New Blog

I am blogging again at a new place.  The new blog is called Kansas Catholic.   Hope to see you there.

KCC Signs Off

In His goodness, God calls me to other endeavors.

Writing this blog has been great fun. I hope that reading KCC has brought some good to those that have come by this small corner of the internet.

When done well, blogging takes a certain amount of time. Since the new year, I have had less time to devote to KCC than previously. I think that has been obvious. I have left but three posts on this version of KCC. The bulk of the posts are on the old KCC site and will remain there.

So, let KCC end with the same words that it began: wolves eat sheep–help the Good Shepherd protect the flock.

This blog has ended. Go in peace.

A Prayer for Priests

A Prayer for Priests

Almighty God, look upon the face of Him who is the eternal High Priest, and have compassion on Your priests in today’s world. Remember that they are but weak and frail human beings. Stir up in them the grace of their vocation. Keep them close to You lest the enemy prevail against them, so that they may never do anything in the slightest degree unworthy of their sublime vocation.

O Jesus, I pray for Your faithful and fervent priests, for the unfaithful and tepid ones; for those laboring at home and abroad in distant mission fields; for those who are tempted; for those who are lonely and desolate; for those who are in purgatory.

But, above all, I recommend to You the priests dearest to me; the priest who baptized me; the priests who absolved me from my sins; the priests who instructed me or helped me by their encouragement. I pray devoutly for all the priests to whom I am indebted in any other way, in particular for [include name].

O Jesus, keep them all close to Your heart and bless them abundantly in time and in eternity.

Amen.

O Mary, Queen of the clergy, pray for us; obtain for us a number of holy priests.

Amen.

Prunana Vitae

Prunus persica is the Latin name for the common peach. Let me tell you how I know.

On a sunny Saturday morning in April last year, as I was re-stringing a classical guitar at the breakfast table and my wife was at the kitchen sink, the telephone rang. My hands seeming more full than hers, my wife picked up the telephone. It was for me. To my surprise, a lawyer on the other end of the line informed me that a distant relation of mine had died and had left me a 160-acre peach orchard in her will.

“Why me?” I asked, slightly stupefied.

The lawyer replied, “Why not?”

As I was unable to make a ready response to that, he asked me if I could meet him at the orchard later that day. We set up a meeting for about noon. His directions were to take Highway 10 for 60 miles east of Kansas City. He said I would see a rest stop on the right once I crossed the Carroll County line. He described the rest stop as a collection of picnic tables around an old cannon and a Civil War battle marker. A mile after that and on the same side of the road, he promised that I would find my new orchard.

We got there just before noon to find the lawyer already waiting for us. After we shook hands, he had me sign some paperwork, and then he handed me an old book entitled, So You Want to Grow Peaches. Looking at the book’s cover, it occurred to me that when I woke up that morning I had no idea that later in the day I would be holding a book about peaches. And, yet, there I was holding such a book at the gate of a peach orchard on a beautiful, beautiful day.

The orchard was in full bloom and the fragrance was splendid. When the breeze was just right, the smell was a little intoxicating. What could compare, I thought to myself. It seemed the perfect day to come into a peach orchard-the receipt of which was memorable like the birth of a child forever marks a day in the mind of a parent.

The lawyer asked me if my family and I wanted a tour of the orchard before he was on his way. We agreed.

“Do you know anything about growing peaches?” he asked.

“Not a thing,” I shrugged. As I said this, the older kids ran ahead to have fun, and I looked back at the lawyer, and said, “What’s to know? Nature does most of the work and then the peaches just have to be picked. Right? Isn’t most of it is just letting nature takes its course?”

God’s Problem?

God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question-Why We Suffer is a new book by Bart D. Ehrman, a former Baptist pastor and now a religious studies professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. The book explains his departure from faith after finally thinking the Bible’s many words insufficient to explain human suffering. He also believed the Bible unable to answer why bad things happen to good people.

Let us consider this book, since these are the very matters that once found me abandoning the faith of my forefathers.

Yes, I doubted God’s existence for a number of years. I was even proud of the supposedly inscrutable proof that I had. So, once upon a time, like a troll beside a bridge in a children’s fairy tale, I would not cross back to belief again until someone answered a riddle to my satisfaction, a riddle along the lines of “why do bad things happen to good people.”

Before anyone attempted an answer, I would point out my supposedly impossible quandary. I would adjure that God could be all-loving or all-powerful but not both, since the degree of human misery was such that an all-loving God would wish to make everything all right–and an all-powerful God would have the means to do it. Since human misery endured, I proclaimed that God was either all-loving and weak or all-powerful and indifferent.

In either case, I found Him unworthy of belief. To have me back on His side of the bridge, I wanted Him to be all-loving and all-powerful, something I said the world around me proved to be impossible. And yet, as from the beginning, God remains all-powerful and all-loving. How was this immortal riddle solved, at least to my satisfaction?

The answer to this question, like the answers to so many of the great questions, is too elegant and too simple for some. For after tying themselves up in rococo knots over years of questioning, some wish for the proper explanation to be as involved–to have each painstaking knot of doubt untied with all of the involvement and elaboration with which it was sinewed together. It is better, usually, to free a bound captive by cutting through the rope (even if, as shown below, Jesus once had one’s knots untied rather than cut through).

So, what is the answer to this question: Why do bad things happen to good people?

It is this.