Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

During the last few weeks of Lent, I worked on writing my master thesis. Mercifully, my professor let me take as much time as I needed after the baby was born, and we finally decided I should have a draft turned in around April 1st. I should hear back from him any day now about corrections and additions I need to make. Josh has already finished his thesis. We will next have to have them bound; the college's library will then have our theses as books on its shelves, along with those of our classmates.

I also started back at work in March - in a sense. I show up on Tuesday nights when the Parish School of Religion (CCD) classes meet and work on paperwork at home. I drop by the rectory just to get some things out of my office after the secretaries have already left; it's easier that way. I now have to start preparing for First Communion. We have about 25 kids receiving their first Eucharist at the beginning of May. We were planning on having a bilingual Mass since a majority of the students come from Hispanic families; however, the priest who speaks Spanish in our parish was reassigned as of this week. So I guess I'll be asking the deacon to be there to give the homily at least in both languages.

Here are a couple of pictures of John Paul from the end of March - two and a half months old:




During Holy Week, Josh helped to lead a retreat of sorts for the students at his school (all boys) and the girls' Catholic high school. It started at 5 pm on Holy Wednesday and went through 5 pm on Holy Thursday. Following the model set up by the USCCB the students and teachers who wished to participate fasted for those 24 hours - it was a "Fast-a-thon" - in solidarity with the poor and especially migrants, since migration was the theme this year. The retreat began with Mass and icebreakers, and the students learned about Catholic Social Teaching through talks and activities. John Paul and I went home for the night and returned around 10 am the next day. It was nice to see the students learning more about migration, since many of them take the attitude - no doubt learned from their parents - that "those illegals" should not be here. They came to see that this goes against our Catholic faith. Persons who are in this country "illegally" still have dignity and are our brothers and sisters in Christ. They were challenged to ask questions (such as why people feel the need to migrate here "illegally" in the first place) instead of accepting the common attitude toward migrants as criminals or leeches on the economy. I was impressed to see the maturity of some of my former students, who are now seniors. The retreat concluded with making and eating together a simple meal of rice, beans, and tortillas.

Josh, John Paul, and I attended the bilingual 3:00 Good Friday service at our church, which was packed. We considered following the crowd watching the living way of the cross process through the streets, put on by the Hispanic youth group. However, John Paul was apparently getting hungry, so we walked home instead. (We usually walk to church since it is only a few blocks - 5 to 10 minutes - from our house; that's much nicer than putting JP in the car, driving two minutes, and taking him out again.) On Holy Saturday we had lunch with Josh's parents and brother before driving to Houma to spend the night at Grandpa's house, along with my parents. Uncle Al, Aunt Delia, and Austin came in from Houston, and my sister and her boyfriend came in from Shreveport. Although Josh and I prefer the Easter Vigil Mass, we decided to hang out with my family Saturday evening and go to Mass with everyone in the morning; we weren't sure if John Paul would make it through the longer Vigil Mass either. Before Mass on Easter morning, John Paul was sporting his bumGenius diaper and bunny ears:



Here he is with his Mia (my mom):



Mass was very good, and it was nice to see the people from my grandparents' church again. Celebrating the Resurrection of our Lord was of course joyful, but there was a touch of sadness without having Grandma physically with us. Yet she was with us in the liturgy, celebrating Christ's triumph over death with the communion of saints in heaven. Easter last year was spent between my grandparents' house and the hospital, where we would go to see Grandma during the visiting hours in the critical care unit. I hope she was happy watching us all together this year.

After Mass, JP donned the bunny ears once again. Here he is with his Grandpa (my Dad) and his Aunt Amber (my sister):





Looking at his Easter basket:




A couple of family pictures:




The table of candy, colored eggs, and decorations is a tradition that goes back to my Grandma's childhood. The cutouts are originals from my great-grandmother. The sheer amount of candy was a source of fascination when I was I child; I still love to walk by the table and eat pieces of chocolate all day long!

We had a crab and crawfish boil as our Easter feast. Here are some pictures of the prep work:


That's James, Amber's boyfriend, me with JP in the wrap, and Amber; this was James and John Paul's first crawfish boil. James is stirring up the live crawfish as they're being purged. Here are Grandpa and Dad getting the pot ready:



And here's Grandpa with Aunt Delia and Uncle Al:


We had a nice day; the food was great and it was nice spending time with family. Josh's parents also spent part of the day with us, and the neighbors dropped by, too. There was lots of candy to take home; Josh and I have almost finished our share of it already. A couple days after Easter, here's what JP was up to:

Prayer for Grandparents

I just wanted to share this Universal Prayer For Grandparents, composed by His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI this year:


Lord Jesus,
you were born of the Virgin Mary,
the daughter of Saints Joachim and Anne.
Look with love on grandparents the world over.
Protect them! They are a source of enrichment
for families, for the Church and for all of society.
Support them! As they grow older,
may they continue to be for their families
strong pillars of Gospel faith,
guardian of noble domestic ideals,
living treasuries of sound religious traditions.
Make them teachers of wisdom and courage,
that they may pass on to future generations the fruits
of their mature human and spiritual experience.

Lord Jesus,
help families and society
to value the presence and roles of grandparents.
May they never be ignored or excluded,
but always encounter respect and love.
Help them to live serenely and to feel welcomed
in all the years of life which you give them.

Mary, Mother of all the living,
keep grandparents constantly in your care,
accompany them on their earthly pilgrimage,
and by your prayers, grant that all families
may one day be reunited in our heavenly homeland,
where you await all humanity
for the great embrace of live without end. Amen!

On the Child as a Gift, and Mary

I've been posting so sporadically because Josh and I are finishing up our last class in our masters program, and since it's a summer class, it's more intensive. We're currently taking Mariology - which is the study of Mary - and recently had to complete either a research paper or a book report for the class. I chose to read a book by Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) and Hans Urs von Balthasar called Mary: The Church at the Source.

I mention this because I came across a passage in Balthasar's section of the book that I wanted to share with you:

For their part, parents who believe in God know without reflection that by themselves they can never be the adequate principle of the production of a human being. They give God the glory and thank him for the gift of their child, just as the child thanks them and, together with them, God, for himself. In a sound anthropology, then, the two things are inseparable aspects of a single whole. A sound anthropology does not sunder the parents’ fruitfulness into a purely physiological half and a separate spiritual-ethical half; the two aspects belong together in man, because man is inseparably body, soul, and spirit. Nor does it seek to sift out human causality from divine causality. It would be highly inexact to say that the parents produced ‘only the body’ of the child while God added the soul (if it were that simple, animals would have greater procreative power than man). Nor does it make any sense to separate the ‘spiritual soul’ (deriving from the parents) from the ‘person’, which comes from God. Man is one, and the parents and the Creator cooperate in bringing him forth in an unfathomably mysterious way.

I suppose I had always thought of a simple division of labor, it you will, in which the parents provide the matter (the body) and God provides the form (the soul) of the new human person. In thinking about Balthasar’s words, however, I realized what a large role any given set of parents really have in the procreation of children. It really is mysterious how a being that once did not exist suddenly does exist and how human persons are given such great responsibility to bring into existence (with God) new beings. Just ponder that for a moment...

Then I thought about what this statement has to do with Mary, and I realized what a large role Mary really had in the Incarnation (when God became Man in Jesus Christ). She cooperated with God in such a way that she contributed, in a certain mysterious sense, to who Christ is – in his body and in his soul. She of course did not give Christ his divinity, but if we remember that Christ remains both God and Man for all eternity, just imagine how pivotal the role of Mary is. She is properly called Theotokos, the Mother of God (and has been called such at least since the year 431). Furthermore, if she is the Mother of Christ, and the Church is the Body of Christ, as Paul writes in his letters, Mary is also the Mother of the Church - our Mother. There's so much to think about here!

Balthasar continues in the next paragraph:

One owes thanks for what one has received as a gift. Now, in the bringing forth of a human being there is – objectively, at least – an intention to give. Morally healthy and responsible parents do not procreate and bear a child primarily for themselves, which would be a form of egotism, but abandon themselves into the great movement of life, which gives itself away to further generations and consents when the newly begotten child becomes independent, “leaves father and mother and cleaves to his wife”, and becomes a giver of the gift in his own right. What is begotten is one who can beget: such is God’s deepest intention in creating.

My first thoughts in reading this passage were about how we explain why God created human persons in the first place: because he loves us. Having a better understanding of time and God’s timelessness than I did as a child, I thought I understood such logic. However, I think Balthasar makes a deeper point. We can all understand, as human beings, the idea of loving a child before he or she is even conceived. We can see that the child is a gift, not something that can just be apprehended at will. When I thought about that, I understood the idea of God creating us because he loves us. We do not have to exist for God to love us; he can love us before we exist, just as a couple awaiting the gift of a child already loves the child before he or she exists.

When Josh and I were, not too long ago, pondering our future and where children and our education fit, the best advice we received came from a former professor of mine at the University of Dallas. He wrote to me in an email, "I would not put off having children. In the larger scheme of things, this is the most important thing you can do, with huge eternal consequences." Wow. That statement really hit us. Of course participating in the creation of new human beings is vastly more important than any degrees we can ever earn! We'll still try to pursue Ph.D. work, but if it doesn't work out, it won't be the end of the world by far. Perhaps it just means God is calling us to another way of life.

And when we thought about life that way, we definitely loved this child before he/she existed. In fact, as God does with each of us, we loved this child into existence.


*Source: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mary: The Church at the Source, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 127-128.