Rocky Balboa: A movie about a life worth living

As we dive into the dog days of summer and triple digit temperatures the time comes around to sit inside and watch a good movie rather than cooking in my own juices by daring to go outside.  My brother lives down in Las Vegas and he never has any pity whatsoever when I complain about the heat, but his his air conditioner isn't broken, mine is.  Regardless, the theme of our movie nights is living life to the fullest.  In chapter ten of John’s Gospel Jesus tells us, “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”  This summer we will be examining just what exactly Christ means by this offer of abundant life.  Last week we started we watched Bella, a great movie about love, family, and adoption.  This week we are watching Rocky Balboa, which is the last movie in the Rocky series.  Rather than dealing with Rocky as a boxer who has some new fight or new challenger to overcome, it deals with Rocky as a retired boxer who is dealing with life after the death of his wife and the estrangement of his son.  This is one of my favorite movies of all times because the point of the movie is not whether or not Rocky wins the fight at the end, the point is that the fight is worth fighting.  When I say the fight I don’t just mean the boxing match, I mean the fight of living life every day to the fullest.  Here is one of my favorite quotes from the movie.  It is where Rocky is talking to his son, who blames his dad’s fame for why he is not able to get ahead in the world. 

“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard you're hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done! Now if you know what you're worth then go out and get what you're worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain't you! You're better than that! I'm always gonna love you no matter what. No matter what happens. You're my son and you're my blood. You're the best thing in my life. But until you start believing in yourself, ya ain't gonna have a life.”

How true this is for us and God.  Life will beat us down, and we have to be willing to get back up again.  God loves us and will help and support us, but we have to be willing to move forward.  We have to be willing to trust in Him.  It is far too often that we take the way of cowards and back down.  We want to blame anyone we can for why we aren't who we know God has called us to be.  We don’t want to take responsibility for our actions or the consequences that they bring, but we have to. To live life to its fullest, to live it abundantly means standing toe to toe with the lies that the world presents and not backing down.  It means standing with Christ and the Church that he founded.  To truly live means giving nothing less than all you have and all you are every single day for the glory of the Kingdom of God.  Will life knock us down if we live like this, absolutely. Will Christ put us back to our feet and help us to win the victory in the end?  Indeed He will.  He has already won the victory, we just have to stand with Him in order to share in it.

Tough love and Baseball

One of my favorite movies of all Time is A League of Their Own, which is about the short lived life of women’s major league baseball. Towards the end of the movie one of the star players quits and decides not to play the following season.  The manager (Tom Hanks) asks her why and she tells him that it is just too hard. He responds, “It’s supposed to be hard.  If it wasn’t hard everyone would do it.  The hard is what makes it great.”  This pretty much sums up my faith life on an almost daily basis.  There are a lot of good religions out there, but if you want a truly great one, stick with the Catholic Church. As with all great things, however, it is hard.  Christ himself warned us of that fact when he told the Apostles, “If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first.”  Now things might not be so bad if the world would hate us for doing things that were relatively easy, but as a general rule it doesn’t. It usually hates us for the things that are hard.  The things that can challenge even the most dedicated and leave even the holiest weeping in frustration in an Adoration chapel somewhere.  Exactly what those challenges are will vary from person to person, but I really think that most of us have them. 

For me, one of my biggest struggles is with the fine art of Natural Family Planning (NFP).  It isn’t that I question the theology behind it, because I don’t. I understand the theology quite well; it is just hard to put into practice.  There have been many an occasion where fertility signs have been less than crystal clear and Katie and I have just wanted to scream in frustration. Before I got married I remember learning about

NFP and having it presented to me as though it were so easy a trained monkey could do it.  After all, it is all part of God’s plan for authentic married love, so there is no way he would make that extremely difficult or challenging right? Wrong, oh so very wrong at least on the challenging part.  It is true that NFP is one of the gifts God has given us to space our children and manage family size, but it is far from easy.  Then again, real love usually is.  Why do you think that part of the wedding vows involve the “for richer or poorer, sickness and in health” part?  Because real love is tough; and if you can’t make it through being poor and sick, than you don’t really have the level of love that Christ calls you to in marriage.  Real love is hard and real love is painful and it only takes a quick look at the Cross to remind us of that fact.  What is easier to forget is that real love is worth it.  In the pain and suffering of the moment it is easy to forget what real love is all about and just make the choice that will make us feel better in the short term. But love is a lot like Baseball, if it were easy everyone would do it.  It’s the hard that makes it great.

Hard Truths about Newtown

The truth about what really happened in Newtown Connecticut is hard.  To be completely honest I don't really think most of our country is really ready or willing to hear it, let alone accept it.  It is easier to just advocate gun control or blame video games then to face the truth. Regardless, I want to share with you the truth about the cause of the Newtown shooting, the truth about Christmas, and the truth about the human soul.

     One of the most surprising things about the Newtown shooting is how everyone seems so shocked that it actually happened. How could someone do such a terrible and cruel thing? For the love of all that is holy, they were just little kids.  They had their entire lives ahead of them, but those lives, hopes, dreams, and everything else were snuffed out in an instant by some sick killer who just didn't care.  Here is what else was strangely absent from the outraged news reports that came crashing in around the world during the hour of terror at Sandy Brook Elementary, the other 137 children who died. Do you know what the difference between the children at Sandy Brook Elementary School and the other 137 is? One word, wanted.  Nobody wanted the other 137, so it was ok to let a killer loose on them in some back alley abortion clinic.  Nobody wanted them, so their parents were encouraged to have them killed instead of putting them up for adoption. It tears my heart out and makes we want to scream I LOVE YOU!!! from the mountain tops, because those babies ARE wanted.  I think the problem actually lies even deeper than the murder of innocent children.  I think the problem lies in the fact that our society has forgotten how to truly love and instead just treats other human beings like they are just some kind of cheap imported commodity. If you are not wanted, go away and die.  When we protect this insensitive attitude and try to make it look hip and cool by calling it the right to choose, we have failed our families, our country, and ultimately our God. 

This idea of no one caring because you aren’t wanted isn’t just an abortion issue either.  How many young people were killed as a result of Gang violence in the streets of Chicago or New York or Los Angeles?  Was our nation outraged over their deaths or did we some how believe that they deserved to die because of the choices they made?  Did they deserve to die because they weren’t like us?  Do they deserve to die because they are not wanted in our society?

How about the young children (and adults) who die out in the desert trying to sneak across the border and build a better life for their families?   When they die from lack of food or water do they deserve it?  Do they deserve to be packed like sheep into the back of a truck with no sanitation and smuggled across the border?  When we hear about these things do we feel outrage, or do we treat them like they deserve it because they too are unwanted?

That’s the funny thing about human dignity, we don’t really get to pick who has it and who doesn’t.  It is a gift given by God based on who we are, not what we have done. It doesn't matter one bit what you can give to society. In the eyes of God and His Church, you are a human person and that is all that matters.  You are wanted.  Sometimes  it is easy to forget that we don’t get to pick and choose who is wanted and who isn’t in the eyes of God.  I think the Catechism put it best when it said in paragraph 457-458,  

 "Sick, our nature demanded to be healed; fallen, to be raised up; dead, to rise again. We had lost the possession of the good; it was necessary for it to be given back to us. Closed in the darkness, it was necessary to bring us the light; captives, we awaited a Savior; prisoners, help; slaves, a liberator. Are these things minor or insignificant? Did they not move God to descend to human nature and visit it, since humanity was in so miserable and unhappy a state? 

     The Word became flesh so that thus we might know God's love: "In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him." "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” ”

When Christ took on our human nature, a lot of people thought he didn’t really have anything to offer either.  In fact, when it came to not being wanted He led the pack.  They even crucified Him because He wasn’t wanted by certain parts of society.  The Truth is, God wants us.  Not just some of us, but everyone single one of us.

This is the truth about Newtown.  This is the truth about human dignity. This is the Truth about Christmas.

Once Upon an Election

Over the past several days I have been giving a lot of thought to our recent elections and the voting process in general and I have come to a few conclusions that I wanted to throw out so that others could roll them around in their minds and discuss them on cool fall evenings over a cup of steaming hot cocoa.  The first is that presidential elections are in many ways very anti-Catholic.  Let me be clear that I do not mean this in a policy or legal way (though some have already stopped reading), but rather in a practical and spiritual way.  For example, over the last 2 months how many conversations have most of us had with friends and family members about something political, either a ballot measure or a candidate or the evils of of one political party vs. the other? Now compare it with how many conversations you have had and the amount of time you have spent talking to people, friends, and family members about your faith or about how God is working in your life?  How many billions of dollars and thousands of hours were spent on political campaigns that could have been spent spreading the Gospel?  How many of us were absolutely glued to our television/radio/computer for all three presidential debates, but have never bothered to tune in and watch a general audience from the Holy Father or even listen to Catholic radio?  How many Catholics put a sign in their yard or a sticker on their car proudly proclaiming their political allegiance, yet would never consider proclaiming their faith in any such way because someone might find it "offensive"?  My point is not that the political process is bad and that we shouldn't care, my point is simply one of priorities. When the first Commandment says that we should have no other gods before God, where do we really stand?  The amount of time, energy, and resources that we spend on politics reveals that many people in our world are still desperately hungry for a savior.  The problem is that they are looking to the wrong man.  The President of the United States is not our savior, and it doesn't matter if he is a Republican or a Democrat. Christ is our savior.  He transcends political, social, and racial boundaries.  Christ doesn't care if you are part of the 1% or the 99%, He cares if you are following Him. It may be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter heaven, but how many people even know what these words of Christ even really mean? We have been commanded by our savior to go out and make disciples of ALL the nations.  The work of spreading the Gospel is not something reserved for the priests, youth ministers, and professional evangelists; it is the work of all of us, the faithful in the trenches of the world.  Now this isn’t to say that elections are not important.  After all, our president and elected leaders can either make it much easier to follow the will of God, or they can pass laws that directly attack Gods people and His Church.  In the end, however, God will triumph. Cardinal George remarked upon the election of Pope Benedict about where was the successor to the Roman emperors? 

Where was the successor to Julius Caesar or Marcus Aurelius?  They were long gone and no one really cares about them anymore, but the successor of Peter was standing right next to him.  Long after this election and all the others are over, the Church and Peter will endure.  Let’s keep our eyes and our hearts in that direction.

All Saints Day

Within the 2000 year history of the Catholic Church we have been privileged to have some absolutely amazing Saints.  There have been many who have gone to great lengths to lay down their lives and their bodies for their God and their Church.  With the exception of St. John, all of the other Apostles were martyred for their faith.  Their love for God and their fellow man was so great that no persecution was too great and no price was to high that they would not willingly and gladly pay it.  St. Peter was crucified upside down and St. Agatha was forced into a brothel and then had her breasts cut off.  St. Lucy gauged out her own eyes because men found them so attractive and she wanted to live her life for God alone and Saint Lawrence was grilled to death because Emperor Valerian demanded all the riches of the Church and Lawrence brought him the poor and the sick.  Saints Thomas More and John Fisher were accused of treason and killed for refusing to betray their Catholic faith and recognize the authority of the King of England as the head of the new English Church.  These are just some of the great men and women and women that we celebrate this week On All Saints Day.  One of the things that all of these Saints have in common is the way they put their faith in God above absolutely everything also in their lives.  While some of them had taken religious vows or were single when Thomas More went to the headsman he did so knowing that he was leaving behind his family to fend for  themselves. His wife would no longer have her husband and his daughter no longer her father, but he went anyway because of his love for God and his faith in the Catholic Church. I am inspired by the faith of these and so many other Saints who chose to live out their faith in the face of adversity.  One of the things that helped these Saints and all the other saints fight the good fight and make it to heaven was how they formed their conscience.  We hear a lot in the media these days about people who do whatever they want and justify it by saying that they were taught in Catholic school and the Catechism to always follow their conscience and do what they believe is right.  While this is true, it doesn’t tell the full story.  While we are supposed to follow our conscience, we are also obligated to make sure that our conscience is correctly formed to the will of God.  So if our conscience starts telling us to do something that God has asked us not to do, then we know there is a problem with our conscience and we need to work on it.  During the Year of Faith, which began this month, the Pope has asked all of us to please read and study the Catechism.  If we do this we will come to know God in a deeper way and it will help us to form our will to His, rather than asking him to form His will to ours. If we don’t form our Conscience to the will of God, then we will never have the strength to walk to the headsman’s block with Thomas More, be crucified with Peter, or gauge our eyes out like Lucy. We will be doomed to lives of quiet desperation, forever blown about by popular opinion and unjust laws.  Only with God and His Church can we stand strong and run the race to the finish.

The Entertainment and the Conscience

As most of my friends are aware, I am a gamer.  I make no effort to hide it and I am, in fact, quite proud of the fact.  I am not just a video gamer either; I have a decent collection of board games as well and enjoy playing them with whomever I can lure into donating a couple of hours to join me in amusement and camaraderie.  One of my favorite genera's of game is the RPG, or Roll Playing Game.  I enjoy these games because in many ways it is like making choices in a good book.  You take on the roll of the main character in  a story and play through the game making a variety of choices that can have an affect (both good and bad) on the overall outcome and ending.  I have noticed a growing trend among modern video game RPGs that in many ways I find rather disturbing, and that is the growing presence of evil choices.  I am not talking about the choice to save a random man who is drowning and who later turns out to be a mass murdering psychopath who slaughters an entire village.  No, I am talking about the conscious choice to become that mass murdering psychopath and go slaughter as many villages as you can and loot their possessions.  In the name of freedom and choice we offer the option to truly take on an evil persona and live it out to the end, often conquering the world or becoming a famous bandit, outlaw, or assassin.  Such choices are frequently rewarded with extremely powerful in game weapons or other rewards that are attainable no other way.for many of my fellow gamers this is not only not a problem, but a good thing.  They look at it as a chance to live out their darker fantasies and do things that in the real world would land them in prison at the very least.  For me, however, it is different.  I would never read a book glorifying evil for the sake of evil or where the main character was an evil person.  When I read a book I want to believe that I could make the same tough good choices that the main character makes.  I don't mind if the main character is unrealistically wholesome or a better person than I currently am. It inspires me onwards to keep my standards high in real life.  When it comes to playing an RPG it is even more true.  I don't want to practice making choices that hurt other people.  I don't want to build a fantasy world in my mind where I live an immoral lifestyle or am a truly evil person.  A big part of this is because it can never truly be completely contained in a fantasy world.  When we condition our minds and hearts to be ok with evil in a fantasy world, we shouldn't be surprised when we quickly start to become ok with evil in the real world.  I know it can be easy to write this whole thing off as the rankings of a crazy gamer, but any English or Literature major (and most liberal arts majors as well) can tell you that books and magazines can have an equally, if not more potent effect on the culture.  

While I realize that most people are not gamers, the majority of us do read books and magazines at least on occasion.  When you look at some of the recent books to hit the New York Times best sellers list, there have recently been some very disturbing pieces. For example 50 Shades of Gray is not really a morally uplifting piece of literature.  In fact it is quite the opposite.  Many people have even put it on the same level as pornography, just without the pictures and designed more to entice women rather than men.  Regardless, the point is still the same or at the very least remarkably similar the effect of making an evil or immoral character in a video game.  You escape to a fantasy world where you can live out a dark fantasy that you would be ashamed of or find unacceptable in real life.  Our leisure time helps to form the innermost core and has a major effect on our soul.  I am sure that just about everyone has heard the saying to “practice what you preach” but in the long run we will all end up preaching what we practice.  If we chose to throw ourselves into pornography, we should not be surprised to find that we struggle with appreciating true feminine and tend to see women as mere objects rather than children of God.  If we choose to live in a fantasy world where instead of fighting for truth and justice we instead choose to relish hurting or killing the innocent and taking what we want from who we want, we shouldn’t be surprised if we find ourselves increasingly desensitized to the plight of our fellow man and simply see them as “too weak.”  I don’t see anything wrong with enjoying fiction or fantasy literature, or even playing RPGs.  What I see as dangerous is feeding dark and sinful passions within ourselves and not even realizing that we are doing it.  Our Catholic faith doesn’t take a break when we sit down and play games or read a book. It keeps right on going.  We are called to live our entire lives for Christ, not just when we are at Church or out in public.  There are video games that I have gotten rid of or refused to play, even though I really enjoyed them because they were supporting and promoting a lifestyle or a choice that was contrary to my faith. As a friend once told me, “you are who you are when no one is watching.”  When no one is watching or when we think it doesn’t affect anyone else, do we still live for Christ?

A new pantheon for a new era: 6 new gods for post-Christian America

Saint Augustine once famously said, "You have made us for yourself O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee." In all actuality he said it in Latin, but his point remains the same no matter what language it is spoken in. We will find our true meaning only in God. God is our creator and He is constantly drawing us back to Himself, no matter how far we wander astray.  Unfortunately it has become increasingly difficult to hear the voice of God calling us back to himself.  In today's post Christian world, we have been presented with a pantheon of new, secular gods that demand our attention, loyalty, and in some cases worship if we are to fit in with society.  Here are the top six that I have met and am forced to wrestle with on a daily basis.  They are Money, Power, Science, Sex, Sports, and humor.  Now some of these may come as no surprise at all, and others may be causing some head scratching around the kitchen table. I want to go into each of the new gods in some detail later, but for right now I want to do just a brief overview on why I think these 6 qualify as our modern deities. The first and foremost reason is this. You are not allowed to question money, power, science, sex, sports or humor.  To questions them, or their inherent goodness is to commit modern day blasphemy and lose your job, social standing, friends, or even find yourself in a lawsuit. Our world is convinced that these six gods hold not only the meaning to life, but the essence of happiness as well.   

     We are all told how if we want to be happy we need to grow up and go to college so we can have a good job and gain lots of money and power. This also results in lots of late nights at the office and frequently working weekends as well. If you question it, you are a slacker and a lazy no-good bum.

     If you question how science is supposed to save the world by killing babies to harvest their stem cells, then you obviously hate all the sick people who MIGHT one day be cured through that research. 

     If you question sex or bring up any kind of old fashioned ideas like “purity” or “chastity” than you are labeled a puritan and a freak. If you say that you want to save sex for marriage everyone smiles and nods, but in the back of their minds most think that you are insane, especially if you are a guy.   

     With sports it is a little easier to see.  If you ask the average American how much time they spent playing or watching sports versus the amount of time they spent praying to God in any given week there would barely be a contest. People even skip Mass to watch the pre-game of the Super Bowl. Humor is the final deity of the new pantheon and in many ways still the most insecure amongst hi brethren.   

     Humor could be lumped in with entertainment in general, but I prefer to leave it out on its own for now. The problem with humor is how we use it to rationalize sin or create a smokescreen for bad behavior. We watch movies filled that mock the things we hold as sacred and important, but instead of becoming outraged we just say “yeah, but it was funny.”  If you dare to criticize a movie for this sort of comedy, your friends will frequently (and usually violently) tell you how wrong you are.  These six new deities are now where mankind seeks to find its meaning, and the restlessness of our hearts goes on.