Dr. Donald DeMarco's new book became available today at Amazon. Here is the forward by Dr. Ronda Chervin: 
How to Remain Sane in a World that is Going Mad

This is the latest book of Canadian philosopher and award winning journalist, Donald DeMarco.  He is the author of such well-known titles as: The Anesthetic Society, Architects of the Culture of Death, New Perspectives on Contraception, The Biological Assault on Parenthood, and The Many Faces of Virtue.

The ability to insert wit into some of the heaviest topics of contemporary debate is surely one of the reasons why DeMarco’s books are so readable.

Another reason for the popularity of his incisive articles and books is his brilliant use of analogy. To whet your appetite for reading How to Remain Sane in a World that is Going Mad, I am here quoting some of my favorite analogies from this new book, a compendium of articles written over the past two years:

-          On how the mind provides the light so we can see where we are going and know what we are doing -  “Who would drive an automobile with his eyes shut?”

-          On why we need a foundation in God of such things as rights – “A client approaches a builder and tells him he wants a house with no first floor only a second floor…The builder, naturally tells the client that such an arrangement is impossible…”

-           About the criticism that Christians are imposing their morality on others – “Because moral values are spiritual and not material, they are not amenable to being imposed on anyone.”

-          About it being discriminatory to oppose such things as gay marriage – “A child progresses in his education when he passes from discriminating between a dog and a cat to discriminating between a beagle and a basset hound…is it sexist to argue that men and woman are different by nature?”

-          On whether failures in marriages mean that marriage should be defunct as some claim – “when a person consumes too much alcohol and then drives his car into a tree, we usually blame and driver and not the vehicle for the mishap…marriage is demanding. It is not like a player piano that is programmed to play by itself.”

-          On why Catholics must try to influence politics – “The coaching staff does not influence the players on the field directly, but surely, through their advice and inspiration influences them indirectly.”

-          On condemning the Church for laying guilt trips on members – “A baseball player took his life because he lost an important playoff game…yet I am unaware that Major League Baseball has ever been blamed for loading athletes with guilt.”

Besides the persuasive rhetoric of such analogies, I recommend How to Remain Sane in a World that is Going Mad for the research Dr. DeMarco has been doing into the ideas of what I would call “the enemies of truth” as found in newspaper articles, television talk-shows, as well as best-selling books. As DeMarco puts it: “I have adopted the mindset that obtaining a secular newspaper is equivalent to capturing the enemy’s plan to destroy civilization.” 

Many apologists for Catholic truth are too disgusted by the views of the confused enemy even to read them.  We may need the shock of the actual wording of errors that are flourishing in our times to become better apologists. Refreshing it is, indeed, to read DeMarco’s cogent defense of truth in the book you are holding in your hands.

Perhaps you are thinking, well DeMarco is witty and incisive but won’t reading this leave me feeling depressed and hopeless?  No, because Jesus didn’t say “Have a Nice Day!” he said “Take up your Cross and Follow Me!” and in the words of DeMarco: “The Church offers a way of life, forgiveness, and redemption. That should be enough to praise it over the world that offers scant light, little forgiveness and no redemption.” 

I was talking to an elderly priest with many painful chronic physical problems. He was recently in a re-hab for a few months. In his bed, he didn’t wear his clerical collar.  When he was leaving to go home one of the nurses found out he was a priest.  She told him that in her Church there is lots of anti-Catholicism, and that she bought into it. But now, finding out that he was a priest she was going to tell them how without most people knowing he was a priest, patients who were normally very difficult and even nasty to the staff because of their pain, stopped doing that whenever he came into the common rooms! 

A teaching I like:  Instead of drowning in self-pity, we should view problems as challenges. Take the word problem out of your lingo.  Sounds good to me. What is your challenge today, friend?

From family holidays back to the seminary: Even though I am a 77 year old grandma and my adult daughters are in their early 50’s, leaving them I felt like a mother cat with kittens taken away when she still has milk in her tits!  

I also thought often of a part of The Lord of the Rings where Lothlorien is visited. It is a place where the elderly go into boats and slowly sail away into the horizon. Psychologically, I think that many of us oldies do feel as if we are casting off from the world.

You know that I am a Widow Dedicated to the Lord. That involves making a promise not to re-marry but to be the bride of Christ, but without a vow in a community of Sisters.  Sometimes widows who have read my books about widows or seen me talk about this on EWTN write me.  One told me of her description of her Dedication that she put on her blog. With permission I am putting it here:

One Love: the diamond gift of chastity
By Shawn Chapman

 I don’t think of myself as a single person, really. Being a widow is different. I am someone who lived and fulfilled marriage vows. However, I am alone. Then again, I am forever changed by marriage, in all the best ways, and I feel its beautiful seal on my soul.
After the death of my first husband, Blaze, in a car accident at the age of twenty-eight, I didn’t understand what my life was- I lost that much of myself. I slept fitfully with the light on for years.
It felt imperative to me to understand my vocation. I was still a mother. I still loved my husband. Just because he was dead, I did not stop feeling like his wife. I didn’t even consider dating.

Over the years my ideas about celibacy evolved as I moved from the chastity of a wife to the chastity of a widow. I was surprised to realize that I felt an expansiveness of love, of my womanhood, of my motherhood, as I developed in this new life I did not ask for, but slowly embraced. When I turned the light off at night, I felt enveloped in love and peace. “Through the silent watches of the night, bless the Lord.” (Ps. 134:2b)

I wondered, during the quiet mutations happening in my soul, if this was how priests and religious felt- like they were half in love with everyone, like their hearts were available to people, and to God in a special way.
We could think of a celibate person not as “asexual,” but, as a sexual being, who is celibate in expression. 

I have come to recognize sexuality as a spiritual energy, so to speak. It is like a power current and a connection, body and soul, to and through God.  This was so when I was with each of my husbands, and it is so now. It is just directed differently. The proper direction of the spiritual energy of sexuality is what chastity is.

 My reasons for remaining celibate were changed over the years. I still loved my husband as much as I ever did, and he was part of me. The change was that I felt married to Jesus.

 I was so perfectly at peace with this idea, that God is the husband of the widow and the father of the orphan, that it was a very difficult adjustment for me when I felt I was being asked to consider loving Bob, ten years after Blaze’s death. 
It took a lot of prayer, a few “burning bushes,” and a couple of little miracles to help me see that loving Bob was now my way. I came to understand that Christ and I were going to love Bob together. Slowly this began to make sense, and I was able to let that love happen.
  I was very, very happy as Bob’s wife. I was more happy and unified with him than I can say. Truly, we formed Christ in one another and experienced Him living in our relationship. In an ineffable way, though changed, it seems to me that we still experience that.

Like a diamond that stays the same through its various circumstances, chastity is given to me again in a different setting, with a new cut. I didn’t think this would happen again, being widowed a second time.  But I cherish this beautiful gift, this diamond of chastity, like a spiritual engagement ring for a new life, in a new way, with Christ. It is powerful and affirming.

Widowhood is to live with a bottomless loss. But it is also a very special kind of love, and celibate chastity can be one of its expressions. It is less an expression of emptiness, in time, than a different kind of wholeness.
I heard that a wife said to her dying husband, “I love you so much, what will I do without you?” He said, “Take the love you have for me and spread it around.”. I think I have started to do this again now, and I recognize it as a sign of life.
As a daughter of the Church, I have the richness of Carmelite spirituality to draw on, and other Catholic spiritual traditions, too, that speak of the soul as a bride of God. Ronda Chervin, who has written about the spirituality of widowhood, calls this, “Jesus [as] the second Bridegroom.” * (In my case this would be “third Bridegroom,” of course.)

This understanding of my present form of chastity is profoundly healing for me. I feel filled, enclosed, and loved, carried and protected every day, in spite of my still very present loss. Celibate chastity is a positive, liberating presence in me, peaceful and meaningful.
To me, the virtue of chastity is a true One Love that puts all other loves in their proper perspectives, making them even more vivid. It’s a bright jewel given to my soul. The more I learn about it, the more I am dazzled.

“From His fullness, we have all received, grace flowing upon grace.” John 1:16

Here is more from the “words in the heart” allegedly from the Holy Spirit to me in the year 2008, entitled God Alone!   If this is the first blog you are reading, go back to the blog of 12/18/14 to see my explanation of these seeming locutions.

May 19, 2008

Expectations
Holy Spirit:
Go back to the teaching on expectations in previous messages of others you have read. You think “if only one person, plant seeds, etc.” is a cliché bromide. This is because your culture is dominated by statistics and cynicism. This is not a PR campaign. It is a transition for hearts. Have you not been changed? Was it so easy for you to become more loving that you want to doubt that the Source is directly working on your transition? 

“Love is patient, love is kind…” You are all too inclined to impatient harshness.

Yesterday you had a day of grey fear of the void. You became anxious. We told you
that it was okay and to move slowly into what would be sent to you to fill your time.

You are in training.

May 22, 2008
Our Church
Holy Spirit:  
Those working to heal divisions in the Church sometimes want to minimize the splits so they can have hope. We want, through love, to open each side to the truths which will enable each of you to let go of attachments to errors and half truths.

The truths that set you free are known to you already, but are veiled, not only by false philosophies, but also by lack of deep spirituality. Notice that in the midst of all the ecumenical and interfaith dialogues, John Paul II called leaders together in Assisi for a retreat.

If you are called to help heal divisions, you must become closer to those around you. Before, you would feel too angry with them to want to get to know them better.

(Note from Ronda: a reader wondered if this locution could be seeming to say the errors that divide don’t matter. I replied that I thought it meant that experts should work on those thorny issues in ecumenical dialogue but that some of us, I included, would be better off trying simple love and prayer.)

The image I got this Christmas to make into a prayer was that Mother Mary of the Nativity wants to feed my tiny soul – you tiny souls also??




Not a Christmas image at all but coming in response to some typical “holiday” scenes:

May 16, 2008

(I woke suddenly with images of war. I have been reading about the Vietnam War
and the Iraq war).

Jesus:

Wars are a shock treatment (we, the Trinity, permit) to break through the dreadful complacency of worldliness. What is important is not your analysis, but the cracking of the shell – the breaking through the illusion that you and others can make a paradise out of combined selfishness.

Shame

Jesus:

You are inclined to feel shame because you are vulnerable, instead of shame because you sin. The healing is to accept your creatureliness with childlike simplicity: “O, my Father in heaven, your little child feels weak, uncertain, and miserable. Lord have mercy,” and then toddle along through your day as we strengthen you.”

About Conversation

Holy Spirit:
There is a roughness in your talk, not only as in talk among embattled soldiers full of vulgarity and cursing, but also within your families. Teasing can be a form of fondness, but I am advising you to avoid harshness or the indifference of not greeting each other with words or gestures or smiles of welcome. It (rough talk) leads people to become shut up in cold defensiveness and then to seek relief sometimes in the comradeliness of shared addictions or in solitary addictions where there is a note of tenderness toward the self: such as “poor me. This drink will make me feel better, or this masturbation, this over-indulgence in food makes me feel good.

May 15, 2008
The Family

Holy Spirit:

Out of individualism, you think too much as if each individual has to have every virtue to be complete, whole and perfect. Your critical eye focuses on each one in a family and you think about each ones defects and your mind works on how you would like each one to be. The same with your family in the Church.

FORWARD

Nine days before Pentecost I prayed a novena to the Holy Spirit each day. In the middle of the night after the Pentecost Liturgy I woke up suddenly at 1:30 AM. It seemed as if the Holy Spirit was speaking to me in my heart.
Since I believe that these are true, I am placing them before the reader. However, it is important that you know that in the tradition of the Roman Catholic
Church of which I am a member, there is no obligation to believe in the validity of any visions or words, audible or “in the heart.” Such phenomena come under the title “Private Revelation.” Approval of such by Vatican authorities means only that they contain no doctrinal errors or viewpoints dangerous to the faith, not that they are considered to be certainly from God. In any case, private revelation never has the status of Biblical Revelation. For example, Catholics are not required to believe the messages given even in approved apparitions such as those at Lourdes or Fatima.

May 13, 2008

Holy Spirit:

To prepare for eternity we want you to appreciate the beauty of creation and life even more, but also to relax your grip on it. Let yourself be wafted a little bit above everything, as if you were levitating.

About the Moral Law

 St. Paul:
“Straight is the gate and narrow the way….” (Matthew 7:14)

Sin seems like liberation but turns to dust. You experienced this. In these times on the globe there is a clearer understanding of this because of the publicly viewed excesses and catastrophic penalties in the flesh. The hope of joy in procreative marital sex has been veiled because of divorce where the children can become pawns. So, the young people don’t feel the secure nest.

There is need for strong open witness about the brambles on the strayed path
and the goodness of the straight path. This is being done in some contemporary
Christian teaching on chastity, where the witnesses are open about their experience. You need freedom in the Spirit to be honest… for the sake of liberation from a society as crazed on this as the pagan societies I preached to. 

To be chaste people have to cleave to Jesus as I did with passionate constant prayer.

Many of you readers prayed for my daughter, Carla, with T-cell lymphoma.  The good news is that after terrible chemo treatments she is now weak but in remission.  She says that Jesus healed her and asked me to thank all the prayer warriors that prayed for her through my pleas for prayers!  Thank you all the saints, angels and Jesus, Mary, Joseph who helped her.

From Sheila Kaye-Smith:  Shepherds in Sackcloth – this English novelist wrote in the 1920’s – she became a Roman Catholic but wrote about rural English life.

A saintly old woman is speaking to an old Anglican priest who comes to bring her Holy Communion after Mass each day.  He is grieving after the death of his beloved wife. 

She says: “Our flesh is tired and has its own place to go to. Our bodies soon grow tired, and the earth wants them…the earth gets our bodies back, which belong to her – and I reckon our bodies are sometimes very glad to go…I reckon her body was getting tired of her soul. I sometimes think our bodies don’t understand our souls, and are afraid of them. Our souls don’t always treat them as kind as they ought and our bodies want to get shut of them and lie down…”

He says, “but I loved her body.”

She says, “You loved what her body was trying to tell you about herself, but often our bodies are like beasts that don’t understand their riders, and her body could never tell you all that she is, all that you will know someday.”

We had a beautiful dinner and live classical music concert here at the Seminary as a fund-raiser.  I was impressed by how beautiful it was that in former times only upper class people had live concerts in their drawing rooms, and how much more wonderful this is than concerts on TV. 

In a sermon a priest mentioned that mystics such as St. John of the Cross “even suffered.” I was astounded by that word “even” as if most of us don’t suffer a lot every day in many ways. I thought an explanation would be that sanguine temperament people tend to see life as relatively happy unless something tragic happens, whereas melancholics, like me, will find life burdensome and sorrowful even if we take joy in the gifts of each day. There are positives to the melancholic temperament such as being serious and, with God’s help, working hard to alleviate sufferings than sometimes sanguines wouldn’t notice, but still it is a cross we may need to acknowledge we are carrying so as to unite it with the cross of Jesus.

A priest here at Holy Apostles, Fr. Dominic Anaeto likes to say:  “Don’t hang your joy on any thing, person, or event.”

Fr. Dennis Kolinski of the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius, a fairly new community devoted to Restoration of the Sacred through Service at the Altar, who teaches here at Holy Apostles, offered a one day Retreat on Prayer to women in the area. They thought about 20 might come but about 100 came!

I loved seeing all these women sitting so quietly at the Tridentine Mass and Fr. Dennis’ talks and then the silent day of recollection. Almost all the Catholic women I ever met since I came to Connecticut were there. 

About petition prayer he made an observation that put certain things in a different light.  He said there are 3 possibilities. There are things God will never give us no matter how much we pray for them because He knows they will not be good for us.  There are others He will give even if we never pray for them because He knows they are good for us.  The 3rd group are things He has chosen to make conditional on our prayer or the prayers of others for us.

In prayer I asked Jesus whether He might give me more thoughts about this and He seemed to tell me: “It is a paradox.  On the one hand I came to open the gates to heaven where the soul will dwell for a long time without the resurrected body.  And I came to detach humans from over-attachment to material things.  On the other, We created man to be an entity between animal and angel and we didn’t think the body was ugly the way you do, Ronda. So, take a little time out and consider what this means for you."

This is what came to me when I thought about it more: Okay. I see that when I love other people I don’t find their bodies ugly even if they are not pretty or well-formed or even if they are very old and wrinkled. I understand that you let us suffer from the old age of our bodies with ugliness and pain to wean us from this world to want to go to the next stage of eternal life.

Little children don’t find defecating obnoxious – they find it fun.  So maybe I have to pray that you, Jesus, in whom all things were made, will heal me of any Puritanic streak I got from my father, grandmother, and from the culture.

Would I really like to just live in a think tank and never walk around and see the beauty of nature?  No! 

I am reading a book of excerpts from the famous Jewish sage, Abraham Heschel.  

                                     Here is a quotation I especially liked:

"In no other act does man experience so often the disparity between the desire for expression and the means of expression as in prayer. The inadequacy of the means at our disposal appears so tangible, so tragic, that one feels it a grace to be able to give oneself up to music, to a tone, to a song, to a chant.  The wave of a song carries the soul to heights which utterable meanings can never reach. Such abandonment is no escape...For the world of unutterable meanings is the nursery of the soul, the cradle of all our ideas. It is not an escape but a return to one's origins." 

A corollary I thought of was that the dark night of the soul is to wean us from the excitement of the illuminative way into the peace of the beyond words unitive way.

An older priest recently had some kind of heart episode so that he now has speech aphasia and can’t talk well but he can talk a lot. It happened that I went to Mass thinking someone else would be celebrating it, but he was there alone, perhaps just as glad no one was there as he practiced trying to enunciate the readings.

He did stumble over many words in the readings. He was much better with the proper of the Mass, and happily made no mistakes in the words of consecration. I found myself deeply moved to be at a Mass with a priest who was not in full natural level power but weakened, struggling.  It gave me an image of what it might be like someday to be in a convalescent home where the priests celebrating the Mass were not visitors but residents. 

Since this priest normally has a very strong character, I thought that his being weakened by his stroke made him more lovable perhaps to those who might usually find him difficult.  And, then, I had a blessed thought, “me, too!”  Someday I might be more lovable if I was much weakened! 

Some words from my personal journal where I think it is Jesus speaking to me. But first, there are so many lines in the psalms begging God to guide us and walk with us – why couldn’t that sometimes mean with inner words in the heart?
Jesus: In heaven there will be all transparency and no misunderstandings or rejection, so it is natural that you long for that and try to make it happen “on earth as it is in heaven.”  The problem is that due to your fallen nature even though there is much love between spouses, parents and children and friends, there is never complete understanding. That’s why you need Me as your bridegroom.

Jesus:  Now, this is a complicated day and you want to be in the background, sweet, affirming, not contentious and tense.  Yes?   The how is by concentrating on My presence in each situation.

I have a terrible time with the cold since my circulation isn’t good and I am so sedentary and just cold-blooded.  Usually I complain endlessly because at the seminary most of the men need less artificial heat and so the heating system isn’t activated until the end of October.  This time the Holy Spirit seemed to urge me to just not complain at all, but just put up with the inconvenience and bulkiness of bundling up.  I found that I am much more peaceful not complaining!   In Low’s Recovery International for anger, anxiety and depression one of the slogans is “drop the complaining habit.”

On always wanting everyone to be spiritual in the same way, mode, tone, flavor, that I am:

Jesus: Do you see that the dance with each person is different?  I who made the world, can’t I choreograph a different dance for each beloved human person?


In spiritual direction, the priest suggested not thinking of things that don’t go well as failures so much as them being opportunities to learn.

On concern about the Synod:
Jesus: I am sovereign.  Terrible things happen to My Church from the very beginning. You are to cling to Me and to those I have given you to trust. Don’t let excitement over possibilities take the energy that I want you to put into loving everyone around you. How did the future of the Church look to the disciples when St. Peter was crucified? Or when those in the diocese of Hippo Augustine buried that saint with hordes ready to take over their region?  Let your motto be “The Gates of Hell will not prevail.”

Concerning a setback in a work project:

Jesus:  Was My mission on earth a mistake because there were so many set-backs even to the seeming set-back of My crucifixion? 

Jesus: About those you are anxious about:  Swathe them in the mystery that is  Me.