Thanks, Fr. Mark!

ChelseaPersonal, Suffering2 Comments

LOTRIt was such a pleasure to meet both Doug Barry and Fr. Mark Mary, hosts of Life on the Rock on EWTN, the other week. I did not know this, but Fr. Mark has a blog called Power & Witness and in his most recent post he mentions my appearance on the show and reflects on suffering and growing in holiness:

This past week we had Chelsea Zimmerman on “Life on the Rock” speaking about the sanctity of human life. Chelsea is paralyzed from the chest down from a car accident when she was 17. Today, 11 years later, she works for her parents and finds time to blog on a number of pro-life issues.

I was deeply impressed by her positive attitude and her moving forward with life despite her disability. Her life after the accident entails some harsh realities and limitations, yet Chelsea focused on what she was still able to do. She made decisions about what was important to her and what was going to be the focus of her life. One of those decisions was to be close to God, and to try to order her life to God.

She was drawn to the message of St. Therese and her doctrine of spiritual childhood in dealing with weakness and suffering. St. Therese once said that, “The goal of all our undertakings should not be a task perfectly completed, but the accomplishment of the will of God.” Sometimes we focus on what we do not have in terms of gifts and abilities instead of focusing on God’s will in our lives. Childlike faith is to accept all things from the hands of the Father. As St. Therese once said, “Now, little children do not know what is best. Everything is right in their eyes.”

We all are tempted to rebel at the suffering God allows in our lives. In and of itself, suffering is an evil. Ultimately it is the result of the disobedience of Satan, and Adam and Eve. But through the incarnation and the paschal mystery of Christ (His suffering, death and resurrection), God has redeemed suffering. He does not take it away or remove the pain of it. But He has made it redemptive through the cross of Christ. By faith, we can unite our cross with His, and, through the cross, we have a new likeness to Christ who suffered for us. He draws close to us in the midst of our sufferings.

Read the rest and do take some time to check out some of his other writings. He’s got such wonderful insights!

Thanks for the mention, Fr. Mark! And thanks for a wonderful interview…we should do it again sometime 😉

How to Give the Perfect Man Hug

ChelseaHumor, Men, video1 Comment

Ha! After this week’s post on manliness, I just couldn’t resist sharing this one. I found it via Joe Carter’s First Things post 50 Things a Man Should Be Able To Do Enjoy:

How to give the perfect man hug from Charles Clayton on Vimeo.

Narrator: “The modern world is a complex place for many men.” So true. There is no doubt, our society is very sexually confused.

Related: What it Really Means to Be a Man

New Cloning Movie: Never Let Me Go

ChelseaCloning, video1 Comment

Never Let Me Go starring Keira Knightley is supposed to be released this October:

Near as I can tell, it’s about a group of friends from an English “boarding school” who find out that they are actually clones who were born and raised for providing organ transplants. Kind of similar to The Island, maybe? Though, judging by the trailer, significantly toned down, action-wise. Of course the premise sounds outrageous, but, with scientists already cloning human embryos and a society relatively comfortable with the idea of creating and harvesting some human beings for scientific research, this is exactly where we are headed out here in the real world.

Thanks to Rebecca Taylor for providing this passage from the book that the movie is based on about how society can accept the creation and harvesting of clones:

After the great war, in the early fifties, when the great breakthroughs in science followed one after the other so rapidly, there wasn’t time to take stock, to ask sensible questions. Suddenly there were all these new possibilities laid before us, all these ways to cure so many previously incurable conditions. This is what the world noticed the most, wanted the most. And for a long time, people preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere, or at most that they grew in a kind of vacuum.

But by the time people came to consider…whether you should have been brought into existence at all, well by then it was too late. There was no way to reverse the process. How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days?

There was no going back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease. So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren’t really like us. That you weren’t really human, so it didn’t matter. [Taylor’s emphasis]

What is Manliness?

ChelseaMen1 Comment

AOMI been meaning to post this for several weeks now! Art of Manliness recently had a great article titled What is Manliness? In it, the authors examines the different cultural and philosophical definitions of manliness, concluding that, for by any man, in any situation, manliness essentially boils down to:

striving for excellence and virtue in all areas of your life, fulfilling your potential as a man, and being the absolute best brother, friend, husband, father and citizen you can be.

A mission fulfilled by the cultivation of virtues such as:

* Courage
* Loyalty
* Industry
* Resiliency
* Resolution
* Personal Responsibility
* Self-Reliance
* Integrity
* Sacrifice

Of course the same can certainly be said of women as well, but, as the authors point out:

women and men strive for the same virtues, but often attain them and express them in different ways. The virtues will be lived and manifested differently in the lives of sisters, mothers, and wives than in brothers, husbands, and fathers. Two different musical instruments, playing the exact same notes, will produce two different sounds. The difference in the sounds is one of those ineffable things that’s hard to describe with words, but easy to discern. Neither instrument is better than the other; in the hands of the diligent and dedicated, each instrument plays music which fills the spirit and adds beauty to the world.

Beautifully stated. Men and women are certainly both equal our dignity as persons and deserve equal respect in that way. But we are profoundly different in how we are created biologically, emotionally, spiritually and we are meant to compliment each other with those sexual differences.

One example that the author gives as an essential difference between the sexes is that, generally speaking, males have a harder time moving from boyhood into manhood than girls do moving to womanhood. These days, I think a lot of this has to do with the culture we live in and the prolonged adolescence in both sexes, really. Nevertheless, it is true that, while femininity and “womanliness” tend to be more intuitive, men typically learn manliness from other men, especially from their fathers who are their very first masculine influences. This is why it is so important for young boys, if they have an absent father, to have (an)other good, positive masculine influence(s) in their lives.

For those trying to raise good, manly men of God, over at Catholic Exchange’s TOB Channel, Kevin Whelan has been chronicling his progress with what he calls the “Manhood Project“, an on-going discussion he use as a way to help his sons grow into Godly, Loving Men: See Parts one, two, three, four, five, six and seven. Good stuff!

Other good manly articles at AOM:
So You Want to Become a Man
Coming of Age: The Importance of Male Rites of Passage
Get the AOM Book

TOB Tuesday: The Golden Sea

ChelseaFaith, Love, Marriage, Theology of the Body, TOB Tuesday1 Comment

Drawing inspiration from the song 31 Flavors by Trevor Hall and his upcoming wedding anniversary, Theology of the Body speaker/teacher Bill Donaghy has a delicious reflection the true meaning and purpose of earthly marriage:

“Tell me how many songs that I must sing before I can see you in your glory, hear your whole entire story, bathe inside your golden, golden sea?” – Trevor Hall
…
How many people do we really know, deep down, to the core, and to the point of practically being able to finish their thoughts for them, predict their actions, read their hearts, swim in their golden, golden sea of experiences? Is it one? Two?

The only soul I can honestly say I know on that intimate, almost spousal level, is… well, my spouse.

As we approach our 7th wedding anniversary (just three weeks away), I’ve been thinking of her more and more. I mean really thinking of her. This whole marriage thing is pretty earth-shattering you know. What a blindingly brilliant thing it is to be able to say to another human being, “Come in….. look around. The place is yours.” What a crazy thing it is to say to another person, (you with all of your sins and weaknesses, they with theirs) “Let’s become One. I give you sovereignty here. I turn over the key. What’s mine is yours and what’s yours, I ask of you, let it be mine.”

I am convinced that God gave us marriage as an aid or a preparation for Something More, Something Big. Namely, HIS entrance into the human heart, and our hearts entrance into the Communion of Saints in Heaven some day. Marriage is a “school of love” and a fertile field where the fruits reach high, “so high that I can almost see eternity” (that’s Anne Murray by the way, not Trevor Hall). But to plant Heaven’s seed you need to dig up that soil, scour those fields, remove the rocks and old roots of selfishness and greed and ego. Marriage is farming the fields.

Please, read the whole thing, it’s just-so-yummy!!

Speaking of Bill: check out his wife’s cd: Songs from a Mommy’s Heart

TOB Tuesdays

Dr. Lou Just Doesn’t Understand

ChelseaAbortion1 Comment

Dr. LouCoach Lou Holtz recently spoke at a pro-life fund raiser in St. Louis. A friend just forwarded me Vitae’s most recent email update which included this quote of his from that evening:

“There are a lot of things in this world that I don’t understand. I don’t understand how a black cow eats green grass and produces white milk and yellow cheese. I don’t understand why they sell hot dogs in packages of eight and hot dog buns in packages of ten. I don’t understand how you can terminate a baby late in its pregnancy, yet if you kill the egg of an eagle you go to jail. I don’t understand why you can’t give a girl in school an aspirin without the parents’ consent, but you can take them to an abortion clinic without their permission.”

“Dr. Lou” has such a way with words, doesn’t he?

Jerry Seinfeld on Family, Parenting

ChelseaFamily1 Comment

It always takes me a while to get back into the swing of things after being gone for a while. So, I thought I’d ease back into normal blog-mode by starting with a few quick comments on this great Parade Magazine interview with comedian SeinfeldJerry Seinfeld. It’s from back in February, but for some reason I just found it recently in my car.

On family, Seinfeld, now a married father of three, told Parade:

“If I was younger, I’d have six kids by now…I love it. I love having a family and kids and all the madness. There is no aspect of it I don’t like. Even when it’s horrible, I love it. I didn’t realize how tired of single life I was and how ready I was for married life.”

Interesting, considering the comedian is best known for his role as a perpetual bachelor who spends his days hanging out with his other perpetually single and child-free friends.

Of course, the message of our modern culture is that kids are a drain on individual freedom and prosperity and even on relationships and should be avoided at all cost…or at least put off for as long as possible. And then, the fewer the better. A related post worth revisiting: How Can There Be Too Many Children?

Seinfeld also had interesting thoughts on why some parents go overboard giving their children everything and letting them do whatever they want. He says that kids today aren’t as innocent as they used to be and:

“We feel so guilty for destroying that innocence—which is what we did—so we’re now trying to repair that by creating perfect childhoods for our children…The reason we overdo it so much is because we feel so bad about it.”

Talk about lost innocence and overdoing it. I couldn’t believe it when on my recent trip I learned that my 11-year-old step cousin, the night before we all went to Islands of Adventure, was up until 2:30 a.m. texting…a boy! Setting aside for a second the fact that this child is talking to boys at 2 in the morning (with no punishment that I’m aware of), what is an 11 year old doing with a cell phone in the first place?!

Kids have it bad enough already with peer pressure and, as they get older, their own raging hormones. The last thing they need is to constantly be betrayed by the adults who should be protecting them.

Speaking of family and parenting, Jen has a good thread going on her blog on how parents can help children stay strong in their faith

Home Stretch!

ChelseaPro Life2 Comments

After taking it easy for a few days here at the Walking Z Ranch (my aunt and uncle’s house) in Georgia, I’m finally on my way back up to Missouri! I’m not promising anything this weekend, but by next week hopefully I’ll back up and running here with fresh blog content.

Speaking of Missouri. Our Democratic Governor recently allowed a major pro-life bill to become law here!

iPhone Ad: Big News

Chelseavideo1 Comment

My dad just passed along to me another cute iPhone ad:

See also: iPhone 4 Ad With Ultrasound

TOB Tuesday: The Mystery of Sex and Love

ChelseaSex, Sexuality, Theology of the Body, TOB TuesdayLeave a Comment

Brendan Roberts has a great Theology of the Body primer up at Catholic Exchange:

Sexual messages are thrust upon us almost everywhere we turn. The sexual content of most television programs are helping to form the morals of the young generation especially. Therefore there are constant themes of making marital infidelity, sex divorced from covenantal relationships, contraception, active homosexuality, lying, theft, and revenge as either morally neutral or morally good. However we know through Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church that they are contrary to the will of God.

But the mystery of sex is much broader than sexual activity. The Christian mystery is how we strive to live our lives according to our understanding and experiences of God. Because it is a mystery we can never come to the fullest understanding of it on earth. Therefore we can never solve it, but can always dive deeper into the wonderful mystery.

read more

It’s funny that Roberts talks about the immoral sexual behavior that our current culture thrusts in our faces because just yesterday I read a post at the liberal Feministing blog lamenting the abstinence message of popular teenage movies like Twilight and High School Musical and from young singers like Taylor Swift and the Jonas Brothers. The author even went so far as to say that the abstinence-only side is winning the “culture war!” I think that’s a bit of a stretch, though I would certainly be happy if that was the case!!

See more: TOB Tuesdays