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How could God take my precious son at age 43 and yet allow rotten people who have stopped believing in God to keep on living? My son was a great Catholic and spent eight years in Catholic schools.
Bombshell
In August 2015, Fox newscaster Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) becomes ill as she prepares to moderate the Republican debate. Fox News CEO Roger Ailes (John Lithgow), who favors conspiracy theories, thinks she may have been poisoned. Kelly is criticized after asking then-candidate Donald J. Trump about his past sexist remarks and if a man of his temperament should be elected president. He begins to tweet insulting remarks about her—and others follow suit.
Conscience: “. . . a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed. In all he says and does, man is obliged to follow faithfully what he knows to be just and right.”
—Catechism of the Catholic Church
As she faces daily torments of dementia, this author finds strength and peace in prayer.
When I became a Catholic at the age of 20, I loved the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Now, more than 40 years later, my behavior is morally acceptable, but I am tortured interiorly by inappropriate thoughts, lacking focus and concentration. While polite and kind outwardly, I get irked or offended by others’ behavior. I am impatient, judging inwardly in my mind.
A lot can happen in forty days and forty nights.
The key to loving your neighbor is learning how to love yourself.
The forty days and nights of Lent are about simplification, purification, getting priorities reestablished and remembering that God, not my ego, is the center of reality.
The word discipline comes from the Latin discere, meaning “to learn.”
Slavish imitation is not what holiness is about, but rather it’s about learning to love God in our own time and place with its own sensibilities and ways of following in the footsteps of Jesus with all our heart and mind and soul. It’s about doing and making choices commensurate with our own capacities, our own strength and/or weakness of mind and body. We don’t have to be nutty to be a saint, but being in love with God will sometimes move us to do things that others will consider nutty or unbalanced.
