Category: Behold Vancouver

He was a skeptic until Christ came, but there was one thing the Doubter didn’t lose faith in — and that saved him.

Jesus said to him, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”

—John 20:29

In those first days following the death and burial of Jesus, the Apostles were left adrift. After all, the One who had been their focus and point of reference through years of mission and service was gone. God had gone quiet, no longer speaking to them or guiding them. How could they make sense of everything that had happened to Jesus? Everything that had happened to them?

As their hopes crumbled around them, there was no escaping the darkness brought on by the Crucifixion. The disappointment and disillusionment of Good Friday had not yet been transformed into the light of Easter.

Then everything changed. But Thomas had been absent when Jesus first appeared to the Apostles on that first Easter Sunday. Should it be any wonder, then, that he would still be overwhelmed by Holy Saturday sadness?  And I don’t think it’s fair to fault Thomas for being skeptical at the stories of Mary Magdalene and others seeing Jesus. With these same themes in mind, Pope Francis has reflected, “Doesn’t the same thing also happen to us when something completely new occurs in our everyday life? We stop short, we don’t understand, we don’t know what to do. Newness often makes us fearful, including the newness which God brings us, the newness which God asks of us” (Homily for the Easter Vigil 2013).

Although Thomas did not initially believe in the resurrection of the Lord, he remained faithful to the call he had received from Jesus—the call to be a part of the community of the Apostles. While his doubts would not allow him to believe that the others had seen the Lord, Thomas never lost faith in their fraternity and it was ultimately in and through that community that Thomas finally encountered the Risen Christ.

In The Genesee Diary, Henri Nouwen recalled that Didymus, the name of Thomas, means “twin” and that the Fathers of the Church had commented that all of us are “two people: a doubting one and a believing one. We need the support and love of our brothers and sisters to prevent our doubting person from becoming dominant and destroying our capacity for belief.” And so, we might say that the Church is inviting us reflect not so much on “Doubting Thomas” as on the living and dynamic faith of the community—the Church—of which Thomas was a part.

He was a skeptic until Christ came, but there was one thing the Doubter didn’t lose faith in — and that saved him.

Jesus said to him, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”

—John 20:29

In those first days following the death and burial of Jesus, the Apostles were left adrift. After all, the One who had been their focus and point of reference through years of mission and service was gone. God had gone quiet, no longer speaking to them or guiding them. How could they make sense of everything that had happened to Jesus? Everything that had happened to them?

As their hopes crumbled around them, there was no escaping the darkness brought on by the Crucifixion. The disappointment and disillusionment of Good Friday had not yet been transformed into the light of Easter.

Then everything changed. But Thomas had been absent when Jesus first appeared to the Apostles on that first Easter Sunday. Should it be any wonder, then, that he would still be overwhelmed by Holy Saturday sadness?  And I don’t think it’s fair to fault Thomas for being skeptical at the stories of Mary Magdalene and others seeing Jesus. With these same themes in mind, Pope Francis has reflected, “Doesn’t the same thing also happen to us when something completely new occurs in our everyday life? We stop short, we don’t understand, we don’t know what to do. Newness often makes us fearful, including the newness which God brings us, the newness which God asks of us” (Homily for the Easter Vigil 2013).

Although Thomas did not initially believe in the resurrection of the Lord, he remained faithful to the call he had received from Jesus—the call to be a part of the community of the Apostles. While his doubts would not allow him to believe that the others had seen the Lord, Thomas never lost faith in their fraternity and it was ultimately in and through that community that Thomas finally encountered the Risen Christ.

In The Genesee Diary, Henri Nouwen recalled that Didymus, the name of Thomas, means “twin” and that the Fathers of the Church had commented that all of us are “two people: a doubting one and a believing one. We need the support and love of our brothers and sisters to prevent our doubting person from becoming dominant and destroying our capacity for belief.” And so, we might say that the Church is inviting us reflect not so much on “Doubting Thomas” as on the living and dynamic faith of the community—the Church—of which Thomas was a part.

Wait. What’s a sacramental?I have always been drawn to sacramentals. I keep on hand holy water, medals, and many Lents’ worth of palm branches, not to mention a drawer full of miscellaneous holy cards and third-class relics (some of which are blessed, though I’ve mostly forgotten which ones).

I often think to myself that it might help me to use them a bit more. But sometimes I worry about abusing them, falling into the error of treating them like good luck charms. I guess that despite my attraction to the idea of sacramentals, I have always been foggy on exactly what they are, and how they work.

So I poked around a bit and found out three things that took away my fears and cleared things up for me.

Sacramentals are more than just blessed objects

Religious (and sometimes ordinary) objects that have been blessed by a priest are sacramentals. But other things are too. A sacramental can be an action, time, place, or event — anything used by the Church to open us up to God’s grace. So, for example, fasting, genuflecting, or making the sign of the cross is a sacramental, as is a sacred place like the site of an approved Marian apparition. There are also blessings of the home or vehicles, or special blessings and objects associated with saints, such as the blessing of throats on St. Blase’s day, or St. Joseph’s table. Even Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt’s flying Miraculous Medal is a sacramental. Sacramentals are all around us.

Sacramentals get their power partly from your disposition

The seven sacraments don’t rely on your disposition to work. I can be a real jerk but still contract a true marriage. A priest’s ordination can be valid whether or not he is a holy man. A baptism can be performed on a small child unaware of what is happening. But with sacramentals, your disposition opens you up to the grace God wants to give. In this sense, using a sacramental is like praying. Just saying the words or going through the motions isn’t enough. Blessing yourself with holy water or genuflecting might not be a way to open yourself to grace, if you’re doing those acts unthinkingly, or with wrong intentions, just as saying the words of the Our Father doesn’t mean much if your heart isn’t lifted to God, however imperfectly.

Sacramentals also get their power from the prayers of the Church

But your disposition isn’t the only thing that counts. Using a sacramental unites your prayer—as flawed and weak and poor as it most certainly is—with the intercessory prayers of the universal Church, the Bride of Christ.

In chapter 20 of The Spiritual Combat, Lorenzo Scupoli addresses the harmful effects of sloth and offers guidance on how to combat it. Sloth is not merely physical idleness, but a deadly torpor of the soul that paralyzes spiritual growth, dulls discernment, and opens the heart to deception.

Scupoli points out that sloth is like a worm eating away at wood. The danger of sloth lies in silent and gradual decline—small delays, minor indulgences, and habitual postponements that lead to spiritual bondage. It attacks not only good intentions but also developed virtues. Left unchecked sloth can hollow out our spiritual life completely. However, armed with immediate action, true diligence, patient persistence, and the grace of God, we can fight this battle and win.

Scupoli counsels us to avoid curiosity, worldly attachments, and unnecessary occupations that feed distraction. He emphasizes the importance of immediate action (i.e. prompt and cheerful obedience to divine inspirations and the demands of duty) for delay makes tasks seem more burdensome over time. Sloth feeds on delay. The moment between inspiration and action is where spiritual battles are won or lost. Act immediately and you starve sloth of its power. Hesitate and you give it a foothold.

We must also watch out for false productivity. This is when we rush through our spiritual duties—racing through prayers, speeding through the Rosary, hurrying through Scripture reading—just to check them off our list and get back to what we really want to do.

This isn’t true diligence; it’s sloth wearing a mask. True diligence consists in performing each task at its proper time with full attention. Real spiritual practice requires presence, attention, and a willing heart. It is better to pray one decade of the Rosary with full devotion than to recite an entire Rosary while mentally planning your day.

To reawaken zeal, Scupoli exhorts us to remember the immense value of every act done for God—even a single prayer or act of self-denial outweighs the world’s treasures. Each victory over laziness brings heavenly reward, while habitual neglect leads to withdrawal of divine grace.

One of sloth’s most effective lies is making tasks seem overwhelming. The ancient spiritual masters knew the antidote: break overwhelming tasks into manageable pieces – break long prayers or labours into short periods until strength returns; rest briefly when overwhelmed, then resume the task steadily. This gradual discipline weakens sloth and strengthens virtue. As one Desert Father wisely said: “The person who begins with small things will eventually accomplish great ones.”

Patient persistence is another key remedy against sloth. We must fight sloth with immediate, forceful action and yet we must also exercise patient trust in God’s slow work within us.

Is your faith certain enough to stand up against the doubts and different ideas out there? 

Fr. Mike shares insight about certainty from Dr. Montague Brown, professor of philosophy at St. Anselm College, New Hampshire. Dr. Brown says certainty is intellectual belief based on the evidence. It’s not blind belief. Someone with certainty is not going to change their mind without new objective evidence. Many times people change their minds not because of new evidence, but just because of new people in their lives. They’ve simply been exposed to new behavior. This happens to students in college quite often. 

Christianity is evidential. It hinges upon an indisputable event, the life and death of Jesus. 

If you’re from a small town, you may think the way you were raised is just part of your small town’s way of thinking, and that a well-known university in a big city must have a broader, more enlightened way of thinking. But really, the university is just as subject to its way of thinking as the small town is. The culture of a university is just as insulated as that of a small town. 

Don’t get so caught up in the culture around you that you give in to new ideas without evidence—whether that culture is a university, a new workplace, new friends, new family, or a new city. Let your faith always be backed up by the evidence. Fr. Mike is certain in his belief that Christianity will then always come out on top.

Why does life feel empty—even when everything seems “fine”? 

Fr. Mike Schmitz and Dr. Arthur Brooks explore why modern life leaves so many people restless, anxious, and disconnected. From neuroscience to faith, they reveal why pleasure isn’t happiness, why technology can’t give us meaning, and how returning to God may be the only way out of the Matrix. 

If you’ve been searching for purpose, this conversation will change the way you see happiness—and your life.

When you get rid of extra stress, lasting inner peace becomes attainable.

When someone asked me, “How are you doing?” a few years ago, I would usually say fine, and give my biggest, fakest smile. The real answer to that question was “stressed out of my mind,” but most of the time, the question “How are you?” is perfunctory and not an actual inquiry — and so we answer politely out of habit. But if you asked me that question today I would answer “fine,” and truly be fine (not insanely stressed).

That said, event though I’ve made progress, I still find myself filling any free moment I have with busyness. Even though I have fewer stressors in my life, I occasionally feel like I should be busier and start creating unnecessary stress to fill the void. 

If you struggle with stress, self-imposed or not, have I got a woman for you. She’s a 19th-century Carmelite named Sister Marie-Aimee of Jesus, and she wrote a little book called The Twelve Degrees of Silence.

Sister’s intent was to help people attain inner silence so that they could know God better. But I have found that if you look at her steps today, you can use them more superficially to help fight day-to-day busyness and stress. When you get rid of extra stress, acquiring a lasting inner peace becomes attainable.

Check out these 6 touch points from Sister Marie-Aimee, and see if you can find any ways to change your routine in response to them.

1. Silence of words

We’re inundated with communication every day. For example, texting. Are all of the texts you send necessary, or could you cut back on some texts and free up that mental space? Could you set a few times during the day that you send messages and then not text in between those times? That might allow you to have some clearer headspace.

2. Silence of movements/actions

Ever noticed a nervous tic you have? For a while I would shake my leg when I was thinking or bored. When someone pointed it out to me, I realized the constant motion was not actually helping me, and worked to change that habit. Try to find some movements or actions that you do in a day that are just fillers, and are actually making you less calm and more busy. 

3. Silence of imagination

Do you spend a lot of time during the day thinking about what the future will look like? That might be what you’re doing tomorrow, or what you’re doing when you get home tonight, or what you’re doing for lunch. Regardless of how far into the future you are looking, it is better to focus on the present moment if you want to foster inner peace. 

Work, family, plans with friends, sports … when do you take time to savor life?One of the problems that constantly comes up in many people’s lives is maintaining balance between work life, family life, and personal time. But in most cases the root of the matter is the inability to prioritize what is really important, especially caring for one’s own life. When something is really important for us, we find the time for it.

We tend to postpone the important things because of what’s urgent so our health and our relationships with others suffer. In fact, it’s the family that usually pays the high price of all the rushing we do. Don’t you think we need to stop from time to time? Could it be that we’ve forgotten the importance of taking breaks in everyday life? Have we forgotten the art of stopping?

We may be doing well in our work and achieving our goals, but on the way we can forget to take care of the life that sustains everything else.

How can we take better care of ourselves and not fall into unbridled busyness? The recommendation, from the ancient philosophers to the experts in occupational medicine, is to learn to take breaks in day-to-day life. It is an old and wise custom to pause in the middle of any activity, and it has great benefits.

Philo of Alexandria (1st century AD) understood rest as an activity without effort, as a creative state of calm. For the Jewish philosopher, only the irrational man is agitated, while the wise man knows how to rest to get in touch with his own creativity.

The art of stopping

The word pause in its Greek origin (anapausis) refers to “repose,” “interruption,” “rest.” In ancient times, the pause was understood as a creative act, as a healing interruption.

Specifically, it is interrupting what one is doing in order to do something totally different. While there are many exercises that can be done to rest psychologically and physically, a true pause must always include the opposite of what we are doing at work.

If we have been sitting in front of a computer, the pause cannot be a video game, but should involve physical activity. If we have been talking a lot, the pause should be silence. If we have been reading a lot, the pause is not to read something else, but to do something different.

The pause for those who work with great physical effort is stillness. For those who are working alone, their pause may require contact with others. And if it is the other way around and you work with many people, the pause will be a time of reparative solitude.

Scrupulosity is a psychological disorder primarily characterized by pathological guilt or obsession associated with moral or religious issues. If you’ve ever dealt with it—or know someone who has dealt with it—you know how confusing and difficult it can be. 

Today, Tanner helps you identify it, call it what it is, and turn to the Father’s merciful love for you.

You probably don’t outright lie on a regular basis. But, do you exaggerate? Do you give half truths sometimes, or leave things unclear on purpose? Do you hide some facts in order to smooth things over? 

Today, Fr. Mike shows us the very-human reasons we all struggle with these “white lies”, and how to tell the “full” truth more often. 

“Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.” —Jesus in Matthew 5:37