by T.J. Burdick | May 28, 2021 | Something Catholic
Every morning, my daughter and I drive for 25 minutes to get to the school where I teach and she learns. We start with a short prayer asking Jesus, Mary, and Joseph to protect us and help us serve God better. After that, no music, no audiobooks, just silence.
My daughter typically takes out a book to read.
I pray. Specifically, I pray the rosary.
For whatever reason, I can never complete the entire rosary during our morning drive. If we were in an adoration chapel, 25 minutes would be more than enough time, but when I’m at the steering wheel mentally preparing for my school day, distractions abound, so much so that I typically can just barely finish the third mystery before pulling into the teacher’s parking lot.
For months, this weighed on me. It hurt my scruples not being able to finish something I had started in the spiritual realm, and I felt bad for making my Guardian Angel finish all of those rosaries. As soon as my work-day started, I’d already feel like I had failed at prayer.
It didn’t end there. In fact, it only got worse. I pray Morning and Evening Prayer from the Divine Office as part of my requirements from the Dominican Rule (I’m a Lay Dominican) and there were multiple times when I would either go to bed too exhausted or wake up without time and energy to pray.
No rosary. No Divine Office. No prayers. No spiritual zeal.
So, I did something drastic: I axed the rosary from my prayer life.
Before you get up in arms, know that I love the rosary, I really REALLY do, but as much impact that it has had on my life in the past, I simply cannot allow it to be the foundation of my spiritual life like it once was. It’s powerful, and beautiful, but it isn’t required, and at this point of my life, I simply don’t have the extra time to spare, especially considering the priority I’m to give to the Divine Office.
Christians, especially those attempting to become devout, have a tendency to put too much pressure on themselves to “pray without ceasing.” We think that if our minds and hearts aren’t completely set upon the things of God and His manifestations in our lives, then we run the risk of being overtaken by “the world.” So, we set prayer goals like “I’m going to pray the rosary / read scripture / do a Novena / [add your fav devotion here], etc.” Then, when we fail to achieve those goals, we’re stricken with guilt for not having done all we could have to make it work, exasperating whatever spiritual benefit we might have gained from starting it in the first place.
Stop putting so much pressure on yourself to pray.
Don’t stop praying entirely, but find a balance.
As for me, I’ve lowered my rosary expectations. Every morning on my drive to work, I pray a single mystery. This provides me with enough time to focus on prayer, prepare myself mentally work and, you know, actually drive.
by T.J. Burdick | May 21, 2021 | Something Catholic
Five years ago, I opened the doors to an online learning platform known as Signum Dei. I wanted to create a single site that would feed catechesis in entertaining bites to Catholics both young and old alike. It took a LOT of work to build the three pillar programs:
- Tiny Thomists for families with young children
- Lit Catholicism for teens and young adults
- Signum Dei for adults who want to study their faith seriously
Usually, I open up registration very fall for new students, but this week, I decided to make it evergreen, which means that registration is open now and forever.
If you’d like to help my writing career and learn more about your Catholic faith, please consider clicking here and becoming a member of Signum Dei. If you already are a member, thank you so much for your support– it means a lot to me.
Something you should know before you sign up: due to the business of my writing schedule I will not be able to offer any new courses through Signum Dei for the foreseeable future. That being said, the current courses are quite comprehensible and will serve you immensely for years to come. However, if you are joining Signum Dei with the expectation that more will be developed, then I’d recommend not signing up. If, however, you simply want to support me by becoming a member, then that’d be swell to🙂
If you’d like to support me and don’t need/want a subscription to Signum Dei, you can do that too. Simply click on the “Donate” link at the top of this page (or click here).
by T.J. Burdick | May 14, 2021 | Something Catholic
The Priest at my childhood parish was publicly defrocked recently and, I have to be honest, I’m struggling with it. I always considered him a holy man, rich in mercy and kindness. A few years back, he was accused of having a relationship with a woman and, while it caused a lot of uproar, I never really registered it as I was in the throws of living my own life as a new father and busy teacher.
Then, the accusations became confirmed. Worse yet, the woman was a minor when it all started.
My first reaction was shock. How could nobody have noticed? And for so many years? How blind was I as a young adult to not realize the secrets that swam in the parish I spent so much time in?
After the initial shock, anger set in. How could he? What kind of holy man abuses a minor? It’s scandals like this (and all of the others that have come to light in the last decade) that makes it difficult for me to even attempt evangelization. After all, who’s going to convert to the religion of “child molesters”?
Then, mercy sunk in. The standard by which Priests are judged is justly higher than that of the lay man/woman. St. James himself wrote “My brothers and sisters, not many of you should become teachers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly” (James 3:1). Whenever someone is called to teach the faith, and more importantly to live it in the state of Holy Orders, of course God will scrutinize their deeds more closely.
That’s when I went retrospective. What about me? Why don’t I get half as angry with my own sins? How come I’m more upset with Fr. Defrocked than I am with my own imperfections?
This is the difficulty we have as Catholics in today’s world: We are evangelizing with a handicap.
We are at a disadvantage when we attempt to spread the Gospel because we aren’t 100% able to live it. We’re chained to our vices, some with iron less breakable than others. We serve one Master who only has a plan A- to love. We also serve another master for which we most of our time, money and energy devising, carrying out, and experiencing the effects of a plan B- to love ourselves.
Yet, even in our imperfect human condition, we are still charged by Master A (God, if I wasn’t clear), to carry His love to the ends of the earth. Regardless of the darkness that overshadows our intent, or the malevolent reputation we have inherited by our leaders, we are still justified by Christ in our efforts. We are still conduits of mercy in our brokenness. We are still capable of choosing to love.
by T.J. Burdick | May 7, 2021 | Something Catholic
According to National Geographic, scientists have identified more than 1.2 million species of animal and plant life. What makes this statistic remarkable is not what we know, but what we don’t know– according to the same source some 7.5 million species (or 86% of all life) are still unknown to us (source).
When I discovered this fun fact, I thought to myself, “How can they possibly know what we don’t know? I mean, if there are 7.5 million other species that we don’t know about, how can we assume that they exist all together?
The answer: imagination bound with logic.
The earth is a massive planet. Science is a relatively new thing for humanity. Given the short amount of time we’ve been assigning species to living things, the sheer magnitude of the earth’s surface and sea, along with our inability to travel to the more remote places on the planet, reason leads us to believe that there’s more life on this rock than we know. When combined with the imagination, the concept takes on an added layer of amazing– what do these lives look like? How do they survive? How can we get to them?
The same process is one that I am currently exploring in my Catholic faith. For more than a decade, I’ve been studying Theology and Philosophy from the viewpoint of reason (almost) exclusively. A logical interpretation of faith via deductive reasoning, logical reflection, and a whole lot of Aquinas have made me a really, really boring person to talk to when it comes to God (ask my wife!). But no matter how much I understand, I find myself falling into the existential abyss that some of my favorite scholarly Saints fel into too, I’ve discovered that the more I know, the more I realize I don’t know about God.
And that’s not a bad thing.
Something truly remarkable happens when you hit this level of spiritual obscurity; you see things differently.
For me it started with the fiction of Lewis and Tolkien. Their world-building and fantastical treatment of the faith led me to think about just how little my theological understandings of Catholicism (and religion in general) amount to. If my scientific generation can only identify 14% of all known species on this physical earth, then surely we are just as behind, if not more, in understanding an omnipotent, omniscient, and infinite God?
Initially, this realization led me into spiritual panic. All I had worked so hard for academically seemed useless when it came to sanctity: I could explain what I believed, but I could never ascend to the fullness of truth. At least, not completely.
In fact, this reality was one that Lewis himself passed through during his conversion to Christianity. He struggled to identify the source of his holy longings as something (or someone) purely based on reason and faith. It wasn’t until Tolkien influenced the young Lewis through the imaginative completion of his reasonable faith:
“For Tolkien, grasping Christianity’s meaningfulness took precedence over its truth. It provided the total picture, unifying and transcending these fragmentary and imperfect insights… Tolkien thus helped Lewis to realise that a ‘rational’ faith was not necessarily imaginatively and emotionally barren. When rightly understood, the Christian faith could integrate reason, longing, and imagination” (McGrath, C.S. Lewis – A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet)
We have been reminded by the Thomists on nearly every occasion with which we have the good fortune to hear them preach that faith and reason are intimately bound. But for today’s Catholic (and for the C.S. Lewis’ of the world), a singular element is missing, one that might be the most important of all: imagination.
The knowledge that can be mined in the caves of the Catholic doctrine are second to the infinite mysteries that can be found in the skies. Faith and reason are solid first steps toward those celestial clouds, but until we can shape-shift our faith into the wings of a dragon through a proper Christian imagination, we will never live lives holy enough to soar to such heights.
by T.J. Burdick | Apr 30, 2021 | Something Catholic, Uncategorized
Last year my wife and I thought it would be a great idea to buy a house while she was 7 months pregnant (during a pandemic). We’re smart like that.
We needed the space. Our 3 bed 2 bath wasn’t going to cut it with baby number five (+ a room for my mother in law who lives with us). So, we put an offer down on a bigger house, worked our butts off to sell our own, and within a span of about 2 months we sold the house, occupied our new one and the weirdest thing happened – we became financially stable.
Ever since I joined the workforce as a teacher fifteen years ago, I had always lived paycheck to paycheck, tax return to tax return. During that decade and a half, my wife and I were missionaries, then first-time home owners, then first, second, third, and fourth-time parents. We paid back 5 figure student loans while paying straight up for my five-figure Masters degree. We saved. We sacrificed. We scraped by.
We might not have been able to afford family vacations or extracurriculars for our kids, but our hearts were always full with the few blessings we were given – safety, food, and our relationship with God and one another were all we needed. We were a family, and our most honored member was Lady Poverty.
Then, when our bank account grew, something changed.
Financial burden can be transformed into a spiritual weight that rivals that of Atlas, and it’s that heavy lifting that can take its toll on your soul.
Granted, a huge burden was removed from my shoulders – I no longer had the constant stress of not being able to pay off my regular bills (let alone those unexpected ones),
However, the spiritual ramifications of being financially stable are a forest of vines that I am still sifting through:
- Should I save $ for my children’s college education?
- Should I spend $ on a vacation that we’ll never forget?
- Should I guard $ to be prepared for an unexpected emergency?
- Should I give $ to my parish or a missionary organization?
Every time I cut one of these creepers down, 30 more hang in their wake.
When I was poor, I only had one concern: survive.
Now that I’m financially stable, I don’t know how to use my $ to serve best because everything feels like a risk. At the same time, inaction eats away at my scruples. It feels like I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t.
I’ve never loved the idea of $, I’ve only ever known that I needed more of it to survive. Now that it is a semi-abundant resource, I know not how to use it to honor God.
When (if) I ever get through these vines and to the celestial castle that they’re protecting, I’ll send word to let you know.
Note: I realize that this article may come off as overdramatic. I mean, I’m actually complaining about financially stable, which is arrogant, especially during a global pandemic. To which I respond with St. Paul’s words to Timothy: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows” (1 Tim 6:10). I am highly aware that my dependency on my bank account is somehow related to my spiritual state. What i don’t know is to what degree I have become a slave to it.
by T.J. Burdick | Apr 23, 2021 | Something Catholic
Spiritual dryness. The pandemic has made many of us dry inside. Just last week, my family and I went to Mass and physically accepted the Eucharist for just the third time in more than a year. The graces that the single act provided for my family were notable- both my wife and I are still in awe of just how much going to Mass has freed us from a plaguing aridity in our souls.
For months, my spirit was numb. It wasn’t until I went to confession recently that I realized just how lifeless I truly was. I found myself confessing sins I didn’t normally commit because, frankly, I didn’t care. I didn’t see a benefit to prayer. I didn’t see the point in spiritual reading, contemplation, not even simple acts of charity. Life felt meaningless.
Father, in his sage wisdom, told me that I was in a “Lenten desert,” but the problem was that we were in the Easter season, no deserts allowed! We laughed, and he went on to say that sometimes, our spiritual state doesn’t align with the liturgical calendar. When that happens, we need to cleanse ourselves with the life-giving water of Christ in the Sacraments.
Here’s thing, we need to turn on the faucet.
It’s like taking a shower: God’s grace is waiting in the pipes of our lives. At times, the pressure is so strong that the pipes leak and pour grace upon us regardless of our intentions (or lackthereof). Other times, we intentionally remove our worldly clothes and step into the stall, naked in his sight. We pull the curtain behind us, protecting us from the worldly allurements, then we turn the knob and let the water flow.
The Sacraments, then, act like the little hooks that keep our shower curtains from falling when the water hits our heads allowing all of God’s graces to fall upon us, cleansing us from the lesser beings we would become without Him.
Covid has forced us to live our lives in ways that have proven to be… difficult. We’ve suffered financially. We’ve suffered loneliness. And, perhaps most importantly, we’ve suffered spiritually by not being able to participate fully in the Sacraments and the graces that come with them.
If you are feeling spiritually dry, frequent the sacraments as best as you are able. Let their celestial water purify your soul as they sustain the curtain between who you are, and who you could be without God’s grace.
Get wet.
