It Matters Who You Marry

Hi Ladies! One of our team members found this article online and wanted to share it.  It has some pretty good advice.  Check it out!

Peace to your beautiful hearts,

Sr. Elizabeth, TOR

  

Real Beauty Sketches

Hi Ladies!

  Check this out.  It's amazing. 

 It's insightful.  It's thought-provoking. And it speaks for itself. So that's all I have to say about that.

Peace to your beautiful hearts,

Sr. Elizabeth, TOR

Less Sentimentality More Jesus

When I first thought about writing a post-lent reflection, I was drawing a complete blank.  I hadn’t really noticed any fruits from my sacrifices, and I was really disappointed.  I decided to go to the chapel to pray about it and to see if the Lord would give me a little help and insight.  As I was praying and trying to find something that had changed in me, it hit me. I was in the chapel praying....

 Let me explain by proposing a scenario to you -- You wake up at 7am and make a cup of coffee and eat a small breakfast, which gets you through your 8am class fairly well.  At 9:30, you go to Mariology, where you are completely amazed by how wonderful Mary is and all you want to do is go to the chapel and pray about all the new things you learned, but you have to make it through one more class first.  After that last class, it’s now 12:15 and you’re tired and want to take a nap, you’re hungry because you haven’t eaten since 7am, and all part of you wants to do is go home.  But what about going to the chapel?

 Pre-lent I would have gone home 90% of the time. But there I was, post-lent sitting in the chapel, growling stomach and all. I started to think about what had sparked this change? I began to reflect on what I had given up, especially the sentimental media, because that was what was hardest for me. 

 I realized that in distancing myself from overdramatized sentimentality, I was more aware of my emotions, and more aware when they were getting out of control.  I began to notice how much I was allowing my emotions to control my actions, my thoughts, and my life.  In the instance of the after class chapel run, I would let my laziness get in the way of my prayer life.  Not that post-lent I don’t feel lazy, but I am more able to recognize it and work against it in order to grow.  The same goes for other emotions as well.  When I would begin to feel really down about something and start leaning towards self-pity, I was able to recognize those emotions as out of proportion, and renounce it.

 I also realized that it pertains to happy emotions as well! I always thought that feel-good emotions were good and didn’t need to be addressed, but I was wrong.  Those emotions of hope and expectation you get when you meet a cute guy need to be proportionate to the actual position you’re in. If you have only shaken hands with him and told him your name, no good can come out of hoping and fantasizing about your wedding!

 The Lord didn’t make us to be controlled by our emotions. Picture a world where everyone is driven simply by emotion - it’s not a pretty picture.  The Lord created us to be in control of our emotions.  When we watch movies or listen to music filled with sentimentality and excessive emotion, we begin to dwell on those emotions rather than tame them.  We begin to think that good emotion is the only way to determine if something is good, and bad emotion determines if something is bad, but thats not the way it works. 

Sometimes it is hard to pray, we don’t feel like it, or we don’t feel the Lord’s presence, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need to pray! Mother Teresa never “felt” God’s love, but she never doubted that He loved her, and His love inspired her to love the world in an extraordinary way.  Love hurts!  It is a sacrifice!  Sometimes the right thing to do is hard, and sometimes we want to do the wrong thing, but it is precisely in doing what is right, even when we don’t feel like it, that we unite ourselves to Christ and truly learn to love.  When someone says that love is simply a warm and fuzzy feeling, think of Christ on the cross.  True love is so much more than a sentimental feeling! 

 

In Him,

 Carrie

Skirt vs. Girl

Well.

Well. Well. Well.

The skirt challenge has come to an end.

Guess who has a really hard time wearing pants now? This girl.

I have definitely fully re-embraced pants, but it’s just not the same. I wear them and I enjoy them, but I just feel less girly.

Sigh. In the skirt vs. girl challenge: skirt won.

Dang it.

I’m still going to wear pants though. I love my sweats. I cannot get enough of them. But I am certain I will be wearing more skirts/dresses than I used to thanks to this challenge.

Now, in my last blog I pretty much explained what I was learning about the way wearing skirts was helping me to understand my femininity more; that they are an outward manifestation of an inward reality. And that this inward reality was the feminine soul that the good Lord gave me.

I pretty much left you all with that: the feminine soul. I was trying to figure out how to be more feminine, and I came to the conclusion that I should be more like Our Mother, Mary.

Well. Let me tell you. I am awful slow at picking up my own advice.

I did ask myself WWMD more often than before, but it actually didn’t hit me too hard until this past weekend. I was on a retreat called “Suffering Redeemed,” with my fellow grad students. It ended with us celebrating Divine Mercy Sunday (woowoo!). It was a gorgeous retreat, and I had a great time; it was during Adoration that this revelation of womanhood came to me.

I was rereading “The World’s First Love” by Fulton J. Sheen (if you haven’t read it, stop reading this blog, go to the bookstore, purchase it, and start now), and I decided to use his meditations on the Joyful Mysteries while I said my rosary. I know, I know. I was supposed to be thinking about suffering – but! It all worked out in the end, don’t you worry:

I got to the first Joyful Mystery, which is the Annunciation, and FJS said this: “A woman’s role is to be the medium by which God comes to man.”

Brain. Explosion.

I sat there and I thought to myself, well of course Mary’s role was to be the Mediatrix for Christ, which is just one of the reasons she is so stinkin’ awesome. BUT what FJS is saying here reigns true for human relationships as well. Women are meant to bring God to man. Man is to bring God to woman. In marriage, man and woman are to “become Christ” to one another in order to bring one another closer to God and to love more fully and perfectly (Dr. Asci says “Who can love you or your spouse more than God? No one! So in order to love your spouse most perfectly, you need to become God!”).

So I sat there and pondered this in my little brain. Hmm… hmmm… hmmmmmmmmmmm….. shoot. If I want to be a good woman, I should bring God to man[kind]. How can I do that? Aha! Be like Mary! Of course! Just what I have been telling myself! Well. How do I become more like her? Let’s see… she was patient, kind, trusting, obedient, faithful, and humble, loved unconditionally, among many other things (her virtues and their Scripture references can be found here).

Then I came to the horrible realization that I stink at pretty much all of those things.

But I was ok with this realization. Jesus and I were hanging out, and despite me being bad at being a girl, he loves me anyway. So I then went through the rest of the Joyful Mysteries and learned all about being a woman of God through them. Here’s a brief rundown:

The Visitation: Mary’s JOY at sharing her Son. She doesn’t wait to share him with Elizabeth. And p.s. “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.” Yeah. Our feminine souls should do that too.

The Birth of Jesus: Humility. Hard. Core. Humility. Giving birth in a barn? Wrapping your first and only child in swaddling clothes and putting him in a manger? When you KNOW he’s GOD?

The Presentation: Suffering. Suffering out of pure love. Suffering out of love in order to attain a higher good. And a pure and total gift of self. Mary gave her whole body to Christ, both in the sense that she provided her flesh as a means of his nourishment and Incarnation, as well as spiritually by virtue of her fiat. And she knew there would be suffering, and she still said yes! Talk about trust!

The Finding of the Child Jesus in the Temple: Keeping our eyes on Christ, and finding refuge in Our Lady, who experienced three days without Jesus. Sin is the loss of Christ. Losing him for three days, FJS explains, gave Our Mother an understanding of “the gnawing heart of every sinner.” Ouch.

So, in conclusion, the skirt challenge really pushed me to think about authentic femininity this Lent. I thought about it a TON, and a week later I am still trying to get it straight. Why was I wearing a skirt? Why was it feminine? Because of the inward reality it represents: that I am woman and I am awesome. And how can I be a great woman who is truly feminine? Be like my Momma: bring Christ to others. Being more like Mary is only going to help me grow in my feminine identity and increase my ability to be the master of my own mystery, and to grow in the feminine genius. She, with the Holy Spirit, will lead me straight to her Son, because she knows he is the coolest of cool, and the manliest of men, and he’ll help me live out my femininity the way Our Father in Heaven made me.  (WHOA Trinity! Hold up!)

Keep your eyes and heart fixed on the Lord.

 Happy Easter!

Ashley

TBC Easter Grace

          Upon reflecting about this past Lent and the beauty of the joy of Easter, I am still at a loss… did I really do anything these past 40 days to grow? Lent was uniquely hard for me this year. It has been a long time since I have wrote here so just to remind you I did the skirt and dress challenge, gave up my hair for the true beauty challenge instead of make-up, and a few different spiritual ventures to help with the journey. The physical things on the outside that affected my appearance didn’t seem too bad, but on the inside I felt a spiritual dryness that I never had before. A lot of reasons brought upon this distance I had with the Lord, but nonetheless it made keeping up with my Lenten challenges even more difficult. I was in the dessert where the Lord was tempted, within my heart. 

 

There were days when I did not want to pray, to go to Mass, to bring my pain to the Lord. Every day brought forth its own challenges and sometimes I could visibly see the devil putting obstacles in the way of my faith and thwarting the intimacy the Lord wanted to offer to me. I was aching and prayer was not, is not a magic marker that will fix everything, I discovered that during this Lent in a very real way. This is ok. This can be a good thing, the Lord works through our wounds. I have to keep telling myself that, repeating that. 

 

  I have always been Catholic, but my initial conversion that convinced me to “make my faith my own” happened around 8 years ago and was upon the cross with our Lord. Since then I feel a huge intimacy and closeness to Jesus within his sufferings. This Lent was hard to not feel him as close to me, to come to understand a little bit of the distance Jesus felt on the cross when he says, “my God, my God why have you abandoned me?” I was not expecting the distance, so it was extremely uncomfortable and many days I did not know what to do with myself. I woke up each day and tried again. 

 

To top things off after Good Friday happened; I had to work Holy Saturday morning…. Who wants to go to work the day after their best friend and beloved dies in the most brutal way through all of human history?!? Not me. All morning I was so sad, and just really in a funk. Jesus had died for me less than 24 hours ago, and I missed him so much my heart literally was restless and I wanted to stop living my life, roll under the covers, and wake up when it was time for Christ to rise on Easter Sunday. I couldn’t do that obviously, so I went through my Holy Saturday carrying the loss in my heart with the hope of the Resurrection right next to it.

While I was contemplating missing Jesus when he was in the tomb on Holy Saturday words from a homily I had heard once came to mind and I want to share them with you, as I think this is what I am seeking to learn from my Lenten experience, “do not let yourself be defined by your own wounds, but let yourself be defined by Christ wounds.” Even though I heard these words a few years ago, my heart finds so much comfort in them now.

 

I know my Lent wasn’t all “gold stars” or the perfect performance, but I know I was able to give the Lord the thing he wanted all along, myself. I had to forget my own battle scars and remember how the Lord covers me with his own wounds and fills me with his goodness. I am beautifully protected and cozy within the contemplation of the depth of his sorrow upon the cross to help shed light and understanding upon my own sufferings. It is not so much about what we chose to do more of or to give up during the 40 days, but how we enter in and allow the Lord to renew us. As we go into the Divine Mercy Sunday, I hope you are able to find ways to define yourself by the Lord’s wounds, and to be renewed by him throughout this Easter Celebration!

 

Wrapped in His Wounds,

Chloe

Skirt Challenge Victories!

Halleluiah! He is risen! Easter is here at last. I don’t know about you all, but I love Easter – celebrating Christ’s resurrection and no more fasting (at least for a while). As you know, I participated in the skirt challenge this Lent, and it has been quite an experience. Before starting the challenge I had mixed feelings about it. I was worried about having enough skirts to wear the whole 40 days (so I bought some at Goodwill during the first week); I was worried that I would never want to wear pants again at the end (I really like wearing pants); and I just wasn’t sure if I had enough discipline to do the challenge.

  

            I’d like to just start off by addressing the issues I listed above. First of all, I now have plenty of skirts that I can wear skirts for at least a week to 2 weeks without re-wearing one. Second, I still love pants (more on that later), and I am actually wearing jeans today. Third, while I did wear pants a few days during Lent, it was mainly during times when I was running late to something, and for the most part, I managed to wear a skirt almost every day for the whole day.

            As I was reflecting on what I learned, I had a few thoughts. First of all, wearing skirts made me put more effort into my appearance each day. Rather than waking up and throwing on a jeans and a t-shirt (not that those are bad), I took a little extra time to do my hair and chose a nicer shirt. This was great because it made me appreciate beauty more and since we are all daughters of the King, I think that dressing up can be a good way to reflect that. It also reminded me (and hopefully others) of my dignity.

            The second thing I learned/noticed was how tight girls and women wear their pants. Even on a campus like Franciscan, it never ceases to shock me how many women wear skin tight pants or even just leggings with a shirt. Ladies, painted-on jeans and leggings are simply not modest. They leave nothing to the imagination, particularly men’s imagination, and they are not godly. Because I refrained from wearing pants for 40 days, I was more aware of what types of pants people wear. Granted, I am already fairly conscious of how my jeans fit, but this made me even more aware.

            One last thought that I have is that now that I have worn skirts so much, I feel more comfortable wearing them more often. I don’t feel like I have to have a particular reason or event in order to dress up – I can just do it because I’m a woman J

            So as you continue to celebrate Easter and spring cleaning, think about your wardrobe, particularly your pants – are they modest? Or, as my R.A. says, “are they brother-conscious”? As women we have a lot of power in society. We want godly men, so let’s dress in a way that encourages men to be chaste and upright. Happy Easter!

                                                                           

                                                                                                           -Bernadette

He Is Risen!

Hello Ladies! Happy Easter!

After fasting for 40 days and journeying with Christ through His Passion and death, we are now celebrating His Resurrection!  Easter is such a wonderful season and it is such an incredible event that it cannot be contained in a mere 24 hours, so the Church celebrates Easter Day for 8 days!  Isn't is wonderful to be Catholic?!

In the spirit of the Resurrection, we will be hearing from our team as they share the fruits of their 40 day journey this Lent.

Let us rejoice for the Lord is truly risen! May He continue to rise in your hearts!

 

                                          In Him,

                                                                 Sr. Elizabeth, TOR

No Mirrors: Beauty in the Breakdown

This is long overdue, but here it goes.

The goal was 40 days without looking in the mirror. Wrong from the get-go. The goal must always be Christ. My heart must always be yearning and aching for my Savior. Everything I do must be in regards to attaining closer intimacy with my God. The moment of discouragement is the moment I take my eyes away from the great Light. The more I become aware of my miserable state, the more I must HOPE and never despair. The more of our weakness we accept and bring to Christ, the more we relieve His aching heart.

Heading into Holy Week I am trying to enter into the Passion and discover all that the Lord did for me. He endured so much for my weaknesses and sins and selfishness and hardness of heart. If I never bring these things to Him and allow Him to make me new and spotless, then what was the point of His agony and crucifixion? I do not need to be perfect to go to God, in fact, He receives greater joy and consolation when I go to Him broken and trampled because this shows I have faith in Him. Jesus suffered such agony because He has so much love for us that we reject. He is being burned by the flames of His mercy that we reject! When we crawl to the cross and receive His love and mercy, we relieve his aching heart and bring Him so much joy.

When I had an entire week this Lent in which the only time I kept from looking in the mirror was when I brushed my teeth, I felt undeserving to go before Christ and act as if I had just spent 40 days in the desert with Him. Reflecting on His Passion I thought initially that I was not welcomed to kneel before the cross. In reality, Jesus is filled with such compassion when I go to Him weak, undisciplined, lacking, and empty, because at last, His little flower is trusting in Him to water her.

 

 

Although this Lent was a challenge, I believe I have grown tremendously in my understanding of who I am before Christ. I am His little flower, planted beside the cross, with no where to go except deeper and higher. I will stay at the foot of the cross for it is here that His mercy and life is poured out onto me.

Regina Angelorum, Ora Pro Nobis <3
Cayce