NCRegister Blog: How to Pray Your Children to Heaven

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

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NCRegister Blog:The Humility of True Obedience

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

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

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

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

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NCRegister Blog: Death, Septuagesima and the Hillbilly Thomists

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

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

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