For reasons, by which I mean, someone asked me to find something and in the process I found other things, I found a bunch of quotations that I had written on scraps of paper and then tried to lose.

To have beautiful and holy thoughts, to write books on the lives of the saints, all this does not count so much as answering as soon as you are called.

St. Therese of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul

Saint Therese was a Carmelite, but this much general application. I read a story about Mother Dolores Hart, who became a Benedictine nun at the Regina Laudis Abbey in Connecticut. She wrote about this discipline of stopping immediately when the bell rings for a change of activity. Once when she was using a chain saw and the bell rang she thought for a brief moment of just finishing just this one little tiny bit of … something. But then she put down the saw and stepped away and it “exploded”. Honestly I can’t remember what it did but she would have been seriously injured if she had still been holding it. Discipline saved her.

Next up, we have Pope Benedict XVI.

The faithful expect only one thing from priests: that they be specialists in promoting the encounter between man and God. The priest is not asked to be an expert in economics, construction, or politics. he is expected to be an expert in the spiritual life.

Pope Benedict XVI, May 2006, Apostolic Voyage in Poland

This one is important, but difficult for me to accept. Because people here in the United States do expect a priest to run what amounts to a small corporation in their parishes. There are multimillion dollar schools and churches which the priest must keep up. The staff with that infrastructure can be twenty to thirty people, who are subordinate to the priest, but at the same time, are actual employees of whatever diocese he is in. Very complex. And yet, a priest who gets refuses to do administrative tasks will fail. Even if what he does is delegate, it is vital that he do it, and trust in God.

Just to make the point a bit more pointed, the Arlington diocese has what seems like great seminaries for many aspects of the priest’s life. It promotes brotherly bonds which I have heard is exceptionally important for stopping burnout. (I have read of dioceses elsewhere, in which the priestly shortage is so acute that a guy is ordained, and two years later is taking care of three different parishes as pastor, without any associate. Then, he quits! Here it’s on the order of ten years before you are a pastor.) However, the seminary also regulates drinking alcohol and burning candles in your room, while your contemporaries buy houses and have children. Yes, I can understand why. But …. but …

Last quote…

….loving the sick, as Camillus did, is hard, demanding, messy, visceral, time-consuming and tedious work — and performed for people who are not at their best, and often ungrateful. In that kind of work, the devil tempts us to disgust, to self-importance, to the lie that there’s something more significant we should be doing with our time.  

That isn’t true, of course. But such work demands prayer — prayer for patience, for fortitude, for the grace of keeping one’s tongue. 

from the Tuesday, July 18, Pillar Post

What struck me totally about this quote is how much it doesn’t have to be the sick that evoke the lie, that there is “something more significant that we should be doing with our time.” Bringing up children is an activity that is just like this. Time-consuming. Tedious. Messy. Visceral. Oh, there are some very visceral diapers. Indeed.

There are also transcendent moments. I love my children and had many good moments bringing them up. BUT it is difficult work and children often don’t appreciate having their characters formed. Furthermore, they hold a mirror up to us and show us what we really are like, for better or worse. That expression they have. We probably had it on our faces once.

If they have faults, we may have enabled those faults or at least, failed to correct them. I have to say we aren’t responsible for some of what they do, in the sense of a mirror. A friend of mine had a 3 year old child who liked to take off his clothes and run around. She and I had a long conversation about how she never imagined having one of “those” kids. She had certainly never done this as a child, and was not happy that he did it. But she had to figure out how to stop it without killing him.

She is also worth remembering because when I broke my collar bone she took my two children and her two children to the grocery store, and bought me pain killers. I didn’t have any and couldn’t go get them because I was so far gone in the pain. Lovely Susanna.