I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
Thanks to Jill Stanek, pro-life activist, for publishing this Guest Post about the 50 Million Names Project!
50,000,000! When we reached that abortion toll, I woke up, in a way, to the horror of this ongoing holocaust. I wished then, before Internet, email, and computers in every home, there was a way to give names for all those babies. No way!
But the idea of 50millionnames.org was conceived.
A few years later, delivering my dead son Timothy, after a miscarriage, I held his teeny body and felt again the sadness for all the babies that had not even been named. I would hold him, by his name, in my heart forever, and would now and then do something special “for Timothy,” or “in his name.” But what about the unnamed children? The idea grew more insistent, but seemed as impossible as ever.
Fast forward to 2012 – a conversation among pro-life stalwarts about what in the world we should be doing “about abortion.” I’m so proud of those who are fighting this fight politically, but that’s not my way. I’ve prayed clinics closed and fasted for an end to abortion, and hope everyone who loves life will do the same.
But how can we create some sort of positive, beautiful, simple way to call attention to “the child” and not just to “abortion”? I remembered the idea of naming every precious one of those children, and put it out for discussion.
Now, we do have the means, the technology, the communication channels! Now, this is possible! Testing the idea with various people, I found myself reminding others that the babies would probably want us to pray for their relatives and abortionists. It’s hard to pray for an abstract, unknown person, but with a name God can link us to real, particular people! This naming is going to bring blessing and healing. We realized, as we planned the collection of names, that much, much more was happening here.
We began to see each child as a channel of God’s immense grace into the world. If he was meant to bless his family, but his life was brutally ended, was that the end of the story? No! Violence is not the end of the story! Not if we carry him in our hearts as a unique, specific, named person and pray for that grace to flow to all who are connected to him and live in the world today deeply wounded by his absence.
Some of those are the abortionists themselves. Surely God’s instructions to “pray for those who curse you” mean that we should pray for those who are intimately connected to each, specific child because of their own violence against him. So, we designed 50MillionNames.org to encourage these prayers for the unrepeatable, actual children to whom we give names. And then, it got even better!
In the name of each child, we had a kind of “excuse” to do something concrete, something others would notice and that would call attention to the humanity of unborn children without any argument or anger. “In honor of a child I named at 50MillionNames.org, I offer this donation…. I want to volunteer for two hours…. I am planting this tree…. I am writing this letter…. I have designed this work of art…. I wrote this poem….” Do you see? The gesture we offer for each child we name becomes another blessing!
On the night we launched the website, I cleaned up after the launch party, exhausted and happy. Someone asked if all that work I had done was worth it for the number of names we collected that night. I had to think about it for a moment. It had been a huge investment on a “per child” basis! And then I knew my answer: It was worth all that, and more, for just one Child, the Lord Jesus Christ!
This is my most-requested audio – about how we can educate our children well, despite our own inadequacies. The Problem – We must get kids from where they are, to where they need to be; from ‘uneducated’ to ‘educated’. Given the poverty of our own education, we feel asked to do the impossible: build a […]
Some audiences want to cut right to the chase: “Give us practical applications of all your ideas about Sabbath-keeping.” OK – here you go: In this talk I do just that – give concrete, practical ways to dip into the kind of leisure that brings interior equanimity and leaves you more whole, more human, more […]
I prepared this talk for the Heart of a Woman group, in Kansas City, shortly after the suicide of a Catholic mother of ten. It was a shock to me, but not entirely unexpected, as I had known her during the years she struggled with depression and disintegration, despite her devotion to the Church, Christ, […]
For an Apostles of the Interior Life Women’s Retreat, where the theme was “The King Desires Your Beauty,” I prepared this truly interesting talk. Will you believe me when I say that this is another of my favorites?!?! I know, I’ve said that about a lot of these talks, but revisiting them to give a […]
I once asked a friend who calls herself a Jewish-Catholic if it had been hard for her to accept Mary’s role in Salvation History. She laughed and said, “Heck no! Every Sabbath was begun by a Jewish mama’s prayers! I’d have been suspicious if Lord Sabbaoth hadn’t come through a woman.” Jewish women welcomed Sabbath […]
Differences between the original myth of Cupid and Psyche, and C.S. Lewis’ retelling of the myth in Till We Have Faces have the effect of revealing new dimensionality in the Christian understanding of both myth and of the human person. The pre-Christian myth, like the pre-Christian person, is veiled in a darkness that constitutes a […]
In “Stour Valley and Dedham Church” Constable has painted the Vale of Dedham – a familiar and beloved area of his native England.
“The Merry Drinker,” by Frans Hals This is a portrait of an unnamed man, called in the title only ‘a merry drinker’.
Giotto’s painting, The Wedding Feast at Cana, portrays the literal and spiritual senses of this story.
Berlinghieri’s St. Francis appears behind the altar of San Francesco in Pescia, Italy. It is an excellent example of art ordered to divine worship.
A mom is the caretaker of a huge, wonderful, potentially beautiful, critically important place! She, herself, this actual, unique person, is the single most important ‘environment’ in the lives of her children. Like Mary, like the Church, she is an atmosphere. She is an atmosphere of affection. This is not just warm, fuzzy feelings, but […]
Benedictine College hosted a Symposium for Advancing the New Evangelization in 2014. The theme was Transcendentals as Preambles to Faith, and I got to propose my take on that as a paper. Anyone who knows me could probably have bet good money I’d do something ‘three dimensional’ with that, and they’d have won those bets. […]
I once got a chance to do an all-day retreat with one of the sister Apostles of the Interior Life. Naturally, I wanted to discuss the role of leisure in the formation of persons! As usual, I prayed about the upcoming event, and God brought together several threads of my contemplation to weave this talk. […]
Did you know YOU are a poem? Check out Ephesians 2:10, where the Greek ‘poema’ is usually translated ‘workmanship’. I like ‘poema’ better, as it implies beauty and artistry, but ‘workmanship’ is nice. I’ve discussed the importance of poetry, poetic education, poetic imagination and poetic reading in many different venues (many of the talk topics […]
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