a God who fails to understand and provide TRUE meaning to the riddle of evil. Just as St. Paul once wrote:

"Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith; that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead." -Phil 3:8-11

Pray. Mourn. Believe.

The Broken Places

Some great thoughts by Tom McDonald at God and The Machine:

There is a darkness in the world. It’s always been there, since we made our first wrong step and chose ourselves over God. Most of the time, the darkness is just there for us, a shadow on our souls where sin more readily grows. Sometimes, it erupts in spasms of violence or disease and knocks us back on our heels, changing the course of our lives. And sometimes, the darkness cracks a hole in the world and breaks through in a monstrous wave of evil so overwhelming we can’t even fathom it.

And so we pray. Yesterday, we prayed for the innocent souls murdered in Newtown, because that’s what we do. We prayed at mass, in a time and space that is sacred. We prayed for healing. For understanding. For mercy.

In the evening, I had to face a room full of 14-year-olds, and I knew there were questions in their minds. I was there to lecture on Church history: a lecture that normally begins with the Ascension and Pentecost.

Last night, instead, we began where it all ends and begins again. Here:

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How To Win The Culture War

Peter Kreeft has some great advice while speaking at Steubenville.

Minor Revisions - An Aggie Catholic's Reality TV Show

Jen Fulwiler is an atheist-to-Catholic convert who is also an Aggie. She came to A&M as a Freshman, but transferred out before graduation because she thought it was too religious. A few years ago she (and her family) converted to Catholicism. Jen is a great writer, who blogs at Conversion Diary and The National Catholic Register. Now, NetNY TV has a reality TV show about Jen and her family. Here is the first episode: