Since then, I’ve gotten better at interviews, but the questions have also varied. The interviewers who have read the book have given very positive feedback, and their insights have provided good fodder for some great conversations.

The problem with interviews is that you never know what you are going to end up saying, whereas the book itself has been edited with a fine-tooth comb! I love the unity of the theme in my book, how concepts grow and build on each other, and how I said everything I wanted to say. Interviews, on the other hand, are choppy and incomplete. So my best advice is to read the book!

But I wanted to give you the essence of the book by answering some of the interview questions for you. I have also recorded them in audio form if you prefer listening. All I do is read the interview below, so hopefully it’s not too cheesy!

But before I interview myself, here are a few links with recent interviews and articles that I hope can help deepen your faith:

My Interview with Dr. Tom Curran of My Catholic Faith Ministries. He drilled me, but I think I passed the test. It was a great conversation, and I kind of feel like he sold the book for me.

Recovering a Spiritual Sense through the Power of Words at Denver Catholic, summarizing the points I make in my book about the importance of words.

Listen to the audio or read the interview below:

What was the inspiration behind this book?

A few years ago, I was reading the reflections in the Magnificat when the word “ineffable” kept appearing in the writings of saint after saint. It stuck with me because it is such an usual word today, and I had to look up the definition. Ineffable means, “Too great or extreme to be expressed in words.” Our language is always limited when it comes to describing love, especially the encounter with God’s divine life where He wants to immerse us in His love. So, I liked contemplating the juxtaposition of the importance of words with the limitations of words, how to experience a union beyond words, like in marriage when the two spouses give their bodies and their whole lives to each other.

At the same time, I finished reading The Fulfillment of All Desire by Ralph Martin, and began encountering a lot of misconceptions in prayer with different women that I talked with. This came after a time of deep healing in my own life and relationship with God, and as that all converged, I wanted to take the beauty and richness of the faith and put it in simpler words for the modern reader, while still keeping the depth of the tradition of the Church. So this book is a look at why we need to use our words to talk with God, how God uses words to speak to us—especially through Sacred Scripture—and ultimately how we go beyond the words into nuptial union with God, bearing the fruit of a holy life connected to Him. We look at overcoming dryness and distractions, the limitations of words, and how the Holy Spirit guides us deeper into contemplative prayer so we can experience the ineffable love and joy of being united to the Trinity.

Who is this book for?

While it is for anyone wanting a deeper relationship with God, it really is for married men and women, who can use their lived experiences of marriage to better understand how to grow in love with God. Most spiritual books on prayer as a relationship are written by priests or religious, and understandably so, but the spiritual life is for lay people too! Holiness is for everyone.

God transcends all languages, but we have to use words as our starting point. God reveals Himself through His creation, so our starting point for understanding union with God is our closest equivalent – marriage. The Hebrew word for marriage is a word that also means holiness, so I want to break open the close connection between the two. St. Paul says in Ephesians 5:31-32 that, “the two become one flesh, and this is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church.” Marriage is the sacramental sign of the nuptial union of heaven. Heaven is the marriage feast where we will be joined to God’s divinity for all of eternity.

I use marriage analogies and stories from my own life, then show how they apply to the heart of prayer, which is entering into the life of God in a total gift of self where two become one.

Also, because marriage in general is in such a bad state in our culture right now, perhaps meditating on the beauty and purpose of marriage will help those who are struggling to see its goodness and value. We have such broken relationships, so this book looks at what it’s like to be in a healthy relationship using marriage and prayer kind of side by side.

-Why do you highlight the idea of God speaking to us in words?

It is through words that God reveals Himself as a loving Father (and sometimes jealous spouse) because He desires union with us. Words are an act of disclosure about who you are. It’s the starting point of relationship, of communicating to be in communion.

It also matters what words we are listening to. God is speaking to us all the time, but there are other voices, too. The voice of the Spirit convicts, but the voice of the devil condemns. So we have to start paying attention to the thoughts in our head and where they are coming from. God gave man authority to name things, and especially when we name our thoughts and feelings and relate that to the Lord, we can actually grow in our relationship.

And, just like in any relationship, it starts with the basics. You can’t truly be in an intimate relationship without knowing the facts of who the other is, where they were born, how many siblings, what job they have, etc. The same is true with God – we need to know the basics of our faith and the words of Scripture. And sadly, that’s where many people stop, but it is really just the beginning.

Words are important in a relationship. How many marriages are stuck because one spouse or both do not name the fears and struggles deep within. We keep things at the surface, and then our relationships become stagnant.

Words are powerful; they make concrete an invisible idea, just as in the Sacraments words are used to effect spiritual realities and impart grace. The Word actually became a person, too: Jesus Christ Incarnate.

Sacred Scripture is the words of God put into human fashion. It is the main way God communicates Himself to us, speaking words of love. If we want to hear God’s voice, we need to immerse ourselves in Scripture, and I give ideas for lectio divina and other ways to take it in.

Finally, if Scripture is God speaking to us, then that requires a response. The Scriptures open us up to actually receive the person of Jesus Christ in our prayer time, and I talk about that as well.

In what ways is prayer like marriage?

We have two ways of growing in intimacy. Day-to-day life isn’t really romantic or special, but that’s where the real work of giving and showing love happens – taking care of the kids, working, running errands, etc. But we also need time aside to focus on us and our relationship by going on dates and taking time to develop our intimacy.

Similarly, we need “dates” with God as well as the intimacy of living daily life together. These dates are our prayer time, and yet, hours of contemplation will not come naturally unless we are trained by the Master of Prayer: the Holy Spirit. Like working out, we devote time to build up the muscle for silence, training our mind and heart to be lifted to God. We begin by setting aside some time to spend with God, for if we do not want to spend time with Him now, what makes us think we will choose to spend all of eternity with Him?

So we must be honest about our expectations. At one point I asked myself: why was I going to prayer? And my honest answer was because I didn’t want to disappoint God, whereas going out with friends felt more authentic and spontaneous. So I have to be honest: Is prayer a way to prove to God how good I am? Or is prayer a reminder of how much I need the presence of God in my life? Can I be authentic and spontaneous with the One who created me?

Vocal prayer is like following a recipe or using different kinds of tools on a project. There are so many litanies, devotional prayers, etc. that you can’t possibly pray them all, but they all have their time and place, and all serve to help us communicate with God. The words are important, especially the words Jesus gave us in the Our Father.

But, we don’t want to get too stuck on the words that we miss what the purpose of the words are for – to further our relationship. We have to get to a place of honesty in speaking heart-to-heart, and meditation helps us get there. I love the example of ARRR prayer in my book to help facilitate that conversation.

How do we know when God is talking to us?

It takes time and practice but the reality is God wants to speak to us. Sometimes it’s practical, like sensible advice from a wise person or something in a homily that moves you. Often I hear God when I’m journaling, and it comes like a divine yet direct word to my mind. It’s not exaggerated, accusatory, or fleeting. The word is calm, persistent, level-headed. The devil is the accuser and condemner; God has come to save us! His words bring peace and fruit over time.

Other ways God speaks to us: Sometimes we can get an image in our mind or a word of knowledge, something we couldn’t know without an inspiration. Sometimes there’s a tingling in my gut when I know I need to pay attention. We can test it, or sit with it, and discern if its true. We never force a '“word” upon someone, and we also must realize that sometimes we might not hear correctly and that’s okay too. We can always repent and begin again. Fr. Jacques Philippe reminds us that we are never dispensed from a learning experience!

What is contemplative prayer? How does it relate to the “ineffable”?

Contemplation is ineffable prayer because it goes beyond the words, where we are simply present with our beloved. Contemplation is a gift we receive, in which we are caught up into God’s divine life. You cannot force it, just like you cannot force love, but it is rather a response to the invitation of the Trinity to be drawn into the mystery of love.

It’s harder to talk about with words, just like a married couple’s love is less spoken about. It’s just something you have to experience! This time with God is so beyond what we have words for. Still, the training in quiet prayer becomes worth it, in order to be disposed to receive God in this way.

Contemplation relates to the ineffable experience of being immersed in God’s love and protection, of the joy beyond words of satisfying the longing of our hearts. Of course, though, these feelings are fleeting, and we don’t always feel the love or joy, but as we grow in union with God, we grow in connection and contentment simply to be with our beloved. Just as within marriage, there is a deeper peace and commitment the longer you journey together.

Ultimately, prayer is the work of the Holy Spirit, who guides us deeper into the heart of God. We are changed as the Spirit works in us, advocates for us, and breathes life in us.

What is the place of silence and longing in prayer?

Longing brings us to the awareness that there is still more to come. A piece of music we never want to end, a beautiful sunset that we cannot put in our pocket and take home, the longing to possess something great and mysterious outside ourselves. This longing increases our capacity to receive, which St. Augustine compares to the stretching of a sack. And as we long for more of God - even in the difficult situations where we long for resolution or peace - He receives that longing, and longs for us in return, just as He thirsted for us on the Cross.

Sometimes we have to wait in a place of longing while God prepares to do something still greater in us. We grow in virtue as we wait for the right time for God to reveal the next step to us. Longing helps us keep our eyes on the prize- in this case, our final fulfillment as God’s beloved in Heaven.

Silence is the language of love and contemplation. And so we need to protect times of silence, preferably in front of the Eucharist, for God to work in us on a deeper level. I have a much longer and more beautiful quote in the book, but Servant of God Archbishop Martinez eloquently says, “…with His silence He expresses perhaps better than with His words the love that He professes for us….Let us permit that silence to envelop and penetrate us even to our innermost being, and it will teach us more than all the words that we desire to hear.” The words and the silence are always connected.

How do we overcome dryness, discouragement, or distraction?

How much time do we have? Every relationship goes through dry patches, where feelings come and go. It is the same with the spiritual life with times of consolation and desolation, where we have to stay committed regardless of how we feel in the moment. God is never far away, even if it feels that way sometimes. There is no shame in the dry times, for God is still working in us. Sometimes we experience dryness because we are avoiding something we need to talk to the Lord about, or we are in need of a good Confession. Sometimes the Devil wants us to be discouraged to give up, but the fruit is born when we persevere in difficult times. I know my marriage is far better because we have overcome obstacles together.

With distraction, we can get curious: what are you distracted by? Bringing those things into relationship with the Lord IS prayer! Maybe we need to examine our expectations of what prayer looks like and see if it is what the Lord expects. Talk to Him about it. We don’t have to force thoughts out of our mind to only focus on God. Again, bring whatever you are thinking, feeling, and desiring into relationship with Him.

What is the ultimate goal of ineffable prayer?

The goal is union with God: sharers in the divine nature (CCC 51), the wedding feast of Christ and His Bride. The goal is eternal happiness, joy, love, and belonging. We will be able to look back and know all the suffering was worth it to get to this point. This Eucharist is our foretaste of this total-self gift, the consummation of His body on the cross when He said, “It is finished,” and gave Himself to us.

The goal is that we unite our will to God’s will: to want what He wants, to love what He loves. This act of trust and obedience reverses the primordial curse and is a source of grace. Mary is our example of surrender, trust, and willing what God wants. When we give our fiat like Mary did, we bear the fruit of Christ within us to the world.

I am really happy with the analogies and examples I give in the book in this last chapter on union and fruitfulness. From our roots in the streams to the sacraments and the cross, from the fruits of marriage to the surrender of Mary, I think it is the perfect way to end the book. It is practical and applicable and spiritually rich.

Finally, the book has journaling questions at the end of each chapter to help you get communicating with God directly. The goal of the questions is honesty and vulnerability, getting you talking and sharing with God so you can receive what He has to give. Over and over, the feedback from readers is that these questions really helped them in their prayer.

So that’s it! That’s the end of my interview with myself, and I hope it blessed you with encouragement for your own spiritual journey. Thanks for reading or listening!

Allison

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We know other couples who struggle with infertility or health issues or other difficulties where it seems like God doesn’t know best and the method has failed them. Fertility is all wrapped up in the cross and our salvation, and so I believe it is always best to treat this topic with the seriousness and reverence it deserves.

A few years back, I wrote a whole chapter in my postpartum book for women titled “Marriage and NFP.” So today, I’m posting an excerpt from that chapter in hopes it will help women out there who are in the thick of it.

Please enjoy this excerpt from Baby and Beyond: Overcoming Those Post-Childbirth Woes (Sophia Institute Press, 2019).

I can see the temptation to contraception. I’ve heard many Catholics try to argue this point: with PPD, emotional adjustments, physical recovery, the expense of having a baby, and highly irregular fertility markers, contraception can be justified after having a baby. The nurses at the hospital will even push it on you only hours after you’ve pushed your baby out. So, it seems like a good idea to use contraception, have sex whenever you want, and not think about a baby for a while. Well, it seems like a good idea at first.

I’ve been searching the Bible to try to find somewhere that Jesus says, “Forgive me for making discipleship so difficult at times. Let me make an exception because I definitely don’t want you to suffer any more than you already have.” Only, I can’t find that verse (but believe me, I’ve looked!). I’ve heard women say, “Have to struggle with NFP? That’s not the God of love I know.” Yet I have to respond, “ ‘Willing to make exceptions for difficulties’ is not the God of love I know.” And that’s because now I truly believe that the suffering that comes from being faithful to NFP in your marriage after having a baby is the stuff that saints are made of.

I love my children, and even though Lily screamed bloody murder every time I changed her diaper, I still changed it. She hated it, but it was good for her. I absolutely hate practicing NFP postpartum, and I’m usually not good at it (which is why most of my children are less than two years apart). But God asks me to do difficult things because, in the end, it’s good for me. Practice makes perfect, so now, eight years into marriage, my husband and I are getting better at using NFP for spacing, and my children are close in age and therefore have the best playmates. I have no regrets now about having our children when we did, although I may have had some at the time.

I remember yelling at my mom, who had been teaching and promoting NFP since before I was born. I told her they lied: NFP wasn’t happy or fun or good for our marriage. We were not financially stable. And we were having kids faster than I could keep up with. I felt as if Nathan and I were on different planets, and more than pulling us closer, the unknowns and waiting periods of NFP seemed to be causing resentment and pushing us further away from each other.

That was three years into our marriage, and what really helped us was to activate the grace of the sacrament of Matrimony. We had said “for better or worse,” and now we needed God to help us stick it out. We were faithful to using NFP, and so the benefits eventually came, but we had to work through all the hard stuff to get to the payoff. What I’ve come to understand is that NFP is good for marriage in the long run; it’s not a short-term gain.

We’ve also learned so much along the way that has made our marriage stronger. On a retreat, a priest described the process of forging a knife: heating and pounding the metal, cooling it, heating it again, honing it against a stone. But how he summarized the process is what struck me: The blacksmith is not trying to hurt the knife; he’s trying to perfect it. God, who is all good, would never want to hurt us, but He does want to perfect us. When God allows us to go through trials in our marriage, it is because, in His infinite wisdom, He knows it can ultimately bring about good in us, provided we accept His grace.

A girlfriend asked me once how long it took before my husband and I started to get on the same page about parenting and NFP. I told her eight years and four kids. Everything before that was pretty hard. There were even some really bad times in those eight years when I questioned my love for Nathan and why I married him in the first place. There were times when we stormed out on each other and gave each other the could shoulder. I’m not proud of those moments, but it’s how we ultimately responded to them that made the difference: we went back to our marital promises. We had entered into a covenant that could not be broken, so now we had to figure it out. And our love now is stronger precisely because of the difficulties rather than in spite of them. If we had had it easy and never fought or struggled to love each other, there would be no refinement.

The grace of the sacrament of Matrimony is real and effective, provided we are disposed to receive it. Christ, who has shown His love for us on the Cross, “encounters Christian spouses through the sacrament of Matrimony” (CCC 1642). Grace is the gift by which Christ enters into us and transforms our ability to love. The Catechism of the Catholic Church beautifully says that through Matrimony, “Christ dwells with them [spouses], gives them the strength to take up their crosses and so follow him, to rise again after they have fallen, to forgive one another, to bear one another’s burdens. . . and to love one another with supernatural, tender, fruitful love” (CCC 1642).

I’ve seen very clearly through these postpartum times in our marriage that I need God’s grace to love my husband, to practice NFP, and to raise our children. I can’t do it without Christ, because I don’t have that supernatural love on my own. I’m sure our marriage will have other tough times ahead, but because we have navigated four postpartum periods, I feel hopeful that, with the help of God’s grace, we can navigate whatever other difficulties come our way.

Thank you for reading and sharing! Find out more about Baby and Beyond: Overcoming Those Post-Childbirth Woes here.

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And for Ineffable: Learning to Love the God Beyond Words, you can get 25% off at SophiaInstitute.com with the code “Ineffable25”.

You can get 25% off my book using code “Ineffable25” at SophiaInstitute.com

Today I want to give you a bit of my origin story. I guess we’ll begin with my baptism, when (as the story goes) the priest who baptized me, as he anointed me with holy chrism oil, prayed that I would be so slippery that Satan wouldn’t be able to get a grip on me.

Thanks be to God that while the enemy has certainly tried and won some battles, I continue to grow deeper in my faith and burn with the desire to share about God’s love to anyone who will listen.

We had a priest over for brunch recently, and I was reflecting on the time when I became serious about my faith in high school. During that period, I was reading a lot about the saints and learning about the spiritual life, but something was bothering me. All that I knew about prayer came from priests and religious, and I had this feeling deep in my gut that married life should be holy, too. I hadn’t read Familiaris Consortio, Christifideles Laici, or anything by JPII yet, but I instinctively felt that holiness should be for everyone, even families and lay people.

In 8th grade, when I was confirmed, I took St. Bridget of Sweden as my patron saint. Not that I felt particularly connected to her, but she was a saint who was a mother before starting a religious order, and one of her daughters also became a canonized saint. That was good enough for me.

At Franciscan University of Steubenville, I studied the faith, read the documents, lived a life of prayer and Sacraments, and even went on a religious discernment weekend with some friends. That cemented my call to married life, and this feeling resurged that somehow mothers and fathers were meant to be saints, too.

So maybe you can imagine my confusion when motherhood felt anything but holy in those early years. Sleep deprivation, nutrient depletion, and loads of laundry and diapers consumed me. Where was holiness now? Those silent times of prayer and contemplation had all but disappeared. What was the point of all my years of daily Mass and Adoration just to give it all up?

As I wrestled with these questions while giving birth four times over, the content of my book Baby and Beyond: Overcoming Those Post-Childbirth Woes began to develop. I wanted to put into words the spirituality of those early years of motherhood because at that time (7-8 years ago), no one was writing about postpartum (especially in a Catholic context), despite every Catholic mother going through it at least once, often more.

As I have dove deeper into my own journey of prayer and faith and entered a new season of motherhood (no more diapers, yay!), I have wrestled with new questions about prayer and what it was for. I felt like I was influenced by so many people talking about the practices of prayer, but the beauty of the relationship and the invitation to be known got lost in the “urgency” of saying your prayers.

At the heart of it was the two-fold problem of not believing in God’s merciful love, and not forgiving myself. Not that I had never experienced God’s love for me, but there were certainly dark places I didn’t practically believe His love reached. I had told myself I was a failure, and the identity stuck.

The last five or so years have been about uncovering those lies and inviting God’s love to change me. I discovered that my idea of prayer came with expectations of not wanting God to be disappointed in me, rather than God inviting me into a deep conversation of love with me. I read about prayer in the Catechism, in the writings of the saints and spiritual directors, and immersed myself in God’s word. Healing and union came with these old-yet-new experiences in prayer.

And so, my new book reflects that journey into intimacy with the Trinity that involves a level of consistency, sure, but is more about developing the relationship rather than doing things “the right way.” The common theme is that we learn about relating to God through our experience of marriage. Holiness is, in fact, meant for everyone-including lay people. A seed was planted in my heart as a teenager, and I see the way God has been guiding me in my mission all along.

IN THE NEWS:
Here are links to my current articles and interviews. I’ll continue to include roundups at the end of my newsletters.

Loving God Transforms Your Loves, published at Catholic Exchange. Just as loving our family teaches us to love what they love, falling in love with God transforms our desires and our vision of the world. What once felt like sacrifice can become joy as we discover the goodness of God’s plan and learn to love what He loves.

Praise, Petition, and Contrition: Uncovering the Deeper Meaning of the Lord’s Prayer. SpiritualDirection.com published an adapted excerpt from Ineffable on the words of the Lord’s Prayer and what we are really saying when we pray it.

I Saw the Crown of Thorns. Then Something Greater Happened. This is my September Denver Catholic article on my experience in Paris this summer and a reflection on Mass, relics, and pilgrimage.

God’s Plan or My Plans? Looking Into Our Children’s Futures. My parenting article for Catholicmom.com examining our ideals and expectations for our children.

An Ineffable Interview with Bonnie Landry. It’s going to be hard to top this interview with Bonnie Landry at Make Joy Normal. We laughed, we cried, we talked about the spiritual life, and it was awesome. Listen here on Spotify. Or here on Apple podcasts.

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IN OTHER NEWS:
These were rockstar, listen-worthy interviews that I think are really important.

What is Education Really For? on Every Knee Shall Bow Podcast. Why does modern education feel like it’s in crisis? Gomer explores what education is ultimately for and how our understanding of the human person shapes it. The Catholic vision of education is the formation of the whole person through truth, freedom, and virtue, ultimately leading us toward God.

Modern Therapy Makes You Worse Off (But There’s a Solution) w/ Dr. Gregory Bottaro on the Lila Rose Show. This was just so good on healing, therapy, trust, relationships, and the human person.

BONUS EPISODE on Spiritual Abuse - w/ Paul Fahey and the Sisters of the Little Way. If you travel in very Catholic Circles, you have to pay attention to what the are doing, and listen to these conversations around spiritual bypassing and spiritual abuse.

Thank you for being here and for reading! This newsletter is free so I invite you to subscribe or share it with a friend!

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Also, I had a fun conversation with Allison Gingras on the new podcast, “How’s Your Prayer Life?” I’ve listened to a bunch of other episodes, and it’s really interesting to see how everyone approaches their prayer life, with similar themes but different devotions. You can see the whole conversation on YouTube here.

And now for a few thoughts on the saints plus some news on my new book!

St. Paul boldly says in 1 Corinthians 11:1- “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” In fact, he says no less than seven times throughout his letters to imitate him, or be imitators of the apostles or other churches.

Anthropologists would say this makes sense, for humans learn through imitation. From the very youngest years, we learn language by hearing and repeating; we learn manners and cultural customs from copying what we see practiced.

Therefore, what a gift that we have incarnational people to look up to! We can look to the lives of the saints and see concrete ways to be holy. We can imitate St. Paul and thousands of others who have walked this life before us.

And yet…

There can be pitfalls. None of us has the exact same story or circumstances as another saint lived in, nor the exact same time in history. So we have to figure out which parts to imitate while discerning which parts were unique to them; we also have to look to Christ for the direction of our own personal path. We can’t just copy and paste.

Additionally, here are a few other pitfalls to watch out for, speaking from experience.

Sometimes we treat the saints as inspirational stories. Saint stories are great stories! They have marvelous twists and turns with satisfying endings (I mean, the saint part, not often the way they died). I’ve had the temptation to think that reading to my children about the lives of the saints and having a party for liturgical feasts is enough to make them holy. It’s a start, but it’s not a replacement for introducing my children to God and teaching them how to pray.

Sometimes we treat the saints as historical artifacts. This person did this thing, and now they are a saint. Isn’t that so wonderful? They are nice stories about the past that you would read in a history book. Often I forget that saints are alive and ready to cheer us on and pray for us.

One time, I was struggling with something in my marriage and I remember talking to my spiritual director about it. There was a married saint’s name that kept coming to mind so I brought it up, and my spiritual director said, “Okay, what are you going to do next?” My response was to buy a book on that saint and read it. He said (very patiently), “Why don’t you first start praying to that saint and asking them to intercede for your marriage?” Right! That would be a much better, cheaper (and honestly more effective) first step. No harm in learning about the saints, but let’s not forget they are alive in Heaven, share in the mystical body of Christ (that we also share in), and are the Church Triumphant!

Sometimes we treat saints as infallible. Have you ever heard someone say, “Well Jerome was known for his temper and he’s a saint, so I can have a temper too.” You haven’t? Oops. Or maybe you have heard someone say, “Well, this saint said this thing and they are a saint, so it must be true.”

Lord knows I would love to be a saint someday. And the Lord also knows I have said so many untrue, imprecise, and questionable things that if I ever am to become a saint, nobody should take everything I have said as gospel truth.

The beauty of the saints is that they struggled with sins, wrestled with ideologies, and still made it to Heaven. The part to celebrate is that God made them holy despite their failings! Remember: the Pope isn’t infallible, and neither were saints when they were alive. Mary’s the only perfect one besides Jesus!

So if we are going to imitate the saints, let’s imitate their sincerity, fervor, and especially the humility with which they submitted to the will of God. The thing I love most about the saints is that each of their paths to sanctity was under different circumstances. Each path was unique in the manner of devotion, but all of them had the same fundamental surrendering to grace and commitment to prayer and virtue that won them the crown of eternal life.

If we are going to imitate the saints, we should spend more time praying to God than just telling their stories and learning about their lives. We should ask for their intercession more often than having an intellectual exercise about their position. (Room for both, but…priorities.) Above all else, the saints show us that conversion of heart is what unites us to God.

If you want to learn more about how to grow in your relationship with God, please consider checking out my new book, Ineffable: Learning to Love the God Beyond Words, published by Sophia Institute Press and officially available on September 15^th.

If your prayer life feels like it’s stalled, or you don’t know what to say anymore, I can help you navigate the wisdom of the Church. We’ll go through the fundamentals of why words are important, how God speaks to us through His Word, and different ways of looking at vocal prayer and meditation to help give it some new life. We’ll look at the limitations of words, the struggles of training in prayer, and the role of the Holy Spirit in guiding us. Then we’ll go beyond the words into contemplation, discuss the distractions, dryness, and suffering that lead to ineffable love and joy, culminating in the nuptial meaning of union with God. There are prayer prompts after each chapter, and I write from personal experience to show how we can apply the wisdom of the saints to the everyday life of a married layperson.

It’s all in less than 160 pages, using insights and quotes from ancient saints and modern theologians, as well as my own stories and simple explanations. Holiness is for each and every person, and married life offers us a perfect opportunity to grow in union with God.

Here are a just a few of the endorsements its received:

From Claire Dwyer, Author of This Present Paradise:
“When a writer is able to take the most sublime and mysterious realities and wrap them in words that reveal, clarify, and compel, she surely is participating in the ongoing mission of the Word Himself. Relatable stories and solid spiritual theology? Yes, please! Ineffable is perfect not only for adoration and personal prayer but also for the mom’s group or book club that wants something of real substance to pray with and discuss.”

From Dr. Ralph Martin, Author of The Fulfillment of All Desire:
“Skillfully drawing on solid sources, Allison Auth has written a very helpful book for those interested in understanding better the life of prayer and union with God. Enlivened by honest sharing about her own life, marriage and family, this book will help and encourage many.”

From Allison Gingras, Author of Jesus Heals and Director of Digital Evangelization for Holy Cross Family Ministries:
“With warmth and clarity, Allison Auth invites readers into moment after moment of profound yet simple spiritual discovery. Ineffable expertly weaves Scripture, story, and reflective questions that lead readers to more deeply discern who God is and who they are in Him. A prayerful companion I will return to often, nurturing a richer, more personal relationship with the God who sees, reveals, and loves inexpressibly.”

You can pre-order today, and use code Ineffable25 at checkout for 25% off, good through the end of the year.

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I see now the way I worry about things is my attempt at control. If I worry about the train being on time, staying healthy, what to eat, how much money to spend, then somehow the bad won’t happen because I’ve thought it through. I’ve controlled it with my mind.

Only my brain is not that big, apparently, as I have no jedi mind control, and nothing makes you feel more like an idiot than trying to travel in a foreign country. Plenty of stuff went wrong that I didn’t worry about enough, but we made it through.

Not only did we make it through, but we had a darn good time along the way. My son did pick up a cold but he was a trooper, and we still saw just about everything we set out to see: Mont Saint Michel, the D-Day landing beaches and memorial, Our Lady of Pontmain, Lisieux, the Eiffel Tower, the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal, Sainte-Chappelle, Notre Dame, the Palace of Versailles. We also spent an incredible weekend visiting with 190 of our closest French relatives (plus a few Americans), but that’s a story for another time.

This past week at Mass, on the Feast of the Transfiguration, I realized what a mountaintop experience our trip to France was. The ability to pray in so many holy and beautiful places, to be wholly present to the moment and offer sincere and beautiful prayers was more transformative than I expected. By the end of the 10 days, I was ready to come home. But what I wasn’t ready for was the immediate jump back in to taking care of the kids, laundry, grocery shopping, scheduling, school year planning. It was more jarring than I had expected.

Thinking back to our trip, one mountain-top encounter stands out. We drove to Lisieux, parked, found a bathroom, and slid into the chapel at Carmel just in time for Mass. It was a nice Mass—Jesus was there, after all—but the chapel was the least pretty of our whole trip. We saw a sign in the chapel pointing to “la chasse” of St. Therese, which I wondered if it was maybe her room in the convent? Or her clothing?

No, it was actually her “tomb” right on the other side of the chapel’s pillars. We walked over to the reliquary/coffin where she is buried (although she has some relics in the Basilica and other parts of her remains are on tour in Poland…also a topic for another time).

I knelt in front of the bars and prayed from my heart. I shared with St. Therese my desire to do big things for God, the yearning for greatness in my heart, the hope of evangelization with the publishing of my new book.

I felt a camaraderie with this saint in that I long for a big mission to share God’s love. At the same time, I am very aware of my littleness: my small mission field that mainly consists of my family and parish, and the few people who read this newsletter. Therese knew that paradox – for a young girl who died at 24 and never left the convent, she is the most influential saint of the 21^st century. She, who never went on a mission, is the patron saint of missionaries. Her interior life was so rich yet hidden that even the other nuns didn’t see it. They were worried they wouldn’t have anything to say about Therese at her funeral! Therese was a deep-feeler who was often misunderstood. Only in her writings did her depth really reveal itself. That is something I can relate to.

Even though Therese was small and humble in this life, she is now exalted in eternal life because she is united to the greatness of God. She offered her life for souls, prayed for priests, and grew in simplicity and trust of her heavenly Father. I felt this hope and peace as I offered to God my desires, my reality, and asked Him to do what He will with it. And then I stood up.

I smelled the faint smell of incense, so I peeked my head back into the chapel to see if they were getting ready for some service in there. It was empty. I asked my parents if they smelled any incense or anything. No, they said, but maybe it was all the flowers by St. Therese’s tomb. I walked over and poked my nose through the bars. Nope, smelled like nothing in there. I stood beside my son and sniffed again. The scent was definitely there – a faint, sweet smelling floral incense. As someone who is very allergic to most scents, this one was pleasant, dare I say—heavenly.

I have since learned that some people have had the experience of smelling the scent of flowers or incense, as a kind of answer to prayer from St. Therese, who said she would spend her heaven doing good on earth and send showers of roses.

Then I sat in morning Mass on the Feast of the Transfiguration, thinking about the glory cloud that enveloped the apostles as they saw Jesus transfigured, and how they wanted to build tents and stay in that moment of heavenly grace. They wanted to remain in that mountaintop experience, and I get it. Couldn’t I get a whiff of that incense one more time? I now have a longing to hide away while reading spiritual books and writing on lofty, heavenly experiences—or at least to pray without distraction in a beautiful European chapel—but the kids are asking for food and the bathroom needs cleaned and I have to register for this class or that activity.

The mountaintop prepared Peter, James, and John for the scandal of the cross. They could hold on to the memory of Jesus in his glory to help them through the difficult moments.

My life is not a major crucifixion, but it is death to self in a million tiny ways. And then I recalled praying by the tomb of Sts. Louis and Zelie Martin, Therese’s parents. Zelie lost four children in infancy and died of breast cancer when Therese was only four. The reason Therese survived infancy was that she was given to a wet nurse for the first year of her life. Imagine missing the first year of your child’s life, knowing another mother is comforting your baby in a way you can’t!

Zelie knew suffering. She knew the trials of this life as an exasperated mom and business owner, yet she gave her desires over to God. Not knowing glory in this life, she knows it now in the next. Same with her husband Louis, whose quiet and steady devotion paved the way for his daughters to become saints. They were ordinary parents with struggles and frustrations, but God sanctified them through it. Their holiness grew through family life. They weren’t looking to make a name for themselves. They were simply loving God through serving their family, loving each other through sorrow and death.

Therese, the “little flower”, now has quite the large basilica dedicated to her. Not having the large stained-glass windows of Gothic Cathedrals, Therese’s basilica is full of mosaics and feels a bit darker inside. And yet, as I made my way to the front of the Church, I saw that all the light seemed concentrated near the tabernacle, and that is just how Therese would want it. A grand basilica, a little saint, and it all points to Jesus. Light illumines the darkest hour, and the darkness leads to light. Jesus, in the Transfiguration, gave his closest companions a glimpse of that heavenly light.

Now, down the mountain in my day-to-day, I feel the discouragement of people doing more important things than me, or having more readers, or being better writers and teachers and planners and mothers. I experience the overwhelm of parenting, battling screens, planning activities, and the stress of family life.

Then I remember St. Therese, her parents, and my prayer before their relics. Ultimately, it seems to me that the offering of my life and my desires is enough for the moment, even when the moment feels discouraging. To keep on in my little ways that I have already discerned with God is enough, and God can do with it what He wills. If it becomes a big mission, it was all God. If it remains a small offering, it will be glorified in Heaven.

I couldn’t build my tent there in Lisieux, but I have the encouragement that transformation is taking place in me, that God is working on me, and that He will answer my greatest prayer: union with Him.

“All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord who is the Spirit.” (2 Cor 3:18)

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So much is stirring inside that it feels a bit overwhelming at times. I recognized this week how often I have stayed on the surface—I’m listening to good podcasts and spiritual books, but I am actually flying through them, like waterskiing over the surface while the churning continues deep in the depths. I’m not entering often enough into the present moment and the reality of my family life because my mind is off on lofty clouds. I’m avoiding the work of examining my daily choices because there are too many decisions to make, too many honest questions to ask.

I have many good things to decide about – a trip to France this week, figuring out what homeschooling looks like in the fall, what classes to take, books to order, activities to plan, preparing for a book launch, meeting with friends, planning playdates, etc. And yet, I’m overwhelmed by all the options to sift through. But isn’t that what discernment often is—choosing between two good things? I’m realizing the need to further invite God into my plans and help me refine them.

But still, that takes effort. I have things I want to write about, but no bandwidth to wrestle with the words. In my prayer, I receive the Lord’s words in Scripture, but I have yet to go to the depths to respond to them. I sense the Lord saying, “Hang in there, stay in it...be patient…soon it will be made clear.” And I must trust that things are happening even in the churning, and show up the best I can.

After a storm or a big stirring, though, things get washed up on the beach and then it is time to sift through them. There is usually plenty of seaweed along with some trash to discard, but there are also treasures, like sand dollars, coral, and seashells of all shapes and sizes.

We often can’t see what was being formed in those depths until it all gets shaken up and washed up. Sometimes it’s a matter of waiting and being patient, of giving God permission to do something deeper. Then the treasures will appear.

One treasure that’s tumbled out so far is the name of my Substack: Spirit + Bride. When I started writing on here over two years ago, it was just to have a landing place to practice writing. I needed to discover what I wanted to write about and where the Spirit was leading me. I immediately fell into the motherhood space, since my first book was about postpartum issues, but I didn’t feel called to stay there. As I began writing my second book, I saw that my deep insights into spirituality, love of Scripture, and prayer were fueling me. I become passionate when I talk about a rich prayer life and living in the Spirit, about finding grace in the married vocation and staying close to the Sacraments.

The whole goal of life is union with God, a “nuptial union,” as John Paul II called it, that the married life only foreshadows. I want to be united to the Trinity in a complete union where the Father loves me, Christ lives in me, and the Spirit works through me.

In the last chapter of the last book of the Bible, it is written, “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come’ ” (Rev. 22:17). The book of Revelation is the apostle John’s glimpse into the heavenly throne room, the wedding feast of Christ with His Church. I want to answer that call to come and be wedded to God for eternity.

My heart is longing for this union while simultaneously wrestling with laying down my own ambitions and pride, and working to see how my vocation to marriage and family life is the way that God is calling me to this love. So in this newsletter, Spirit + Bride, I want to put into words glimpses of the blessed life of union with God. I want to continue to sort out the subtleties of the spiritual life, so that we don’t fall into the traps of extremes – of over-spiritualizing our earthly reality while also not removing the spiritual from the physical. The goal is integration of holiness within the lay vocation. My hope is to keep my eyes on the prize so we can run this race together. Thank you for joining me as I continue my monthly reflections.

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Today, my son and I embark on a trip to France. Feel free to follow along on Instagram (@allisonauth) where I plan to post pictures. It’s turning out to be a pilgrimage of sorts, so feel free to message me any prayer requests! One of the places we hope to visit is Our Lady of Pontmain, one of the five Church-approved Marian apparitions in France. I actually just wrote about Pontmain and the other lesser-known French apparitions for Catholicmom.com this month:

Three Lesser-Known Marian Apparitions and Their Significance For Today

Ineffable: Learning to Love the God Beyond Words is almost here! It will be available in September, and you can read the description at Sophia Institute. More to come soon!

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One woman is first chair in an orchestra and homeschools her kids. Another turned down a dream job at a Catholic school because her kids are young and she is still figuring out the season she is in. Another woman has half her kids in Catholic school and half in homeschool, has a job, and is working towards her doctorate in the mission of Catholic education. Another is an ethics lawyer, working full-time and I see her kids active in the Church, embracing their faith, and doing wonderful things.

I have been grateful for female doctors and medical practitioners who understand intimately the realities of pregnancy and fertility. Some mothers, like me, are writers on the side. Some are teachers at their kids’ school, and some simply love the life of being a stay-at-home mother. Some, like the many who attended our homeschool conference, teach at co-ops or Catechesis, are involved in their parishes and use their gifts in so many small and comparatively unseen ways. And yet the mark they leave, the influence they have, is priceless.

The one thing they all have in common is that regardless of their employment status or whether their kids are homeschooled or go to school, they each see their role as mother as their most important one. I know one woman (whom I greatly admire) who has worked in the top tiers of the male-dominated banking world, denouncing corruption and standing up for moral ethics while raising four children. Another friend, after working random nursing shifts for over a decade while her children were young, now oversees several crisis pregnancy centers, changing lives and literally saving some. I couldn’t be more proud of the way I see these women using their gifts today.

It doesn’t mean there isn’t a balancing act, but that is for the family to discern. Having frequently been bullied growing up, I’ve come to learn that bullies are insecure about their own lives and choices, and therefore put down others’ lives and choices. The one-sided “dialogue” that says you must only stay home with your kids and enjoy the laundry does such a disservice to the greater and more meaningful conversations about women’s roles in the world. I promise you, the world is better because the feminine genius is in it. (Of course, the world is better when both males and females are living a life of virtue; it’s just that no one disputes the role that men need to work).

The Church gives guidance and discernment, but also the freedom and the wisdom to make prudent choices—and each family will look different. That’s not just for women working/not working, but for every prudential choice a family will make. The deeper problem, as I see it, is that we—as a Church—do not know how to pray well: how to enter into relationship with God, hear His voice, and live in union with Him. If that were the case, we wouldn’t try so hard to get everyone’s lives to look the same.

In my upcoming book, I write, “Jesus could have come and given us a list of rules to live by “to be good people.” . . . But Jesus is not a set of morals to live by. He is a person! A person who engages with us, a person who desires to know every inch of us and reveals Himself slowly so that we would hunger for more of Him.”

The beauty of the spiritual life is how original it is for each of us, and the many and varied lives of the Saints show us just that. It is more than a set of rules; it is a living relationship with the Trinity!

When we lean too much on telling other people what to do, or letting people tell us what to do, it means we aren’t leaning enough on our relationship with God, coming to Him in prayer and letting Him reveal where His plan meets our desires.

When my first book was published, it was kind of like a desire I didn’t even know I had. It was also hard work, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that again. It was the year 2020, and in the midst of book interviews and balancing homeschooling, the world shut down and went crazy. Life got frenetic, and I had a hard time hearing God’s voice; I was so busy listening to this or that voice on the internet and trying to decide about masks and vaccines and how to buy groceries. I told God I desired to hear His voice, so I committed to times of prayer and journaling. A little while later I heard God say to me:
“I am not asking you to do everything or be everything. Just be you, with the specific gifts I have given you. Your mission field is your family first. Focus on that. I love you. There is nothing you could do that would change that. I am sovereign, but I am personal, and that’s what I would like to reveal to you.”

That story is in my book, too, but for a different reason. The point here is that God told me, after publishing my first book, to put my family first. What that meant was getting pregnant later that summer, focusing on settling into homeschooling, and entering into a time of deep healing through spiritual direction.

Writing the first book took time and attention away from my children, but it was not only a profound experience for me—it has also helped many other women in their own mothering journey. I believe God wanted me to write that book or I wouldn’t have done it. Then my mission field again became my family first (notice not family *only*, just family first).

Then, several years later, I told my spiritual director that I thought God was leading me to be more outward again, and he agreed. Now I’m publishing a second book, have had some speaking opportunities, and feel called to keep going outward. That doesn’t mean my family isn’t still first, but that my husband and I and God must discern what that looks like. It also doesn’t mean I have balanced it successfully (who does?), but I’m learning and growing and trying to obey.

The one thing I think is true is that the world needs women. We need their gifts of sensitivity, receptivity, generosity, and maternity in every sphere of work, culture, and education. I think of the gift shop I was in that was disorganized and poorly stocked, where I keenly felt the lack of a female presence. Or the adventure outlet run by men that needed a good cleaning and better customer service. I think the balance and complementarity of men and women extends to so many areas of life, even the seminary, where it is good and healthy to have women professors and some motherly figures to complement the male-dominated sphere.

I like the idea of seasons. One of the speakers at our homeschool conference is a mother of ten, was a missionary in Cambodia for twelve years, and is now a licensed Catholic therapist. Talk about seasons! Nadya Williams has an interesting article in Fairer Disputations addressing gap years in academia, and how we should normalize the experience of women who scale back careers when their kids are little. There are seasons; they don’t stay little forever.

This kind of dialogue, the exchange of ideas and the witness of lived experience, is important when we talk about women sharing their charisms and their feminine genius with the world.

Cleaning out my inbox recently, I came upon a charism test that I took quite a few years ago now. I think it’s important to take the results of tests like these with a grain of salt, seeing them as part self-reflection and part calling. Still, the results can be illuminating and I found writing, prophecy, pastoring, and teaching close to the top. Far below were things like music, service, giving, craftsmanship. To me, this shows me that some of the things that come easier are likely to be callings that I must seriously discern. That obviously doesn’t exclude giving and service as things everyone is called to do, but that maybe writing and speaking on my book are things I can lean into instead of thinking I need to run one more service project for homeschoolers.

The “charism discernment guide” lists two dozen charisms, and the beauty is in knowing that everyone who takes it will get different results because God is creative like that! The craftsmen need the administrators, and the visionaries need help

and discernment. I was talking to a friend who was excited to be teaching classes at our co-op next year. She didn’t know how I could stand in front of a large crowd and give a talk because she would never want to do something like that. Well, after doing both teaching and speaking last year, I can say I prefer the speaking! We have different gifts, thank God for that. I need help teaching my kids!

The point is: we need women in the world, and far be it for me to tell you how to do that. But my contribution is through my upcoming book on prayer, on having a relationship that includes talking and listening to God, in hopes that it helps all of us discern better the season that God has us in.

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Links Lately:

*My recent post from Denver Catholic is on 7 Rules for Online Engagement According to 2 Timothy. And by engagement, I mean interacting with other people, not getting married.

*The Exorcist Files interviewed Fr. Mike Schmitz and there were some really profound moments. Fr. Mike mentions a story about a priest’s near-death experience where he was judged to have lived his priesthood for himself and not for the Lord and his people. When I substitute my own vocation and ask, “Allison, have you lived your motherhood for yourself or for the Lord and his people?” I have to really think on that. That’s a great question to help us discern. Because what does it mean to live your motherhood for the Lord?

Later the host has a really profound “fermentation metaphor,” and I thought on the whole the conversation was fantastic.

I also enjoyed this conversation on Catholic Stuff You Should Know about the threefold calling of every Christian to priest, prophet, and king. I especially liked the part around the how the role of priest is to offer sacrifice, and how even as mothers and fathers we participate in the sacrifice of Christ. Some good stuff there.

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The Holy Spirit isn’t just for Pentecost, where for one day we wear red and think about fire. In fact, I think the Holy Spirit is the most underrated person of the Trinity, who we often misunderstand or neglect to even think about. Perhaps it’s because the life of God is so difficult to put into words—the experience so beyond our understanding—that we don’t often speak of the Holy Spirit.

And yet, the sending of the Spirit at Pentecost started a movement, gave birth to the Church, and activated the life of God in us. While Pentecost is an important (monumental!) feast and celebration, the work of the Spirit is to live in us every moment of every day.

For me, the Holy Spirit is everything; He is the one who has given me access to the life of God, who has made the Scriptures come alive, and who has animated my prayer. We could not pray without the Holy Spirit! That is why Jesus said, before His Ascension, that it is better for us that He goes, “for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). By sending the Spirit, God’s law was written on our hearts, and now we have the grace available to us to choose the good and to love God.

Since the Spirit is so hard to comprehend, let us compare the outpouring of the Spirit to a waterfall. My family recently got back from a trip to Pagosa Springs in southern Colorado, in which we visited the 102-ft.-tall Treasure Falls, so this feels timely.

Water is essential to life, but waterfalls are different than pools, lakes, or even rivers. On our hike, we knew we were getting close to the falls when we could hear the roar of the water tumbling over the edge and dropping 100 feet to the rocks below. As we approached, we were drenched with mist as a reminder of the force and might of the water. Waterfalls demonstrate movement and power—just how the Holy Spirit works in our lives.

Standing by the falls, I felt the loud rumble in my chest and the mist soaking my clothes and hair. As we took pictures of the waterfall, it occurred to me that a picture will never be the same as experiencing it. I don’t mean we experienced standing under it, (for that would have really hurt), but we felt the droplets soak into us and heard the thunderous roar echo in our ears. You can’t experience that magnificence from a picture. We can admire the falls from a mediated distance, or we can let its power penetrate and inundate us, just like with the Holy Spirit. Are we experiencing the Spirit in our lives, or are we just acknowledging Him in our prayers, such as in the sign of the cross?

The water begins high up, and then must take a leap off the terrifying, precipitous edge to the rocks below. Only then does the water experience the joy of flight and the wild adventure that awaits as it flows downstream. The Spirit invites us to this kind of adventurous journey when we take that first step and say, “Okay, Holy Spirit, lead the way.” It can be terrifying to get to the edge and tell God we trust Him, but it’s the only way forward: to lean into the Spirit, to enter into the mystery of God and the life He has planned for us.

And what usually creates a waterfall anyway? Fed by a stream and often carved over thousands of years, the water slowly erodes the rock until there is nowhere to go but down off the edge in a magnificent display of abundance. It is literally an outpouring of water over a rocky cliff.

Standing below Treasure Falls and looking up, all I could think was that I was experiencing an outpouring of abundance. The water kept coming, overflowing into the pool below and beyond. There was no stinginess, no stopping the flow. This is life in the Spirit: an abundance of grace overflowing in our hearts, that began at baptism when water was poured on our heads, and we were filled with the indwelling of the Holy Trinity.

The Spirit moves fluidly, just like water. In the Gospel of John, Jesus connects water with the Spirit all over the place, such as:

John 3:5- “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

John 7:37- Jesus said, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive.”

And then we get back to Pentecost.

In his Pentecost speech (Acts 2:17), Peter quotes Joel 2:28-29: “And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. . . I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.”

When I hear that the Spirit will be poured out, I think of a waterfall of abundant grace, a powerful immersion into the life of God. The disciples received that outpouring on Pentecost, and 3,000 people were baptized that day. Later, Philip was led by the Spirit to run up to a chariot and evangelize the Ethiopian eunuch, leading to his baptism (and I’m told this led to a flourishing ancient Christian community in Ethiopia). All the apostles, in fact, were sent forth on wild adventures of evangelization (and martyrdom), and now they experience the joy of union with God forever.

St. Paul traveled to distant towns, only to end up in prison (several times), where he was ultimately beheaded. And yet, He listened to the Spirit, embraced his imprisonment, and we now have (as part of our canon of Scripture) many of the letters that he sent to churches during this time. The Spirit still speaks to us through these letters. May we all let the Spirit guide us in similarly impactful ways.

In my life, openness to the Spirit has taken me on mission trips, opened doors to friendship, helped me write my books, give talks, and go deeper in my own relationship with God. The wisdom of the Spirit has nudged me to invite others on the journey, and the consolation of the Spirit has kept me close to the Church even in difficult times.

When we receive an outpouring of the Spirit and let Him overflow onto others, we participate in building up the Church. And so, we must invite the Spirit in; we must give Him permission to have His way, to help us take the next step, to allow grace to dwell deeply and richly in our souls. The Spirit living in us is how we are transformed into the image of God.

The invitation for you today is to ask the Holy Spirit to pour into you, help you take a leap of faith, and then live by the Spirit’s inspirations. Ask Him to help you pray, to open the Scriptures, to whisper in your ear. It starts with, “Come, Holy Spirit.”

“The Holy Spirit is the living water ‘welling up to eternal life’ in the heart that prays.” CCC 2652

**If you liked this reflection, you will enjoy my new book called “Ineffable: Learning to Love the God Beyond Words,” coming out this fall. And yes, I mention waterfalls.

Also this month, I wrote about screens, waiting, and giving your children their identity:

On Teaching Your Kids to Wait Well at Denver Catholic - “Every moment we have to wait in a doctor’s office, at a bus stop, in a grocery line or at a red light is an opportunity to practice being still and waiting for the Lord. Only in silence can we hear the Lord speak to us in our hearts. How will our children ever learn to hear God — or love him — if they do not know how to embrace the waiting and the silence?”

Naming and Identity: Our Greatest Calling as Parents at Catholicmom.com - “Over the last fifteen years of parenting, though, I’ve realized that it isn’t enough to name your child; you must also give them their identity. Part of this identity is belonging in your family, qualities or aspects that bind your family members together.
But the deepest part of identity is belonging in God’s family, being made for great things such as giving yourself for another. So many kids are walking around like zombies, their eyes glued to their phones, not giving a thought to the meaning of their existence. They have no framework for understanding suffering, or motivation to do anything great. They are most often just getting through the day. As Catholic parents, we can speak into that. We can help them become capable of greatness through knowing their Divine Father.”

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Last weekend, I was blessed to speak at the Catholic Women’s Conference of Denver Mini-Retreat. It was a beautiful, grace-filled day with an amazing group of women. We reflected on ways of sanctifying our day and growing in union with God through prayer.

My talk was called “Sanctified in the Spirit.” I spoke about Mary Magdalene, her encounter with Jesus in the Garden, and what Mary Magdalene teaches us about loving God. I talked about the role of the Holy Spirit in our prayer life, prayer as a relationship, and practical ways to sanctify our day. It was perfect for the Easter season!

The feedback was incredibly positive and the Holy Spirit was truly present! Many women asked if it was recorded, and one woman (hi Michele!) wanted a transcript to give to her friend in OCIA who had decided to take Mary Magdalene as her Confirmation saint.

So I came home and recorded my talk with these lovely women in mind. It does not have the live-audience energy, but it does have a few coughs and sound blips that make it feel raw. I’m reading more because I am not looking at people, so take from it what you will. If it helps a few more women fall more in love with Christ and grow in their prayer, then it was worth it! Click on the audio track below.

Other Links:

My kids are obsessed with the new audio drama from Augustine Institute - Welcome to Hope Springs. Read my review here on Catholicmom.com, and listen wherever you get your podcasts (including YouTube and Formed.org).

I was so moved seeing all our priests at the Installation Mass of our new Archbishop of Denver, that I wrote about it in my piece for Denver Catholic this month. It’s called Honoring Our Priests and Praying for Unity, and it acknowledges the strengths I see in our priests while also being aware of the struggles they face, as well as ways that we as laity can help. I’ve had several priests reach out to say how much they appreciated it!

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If you listen to my recording of the talk, let me know what you think! I’m really interested in whether it resonates with you and what your takeaways are.

Sanctified in the Spirit: My Talk from the Women’s Retreat

I’m in the midst of book edits, I’m preparing my talk for the Catholic Women’s Conference of Denver Retreat on April 18th, and I’m organizing our local Catholic homeschool conference again. Registration is now live if you want to attend! It’s a lineup that I’m really excited about: RMCHEC.org.

But on top of all my regular duties, it’s a lot.

In March, I wrote at Denver Catholic on why you should confess venial sins and how to approach Confession.

For Lent, I read The Bellbind Letters: Inside the Devil’s Plan for your Motherhood by Samantha Stephenson. Written in a Screwtape-inspired letter form, it was so insightful into the hidden, insidious ways that the devil tries to tempt mothers. I became more aware of the twisted lies and feelings that I’ve been battling lately, and there’s nothing that vanquishes the darkness more than the blinding light of truth. She writes in beautiful prose, and I highly recommend this book.

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I also didn’t have a lot to say because I was going through a period of discouragement. I have been homeschooling our kids for over a decade, and this year brought me to the edge. Not only did I feel very scattered with all the different activities, classes, and schedules, but I also felt disillusioned. I don’t enjoy teaching the older kids that much, and they don’t seem to enjoy it either. Teenagers’ brains are a wild ride and a fascinating science experiment.

As a young, naïve, idealist homeschool mom, I thought that if I just read them good, classic books on the couch (and do a little math), they would turn out just fine. Lately, I’ve listened to some podcasts and read some articles here on Substack that seemed to make the same case. “If you love learning, then they will too, and they will even want to do schoolwork for fun on their breaks!” When they were younger, some of that was true. I actually liked those schooling years.

But now my kids are sleeping in, giving me attitude, and pushing back on the little schoolwork we manage to do. I have felt quite defeated. I’ve fantasized about giving up and putting them into school until I think about packing lunches, the morning commute, and homework at the end of the day. (only half-joking)

I had planned to bring my frustrations about homeschool to God in my holy hour. For most of Lent, I would show up in the chapel ready to problem-solve the situation. And then, somehow, I forgot to bring it up, and my holy hour would be over before I remembered it again. Week after week, I was spending time with my Lord in the chapel and forgetting my desolation with schooling during that hour.

Towards the end of Lent, I realized a shift was happening in me due to a few different factors.

One was that I was reading Substack less. Instagram doesn’t tempt me to jealousy the way the literature scholars and academics do on Substack. I am a simple person, using plain words that are not often in the right order (as my editor can attest to), so what am I even doing on here? No one in my house besides me is reading good books for fun. But with less Substack came less comparison.

Another shift happened as I considered my husband’s situation. He is not a reader, but he is much smarter than me in most non-academic ways, and a better artist to boot. Substack is a place primarily for writers, not a place where people in the trades wax poetic about their jobs and hope to convince people to learn how to weld their own pipes or build their own cabinets. But those people and their skills are important, too.

Then my husband and I traveled to Steubenville to visit my alma mater (Franciscan University) and tour the new trade school, The College of St. Joseph. We were both very impressed with the college’s vision and what they are doing there. Students earn a BA in Catholic studies, which will fuel their vision for life, but they will also graduate with hands on skills in the trades and no debt. They pay off their tuition by working for the school’s own construction company. Their teachers hand on the wisdom not only of the trades but the business skills needed to run your own company. We saw the back of one of their shirts that said, “The Word became flesh and picked up a hammer.” Mic drop.

At the same time, God has been working on my heart in Adoration. Clearly HE is not worried about my children’s schooling situation because I have so much peace when I’m with Him. If there was something truly the matter, I believe He would prick my heart instead of allowing me to forget my worries. It has caused me to reflect more on my children and God’s plan for them. (And it is likely not an academic professor. But who knows? So many adults didn’t like reading until they became adults.) I’ve begun to see more of their good qualities and strengths instead of focusing on the deficiencies.

The last factor was reading about the Saints. Many days, I’ll read a story from Saints Around the World by Meg Hunter-Kilmer. These saints are children, adults, catechists, priests, martyrs, and even criminals. Most are from counties I only have a vague awareness of, and many are not very educated. One woman could only say, “I only know Jesus and Mary!” to any catechism question. She was martyred.

Their stories are wonderful because they are all different, and God worked in their lives in varied ways. It makes me think of what kinds of stories could be said about my children if they were to become saints one day. Whether or not they read the classics in their spare time would probably not figure into the story at all.

On St. Patrick’s Day, we watched a cartoon about his life, and a line stuck with me. When he was telling his parents he was going back to Ireland, the place that enslaved him, he said, “I didn’t know how to pray until I encountered hardship.” It was his abduction, slavery, and loneliness in shepherding that taught him to find God and commune with Him.

I don’t expect anything as difficult as pirates and slavery to befall my children, but I also need to be okay with the fact that life is messy and teenagers don’t always do what you tell them to. God has them on a path that might have lots of turns, but I am only responsible for my own faithfulness.

To that end, I can say the faith is alive in our home. My children, like all of us, do not always want to pray or choose to do the right thing. They are learning and growing and struggling, but I prioritize having a joyful home* and the ability to say “I’m sorry.” My goal is that my kids know they are loved by God and their parents and that they have a purpose to their life.

And day by day, with the help of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that is enough for now.

*I felt confirmed in this fact by listening to a recent episode of the Lila Rose podcast with the Popcaks discussing the CARA study that discovered the #1 factor in children retaining their faith is warmness in the home.

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My two articles this month are about forgiveness and resentment, two things I have historically struggled with. But there’s hope!

Healing Hurt Like An Oyster-

Harsh words can irritate your soul like a parasitic intruder to an oyster. Is there any hope for healing and forgiveness? Here’s how the Holy Spirit is like the nacre layer, able to transform suffering into a treasure.

The Bitter Poison of Resentment: A Sure Way to Kill a Marriage

Just like poison, resentments may seem harmless in small doses but can build up in the system to become lethal.

Resentment means there is a toxic buildup of bitterness and frustration from unmet expectations, lack of communication, attention or respect. The root of resentment is often a valid, unmet need. But instead of working to get the need met, we wall up, arm our defenses or get ready to attack. . .

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Thank you for reading! I hope these articles are a helpful aide to your Lent. My Lent has been fruitful not so much in sticking to my resolutions, but in seeing my glaring weaknesses and my need for God. I am sensing the temptations and the inner voices, and awareness is a good first step, right? Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

I’m preparing for a talk at a mom’s group next week, getting our summer homeschool conference planning underway, and preparing for the Women’s Conference mini-retreat. That’s all the extra energy I have right now but I’ll be back in March with some more reflections. God bless you!

In Case You Missed It…

My newly minted five-year-old was snuggled up against me, huddled in his blanket, when he looked at me and asked, “Mom, aren’t I so cute?” The confident grin told me he already knew the answer: he is totally adorable. I love the boldness with which small children assert the truth: I am beautiful. I am cute. I am lovable.

And then somewhere along the way something breaks.

You begin to despise the body that doesn’t look like everyone else’s, or that people make fun of, or that doesn’t land you that date. You punish it, obsess over it, or change it in a grasp for control. Eventually, you find faith and think your hatred is justified because the Bible says that the world, the flesh, and the devil are sinful. So you *mistakenly* believe that your own flesh is bad.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Back in November, my husband and I were sitting on the couch, coffee in hand, and reading the daily readings. I chuckled to myself at the Gospel, in which Jesus seemingly tells us to hate ourselves: “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). I chuckled because of the way I used to take that literally as an excuse to hate God’s canvas, to loathe what He made in me. I spent a few minutes in prayer that morning reflecting on how far I’ve come, allowing God to speak the truth to me that I am very good.

Later that day, I laughed again as I read a post written by Claire Dwyer entitled: Let Your Embodied Self Be Loved. In it she wrote, “Our physical bodies are the portals to sacramental grace and human love. They are the means of communion with God and others. . . They themselves are living expressions of what is eternal, and miraculously, not only a revelation of who we really are but of who God is. . .If we have forgotten how important our bodies are, our enemy has not. The devil wants us to dismiss, be disgusted by, or destroy our physical selves.”

She goes on to say how we must learn our limitations and not be destroyed by our own zeal. The whole thing is worth reading.

For someone who has had a complicated relationship with her body, as well as zeal for the faith, it was easy to think by that passage in Luke’s Gospel that I was doing what God wanted. I justified my false dichotomy with a spiritual excuse: God told me to hate my own life or I cannot be His disciple.

Only, that is not what Jesus is saying. There is another time the Hebrew word for hate comes up in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Jacob I loved but Esau I hated.” (Romans 9:13).

Was Esau really hated? No, the idiomatic expression in Hebrew means, “to love less.”

Should we love ourselves less than God? Yes! That is the point. If we love ourselves more than God, that is idolatry. Even still, we are not given a free pass to dismiss our bodies or punish them and call it holiness. Rather, we are to love our bodies for the way they express the divine. God created us, put His Spirit into us, and destined us to share in His divinity. That is not something to hate!

I particularly had to confront the war with my body after my babies were born. What a miracle my body had performed to receive new life and birth it into the world! Yet all I could see was what was wrong with it. The struggles with nursing, the stubborn weight that hung on, the pain in my hips, the total exhaustion. I couldn’t dismiss them or explain them away.

I had to integrate them.

As I share in my DIY retreat talk about identity lies, I grew up thinking someone was wrong with me; that I was defective, broken. The postpartum difficulties brought the issues to the surface, and it was through my experience in spiritual direction that I believe I found healing. Not because all my problems were spiritualized away, but because I was loved in relationship.

As I told my spiritual director about the deep issues in my own life, I was always met with compassion, gentleness, and earnestness for me to see my own goodness. Then my director would direct me to prayer, and I would bring the pain to God. Over the course of years, of learning to take care of my body, forgive others, forgive myself, and encounter God in prayer, I learned to love myself the way God loves me. The fissures began to close, as Dr. Greg Bottaro shares in this insightful Substack:

Process Notes

The Architecture of the Person and the Drama of the Self

EVERY THERAPIST EVENTUALLY confronts a moment that no textbook prepares them for. A patient sits across from you—intelligent, faithful, sacramentally active—and describes an interior life of quiet chaos. She knows, with the clarity of catechesis, that God loves her. She cannot feel it. She understands that her father’s coldness was his failure, not hers…

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9 months ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Dr. Greg Bottaro

I’ll give you the punchline:

“But it was Wojtyła who gave us a tour of the cathedral and showed us the way through. Not merely the mechanism of the wound, but the experience of living with it—the drama of the divided self, the felt impossibility of acting freely when the subconscious is running the show. And the path to healing, which runs not through insight alone but through relationship: the slow, patient, grace-soaked work of being received as a gift until we can finally give ourselves away.

The woman in my office is not a theological problem to be solved. She is a person to be accompanied. But she deserves to understand why she is stuck, and to know that her stuckness is not a verdict on her faith. The groove was cut before she knew what was happening. And the healing will take time—more time than she wants, more patience than feels fair.

But the healing is possible. That is the good news buried in all this anthropology. The track can be filled in and rerouted. The fissure within can be closed.

Not by knowing better. Not by trying harder. But by the slow work of being known—and, in being known, learning at last to feel what we have always believed.”

God loves your body! If He didn’t think your body was necessary, He would have made us angels.

If Jesus didn’t care about your body, He wouldn’t have taken on a body Himself so that yours could be resurrected. He suffered in that body to prove He loves you, and in the Eucharist, He became food to enter into our very bodies. Your body is your path to sanctification, for it is through your bodily encounters with the Sacraments that you come to union with God.

Your healing process must involve your body. Your body reveals your soul, and one day your body will be glorified in the Resurrection of the Body. It will be perfected, but it will still be yours. So I suggest you start loving it now, because God loves it.

We want to go to heaven when we die but how many of us have pondered what heaven is like? It’s not long white robes, harps, and bouncing on clouds, Fr. Mike Schmitz tells us. In his excellent Impact Session at Seek 2026 this year called “At the Hour of Our Death,” Fr. Mike reminds us that the God who made the coolest parts of this earth also made Heaven, which will be more than this life and more than this earth. Death is a separation of body and soul, but in Heaven, we will be reunited to our body. We will not be ghosts flying around but instead spend eternity with our bodies redeemed. Click to watch on YouTube to hear him talk about our resurrected bodies which will be incorruptible, undefeatable, and indefatigable.

Speaking of Seek 2026, I was talking with a man at the Seek Conference in Denver who had been very involved in healing ministry. He had a healing charism in that when he would pray with people, many would be physically healed. Not all, but many more than I’ve seen in my lifetime. Then he started noticing most of the prayer requests for healing came from ailments that were related to diet and lifestyle. And instead of miraculously healing these problems away, he felt that God was calling them to a different kind of healing, a lifestyle change that cares of their bodies. He still prays for healing, but his mission right now is to help people become more human. To be on screens less, to eat better, to exercise. It’s nothing miraculous, but it certainly is virtuous, and this he believes—and so do I—is the healing God wants for most of us: to appropriately care for the bodies God gave us.

I write about this in my book Baby and Beyond, where on Gaudete Sunday I prayed for joy and I didn’t miraculously feel joy afterward, but that afternoon I opened up a book that led me to look at my hormone imbalance. The physical healing gave way to spiritual healing because the two are always intimately connected.

I’m not saying I’m always great at it. I don’t like exercise and I lack muscle. If there’s gluten-free chocolate cake in the house, I will be eating it. I enjoy a glass of wine and struggle with putting my phone down. But I also do battle to grow in virtue, and I believe deeply that I am loved by God. I think I’m at least headed in the right direction.

So to wrap this up, God does not want you to hate your body. God loves your body and wants you to love it too. Not with Botox injections and wrinkle cream, but with a virtuous love that makes all your wrinkles look like wisdom. With a love that looks forward to the redemption of this body for all eternity.

In the end, I want a body that can snuggle up to God, look up at Him, and ask, “Aren’t I adorable?” And then know it’s true, because my heart is conformed to His.

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This weekend I’ve been in 2 Corinthians 2-4.

“Thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumph, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of Him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing” (2 Cor 2:14-15).

The Ignatius Study Bible notes that the gospel is being disseminated like the fragrance of incense throughout the world (p 2051). Incense was used in the Old Testament during sacrifices offered to the Lord and I can imagine why the fragrant aroma of incense would be preferred to the stench of animal blood.

While we often still use incense in our Masses, St. Paul also tell us that we are to be living sacrifices to God to spread the gospel throughout the world: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, our spiritual worship.” (Romans 12:1).

It is the witness of our prayer and our life that disseminates the gospel throughout the world. Yet I wonder how well we are doing that these days. I wonder how well I’m doing it—with consuming scroll content on the internet, keeping my head down at the store, or dragging my feet on social activities.

We can’t do it all, but we can do something. And the incense image reminded me of this story that I wrote in my book, Baby and Beyond: Overcoming Those Post-Childbirth Woes:

“In her diary, St. Faustina recounts her struggle, while on kitchen duty, to drain the pot of boiled potatoes. The pot was too heavy for her, and often the potatoes spilled out with the water. So she began to avoid the potatoes at all cost, and the sisters noticed. What they didn’t notice was that St. Faustina was willing and wanted to drain the potatoes but lacked the strength. She prayed to God about her weakness, and He told her He would give her the strength starting tomorrow. The next day, St. Faustina volunteered to drain the potatoes and accomplished it with ease. When she lifted the lid, she discovered the pot was filled with roses, and she heard a voice within her say, ‘I change such hard work of yours into bouquets of most beautiful flowers, and their perfume rises up to my throne.’

Motherhood offers us the same opportunity: to turn our scrubbing toilets and changing diapers into bouquets of flowers. I was reminded of this once when I was steam cleaning the floors and Timothy, a five-year-old at the time, saw the steam rising off the mop head. He told me that if I put prayers on the steam, they would rise to heaven like incense. How wonderful a thought—my prayers rising to heaven on steam while I clean the floor!” (p. 102).

Although I still wonder what the nuns ate for dinner since the potatoes turned to flowers (just doesn’t seem as appetizing), my encouragement is to take the opportunities family life offers, and give them to God as your spiritual worship.

We are the aroma of Christ. Our sacrifices matter, the way we love matters in sharing the good news with others. I cannot tell you what to do in each of your specific situations, but God can. He is waiting—longing—to talk to you, to spend time with you, to accept your spiritual worship if you are willing to give it.

We need holy, loving witnesses today who exude a sweet fragrance to those who are saved and to those who are perishing.

I think this idea ties in nicely with the above article in the Denver Catholic about reflecting love, and also with the Adoration article at Catholicom.com, linked below. I want to be an Adoration missionary. I want every person in the Church to make it a habit to pray in front of the Blessed Sacrament when they can. So much transformation can take place in that space.

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Three Compelling Reasons to Make More Time for Adoration This Year

How much screen time should my kids have? What school should they go to? What curriculum should we use? What meal plan am I using this week? What vitamins should I take? How early should I wake up? What chores should my kids be doing? How much money should I be saving each month? Where can I cut expenses? How can I communicate better in my marriage?

If your brain is anything like mine, it’s brimming with questions I don’t know the answer to. I can make some guesses and pivot if I’m wrong, but there’s a tendency to feel overwhelmed with anxiety at all the answers I need but don’t have.

That is why you and I need more Adoration in our lives. We can only hear God’s voice when we attune to it by spending time with Him, and we can only discover His will for us when we learn to share our lives with Him. . .

Read the rest at Catholicmom.com

What to Say — and How to Help — After Miscarriage or Stillbirth

I had the privilege of interviewing Lauren Accolla, a therapist and volunteer for Behold Your Child - an Archdiocesan ministry for those who have suffered infant loss, often from miscarriage or stillbirth. Read the article on Denver Catholic here.

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“When the sun rises in the heavens, you shall see the King of kings proceeding from the Father as a bridegroom from his chamber.” (Traditional Christmas Antiphon)

I’m finally getting this out in the Christmas season by the skin of my teeth. December was…a lot. A lot of preparation, a lot of sickness, and a lot of work with closing my book deal. And then I’ve continued to be sick for most of January thus far.

But I love the above Christmas antiphon because this season, and our whole spirituality, is not just celebrating that God came as a baby (as miraculous as that was). It’s that He is coming again, our King, and our Bridegroom. Christ comes to us to wed us to Himself; we see nuptial marital imagery all over the Scriptures.

I gave a talk to a group of moms back in November on prayer, and how prayer is like marriage. Essentially, it’s a relationship, and I went through some basic principles before I cut it short because the toddlers had had enough. There was time for questions at the end, and one of the moms asked how to make time for prayer.

I gave an answer which I know was unsatisfactory, but the question has stuck with me. It resonates with the same underlying question I hear from other moms on what homeschool curriculum to choose or how to get the baby to sleep.

You see, there isn’t one simple answer to all these questions. In fact, there isn’t one universal answer either. Every curriculum, sleep schedule, or prayer routine has its benefits and drawbacks.

The problem underlying these kinds of questions is that we want someone else to tell us what to do. What we lack is the ability to go to God and have Him answer the questions for us.

I believe this is because we don’t really know how to hear God’s voice in prayer.

And so, I wrote a book that I hope will help lay people come to an intimate union with God in prayer. It will guide the reader through the stages of a relationship, encouraging commitment and vulnerability, addressing the drawbacks and struggles, and hopefully offer a clear vision of where we are headed in a nuptial relationship with Christ, all while sharing a few funny stories along the way. I’ll quote plenty of Scripture, saints, and scholars along the way, making the rich spiritual tradition of our faith easily accessible.

It is scheduled to come out this fall, and there is a lot to do before then, both with the book and in life in general. But for now, enjoy this sneak peek: an excerpt of the book was adapted for my Christmas column at the Denver Catholic. Click the title below!

The Electric Presence of God: The Shocking Meaning Behind Mary Being ‘Overshadowed’ By Love

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Weary.

That’s the word that has come to mind every day for the past few weeks. Especially last week when the youngest crawled into our bed in a fit of coughing. Figures. After spending each day of Thanksgiving week with a different family, I knew it was bound to happen. We all trudged through the cold, taking turns in bed.

I just need to not be needed for a few hours (or a few days). To collect myself, to think. My Friday holy hour is over too fast and I long for another hour, but there are other duties that God has called me to.

The weary world rejoices.

This phrase also comes to mind every day. The dark and the cold have zapped what little energy I had. It feels like rejoicing takes energy. The kids start bickering and we are all adjusting to more indoor-time together. Except when I shuffle one or two kids to the next thing. Then, back in the car I go.

I’m not the only weary one. All of humanity has felt the weariness and drudgery of life. So why would we rejoice?

A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.

Oh yes, we are finishing out our Jubilee Year of Hope. It’s a great time to remind myself of why we are rejoicing – Christ has redeemed all things. We are no longer slaves to our weariness if we let Christ in.

The light shines brighter in darkness. I see the signs of rejoicing – the son that was healed, the marriage that is stronger, the prayers that have been answered. The thrill of hope means there is much to look forward to because Christ can make it good.

The errands, the bills, the squabbles, the to-do list, the deadlines. I keep waiting for them to end, but the list just gets longer. I have the wrong goal. It’s not to check it all off, it’s to let Christ do it with me.

Just as Mary opened herself to the Holy Spirit and Christ dwelled within, I am offered a similar proposition: Let me enter, and I will change everything.

Christ, you do all things well. Enter into my weariness and transform it into rejoicing.

O Holy Night.

“After a particularly difficult week, I was at Sunday Mass, begging God for joy. It was Gaudete Sunday, during Advent, the pink-candle Sunday of joy, and I felt I had none. The words of the Eucharistic prayer seemed especially poignant that day: As we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

I was disappointed when I didn’t magically feel more joyful after Mass, but I know that God usually doesn’t work that way. Instead, I found myself opening Fertility, Cycles, and Nutrition by Marilyn Shannon, a book I had on the shelf since the beginning of my marriage but hadn’t read much of. . .

The common thread underlying my symptoms was that my vitamin and mineral deficiency led to abnormal hormone levels, which led to anxiety, fatigue, and constant stress.”
Baby and Beyond: Overcoming Those Post-Childbirth Woes pg. 39-40.

Maybe this is your sign to take care of your body this week, to give it what it needs to serve your family with joy.

Still need a Christmas gift for a new mother? Click here for my link to Baby and Beyond.

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Everyone on the Catholic internet is telling you to slow down this Advent. I’m trying, but it’s hard when there is a lot you are responsible for. I’ve barely sat down at the computer and haven’t even been able to send out links to my November articles, so here they are in December.

The first one about hospitality is perfect for this holiday season, and the other piece is for pastors to understand a bit of homeschool pedagogy. It is precisely to try and slow down and get off the merry-go-round of life that we have chosen this path to begin with.

Crumb-y Hospitality

As we enter the holiday season, I encourage you to contemplate your vision of hospitality. For a God who was born in a stable, He certainly shows us what matters most. Jesus entered our world in a lowly place, communicating that presence matters more than performance, or more than the picturesque.

And yet, somehow, God transformed a feeding-place-turned-cradle into a beautiful image that we put on Christmas cards every year. He can transform our messiness into a work of art, too, when we allow our crumb-y hospitality to be a moment of encounter.

In the busyness of the holidays, don’t forget that presence is more important than presents. Many people are lonely or sad this time of year, and can we invite them into our home and help them feel loved? In the whirl of shopping and picture-perfect parties, we can make room for the imperfect.

Jesus came and took on human flesh to save us, but also to remind us that we are each made in God’s image. Let the reality of the Incarnation reveal to us the dignity of those we encounter in this season. Who can we look around and see, and honor the Christ in them?

Read the whole thing here.

Pastors: Homeschoolers are Parishioners, Too

“…In true Catholic education, the person of Christ becomes the hermeneutical key for what is good, true and beautiful. The Catholic faith imbues education with a logical consistency and urgency to form hearts and minds to know and love God.

I may have idealistic visions of parish life, but if the parish exists to support its parishioners, well then, homeschoolers are parishioners, too. Catholic education is for all, no matter where the student’s desk lies.

I believe that the parish should be the center of worship and formation for all its parish families. When the parish is flourishing with reverent worship, numerous opportunities for building community, ongoing formation and growth in a life of prayer, that impacts all families. Homeschool and traditional school families can be joint participants in parish life, supporting and encouraging one another.

If pastors can expand their vision of education, there are also ways that parishes could offer options to homeschoolers…”

Read the rest here.

May you find some rest this Advent!

Allison

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I tried not to, but I cried at the end of Mass, reveling in the heavenly experience we just participated in. My daughter Zoe was the only girl receiving her Sacraments, and looked so lovely in her white gown. Meanwhile, the Church was filled with family, friends, and community from our parish that we have gotten to know over the last few years. Such a gift, such a blessing.

And to know we were all united in the worship of God, in receiving the Body and Blood of Christ, and being filled with Jesus’s love, grace, and presence? It was just too much for my heart, and the rejoicing overflowed into tears.

My faith life is deeply Eucharistic, and it is my greatest joy to introduce the Sacramental life to my children.

I was able to contrast that experience with a Lutheran service my husband and I recently attended for a friend of ours. Sometimes contrast helps the light to shine brighter, and the truth of my love for the Eucharist became more vibrant after attending a baptism and service at this Lutheran church.

As a cradle Catholic, I had never been to a Lutheran service, and with great reverence to my brothers and sisters in Christ, I want to highlight the differences that, for me, allowed the light of the Catholic Sacraments to shine.

The baptism occurred at the beginning of the Lutheran service with limited fanfare. There was no anointing with the holy oil of Chrism, and I found I missed the rich symbolism of the oil, which connects the baptized to the Old Testament anointing of prophets and kings, thus confirming our own baptismal call to be priest, prophet, and king. The symbolism of oil is rich– sanctification, healing, strengthening, dedication, consecration, and sacrifice. Plus, Chrism smells amazing (I definitely sniffed my daughter’s head a few times on Sunday)!

Back to the baptism, there were then a few questions to the congregation about believing in Christ and following Him, to which we all were invited to respond, “Yes, with grace.” There were no questions about rejecting Satan and all his works and empty promises. There was no mini-exorcism. The sense of spiritual warfare was entirely absent, whereas in Catholicism, the call to live in the Kingdom of God and reject the Kingdom of Darkness is center stage.

And I missed the language of “I do,” which we are all familiar with from weddings. The phrase, “I do” really reminds us of the solemn promise that we commit to in these Sacraments. “Yes,” is the answer I give to my husband when he asks if I want coffee in the morning. “I do” are the words I spoke to enter into a sacred covenant with my husband, and also the words I spoke at each child’s baptism to usher them into covenantal life with God.

To their credit, they did use water with the proper Trinitarian formula, and they did have what appeared to be a large Paschal candle, which was lit. But after the baptism was over, our friend was given an unlit, smaller candle to take home and was encouraged to light it on his baptism anniversary. This candle was never blessed or lit from the Paschal candle, which would’ve been done at a Catholic baptism, and so the entire meaning of why he would light the candle on his baptism anniversary was lost. Again, our Catholic symbolism is so rich because we light our baptismal candle from the Paschal candle—the great Easter candle— connecting our life in Christ to the death and resurrection of Jesus and the triumph of light over darkness. Jesus is the Light of the World, and we take on His light when we receive new life at Baptism.

My last two observations are on the atmosphere and communion.

The sense of community is what I believe drew our friend to this Church. They are very friendly and welcoming, and I think Catholics could learn a lesson or two from that. But there is no sense of sacredness in that space: no reverence, bowing, or kneeling. It was all casual. Their format had three different sermons from three different people. People chatted in between segments. The praise and worship was modern and less than stellar (which I do see sometimes in Catholic Churches), and although I grew up Charismatic and love a good P&W song, this experience left me longing for sacred hymns and solemn worship.

We all prayed the Our Father together (and I knew that one), and we also said the Apostles Creed which I was all about, until the last bit was changed to “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Christian Church, the forgiveness of sins, etc.” The original word is Catholic, meaning universal, which the Church was until it split during the Reformation and continued to splinter after.

Finally, they did have an altar, which wasn’t really used except to store their large round bins for communion, and they even had an altar rail, which also wasn’t used. Their pastor did bless these “platters” (I don’t know the term they would use) with the sign of the cross and repeated a few verses from the Last Supper. But it was brief, and what I love about the Catholic Mass is again the sacred sense of worship and ritual sacrifice, the elevation of the Host, and the fact that we are united in space and time to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

As my husband and I are not in communion with the Lutherans, we did not go up, but their communion line was reminiscent of many modern Catholic ones until we got to the part where they kicked back their mini cup of grape juice.

I genuinely am interested in what they believe they are partaking in; what kind of body and blood they are saying “Amen” to. Although Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” Catholics don’t understand that as having a memory of something in the past. Catholics understand remembrance as anamnesis, which makes the past present and thus becomes a real participation in the sacrificial events of Christ’s Passion. If the Lutherans really believe it is Christ’s body, what are the theological implications of that? Where do they store the leftover blessed bread? What do they do with all the little plastic cups that supposedly held the blood?

In the Catholic Church, we store the leftover Hosts in the Tabernacle for Divine Worship, Adoration, and future Communions. We have purificators for anything that touches the sacred species of Christ’s Body and Blood, and we even have a sacrarium in every Church: a special sink that bypasses the sewer and goes directly into the ground for all the water that touches the sacred vessels. We would never put the Precious Blood in plastic cups (precious metals only), let alone throw them away after they had touched His Divine Presence.

Jesus didn’t die on the cross so we could remember it while listening to sermons about following Christ or how grace is everywhere. We have grace in the first place because Christ’s presence communicated to us in the Sacraments sanctifies created things. Jesus’ Eucharistic presence is living in our Churches, Tabernacles, and Chapels. And when Catholics receive His very living Presence, we then take Christ into the world.

I’ve spent 25 years going to Mass and Adoration weekly – sometimes less but sometimes more. I know deep in my soul the real thing of Christ’s sacramental presence in the Eucharist. Like St. Ignatius of Antioch (martyred in 109 A.D.) said, “I want only God’s bread, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, and for drink I crave his blood, which is imperishable love.”

Witnessing this type of worship at the Lutheran Church set my heart on fire for the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist: I want incense, altar rails, patens, and kneeling for Communion. I want to have our Masses be reverent, sacred, and other-worldly as to remind us of the great privilege of the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood.

This kind of reverence does not preclude community-building or a closeness with God in prayer. Rather, it is an important part of the whole to pray what we believe so we can live it.

Sometimes we take for granted what a great gift we have in the Eucharist, but contrasting these experiences in allowed me to fall more in love with our Eucharistic Lord. My daughter couldn’t wait for her second Communion, so we went to Mass again two days later. Now we both look forward to when she loses count of how many times she’s received our Eucharistic Lord. It truly is a foretaste of Heaven.

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I am linking to the articles I have written this month - one about a new ministry called Chrism, and how we can support our priests. Another one on sleep training and the lies we mothers tell ourselves, and finally, a collection of Scripture reflections to help with anxiety. They are taken from my journal and my own journey overcoming anxiety.

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What Parishioners Need to Know About Their Priests: An Interview with Chrism Founder Matthew Rudolph

Situated in the heart of Denver, Matthew Rudolph is on a mission to help priests discover their unique design, so they can live out a happy, healthy and holy priesthood. . .

While the seminary provides a great deal of intellectual and spiritual formation, Rudolph suggests that there can be a gap in its practical application to a priest’s life.

That’s why he founded the ministry, Chrism — a name based on the great priestly unity seen at the annual Chrism Mass, as priests renew their ordination promises.

“We feel called to integrate the various needs of a man so that he can be thriving on the inside to be living out a thriving priesthood on the outside. We’re looking at human formation and leadership, as that overlaps with mental health and healing, as that overlaps with spiritual health and renewal, looking at the whole man,” Rudolph said.

Often, priests find themselves feeling isolated, not having a lot of fraternity locally, or experiencing a lack of unity in the presbyterate.

“Recent studies have shown that 45% of priests have experienced burnout in their priesthood,” he explained. “60% of priests 45 and under have experienced burnout in their priesthood. … 50% of priests do not have a spiritual director. That has a huge ripple effect on the faithful, their priesthood and vocations.”

. . .If there’s one thing Rudolph wants parishioners to know about their priests, it’s that they are human, just like us. Read the rest at DenverCatholic.com

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Sleep Training, Attachment, and the Lies We Tell Ourselves

Last month, a neighbor with a 10-month old came over for dinner. She was raving about how well it was going after they had recently sleep-trained their baby. She could now put him down awake, and he would fall asleep by himself and stay asleep. She felt so rested!

Part of me was very happy for the sleep she was getting, because I know how hard sleep deprivation can be. But part of me felt guilty because I had never really been able to sleep-train my children. Without any jealousy towards her whatsoever (because my five kids are now ages 4-14 years old), I had to examine where this guilt came from. Through prayer and reflection, I discovered some lies I was still holding onto from those early years of parenting.

Lie #1: I could have been a better mom

Read how I identified the lies and spoke truth to overcome them at Catholicmom.com. (TLDR: all babies go through periods of good and bad sleep, and it makes little difference when they grow up. As teenagers, you can’t get them to wake up! We put too much pressure on ourselves to get our babies to sleep and can easily become obsessed with sleep schedules.)

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Struggling With Anxiety? What the Bible Says About Finding Peace

I have been an anxious person for most of my life, but it definitely ramped up when I became a mom. Over the last fourteen years of motherhood, I’ve learned a lot about where my anxiety comes from, and I’ve learned tools to help deal with it.

In particular, God has spoken to me through his Word to show me a path forward through my mental struggles. I will share some of my Scripture reflections below.

Before I begin the meditations, though, I want to remind you that each of us is an intricately connected body-soul unity. Sometimes our anxiety is linked to a trauma response stored in our body. Other times, anxiety can point to a problem with our gut, or low vitamin and mineral levels. For women, anxiety can ramp up when our hormones are off or our progesterone is low. With our body in a healthy state, we are more easily able to attune to the struggles of the mind and soul.

The mind can also be influenced from outside, for both good and bad; therefore, it’s important to learn to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Speak your worries out loud to a friend, spouse or counselor. Write them in your journal and let God either confirm or reject them. When we get our thoughts out of our heads, we can see them more clearly in the light of God’s Truth.

And now for the Scripture Reflections…. Read it all at DenverCatholic.org

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I also want to remind you of my DIY Retreat for Mothers of Young Children for full subscribers! You can cancel at any time.

I have another talk coming up for a group of moms, and hope to turn that into another DIY retreat to grow my collection :)

On the fourth day, they sent us home. I didn’t feel ready to take care of this new life on my own, because I felt like I had no clue what I was doing. We drove home so slowly, with new precious cargo in the backseat, and me holding my c-section incision. I was so swollen with IV fluids that I didn’t even fit into my clothes.

And then began the sleepless nights, the internal monologue, the external loneliness - and two more children in rapid succession. In the darkness of that time, I listened to the lies about myself and my motherhood. What I didn’t have was this – a time set aside to consider the unique struggles of mothering young children, a time to pray and hear God’s voice, and hopefully to combat the loneliness by knowing you are not alone.

Over the last 15 years of motherhood and 5 kids later, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve failed a lot, but I’ve also prayed a lot. And I’ve heard God’s voice speak his truth to me, and it has changed my life.

My goal for this retreat is for God to speak His truth to you to conquer the lies that we all struggle with.

It is set up in two parts: a talk, then prayer time, then repeat. The idea is to listen to the talk, and then take the journaling questions to prayer (ideally a half hour, ideally in the chapel because hey, this retreat is for you). Maybe after that, you take a walk, call a friend, have a snack. And then listen to the second talk and again spend some time in prayer. If you do it with a friend, you can have a small group and verbally process. And then, since you’ve had your prayer, do something nice that you enjoy - exercise, shopping, coffee, etc.

This is your retreat, so do with it what you will. It’s flexible to fit into your schedule.

I led this retreat in person with 25 moms last year, and I think it went really well, so I feel pretty good about you liking it, too.

Feel free to reach out with any questions, and without further ado: your talks and reflection questions.

Topics include: Identity lies, comparison traps, gratitude, honesty, struggles in motherhood, hearing God’s voice. Poverty of spirit, giving all you have, loneliness, prayer, transformation through the difficulties, hope, praying with Scripture and the Magnificat.

Talk 1: Identity Lies

Wisdom 2:24 / Isaiah 31:3 / Romans 13:12-14 / 1 Cor 13:4

“It is easy to look on the gifts of others as a threat. We often want what we don’t have, and in doing so, forget the good that God has given us. But wanting what is not rightfully ours is the root of many serious sins. Let us instead look at how generous God has been to us and rejoice in his generosity to others.” – From the March copy of the Magnificat

Renounce the lies

I am not good enough
I am unlovable
I am too much
I am not smart
I am broken
I am misunderstood
I am ugly
I am worthless
I am forgotten
I will never get it right

Announce the truth

I am enough
I am lovable
I am wanted
I am smart
I am understood
I am beautiful
I am worthwhile
I am remembered
I can get it right

Talk #1 Questions for Journaling:
Pray to be filled with the light, truth, and consolation of the Holy Spirit.

1. What is a problem that can have a concrete solution?

2. What are the lies of the accuser that you have been listening to? Write an example of a lie playing into your experience of motherhood and then renounce it.
“In the name of Jesus Christ, I renounce the lie that I am . . .”

3. Is there a truth that God wants to speak to you today? Is there a truth about yourself He wants you to know? Write it down and announce it.
“In the name of Jesus Christ, I announce the truth that I am. . .”

4. In what ways has God been generous to you? What can you be thankful for?

Spend time receiving from the Lord.

Talk 2: Coins, Cracks, and Change

Luke 21:4- “But she, out of her poverty, has put in all she had to live on.”

Mark 6:30-44 – “Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Come away by yourselves to a lonely place and rest awhile.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a lonely place by themselves. . . Now many saw them going, and knew them, and they ran there on foot from all the towns, and got there ahead of them. As he landed he saw a great throng, and he had compassion on them because they were like a sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. And when it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a lonely place, and the hour is not late; send them away, to go into the country and villages round about and buy themselves something to eat.’ But he answered them, ‘You give them something to eat. And taking the five loaves and two fish, he looked up to heaven, blessed, broke the loaves, gave them to his disciples. They all ate and were satisfied.”

Psalm 65- “Thus you prepared the land, breaking up its clods, softening it with showers, blessing its yield.”

Talk 3 Questions for Journaling:

1. In what ways do you feel empty or lonely?

2. Pray over the words of the Magnificat. How can we become more like Mary?

3. Look back on your week. What are some moments that you could have offered to God?

4. Spend time reflecting on how God is blessing your offering and transforming you.

Magnificat
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear him
in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.

He has come to the help of his servant Israel
for he remembered his promise of mercy,
the promise he made to our fathers,
to Abraham and his children forever.

It didn’t strike me through the heart, but it affirmed many things I have been praying about. And one of those things was wanting to make a deeper and more thorough Confession.

I’ve had hang-ups with Confession in the past, worrying about if I did it right, said enough, or if I missed something important. I’ve grown a lot as I’ve practiced having simpler Confessions. But lately in my prayer, I’ve been wanting to give God more of my heart by making a better examination and Confession, getting to more habitual venial sins so they don’t block my union with God. So my prayer has been, “Lord, show me what venial sins I need to confess that are getting in the way of loving you more.”

And then I read this paragraph in The Soul of the Apostolate, and it was like he was writing an Examination of Conscience for me (even though it was his own, written 80 years ago). God answered my prayer through another person. So I’ll let Dom Chautard help all of us today make a more thorough examination that can lead to deeper spiritual union. Here is a list of suggested venial sins:

-spiritual laziness, failing to raise up my soul to God
-an inordinate love of creatures
-hasty temper and impatience
-nursing a grudge
-being capricious and changeable
-getting soft, loving whatever is easy and gives pleasure
-always talking without any cause about the faults of other people
-a lot of curiosity about things that have nothing whatever to do with the glory of God
-spreading scandal
-gossiping
-making rash and stupid judgments of others
-vain self-complacency
-contempt of others and constant criticism of their conduct
-always looking for admiration and praise and doing things with these in view
-showing off anything that is to my credit
-stubbornness
-jealousy
-lack of respect for superiors
-murmuring
-no mortification in eating, drinking, and so on

I’ll be honest - the one about curiosity has come to mind every time I start scrolling, and it’s a good feeling of being convicted.

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In other news, the Mental Health and Motherhood Summit is this weekend - there is still time to join!

My last piece of news is that I’m working on a DIY retreat to launch here on Substack soon. I’m taking the Mothers of Young Children Retreat that I led last spring, and adapting it so that mothers can do it on their own time. My deepest desire is for all of us to be transformed by spending time in front of the Blessed Sacrament, and I think this will help.

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