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#theprofessorgoeswest

It all started last November shortly after we miscarried our baby. The professor and I were finally getting to making and canning jam out of our frozen berries that we had picked in the summer, and trying to console ourselves in our loss. Then it suddenly occurred to us that we had a window in our childbearing years that allowed for the massive camping road trip that we had always talked about doing *someday*. (Now don’t get me wrong…camping has never my favorite activity…but now that our trip is over I like it more than when we started. In fact thanks to the self-inflating Thermarest air mattress, I slept about how I normally do when not in my own bed.)

I said that I would be willing to do the trip if we broke it up by staying in hotels or with people we knew on the road. And that is when we really got planning. We were going to see 10 National Parks, several State Parks, and as many of the California Missions as we could fit into our schedule. We made it inside of 8 and saw 3 more from the outside. 

We had 11 nights camping, 4 in hotels, and 7 with friends (thank you sooooo much friends!).

The trip was amazing. The drives were long, but the views were so, so worth all of the effort of going there and back again. We made the drive more enjoyable by listening to The Lord of the Rings on audiobook, and we still have some left to finish out on a later road trip.

I will probably spend the rest of the summer writing up my thoughts from our road trip. In the meantime, head on over to my Instagram account to see all of the pictures I posted from our three weeks on the road.

NCRegister Blog: NFP, God’s Faithfulness, and Family Size

“You know, “ I called to my husband in the other room, “If I had lived even a hundred years ago, I would have probably died because of childbearing by now.” We were dealing with yet another health issue of mine related to the wear and tear of pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing. It is not that I am sick very often and pregnancies are mostly comfortable for me, but I have had multiple hemorrhages, many infections, and several miscarriages, which seem to have been caused by a chronic health problem.

When we signed up for our Natural Family Planning courses and planned ahead to when we would use it, this kind of stuff was not on our radar.

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog: A Letter to My Daughter on her First Communion Day

My dear sweet girl,

When I kneel beside you in Eucharistic Adoration, I always wonder what is going on in that sensitive heart of yours. You always ask to sit right in the front of the chapel and settle down quietly to pray. I notice how you look earnestly toward the host in the monstrance. What do you say to your Savior in the depth of your heart? Do you tell him how much you love him? Do you thank him for all he does for you? Do you ask him to help you? Do you pray for me as well? I have noticed that when you pray, God answers your prayers.

Today, May 12, your First Communion day is the feast day of Blessed Imelda Lambertini who is the patron saint of First Communicants.

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog: Catholic Women Want Community (Even in a Blizzard)

Two of my friends and I set out one blustery Friday April afternoon from St. Paul, Minnesota for Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We were excited to spend a weekend together at the Catholic Diocese of Sioux Falls women’s conference despite the forecast a blizzard sweeping through the upper Midwest. We managed to make it to our hotel a couple of hours before snow began to fall, but when we woke up on Saturday morning the blizzard had arrived in full force. It took until the end of my sixth winter living in Minnesota to see my first real blizzard, and I ended up being in South Dakota for it. Perhaps the flatness of the prairie intensified the winds, but I heard that the Twin Cities looked about the same as Sioux Falls.

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog: Easter Hope is for Those who Sorrow

I meditated on the Joyful mysteries to the thump of my feet on the treadmill in the early silence of Holy Saturday morning. Hail Mary, full of grace… The almost wail-like tone of the chanting of the end of the Passion of St. John echoed in my head from the liturgy of Good Friday. It brought me back to another Saturday morning run on the treadmill when my heart was full of hope after I learned I was newly pregnant last Fall. The hope only lasted a few weeks as our baby passed away too soon. While I prayed the rosary my heart ached for our Blessed Mother as I contemplated how her search for the child Jesus in the Temple was a precursor to the laying of her dead son in the Tomb. With all of her sorrow she had to trust in God’s plan and walk away from the body of her son.

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog: When We Accompany We Also Need to Speak the Truth

I want to tell you a few stories of accompaniment and discernment about real people. The first is about a man who once made a great sacrifice for the sake of living the Christian faith. When he was 17 years old he had a son with a woman whom he could not or would not marry. They spent 15 years together raising this son. He had been interested in the Catholic Church from his childhood, but it took him many years to come to believe in all of the Church’s truths. His mother who was Catholic prayed and sacrificed for him everyday, and devoted her life to helping him know and accept the truths revealed by God to the Church. During these long years he learned the teachings of the Church, was drawn to the beauty of truth, grew a real love for God in his heart. He learned much from a bishop, whom this young man described as one of those “who speak the truth, and speak it well, judiciously, pointedly, and with beauty and power of expression” (Christian Doctrine IV.21). It was the truth that compelled this young man to desire to be Catholic.

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog: A Simple Way to Give to the Church in India

David and Kathy Rennie of Bloomington, Minnesota had an experience of being rich with poor outside their gate when traveling to India in 1985 to adopt their sixth child (their fifth adoption). Kathy had long desired to adopt a little girl from India, and had been inspired to do so by the life and work of St. Teresa of Calcutta. Kathy’s mother, Rose Mayer, had sponsored a poor seminarian more than a decade before, and the Rennies contacted him during their visit to India.  This seminarian was now a priest working as a secretary to the bishop of his diocese, and after they made contact he helped them overcome the difficulties they were having in adopting their daughter. It was through knowing Fr. Sebastian Thekethecheril, who was consecrated as Bishop of the Diocese of Vijayapuram in Kottayam, Kerala, India, in 2006, that the Rennies saw firsthand the great poverty of the Christian people of Kerala.

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog: How to Pray Your Children to Heaven

As the Minnesota winter lingered on in full force in February we found ourselves a second weekend in a row in the nearby conservatory. We wandered through the beautifully landscaped greenhouses breathing in the humid, oxygen-rich air, remembering what it is like to be surrounded by green things. As my children dangled over the edge of a fountain, reaching for the tricking water, a conservatory volunteer handed them each a penny, instructing each to make a wish and throw the penny in. My 2-year-old son flung his in with gusto, but the girls pondered over their wishes for a moment and tossed theirs in as well. As we were walking away from the fountain through the greenery, one of my daughters clasped my hand and said, “Do you know what I wished for, Mom? I wished that I would go to Heaven someday.”

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog:The Humility of True Obedience

I hesitated for a moment in my reading aloud to my daughters as I came across Laura Ingalls Wilder’s discussion about wifely obedience with her fiancé Almanzo Wilder:

Almanzo, I must ask you something. Do you want me to promise to obey you? […] I cannot make a promise that I will not keep, and, Almanzo, even if I tried, I do not think I could obey anybody against my better judgment. (These Happy Golden Years, “Wedding Plans”)

It is interesting how Wilder’s understanding of obedience was right and wrong at the same time. She was right to acknowledge that we owe our obedience to certain persons who have authority over us, but wrong to think it involved obeying against her better judgment. I went ahead and read the passage to my girls, and then we talked about how we are never to obey those who have authority over us if it means that we violate God’s law and our own conscience. But nonetheless obedience is a virtue that we are all called to have a Christians; disobedience to God was part of the first sin of the human race. God wants us to obey him and his commandments, but also obey him through our acquiescence to the wills of other people who have authority over us.

Obedience is a part of the Cardinal Virtue of Justice with which we give other people what is due to them…

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog: Death, Septuagesima and the Hillbilly Thomists

When my feeble life is o’er
And time for me will be no more
Guide me gently, safely o’er
To Thy kingdom dear Lord, to Thy shore. (Just a Closer Walk With Thee, Anonymous)

One of the things I love about going to an Extraordinary Form (of the Roman Rite) Mass every Sunday is the great depth of the old liturgical calendar. We recently entered the season of Septuagesima, which begins three Sundays before Ash Wednesday. Since in the old calendar the Christmas season extends to Feb. 2, the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord and the Purification of Our Lady, it is helpful to have this time to transition from Christmas cookies and music to the austerities of Lent. Septuagesima reminds me that I want to have a good, holy Lent in which I acknowledge my own sinfulness, seek to make reparation, and renew my dependence on God…

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…