Discipline is Treason in the Kingdom of Comfort
I had a conversation with a hurting mom recently. We were bemoaning certain aspects of youth culture and how broken it has become, and how damaged it makes our young people in return. She was seeing how the wider culture was robbing her son of dignity and innocence. Even more startling, she told me how he was seeing it too and felt overwhelmed by his inability to escape it.
It was then that a comment I had heard a month or so ago took on new light.
I was listening to a podcast recently that was on website development, which usually leads to personal topics about life, work and happiness. The woman being interviewed made a powerful statement that has stuck with me, even though I can't find that particular podcast anymore. In response to the interviewer's comment on how many achievements she made and how strong of a work ethic she has, she responded with this comment.
"I don't know when, but somewhere along the line in recent history we decided to substitute Comfort for Happiness."
Saint Kateri Tekakwitha
The first time I heard that name, I immediately fell in love with it and knew that, wife willing, my first daughter would be so called. It is unique without being crazy, and has deep traditional ties to it. My wife agreed to the name, and so our first born child, my first daughter was named Kateri.
Kateri Tekakwitha was the child of a Mohawk chief who captured his Algonquin bride in a raid. Kateri's mom had a deep spiritual life and was a Catholic. Her father kept the old ways, but both of them died when she was a young child by a small pox epidemic that ruined many in her town. She survived, but with scars all over her face and greatly diminished eye sight.
Though rejection of the Catholic French Jesuit missionaries was common by the rightfully suspicious Mohawks, Kateri was able to seek out the Jesuit instruction and become a Catholic herself. She was one of those rare people who so give themselves over to the Lord that they never stop growing and progressing in the spiritual life.
The Spiritual Danger of Private Revelations
What is Public and Private Revelation?
Hey Catholics, stop reading books and web sites (especially web sites) based upon private revelations that are not approved by the Church. If you are putting stock in these things, and they turn out to be false, you've been building yourself up to a disaster. At best, if they get approved, they are still only private revelation. Private revelations are not meant for the Universal Church, but for a specific time, place, or group. It ain't Gospel and never will be. Yet, often the followers of private revelations try to demand universal assent of faith to these unapproved apparitions and locutions as if they were the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception or something akin to it.
It is not a healthy spiritual practice to dive into these texts or web sites until they are approved. My advice is to stay away until the Church deems them credible. Let the Church guide you. Don't be a jerk, but be cautious, and look out for those red flags that something's fishy with a message.
The Cross Over Washington, D.C.
It is a grave sadness in our day that Truth is obscured behind such powerful labels as "Conservative" and "Liberal", or "Republican" and "Democrat". Once these names have been fixed to a view or idea, the person behind it is lost. When people become labeled, it becomes easier to dismiss them. When we Christians start dismissing human persons, especially with secular, politically charged labels, then we have emptied the cross of its power. We encourage the party spirit that St. Paul warned us about.
The greatest tool of Satan in America is the use of the Left/Right political system to prevent people- even people with a million dear things held in common- from ever uniting, from ever becoming friends or allies. Our system of democratic elections, steered as it is by those already in power, never seem to care about Truth, only label fidelity. Persons are supposed to be lost, that is how the system works.