Thank You, Lord

Thank you, Lord, for the gift of light and its many attributes.

Life Isn’t Just About the Journey

In my last column, I introduced you to writers Amy Andrews, a convert to the Catholic faith, and Jessica Mesman Griffith, who re-embraced Catholicism as an adult after a childhood in which her parents became evangelical. To help work out their beliefs – and their struggles with their beliefs – they started handwriting letters to each other as a Lenten discipline several years ago. Those letters have now been collected into the book Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters.

For Griffith, one of the biggest reasons she returned to the Church was the fact that we have a suffering savior. Specifically, the Way of the Cross helped her deal with the losses she’d endured in her life, especially the death of her mother when she was a child. During an interview on Christopher Closeup, Griffith told me, “I needed to acknowledge death, to acknowledge that suffering was a reality and something I had endured. I wasn’t getting that from the churches I had been in during my high school years with my family . . . .I needed a way to feel that this story was not over with my mother and the other people we had lost – that we were going to be able to have some connection with them. It’s not something we’re waiting for, it’s not something that’s going to happen when we die. It’s something that we have access to right now. There’s not a wall between us and heaven. It’s much more permeable than we might believe.”

The challenge of dealing with death became a painful reality for Andrews and her husband when their baby died. She recalled, “I felt empty, like the hopes of my marriage, the hopes my parents had for me, the plans I had for my own life – everything was gone, and I was grieving this person.”

Thankfully, Andrews found hope and consolation through her church community and friendship with Griffith: “Seeing Jess beside me, weeping when I was weeping, was more comforting than almost anything else. That’s the incarnational nature of our faith. I was seeing God suffering through her, and that absolutely lightened my burden. It didn’t make it go away, but it redeemed it.”

As they chronicle in Love and Salt, Andrews and Griffith have traveled a rewarding, profound, difficult road together, and they know their successes and stumbles through life will continue, like they do for everybody. They’re firmly committed to keeping their endpoint in sight, however.

Andrews explained, “The reason I think it’s unsatisfying to say that [life is] all about the journey is that you don’t recognize that we, as Christians, believe in a destination. We believe that we are headed for union with God in eternity. It’s not that I don’t think the journey’s important – I absolutely do. It’s just that it’s a journey with a specific destination in mind that then casts meaning back on the rest of life. If we just say it’s all about the journey, we’re lying to ourselves. There is something coming that is helping us make sense of what we are doing as we’re walking down the road.”

As we move through Lent, those are important insights to keep in mind. None of us escapes suffering. But with God’s grace and the support of good people, that suffering can be redeemed and bring us one step closer to our final destination with the risen Jesus.

(This essay is a recent “Light One Candle” column, written by Jerry Costello, of The Christophers; it is one of a series of weekly columns that deal with a variety of topics and current events.)

Background information:

The Christophers: Christopher Radio & Video

Reflection Starter from St. Isidore of Seville

“Study as if you were to live forever. Live as if you were to die tomorrow.” – Saint Isidore of Seville (whose memory the Church celebrates tomorrow, 4 April)

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 in E minor

It’s time for some classical music. This is a presentation of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Symphony No. 5 in E minor” (Op. 64) as played by the Wiener Philharmoniker (Vienna Philharmonic), conducted by Herbert von Karajan:

Thank You, Lord

Thank you, Lord, for the many blessings You have bestowed on Your Church.

Msgr. Pope on Who Needs the Church

“I was asked to go to a neighboring parish and address some fundamental questions related to the necessity of the Church. Many today question the need for a church or The Church and claim they can have Jesus without the Church. And thus the fundamental question ‘Who needs the Church?’ ought to be addressed. . . .

“[T]he fundamental answer I offer to “Who needs the Church?” is that everyone does, because the Church is the Body of Christ.

“To the related questions ‘Why do I need to come to Church?’ and ‘How can the Church possibly be relevant to me?’ the fundamental answer is because it is in the Church that Jesus is first and foremost to be found.”

In a recent commentary, Monsignor Charles Pope (pastor of Holy Comforter-Saint Cyprian Parish, Washington, DC) reflected on how we can better experiencing Jesus in our parishes through, among other ways, conviction in preaching, the cultivation of expectation, and appropriate catechetical focus.

To access Msgr. Pope’s complete post, please visit:

Msgr. Charles Pope: Who Needs the Church? You might as well ask, “Who needs Jesus?” (17 MAR 14)

Reflection Starter from Art Linkletter

“Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.” – Art Linkletter

“Christ Be Our Light”

As we continue living this week and continue our Lenten observance, I offer this version of Bernadette Farrell’s “Christ Be Our Light”:

Holy Father’s Prayer Intentions for April

The Holy Father’s prayer intentions for April are:

General intention (Ecology and Justice): “That governments may foster the protection of creation and the just distribution of natural resources.”

Mission intention (Hope for the Sick): “That the Risen Lord may fill with hope the hearts of those who are being tested by pain and sickness.”

Thank You, Lord

Thank you, Lord, for the graces You give us to meet the needs You entrust to us.

Entering the Story of Christianity

So a rationalist and a mystic walk into a bar. Okay, it wasn’t a bar; they walked into a writing class.

That’s not the opening of a weird joke. It’s the way a life-changing bond was formed between two talented young writers whose personal journeys – told in the book Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters – offer relevant, relatable and theologically-rich examples of growing in faith.

When Amy Andrews (the rationalist) and Jessica Mesman Griffith (the mystic) met in a writing course, they each had different religious experiences in their pasts. Griffith was raised Catholic in southern Louisiana and surrounded by the overt religious practices native to the region. When her mother developed a terminal illness, her parents defected to an evangelical church in search of a healing miracle that never came. Griffith’s father became vehemently anti-Catholic, so she grieved both the loss of her mother and the loss of her childhood faith. Yet the soulprints of Catholicism never left Griffith, so she returned to the Church when she got older.

Andrews grew up with an agnostic mother and atheist father, yet she always felt naturally drawn to God. And though her parents weren’t believers at the time (they’ve since converted), they held to a lot of the values of Christianity. Andrews was further attracted to God in college through her interest in literature and writing.  During an interview on Christopher Closeup, she told me, “I think God is everywhere, so of course I love reading theology, but it’s not like that’s the only place you can see God.”

Griffith had a similar experience, saying, “I was reading so widely at the time because I was in graduate school in a writing program. Reading theology and the Bible alongside all of these other great works of literature, all of it seemed to be pointing in the same direction – the Church.”

Following those literary lines, it was Andrews’ desire to enter into the “story” of Christianity that eventually led her to the Catholic Church. She said, “Part of it was getting married. I realized that you can’t know something 100 percent ahead of time; you have to do it. Then you have the transformation and knowledge that come from actually being married. With that example, I started to think about faith in the same way – that this was not a matter of knowing everything ahead of time; it was a matter of entering a story. And the story had become so beautiful, so true and so desirable to me that I thought, ‘This is as much as I’m going to be able to know from the outside. What I need to do now is enter the story and see what happens.’”

Re-embracing Catholicism’s rituals and traditions was also a boon for Griffith, especially on days when she didn’t feel connected to God. She said, “Going through the motions and rote prayer, these things were very helpful to me because on days when I could not come up with the language to talk to God, the words were there for me in beautiful, ancient prayers.”

When Andrews and Griffith met, they found an ideal, complementary friendship. Griffith agreed to be Andrew’s sponsor into the Catholic Church, and they decided to write daily letters to each other as a Lenten discipline that could help them work out their beliefs on paper. And working out those beliefs became a true blessing when life’s troubles eventually arose. I’ll tell you about those next time.

(This essay is a recent “Light One Candle” column, written by Jerry Costello, of The Christophers; it is one of a series of weekly columns that deal with a variety of topics and current events.)

Background information:

The Christophers: Christopher Radio & Video

Reflection Starter from St. Francis de Sales

“We all have a vocation. We believe that God has placed us in this life to fill a special need that no one else can accomplish.” – Saint Francis de Sales