A Sorrowful Mystery

Rebecca and I believe babies are a gift and meant to be the fruit of a covenant of love. They come tumbling into the world and into a couple’s lives reckless, utterly dependent, and babbling that
inarticulate speech of the heart that only the Spirit can understand. A baby pulls two people in love into a deeper love, a love, they say, that seems scandalously deeper than even the love they have for each other. “Three is the magic number” – reflecting the Life and Love that is God. I think this is how God tries to make us holy, and whole, and unselfish by allowing us to cooperate with Love in making another self. There we get a taste of His Fatherly care.

Rebecca and I know this, believe this, and since our wedding day five years ago this August, we’ve thirsted for this new life. A life wherein the word of our love becomes flesh. But the sorrowful mystery in our life’s rosary is that we cannot have our own biological children. We knew babies were gifts never to be grasped. For us, the process of In Vitro Fertilization seemed to be tampering with those sacred powers that Psalm 131 says are “too great for us” and beyond our reach. Our faith informs us as well that IVF would pull our biology from our theology, creating life outside of the expression of our love. So we mourned the loss of little ones and wept like Hannah, praying for a miracle and preparing our hearts for the call of adoption.

Then we found both in Snowflakes, an organization that seeks to heal the wound caused by aggressive reproductive technologies like IVF. It’s little known, but when a couple have their sperm and eggs meet in a glass dish (in vitro), science assists in the hopes of making more “viable” embryos for implantation; sometimes up to dozens of little souls. When an IVF couple achieves a desired pregnancy, those remaining little ones are cryo-preserved (frozen) sometimes for years and years, awaiting the warmth of a mother’s womb and a chance for life. Across the country, there are over 400,000 of these frozen embryos. Science has rushed into a mystery “too great for us” and the question now is, what do we do with these embryos? Destruction is an assault on their dignity, as is embryonic stem cell research.

This is where the Snowflakes program (which sees every embryo as a unique and individual life) offers a beautiful and life-affirming answer: Adoption. It is without a doubt a challenging call, and a journey laden with heartache. Rebecca and I see this call as an answer to our prayers for a family, and a witness to the dignity of these little “snowflakes” who are already in the world, waiting for a warm heart to grow beneath. To date we have loved and lost twelve tiny souls through the transfer of these embryos and their two resulting pregnancies. And now our thirteenth is growing within Rebecca. But the sorrow continues. An abnormality has been found in the baby’s brain and we need a second ultrasound to determine what’s happening. We ask for your prayers as we walk this sorrowful way. The ultrasound is today at 1:30 followed by a consultation with a high risk pregnancy doctor.

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

Three is the Magic Number…

Who knew back in grammar school, while munching down on me Lucky Charms cereal, waiting to make that hike into Alexander Denbo Elementary School (I was a “walker” not a bus kid), that there was a deep theological mystery being piped through the TV on that awesome cartoon between the cartoons – “Schoolhouse Rock“?

I don’t know who wrote this song, but it gave me a glimmer of the truth about God and ourselves…. in a Saturday morning cartoon! Just look at these lyrics…

Three is a magic number,
Yes it is, it’s a magic number.
Somewhere in the ancient, mystic Trinity
You get three as a magic number.

The past and the present and the future.
Faith and Hope and Charity,
The heart and the brain and the body
Give you three as a magic number….

A man and a woman had a little baby,
Yes, they did. They had three in the family,
And that’s a magic number.
________________________________

So often we hear people say “Things happen in threes.” Perhaps it’s because Three is the watermark behind everything, for the Trinity is the Truth behind all of creation! That Ancient Mystic Trinity is the ceaseless whirlwind of Self-giving love that is the interpersonal relationship of the very life of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! God is not a solitude, said Pope John Paul II, but a family!

It’s deep, it’s mysterious, but it has it’s echo in every family…. and the reality that a “man and a woman had a little baby” is a little glimmer, a little icon of this great mystery of God. That He should will that His Life be reflected in human love, in its giving and receiving of love between persons which “makes love” and brings life into the world is…. well, magic!

And all of this is a build up to a very real and personal experience of mine…. or should I say… ours.

A man and a woman had a little baby,
Yes, they did. They had three in the family,
And that’s a magic number.

Coming January 20! Baby Donaghy….
Wooohooooooooooo! (to be continued 😉

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

SNOW DAY!! LET’S GO COMPLETELY INSANE!

Well, we’ve let our students go at noon today due to the SNOW… or should I say, they let US go at noon today. We all know it’s the teachers who are more excited about these frosted flakes of freedom. Come on! We’re the ones up late checking the Doppler 7500’s and prowling around the Weather websites, ravenously seeking those satellite images of whiteness hovering happily over our little piece of academia.

But I made it look good in the classroom this morning. I contained my inner joy at leaving early. I held fast during my last period. My infamous Yellow Group tried so hard to give up (“Mr. Donaghy, we’re leaving early… we should just play a game.” “Yeah, we should watch a movie.” “Mr. Donaghy, I have to call my mom.” “Mr. Donaghy, this is ridiculous…”) but we pressed on, and in my heart, I knew it was ridiculous. Hah! But I laughed in the face of ridiculousness! I hushed and mushed this team of adolescent sled dogs (it’s an analogy, they’re really great kids!) through the snow, through the book of Joshua, through the period of the Judges, Samson and Delilah, and a couple of other notes which I know they will always remember and treasure close to their hearts. I think it’s up to two or three inches out there. Sweet! Hey, it’s over! I don’t even remember what I was saying! Let’s go home!

Oooh, maybe I’ll build a biblically inspired Snowman? Jobab son of Cush, or maybe Nebuchadnezzar…. Og the King of Bashan? So many possibilities! Woohoo!

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

On Snowflakes and Beyoncé

“How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat.”
– Henry David Thoreau

Ken Libbrecht, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, is a snowflake expert. He’s taken phenomenal photographs of actual snow crystals and flakes, even creating a “Field Guide to Snowflakes” that showcases these miniature masterpieces. On his website, www.snowcrystals.com, he basically affirms the old saying that no two snowflakes are exactly alike. But let’s let Ken speak for himself!

“The number of possible ways of making a complex snowflake is staggeringly large. To see just how much so, consider a simpler question – how many ways can you arrange 15 books on your bookshelf? Well, there’s 15 choices for the first book, 14 for the second, 13 for the third, etc. Multiply it out and there are over a trillion ways to arrange just 15 books. With a hundred books, the number of possible arrangements goes up to just under 10 to the 158th power (that’s a 1 followed by 158 zeros). That number is about 1070 times larger than the total number of atoms in the entire universe!”

Ken, that’s AWESOME!

“Now when you look at a complex snow crystal, you can often pick out a hundred separate features if you look closely. Since all those features could have grown differently, or ended up in slightly different places, the math is similar to that with the books. Thus the number of ways to make a complex snow crystal is absolutely huge. And thus it’s unlikely that any two complex snow crystals, out of all those made over the entire history of the planet, have ever looked completely alike.”

And now, a seeming digression…

Don’t you love it when a catchy tune gets stuck in your head for the entire day and you CANNOT seem to shake it? Maybe it’s the theme from the Andy Griffith Show, or Beverly Hills Cop, or that Empire Carpet commercial? And then you feel compelled to tell a friend like you’re the Ancient Mariner and they say “AAAGHHH!! Nooo! Get that albatross away from me!!” and BLAM! You’ve spread the maddening melody and the beat goes on…

Enter Beyoncé and her infernal song Irreplaceable.

Played out, played to death, crammed down our ears a hundred times a day. You must not know about me, You must not know about me…. AAAGGGHHH!!!!! It’s a catchy tune, granted. But it’s got issues. Let’s lend an ear to the lyrics:

“You must not know about me, You must not know about me
I could have another you in a minute, matter fact he’ll be here in a minute… “

Ouch. As William Congreve once said, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” (I thought it was Shakespeare too, but it actually comes from a play called the “The Mourning Bride” (1697). Thanks Mr. Internet!)

“I can have another you by tomorrow, So don’t you ever for a second get to thinking you’re irreplaceable.”

Now Beyoncé’s song is filling the airwaves (#1 on iTunes for weeks). The lyrics of this song have an angst that we can all recognize in our culture; it points to the ongoing war between men and women, the battle between love and lust, the dichotomy of seeing others as a gift or choosing rather to grasp at them as if they were objects just meant to sate our own selfish desires. Now in light of these battle scars, I would affirm Beyoncé’s reaction in the song. If the woman has been abused or objectified in the relationship, she should jump ship and get out of the situation. The problem is, she jumped right past the lifeboat that carries us into the sea of seeing people as persons, and she turns around and treats men as objects herself! “I won’t lose a wink of sleep ’cause the truth of the matter is replacing you is so easy…” What are we, vacuum cleaners? Washing machines? The truth is, we are not replaceable. We are not pleasure machines that can be exchanged when the pleasure dries up.

The truth is, we are like snowflakes. Each of us is unrepeatable. Every one of us is, in fact, irreplaceable. And yes, even when we fall for the lies of our culture, becoming just a face in a crowd, selling out our virtue for the quick and easy, becoming a number instead of that New Creation Christ calls us to be, we are still, deep in our being, utterly and inviolably unique and irreplaceable. There will never be another you.

As Pope Benedict XVI said in his inaugural homily “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.”

And Pope John Paul II sang this truth as well when he wrote “The human person is a unique composite – a unity of spirit and matter, soul and body, fashioned in the image of God and destined to live forever. Every human life is sacred, because every human person is sacred.”

So don’t you ever for a second get to thinking you’re NOT irreplaceable.

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org