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A Murderer and a Mother

For awhile, an 11-year-old girl named Maria repeatedly rejected the sexual advances of a man who worked on her family’s farm. The man repeatedly refused to respect her rejection. And there came a day — July 5, a hundred and nine years ago — on which the man wouldn’t take no for answer. He tried to rape Maria.
Maria shouted for him to stop, and not so she’d be protected from him, but so he’d be protected from the sin he’d commit in rape. Angry at her response, he stabbed her fourteen times. On July 6, her wounds would prove fatal but before she died, she spent a day praying for the man, saying she forgives him and hoping she’d someday see him in heaven. Then, she died.
The man spent about thirty years in prison. While there, Maria appeared to him to tell him she forgives him. When he was released from prison, he visited Maria’s mother’s house. When she answered the door, he asked for her forgiveness. She said she’d already forgiven him.
This is where healing starts.
Several years later, in 1950, the man and Maria’s mother went to Rome to attend a ceremony together the day Pope Pius XXI canonized her. Ever since, she has been St. Maria Goretti. Today (July 6) is her feast day.
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Empty.

Lent is the season of the church that starts on Ash Wednesday (today) and ends on Easter. It’s dark and somber. Solemn and quiet. Chock full of scripture, tradition and spiritual discipline.

Sometimes, especially toward the end, Lent is sad.

But I love it.

In an email I got around Ash Wednesday last year, a friend of mine who’s a Franciscan friar explained the concept of kenosis. It’s the “process of emptying,” he wrote, and it’s “very common in our Christian spirituality.” Especially during Lent.

Most practicing Roman Catholic Christians fast until dinner on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. We don’t eat meat on Ash Wednesday, or on any Friday in Lent. We usually make a 40-day sacrifice. Sometimes, it’s a sacrifice of time, like volunteering at a food bank, going to mass daily or waking up earlier every day to read the Bible. Other times, it’s actually giving up stuff. In past Lents, I’ve given up chocolate. Bread. CDs. Facebook. Once, I heard about a guy who gave up his bed (so he slept on the floor).

But what people give up is only part of the point. The rest of the point is what happens to you when you deny yourself something. Fewer things means fewer distractions. Time is finite. Attention is finite. The fewer our obligations, the more time and attention we can give to what’s left. The more time and attention we give, the higher the quality of it. When we give up stuff, it puts a new perspective on the difference between the words want and need. When we sacrifice, it empties us.

That, the Franciscan friar wrote, is the point.

“In order to let God fill our life, we need to empty it first.”

Here’s to an empty Lent.

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On waiting.

“For a stalk to grow or a flower to open there must be time that cannot be forced; nine months must go by for the birth of a human child; to write a book or compose music often years must be dedicated to patient research … To find the mystery there must be patience, interior purification, silence, waiting…” -Pope John Paul II

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Seek first His kingdom.

Pretty much daily, I need to remind myself that Jesus meant what he said. He didn’t speak to break an awkward silence or to draw attention to himself.

“Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things,” he said. “For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”

What we need: Food, drink, shelter, clothes.

Kick it up a notch.

What we think we need: Financial security. A significant other. Our way.

It boggles the mind that he told us a) what to do because b) he knows what we need and c) he will get it to us. Yet so often, we still seek first all the other stuff.

He meant what he said. Every word. Trust him.

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Why I Love Halloween

This post originally appeared on Catholic Revolutionaries. I wrote it a week after Halloween last year. As the holiday approaches, it’s been on my mind. So, I thought I’d share!

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Last weekend, my dad dumped a giant bag of fun size candy bars into a giant bowl. I peered out the window.

“I wonder when trick-or-treaters will get here,” I thought out loud, watching my neighbor — a space alien that night — decorate a tent in her driveway across the street. “I wonder how many we’ll get!”

When the kids finally came, clad in costumes like Spongebob and ninja and princess, I reached into the bowl of candy and tossed some of it into their plastic pumpkins and pillow cases. They thanked me, mostly, and their parents waved. And between each ring of the doorbell, I really couldn’t contain my excitement.

I love Halloween. I always have. This year, I think I’ve figured out why.

As a kid, I didn’t care much for the candy (maybe minus Twix), but the experience made me glow. I’d dress up like a gypsy, a witch or a cowgirl and traipse around suburbia knocking on doors, trick-or-treating. Something in the sometimes crisp Florida fall air and in the rubbing elbows in the streets with kids and parents I’d otherwise never meet just made me giddy. For one night — just one — we’d all let down our guard.

As a trick-or-treater, I’d wave at people I’d never met. I’d skip across streets and when cars came by, their drivers would smile and stop until we’d crossed. As an adult, I watch my quiet neighborhood come to life. I embrace the one night when suburbia welcomes the stranger.

That’s why I love Halloween.

In a neighborhood of folks who stay separated from their nameless neighbors by fences and closed garage doors and “our convenient Lexus cages,” to quote Switchfoot, everything changes for a night. We don’t get suspicious when strangers walk past our houses. We don’t yell at them if they cross the grass. We invite them to our homes. And then we give them things.

Imagine a world where every day felt like that. But instead of candy, we could give guests what they need.

“Instead of monsters and zombies, people could not dress up as anything,” my best friend Laurel said the other day. We could all just try to be like Jesus. If only it didn’t take a mask to get us to welcome a stranger, and it didn’t take candy to get them to come. And in other ways, if only every day could be more like Halloween.