Author: Maria

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Review: A Sacred Look

I had the pleasure of meeting Sr. Nancy Usselmann this summer. She was visiting as part of a media group that was in town for the filming of I Still Believe (go see it in March when it’s out!). She dropped by the house with her posse for mojitos, and we had a lively visit.

We talked about movies, books, and superheroes and discovered a common love of seeking the seeds of the Gospel in popular culture.

Her book, A Sacred Look: Becoming Cultural Mystics, explores movies, music, television shows, and the current phenomenon with heroes and superheroes through a Catholic lens. She develops an approach to experiencing this entertainment that includes developing relationships. When we seek what is good, beautiful, and true, we want to share it, and share the experience.

We can carry these messages from the fictional plane into our lives because we “hunger ever more for communion, connection, and intimacy with other people….This physical existence is never enough. We long for communion with a Being beyond our comprehension” ( pp 127-128).

Becoming cultural mystics helps us spread the Good News of God’s love and our salvation through Jesus Christ by being in tune with the those seeds in the culture, and interpreting them for others. It’s not just an enriching way to respond to the entertainment we consume, but a way of living the New Evangelization.

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loving a gloomy day

I love a gloomy day every once in a while. It keeps the glorious sunny days fresh — I can’t appreciate the beauty of a sunny day if I don’t have its contrast.

But to be fair — I could say the same about the sunny days — they help me appreciate the beauty of an overcast or rainy day. I love a good storm. I love the monochromatic colorless day that, in its rarity, sparkles in a natural black and white filter.

I love to put on a ridiculous outfit of fuzzy socks, sweatpants, and flannel shirt, the more mismatched the better, and run a pot of coffee or brew a pot of tea, and sit somewhere near the gray light and read. Or pray. Or write. Or all of it, to the soothing soundtrack of a soft rain.

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Review: When Life Gives You Pears

casually reading with a side of espresso pretending to be anything but a tourist

I should have staged this picture of me reading When Life Gives You Pears: The Healing Power of Family, Faith, and Funny People with St. Peter’s Basilica in the background or the amazing blue water of the Aegean Sea as we cruised through the Greek Islands. Instead, you get a real moment of downtime when I was in fact reading Jeannie Gaffigan’s harrowing and inspiring memoir about her medical and spiritual journey after discovering a pear-sized tumor in her brain stem.

Who takes this book on a mediterranean vacation? It’s not exactly lite reading for a cruise. And yet, it was just the right thing to bring along. First of all, I was looking forward to reading it, and that’s good enough for any time. I’m a fan of her work, and last year when Catholic Twitter blew up with the news of her tumor, I added my prayers to the mix.

What a blessing to be able to read about the happy ending of those prayers. Jeannie not only survived the surgery and the subsequent life-threatening illness that followed, but her family survived the experience with grace.

More than anything, it seems to me the story Jeannie tells is a story about grace. How circumstances and situations lined up just right to set into motion events and people who would save her life, and along the way, I think, strengthen her family in ways that faith often does. Sure, we get the details about that pear squeezing her brains, but we also get a vulnerable and intimate look into what happens when we give our suffering and fears to the Lord and trust in him.

Jeannie’s story is inspiring. It’s laugh out loud funny at times. But make no mistake, it’s a profound lesson in taking the lemons pears that life throws at us, and turn them into something beautiful. It was just the right thing to bring with me on my pilgrimage — and an opportunity to round out those first prayers for the Gaffigans by once again bringing them up in prayer, this time of thanksgiving, at some of the holy sites we visited.

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