This summer, CatholicMom.com is hosting an on-line book discussion group for Sherry Weddell’s Forming Intentional Disciples. Each session will focus on one chapter of the book, and yours truly is participating. Hit the link above to see all of the participants, and to find the discussion questions.

I found myself engaging in some unintentional discipleship this past week. Last Thursday evening my wife slipped on the stairs and ended spraining her ankle quite badly. Four-to-six weeks badly.

Her right ankle.

Which is to say, her driving ankle.

It’s amazing how much easier it is to love others and put them first in a Christ-like way when they don’t, you know, actually need anything from you.

But I digress.

Chapter 5 of Forming Intentional Disciples is entitled “Grace and the Great Quest”; and it’s mostly about how a proper interior disposition is needed to receive all the grace from the sacraments. To give an example of my own, sacramental marriage is a major source of grace for learning to live with your spouse, and ultimately with your family, and for growth in holiness—if you expect it to be, and if you live accordingly. If you go into a Catholic marriage thinking mostly about the reception, and with plans to split up if it doesn’t work, grace might be scarce on the ground. (The grace doesn’t go away, mind you; it’s there waiting for your disposition to change. God is good, all the time.) God gives us the grace, and we truly cooperate with it.

For example, God gives me the grace to humbly and cheerfully drive four children and one spouse to everywhere they need to go, whilst making sure that everyone eats and stuff gets washed, and it short to do all the stuff Jane usually does as well as what I usually do. It’s up to me to cooperate with that, and I do. Mostly. Sometimes. Except for sometimes, especially late in the afternoon, when I just get irritated. While my kids are at Crossfit, I’m having a cross fit.

But I digress.

The discussion question is, It can be hard to settle our minds on the idea of “cooperating with grace”. How would you explain the Catholic doctrine on salvation to others?

Now this is something I’ve thought about a lot over the years. During my Protestant excursion, I read a number of “reformed” thinkers, who insisted that we could do nothing, I mean nothing towards our own salvation. We couldn’t even say, “Yes, Lord” to his offer of salvation; that was saving ourselves by our works. For all intents and purposes, God had to say it for us. (R.C. Sproul, I’m looking at you here.)

During that period I came up with an illustration:

Suppose your town is flooded, and you’re stuck on your roof, and the water is rising, and you’re afraid you’re going to drown. And a helicopter flies over, and drops a rope ladder. If you grab the ladder and climb up, are you saving yourself? Well, sure: but you couldn’t do it without the helicopter, and the pilot is the one who will get the credit. You’re just cooperating with the pilot to save your life.

Similarly, Christ has redeemed all men and women all over the world…but we still need to take up our crosses and follow him, as the gospel reading said last Sunday.

This summer, CatholicMom.com is hosting an on-line book discussion group for Sherry Weddell’s Forming Intentional Disciples. Each session will focus on one chapter of the book, and yours truly is participating. Hit the link above to see all of the participants, and to find the discussion questions.

In Chapter 3 of Forming Intentional Disciples, Sherry Weddell describes a couple of parishes where the percentage of disciples is high, and how dramatically different they are from parishes where the percentage is more typical. She also explains one of the reasons why our parishes might not bear all of the fruit we might hope for: all too often the people running the programs aren’t themselves disciples, and so aren’t operating out of their Spirit-given charisms.

The Catherine of Siena Institute has for many years been conducting “Called & Gifted” workshops, in which they work with normal Catholics to help them begin to discern their charisms, the gifts the Holy Spirit has given to them, particularly to them, to help build up the Body of Christ. We will be most fruitful when we are doing the kind of things we’ve been given the charisms to do, and much less so otherwise. (Do not ask me to head up a hospitality-based ministry. Just don’t.) But charisms manifest in disciples, and so in order to take our parishes where they need to be, we need disciples who discern their charisms and use them.

This may sound more complicated than it is. Part of being a disciple is being will to submit—ooooh! it burns!—submit, I say, to Christ and his call. If we can begin to repent, and follow his lead, he will lead us where he needs us to be. No program can bring this about in my life; it takes me saying, “Lord, let it be done to me according to your will.” This is scary, but necessary. From it everything follows.

Anyway.

While re-reading this chapter, I experienced again the same feeling I had so many times while reading the book for the first time: I want this. I want to see this happen in my parish. I want to help make it happen. I dunno how to go about that; but look back at the previous paragraph. If I’m a disciple, Jesus will lead me into the things I need to do. I need to be a disciple, and to be ready. I admit to being curious as to what will happen.

This summer, CatholicMom.com is hosting an on-line book discussion group for Sherry Weddell’s Forming Intentional Disciples. Each session will focus on one chapter of the book, and yours truly is participating. Hit the link above to see all of the participants, and to find the discussion questions.

Session 3 of Lawn Chair Catechism is looking at Chapter 2 of Forming Intentional Disciples: “We Don’t Know What Normal Is”.

In this chapter, Sherry Weddell talks about the three journeys that are supposed to be normal parts of being Catholic:

1. The personal interior journey of a lived relationship with Christ resulting in intentional discipleship.

2. The ecclesial journey into the Church through reception of the sacraments of initiation.

3. The journey of active practice (as evidenced by receiving the sacraments, attending Mass, and participating in the life and mission of the Christian community).

I’ve written quite a bit about the “personal interior journey of a lived relationship with Christ“; it’s become one of my things. But Sherry Weddell makes the point that in many of our parishes there’s something like a code of silence about the interior life. It’s something you don’t talk about. Instead, those who are actively pursuing it tend to assume that other Mass-going Catholics are doing the same; and those who aren’t aware that the interior life is even a thing remain unaware.

This is a Bad Thing. Because becoming Catholic and going to Mass every week and not actively pursuing the interior life is like getting married and kissing your spouse once a week and never, ever talking to him or her; and those who don’t know that more is possible are seriously being cheated.

Each time I read this chapter I get all excited. There’s this neat thing I know about that others may not, and I’d like to share it with them, and I’d especially like to share it with others in my parish. Alas, I’ve no real idea how to go about it. One of this week’s discussion questions is, “Are you comfortable talking with others about your relationship with God?” And the answer is, well, yes and no. I’m comfortable talking about my relationship with God. And I’m comfortable talking about it to others once the subject has been broached and I know they are interested. But as an introvert, I’m not all that comfortable talking with others, and I’m not very good at starting conversations with others without some reasonable pretext. If there’s a store called “Small Talk ‘R’ Us”, I don’t work there.

This is one reason I became a Lay Dominican: to have companions on the journey that I can talk to about spiritual things.

(In the unlikely event that anyone from my parish sees this: Hi! Feel free to raise the subject!)

A few days ago, I wrote, “If you don’t feel pain when they hurt, you don’t love them.” Upon reflection, I have to correct that.

Depth of feeling is not the measure of love. Action is the measure of love. It is not essential that I feel anything at all when someone I love is hurt; what is essential is that I am moved to action.

When my daughter falls down and skins her knee, yes, I feel bad; but I also comfort her. When I hear of massive earthquakes in Haiti or tornadoes in Oklahoma, I might or might not feel bad; some people have a lot of empathy, and some don’t. But even if I do not feel bad, I can still love those harmed by the catastrophe. I can still choose to take action: to pray, to send aid. These actions, done for the good of the victims, constitute love. Conversely, I can feel bad, very, very bad, and tell everyone how bad I feel about the victims of the catastrophe…and not love them at all in any objective way.

Action is the measure of love.

Feelings are called emotions precisely because they move us. Feelings of hunger move us to eat. Feelings of pity move us to aid or comfort. Feelings of anger or lust all too often move us to sin. The emotions themselves are not good or bad; only the actions that result from them (or the inaction despite them) can be good or bad. (We here in America spend a lot of time consuming media that moves us inwardly but without moving us to real action. We complain or we chuckle or we sigh, but do nothing. The emotions are short-circuited, as it were. This might be a problem.)

Action is the measure of love.

But if that is so, how can we truly love God? True love drives us to action. But He is perfect, omnipotent, infinite; he needs no help or comfort from us. How can we love him?

Jesus has given us the answer. He asks us, how can we love the God we have not seen, if we do not love the neighbor we have seen?

Action is the measure of love. That action might only be a prayer, an invocation of God’s help. (Only a prayer! Hah!) It might be more than that, depending on our means and on the proximity of the neighbors in question. But action is the measure of love.

In Strange Gods, her new book on the idols present in every day life, Elizabeth Scalia has this to say about the words “peace” and “love” and growing up in the ’60’s:

During that time, the word love—a deep word communicating all kinds of messages about permanence, commitment, self-abnegation, and sacrifice—began to be used to describe situations and encounters that were shallow, short-lived, casual, and self-serving. Simultaneously, the word peace, an equally deep word that, especially when partnered with love, gets to the heart of contentment, serenity, gratitude, and joy, was hauled into the shallows, where it came to mean mostly an “absence of war” and nonjudgemental permissiveness….

…in truth, peace and love, either conceptually or spoken, if applied at critical moments, can do the work of God and the angels. Overused, misapplied, or simply bandied about, they become as meaningless as scrap paper; and when we render words meaningless—especially powerful words like peace and love—our understanding of them becomes warped. Then, as when a teenager flings his stuff thoughtlessly and lazily about the house—disorder follows.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Love isn’t something easy, something you just fall into. And words are not just noises meant to invoke a warm cluster of feelings. They have meanings. Love is something you have to make—something you have to build, every day. If you are not willing to sacrifice your time and effort for someone, you don’t love them. If you don’t feel pain when they hurt, you don’t love them. If you simply feel a strong desire to have sex with them, you don’t love them. When you have casual sex with someone, you are not making love. (But I digress; this is a post about words, not about marriage.)

Words have meaning. Humpty Dumpty was a liar.