Letter to J

 J__,

Glory to Jesus Christ! Good to hear from you--was wondering if you had deployed yet, so figured you would have been busy and didn't want to contact you until you had settled in. I don't even know where Niger is on a map, so can't imagine living there for the next six months. 

On that note, though, it may be God's good will that you are in fact there now. D and I watched a film last night called "Mully" about a man in Kenya who was abadoned by his family as a child and lived begging as a street boy for ten years, before finding work and eventully moving his way up in the ranks. After a few years, he was an industrious, self-made millionaire. He got married, had eight children with his devoted wife, and was living the material dream in high society. 

One day he encountered some street boys on his way to an appointment in Narobi and he shooed them away. When he finished with his appointment, they had stolen his Mercedes and were nowhere to be found. He filed a police report and was forced to take the public bus back to his home. The whole way, he could not get the thought of those boys out of his mind. He was once in their shoes, after all.

When he returned home, he told his wife and children over dinner that he would no longer work another day for money, and that he would sell everything he had in order to rescue street children. He felt God was calling him to this. He started going to the streets and bringing one, two, four...then tens, twenties, hundreds of street children to his home. He wife would cook for them and wash them. It became pretty crazy after a while, hundreds of children in their home, and his own children were becoming somewhat resentful. Eventually they were sent to boarding school, while Mr. Mully continued bringing abandoned children to his home and caring for them.

The transformation is amazing, and the result of great faith and a wild abadonment to providence. His church elders kick him out, they want nothing to do with this undertaking. Most of the family's friends abandon them, encourage his wife to divorce him. One night as the money was about to run out, the family prays, and a truck with thousands of pounds of grain appears. 

In another instance, after they had outgrown their space and moved the Mully Children Foundation to the middle of the desert during a drought, he begins building a bridge like a Kenyan Noah, just because God told him to. They are running out of water, and he drives four hours each day just to fetch it from the closest town. He realizes the pressure, and so turns to God and once again prays. And God leads him and his wife out to a certain spot in the desert, and he says, "this is where we dig." There was never any successful well drilling in this region, and yet after several days of digging they amazingly hit water! A bonafide miracle, the result of faith. Using the water for the children and his family, but also for irrigation, they construct greenhouses and plant thousands of trees, actually transforming a barren wasteland over time into a lush green landscape with it's own microclimate (including rainfall). Amazing. Highly recommend the film.

It's funny you mentioned the Shia LeBeouf interview with Bishop Barron as well, because I finally got around to watching it yesterday, right before D and I watched Mully. I thought it was an interesting juxtaposition of the very polished, very intellectual, very estalished Bishop sitting down with this newly minted, unpolished, zealous neophyte who uses the word "douchey" in response to one of Barron's questions in the first like five minutes, and who "don't know nothing" about this or that. What he does know is that he at one point had a gun on the table and was saved by God's grace (and no doubt with help from St. Pio himself). I found the using him as a poster-boy for the Latin Mass by gloating trads missed a large chunk of the essence of the interview (though it was a part that wasn't lost on the audience, since Shia was so intentional about bringing it up). 

In the interview I found Shia to be refreshingly honest, unrefined, and real. I'm rooting for him. Though I respect some of the work Bishop Barron does, I have some reservations I can't quite put my finger on; though I do give him credit for having Shia on and deferring to his lengthy monologues without running too much interference. It's an interesting juxtaposition, these two figures. I think he, like you, recognizes that pernicious ego and pride that is at the root of so much of what we do. We get self-assured and righteous and then (hopefully, by God's grace) He humbles us by taking us out at the knees. Sounds like that's been your experience lately as well. The only antitode to pride is humility, and we only gain humility by going back to those basics like where Shia is--that we are sinners, that we still to a degree wear diapers even as adults in the faith, and that we cannot live without supernatural grace. Every time you think you're something, pray to be reminded that you're not (of course praying the Litany of Humility is a good practice as long as you are prepared for the prayer to be answered, which it will). I'd be curious how your experience in Africa will give you some perspective. I still think we are so spoiled here, forget that child-like faith that is so dependent on Providence (as I witnessed in the film I described to you above) in the African people, and how our material well-being is sometimes a great handicap to our spiritual health (for a challenging read, Happy Are You Poor by Fr. Thomas DuBay)

If I could share a musing as well...I know we had talked about the vaccine a couple years ago, I'm not sure if you were forced to get it being in the military, though I know you were resistant to it. I'm one of the only people in my circle I know to have gotten it--though I feel like I made the best decision I could at the time given the information I had, and my wife being in health-care who was taking care of her elderly father in law. Now I just feel that I was most likely lied to, given half-truths about its efficacy, and may have to deal with the unintended consequences of having taking it (2 doses 2 years ago, no booster, kids are unvaxxed). All my trad friends seem edified as more research comes to light, and I feel more and more duped, though at the time I felt my reasons for not getting it did not outweigh the reasons for getting it.

Of course it would have been another issue entirely if taking it made one culpable of sin. That is not the case, however, as the Church had already determined that one could take the vaccine in good conscience if they so choosed to (see Edward Feser's "The Catholic Middle Ground on Covid-19 vaccination" here). 

The reason I was thinking about this the other day was I had a Catholic friend from years past call up informing me that her annulment has been approved, and she was relieved and celebrating (I was aware she had gotten divorced). I was thinking about the vaccine and annulments--how if the Church determines there is no sin in receiving the vaccine, then there is no sin in receiving the vaccine, no-matter what self-appointed Catholic influencers, and even clergy say to the contrary. Likewise, if the Church rules in Her rightful authority a declaration of nullility, then one has to trust that and no self-appointed outside authority has the right to question or render judgment otherwise. The tribunals are the ones who will have to answer and account at the Judgment. We have to trust the authority of the Church.

All that being said, even though it's not a sin to get jabbed and not a sin to remarry, technically speaking, if one receives an annulment, THAT DOES NOT NECESSARILY MEAN IT'S A DE FACTO GOOD, WELL-INFORMED, OR MORAL THING TO DO! I have known people who knew they probably *could* have procured an annulment, though in their conscience they knew their marriage was sacramental, valid, and unbreakable and sought not to, even as their spouse did (and ultimately remarried or entered into an adulterous affair). I'm also growing suspect of these papal canonizations--St. Paul VI, and now the beatification of John Paul I. And yet, again, it is not my place or within my authority to say they are not saints!  It's above my pay-grade, as they say. That doesn't mean I have to have these popes on my spiritual speed-dial for intercessory prayer, though I (or anyone else) could if I felt some connection to them. But like the vax, like these rubber-stamped annulments, these recent canonizations just have me going 'huh.' Oh well. God will sort it out in the end.

Stay in touch, write anytime, stay safe, and pray for us, and we for you.

R