We Are All Called to Lives of Holiness
For reasons that I am not going to discuss explicitly, I have been contemplating our culture's hostility towards children. We live in a culture that views children largely as a nuisance or accessory. Unfortunately this view has pervaded the culture including within the Catholic Church and other Christian communities. My husband and I have been …
Continue reading "Society’s Disconnect from the Joy of Children"
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Catherine of Siena who is one of the four female Doctors of the Church. One of the great literary works found in the Catholic tradition is The Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena. The Dialogue is private revelation dictated by her to her secretaries while she was in …
Continue reading "St. Catherine of Siena and The Thirst for Holiness"
This week is National Infertility Awareness Week. I wrote yesterday about what it is like to be Catholic with only one child without even realizing that it is Infertility Awareness Week. Infertility comes in many forms from the couple who cannot conceive to people like me who have a child and then suffer repeated miscarriage. …
When my husband and I got married we figured given our somewhat later age (I was 29 when we got married) that we would have four or five kids. We had undergone a radical conversion while dating thanks to our priest sending us to a Theology of the Body seminar. We finally understood the why …
Continue reading "Being a Catholic Mother of “Only” One Child"
Today I want to share a post by my father, Mike Rapkoch, from his Ricochet site. My grandmother became critically ill about 2 weeks ago. My husband and I rushed out on the drive from Virginia to my home-state of Montana, expecting the worst. Instead, my grandmother recovered and amazed us all. My father was …
9-11 means a lot of different things to people. Everyone has a story of where they were on that day. I just happen to be one of those people who spent 45 days smack dab in the middle of the pain, agony, and destruction of 9-11. On 9-11 I was stationed at a large intel …
Continue reading "What 9-11 Means to Me This Year: From a Relief Worker"
In 2004 I was diagnosed with delayed-onset PTSD. It took three years for my 9-11 relief work to catch up with me. While most 20 years olds were partying in college or worried about exams, I was consoling 400 people whose loved ones had been murdered in the Pentagon. I had only been in the …
November is the month in the Church when we remember and pray for the dead. The month begins with the Solemnity of All Saints to celebrate the men and women who have gone before us and who pray for us from Heaven. Then All Souls is on the 2nd, which is dedicated to the dead …
It is easy for me to get worked up about the evil going on in the world, or about how I fail often at being the mother and wife God wants me to be. By becoming distracted by all of the darkness, or by allowing a self-loathing dialogue to run rampant in my mind, I …
Swimming the Depths 