Credo: Brutal Honesty and UnBrutish Reason

Yes, I am still trying to find time to write about the election (my first reactions are here) but until I do here is one thought and links to two must-reads:

Thought: I need to go to confession this Saturday, because just looking at Harry Reid was bad for my soul this morning. I wonder if going to confession and unloading all of our negative feelings into the sacrament isn’t a very good idea for many of us? Just wanted to put that out there. But if you do it, bless the poor priest who has to receive it all — both the one in the confessional, and the High Priest in heaven!

Meanwhile, the Year of Faith has inspired both Tim Muldoon and Melanie Bettinelli to closely examine our creed. Melanie has invited a whole slew of writers to take it on, line by line, while Tim is doing it on his own, and this morning they both offer up winners.

For Melanie, our own Calah Alexander has taken up Of all things visible and invisible”, and as she is still postpartum, she goes brutally honest and takes it to a profound place:

God seems lost to me. I feel like I’m praying to a void, and I’m having trouble convincing myself that I ever felt otherwise. Hope, faith, belief, they all seem to have slipped out of my grasp, in such a way that I can’t remember what life was like when things were different. I look at my children, all conceived through the mysterious non-workings of NFP, and I love them, but I wonder, “why am I doing this? Why am I following these teachings, why do I believe these things?” I can’t remember the faith and conviction I once had, and worst of all, I don’t really care much anymore. I’ve skipped Mass on several Sundays, telling the Ogre that I don’t feel well enough to go, that the baby is too cranky, that I’m still post-partum so I get a dispensation, when really I just don’t care. It seems unimportant and irrelevant, God and Christ and praying and all that. None of it seems to have any connection to my life, nor does any of it seem real to me anymore. It’s all just invisible.

But following the strictures of the Church, the wishes of my husband, and plain old habit, we had Lincoln baptized two weekends ago. Baptisms take place in a church, and usually after a Mass, so I bit the bullet and went.

Read it all, particularly if you’re feeling laid low by recent events. Read what a little bit of discipline, born more of obedience than anything else, and a little bit of willingness, can bring forth. God only ever asks for our willingness.

Then, after the heart-feeding that is Calah’s piece, you can feed the head with Muldoon, who is looking at “maker of heaven and earth and taking on the “Creationism vs Science” argument:

To profess faith that God created heaven and earth is emphatically not about professing ignorance of particle physics or indifference to billions of years of evolution, both cosmic and terrestrial. It is to profess that everything that is knowable through science—from Higgs boson to hominid evolution—has meaning. The researcher in theoretical physics, no less than the professor of Divinity, performs a loving work of meaning-making, and in so doing cooperates in the ever-unfolding work of divine creativity. In such work, the original sin is falsehood: the unwillingness to pursue one’s questions fully, to stop at partial explanations.

Great stuff from two of my favorite writers. Enjoy!

And yes, that is a beautiful crucifix; it’s hanging on the wall of my office right now. You can find it here.