Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment. St. Bernard of Clairvaux said that there are four levels of love:  Love of self for self’s sake. Love of God and others for self’s sake. Love of God and others for their own sake. And love of self for God’s sake. When we get stuck in Level 2, pride is often at the root of it. We spend a lot of time trying to “fix” people. You know, to tweak God’s “masterpiece” just a bit. If we want to grow in perfect love, we need to resist this, and to move toward that third level, when we love others […]

Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment. I realize this might sound a bit like “Keepsake.” Please bear with me. Creating and preserving the memories of family life is a really important aspect of motherhood.  From baby books and family recipe files to scrapbooks and (more recently) personal blogs, we are the keepers of the important milestones of our children’s lives. Some images are strongly visual: a flour-dusted toddler grinning proudly over a freshly baked pan of sparkly sugar cookies. The chocolate-smeared princess on her first birthday. Craig and I with our two good friends, celebrating my birthday in a hot air balloon. Others are a […]

Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment. In Mark 10:6-8, Jesus describes marriage in its most elemental terms. “From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother, and be joined to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh.” In this passage, the leaving and cleaving (or “joining”) is attributed to the husband; in our egalitarian culture, the process is one that is experienced by both the man and woman, each of whom has a personal history that to some extent must be set aside in order to commit fully to married […]

Begin with Prayer of Abandonment. I was well into adulthood — over thirty, in fact — before I had acquired enough “stuff” to need a moving van. Up until that time, everything I owned in the world would fit in the back of my Toyota: a large box of books, another of kitchen equipment, and some clothes and linens. Oh, and one more thing: a large gray suitcase full of memorabilia. Old letters and pictures, yearbooks, t-shirts, scrapbooks, awards, report cards and diplomas, and a Mason jar full of dried flower blossoms from every corsage and bouquet I had ever received. Most of it had no real […]

Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment. “Our labor here is brief, but the reward is eternal. Do not be disturbed by the clamor of the world which passes like a shadow. Do not let the false delights of a deceptive world deceive you”  (St. Clare). Socrates once observed that the key to greatness is to be in reality what one appears to be. Perhaps there is no greater opportunity than marriage to attain this consistency of character. In the crucible of family life, it is impossible to hide one’s true self — with all its attending strengths and weaknesses — for long. While there are […]