My Christmas Letter to You, Whether You Celebrate Christmas or Not

Dear and Precious One,

God loves you with a deep and everlasting love. His is the only perfect love you will experience here on earth. All other loves, as beautiful as they can be, are only pale imitations of His true and abiding Love. He resides in your heart, caring for each precious beat of it, whispering to the inmost part of you His words of True Love.

Like all good loves, He listens, too. He waits for your word, longs to hear you utter the smallest of prayers so that He can hear your desire for Him, for change, for perfection. He wants you to love Him in return. He will never force Himself upon you. He will wait for you and love you from afar for as long as you demand it.

He knows how you breathe, how you feel, how you wonder. He also knows your struggles. He meets you with Mercy when you fail to live in the way that He knows is best for you. He asks you to wait for something much better than you can imagine. He sighs with your impatience and anger at Him and loves you anyway.

Your life is so much more than you can even imagine. His plans for you are so far above your ideas as the Heavens are above the Earth. Allow Him, the author of your very soul, to whisper the first parts of His desire
s for you in the silence of your expectant heart.

I will pray each day for you, my brother, my sister in Christ,
Christie Martin

An encouragement...

Christ had Simeon to help Him carry His cross.

You have Christ...


To my mother and my father as they cope with a new burden together: You have faithfully borne all your burdens. You can cross this chasm, too. I love you. I'm with you. You are not alone!

"Be not afraid..." Pope John Paul II

The Guns in Disguise

Come Holy Ghost, Creator Blessed!

I had the privilege of spending yesterday on retreat with the youth of Saint Martin's Church preparing for Confirmation. Let me tell you first of all how impressed I am with these kids. Moms, dads, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents: you have every reason to be proud. I witnessed prayerful homage to Our Lord, genuine compassion for each other, and rollicking solid good humor in these kids. They are an outstanding group of young people, ready and able to take up the reigns of adult Christianity in our Church. Thanks be to God for all of them!

Sister Dolorette of the School Sisters of Notre Dame put together the retreat and did an excellent job. Her stories reminded me, once again, that nobody lives life quite like a Sister!

She shared one story of two teens in a South American country, facilitating catechises in their village. The former catechists had been abducted and found near dead, yet these teens stood and taught their catechises even while government guns had them in their sights! Sister Dolorette described a Communion Service with rifles trained on the congregation, and asked the young man and woman how they dared. The man answered her, "If I wasn't willing to die for Him, I couldn't live for Him."

In America, Sister explained, the guns are not so obvious. The dangers are hidden and seductive. We are still in mortal danger, but the weapons trained upon us are subtle, even packaged as something to be desired. In our ignorance we grab hold of the barrel and dance with our own doom here, all the while thinking we are free.

So, in some sense, our teens have a harder time recognizing the dangers to faith, the threats to their very futures as whole and healthy adults. We live in a country that pretends there is no such thing as sin, except the sin of being faithful. These children are coming of age in a land where Anti-Catholicism is the last socially acceptable prejudice. They will have to fight to hang onto their beliefs. They will have to battle the subtle pitfalls of a seductive world to hang onto their God-given right to be Catholic.

And from what I saw yesterday, these kids are ready for it.

Please pray that all of our candidates have hearts set aflame for the Truth!

Hang in there!

A few weeks into Lent and your intentions may not be translating into actions. Don't let your pride get in the way of perfecting yourself. You will never be perfect. It's that simple. You will always have to be humble enough to see that there is more work yet to be done. Mother Teresa reminded us that "God doesn't require us to succeed; he only requires that you try." Yearn for God, but you will not become God. If you think you should be perfect, you never will even come close. If you've fallen, forgive yourself, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and join the rest of us who are striving to become who we were made to be. It is a dusty work.

I'll be hitting the Confessional soon myself--of that I'm certain.

Oprah and the Dominicans

Polite, respectful, interested... Those are not words you expect to associate with a daytime TV host and Catholicism. Oprah's interview with the Sisters of Mary this past week was a delightful interlude for those of us more used to being the butt of jokes. (Not that this is bad: humility is good for the soul and watching The View could be considered an act of penance)

Rare as it is, when the media gets us right, we should celebrate. We should encourage. Most of all, we should let them know. So, Oprah, if you are listening: way to go!

Segment 1


Segment 2


Segment 3


Segment 4


If this looks good to you, contact the Sisters here.

To contact Oprah and thank her for treating the Sisters respectfully!

Lent for little ones

I've got a house full of little ones. Lent is a challenge. How do you convince a four year old that giving up a good thing is a good thing? Well, in all honesty, that's hard to do. We simply use the "In our family" explanation. It goes like this, "In our family, we don't eat candy or sweets during Lent." Then we go from there. We explain why we offer it up and all the other useful stuff that will serve to explain matters when they are a little older, but in the meantime, they accept this line in the sand difference between our family and others.

Being Catholic, we like to involve all the senses in our daily walk with God. We've talked with the kids all year about how our sins hurt each other and especially how they hurt God. To make this point concrete we have a Crown of Thorns during Lent. It sits on our dining room table next to a tin of toothpicks. When we hurt other family members through carelessness, spitefulness, or harsh words, we apologize and then put a thorn in the crown. We leave the toothpicks in our crown until daddy and mommy make it to Confession, when we get home, we all cheer and clap as we remove all the toothpicks and start afresh. The kids tell each other to be good and it becomes a challenge to keep the crown free of thorns for as long as possible.

Now as you can imagine, by the end of Lent mommy and daddy are being reminded very frequently to go to Confession. Also, the kids have gotten the hang of rebuking the mote in each other's eyes while tripping over the logs in their own. Naturally, with this exercise comes the accompanying exercise in charity and self-examination (that's what's known as the "flip side" by those old enough to remember 45s at sleepovers).

For those who seek and do not find...

God is. I got that message loud and clear one day when I least expected it. Faith wasn't something I merited or even asked for. It came as a complete surprise. No doubts here.

For those who have no surety but only doubts and longing you could take my word for it, but I can't imagine that would be satisfying.

I could also show off my faith to you. "I'm so certain!" I could tease. "No doubts here!" I could brag. Not only would that be wrong, it would be all wrong.

Instead, I'll tell you something I also know for sure: your faith is greater than mine. I'll offer you this in explanation. God gives us what we need to seek Him. Once I knew the truth, I would continue to seek the truth. I am like a dog with a bone, I will gnaw away at it until I get to the marrow. I'm not about to let it go. But, to seek God, I needed Him first. I had to have proof. Any amount of doubt would have lost me. I am that petty.

What I'm saying is this, faith is a gift from God. The less mature of us, the ones like me, are given more. We can't handle the subtelties of faith.

You seek. You long. You suffer for God. That is the truer faith. You are made of a harder wood than I. Do not be afraid.

Imagine that we are children learning to walk to our Father. You have stood and taken your tottering steps on your own. You stumble and fall like the rest of us, but our Father knows you. You may pout a bit, even cry, but you are going to stand up and keep going.

Me and my ilk? We give up too easily. We're distracted by the toys lying about us. For us, we need a constant guiding hand or we will sit and idle away our time staring at the dust motes dancing in the light.

You, though, you who seek and do not find? You are made of stronger stuff. You are the older brother or sister. I'll cheer you from behind.