My Famous Kitchen Sink Edition

Volume XXVI, Number 5
March 17, 2022

CatholiCity Friends,

Happy Saint Patrick's Day! It's high time somebody (that would be me) gives you a break from the worries of the world.

Kitchen Sink Edition?

Which means it's the right moment for my "kitchen sink" edition! For new readers, that's when I write about the weeds which have piled up in the backyard of my tangly mind and haven't made it into this Message yet.

You'll Like at Least 7 of 21

I throw in everything, including the kitchen sink. As always, my goal is to change your life. Just hit reply to let me know your reaction.

One last thing before we begin. I'm not sure why thousands of you didn't order our new Daily Prayers to Save America (although many of you did). Maybe you just missed the new release? It takes just 12 minutes a day, and it's only $1 if you order online, and free by mail.

Stock Up for Lent

Rat, tat, tat, here they come!

1. Two-Way Debt?

All of us possess the true faith because eighty generations of Christians kept the true faith to pass it on to us. This is an actual, unbroken, two-thousand-year-old human chain of baptized individuals stretching back to the twelve apostles rushing out of the upper room just minutes after Pentecost to convert thousands in Jerusalem.

Each person in your chain (most of them blood relatives) has a birthday, a name, a story, and a particular day on which they died. We owe them. We pay off that debt with our own fidelity so future generations may look back upon us with gratitude for the priceless inheritance. In short, don't dare break the chain. God Himself and people born and unborn are depending on you.

2. Pray in a Certain Direction

Try this (despite me making it up yesterday). The closest Catholic Church to your home is in a certain direction on the compass that takes just a few seconds to figure out. Jesus is there in the tabernacle. Place a crucifix or image of Christ on a wall in your home so when you face it, you are facing in the actual direction of the Real Presence. Pray directly toward Jesus when you see it. You can also genuflect if the Spirit moves you. This little piety will also warm Our Lady's heart.

This got me to thinking. The Eucharist is technically in every direction. You are always situated on one point on the Earth with hundreds of thousands of tabernacles located 360 degrees in every outward-facing direction.

3. Fast Food Version

Not many of you know that I was a UPS man 37 years ago. Big brown delivery truck and everything. (And yes, I was exceedingly handsome in that uniform, as I am today without the uniform, and l called everybody Chief. Yet I digress.) I often parked at the nearest Catholic Church, with the truck facing Jesus to "have lunch" with Our Lord. Next time you get coffee or fast food, ain't nothin' stopping you from doing the same.

4. Almost Gone

Our custom-made Holy Sepulchre Rosaries are almost gone...

Editor's Note: Sorry, the Holy Sepulchre Rosary is no longer available. Our unique Jerusalem Soil Holy Land Rosary is available here.

5. The Nada Doctrine

In his spiritual teachings, Saint John of the Cross begins with what is called the Nada Doctrine (nada is Spanish for nothing). In short, we must commit completely to letting nothing stand between ourselves and doing God's will.

So take a moment and ask yourself, "What stands between me and doing God's will?" The first few things that come into your mind are probably a good place to start, but ask God to show you more over the next few weeks of Lent.

My own extreme late-night reading habit jumped immediately to mind, but upon reflection, it's really about purposely not getting enough sleep, which makes it more difficult to pray and keep my cool at work.

6. Poetic Genius? You Decide.

I composed this original work 38 years ago and it's a slowly unfolding gag, so give yourself some time to get "sucked" into it. (I'm still waiting for the call from the Pulitzer committee or the Nobel Peace folks or whatever.)

7. Jesus Perspires

Jesus has a body. Right now. If you were in heaven, and were standing directly in front of him, you could see the individual hairs on his eyebrows, hear the particular timbre of his voice, and feel the movement of the muscles beneath the skin of his forearms if you were to clasp your hands around them. He perspires, because Jesus is true man.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, even though I have contemplated his physicality for many years—sometimes I try to imagine Him standing in front of me when I pray, but I usually have trouble visualizing it. Years ago I wrote an essay about these ideas called "Understanding the And: Jesus, Babies, and Laptops," which you might enjoy.

8. Sound Wisdom, Literally

Over the past several years, while conversing with others, I have observed that paying attention to tone of voice is more important than the words people speak (as vital as their words are). Spend the next day or two focusing on tone of voice: in your personal life and what you take in through the media (there is also "tone" in the written word). Let me know what happens.

9. Streaming Straight to Hell

I have just completed a decades-long experiment on myself. My conclusion is inescapable. Streaming television and movies is an important part of a diabolical conspiracy to steal holiness and heaven without us being aware this is happening. What are the conclusions of your own experiment?

10. Start Tonight!

Discouraged by your slow, years-long progress in your spiritual life? Our brand-new podcast with Father John Anthony Boughton, my son Xavier, and his friend Anthony is truly life-changing. Father is the Vicar General of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and founder of our Operation True Cross prayer movement. In this podcast he explains a daily (and supernatural) technique to forgive others that you can start using tonight. Astoundingly, it can lead to miracles for the people who have harmed you. The true stories Father shares are riveting, including one about a murderer that brought tears to my eyes.

Father's Forgiveness Strategy

11. What Are Satan's Gateways?

In the second half of the podcast, they also discuss in detail the chilling and deceptive "gateways" the evil one uses to enter into and ruin a person's life. Their discussion of the occult roots of yoga alone is nuanced and filled with helpful distinctions and alternatives. Father John Anthony is a master spiritual director. Like Saint John Vianney, he spent many years hearing Confessions day after day, all day long, in Nicaragua. Listen and then share this treasure with others.

Learn about Satan's Gateways

12. The Perfect Question

Ask everyone in your life, including strangers you run into during the course of your day, "Which family member or friend needs the most prayers right now?" Everyone has an answer. Then, offer to fast, pray a Rosary, or offer Holy Communion or your daily reparations for that person.

13. By Any Other Name

Did not the Father, before He brought the universe into existence, design the rose for Our Lady?

14. A Line from a Movie

In the 1997 movie, The Edge, two starving characters are stranded in the wilderness, and against all odds, have to kill a massive, vicious bear. The character played by Anthony Hopkins, to encourage his friend, makes him repeat a phrase. "What one man can do, another can do!" You can find the scene on YouTube. (Warning: there is foul language.) This phrase is the reason why the Church canonizes saints. What they can do, you can do.

15. Stopping Mid-Letter

Among other things, this Lent I'm trying to give up interrupting during conversations. My son gave me a tip: mentally count to seven after the other person stops speaking. I've even been using my fingers to count off the seconds, which cracks up the guys in the office (but it works).

As I fail at this all day long, I am encouraged by a habit of Saint Francis de Sales (who wrote the best book on how to become a saint, Introduction to the Devout Life). When someone came to speak with Francis while he was writing, he was able to stop composing not just in the middle of a word, but mid-letter. Thus, he interrupted his own desire to keep writing to respectfully listen to another person.

By extension, I'm coming to realize that not interrupting is really me interrupting myself from talking over people. Also, in these first weeks since Ash Wednesday, I find that when I begin to interrupt, I can stop myself mid-word, even a few words into interrupting.

What one man can do, another can do.

16. Keep Civilization Going

If you know a friend or a married couple on a fixed budget or struggling financially, invite them out to dinner and pick up the tab. Enjoy an edifying conversation.

17. The Truth About Fasting

You can do it. What one man can do, another can do.

18. Another Truth About Fasting

As G.K. Chesterton observed, anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Imperfect fasting is still fasting.

19. The King of Silence

Am I right about this? The best moments in any possible human day take place in the pew, after receiving Holy Communion, when Jesus is inside you, and there is nothing between you and Him, and you can just tell Him the truth, and ask Him for anything, and listen for His silent voice. How many times have I wasted those Golden Minutes!

20. Spiritual Answering Machines?

I concluded years ago that our souls are like answering machines (that's voicemail for you kids). When we pray, especially during Adoration or after receiving Communion, Jesus records messages we cannot hear in the moment. His guidance "comes out" later in the day, or in the days that follow, through providential events, conversations, things I read or hear in the media, from you, and especially through my interactions with others.

Look. Listen. Ask. Receive.

21. The Kitchen Sink

Somebody once told me that we could pray a Hail Mary or Our Father when we wash our hands. I wash mine mostly in the kitchen sink.

So there it is!

Twenty-one is enough for now.

A Note from Our Sponsor

Today's message is sponsored by the theological virtue of hope, which is a fruit of faith, which is impossible without grace.

It's all about hope. If you don't have much, then drink in some of mine. Try to drink all of it. The more you take from me, the more I have, because it comes from a well that never runs dry.

Now let's all get back to the war for the salvation of souls and the fate of nations between powers and principalities.

The Other Saint Patrick Prayer

We are going to fight, and we are going to win! Now let us pray part of an amazing, little-known prayer of Saint Patrick, tens of thousands of us together, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit...

I rise today, and I bind me
To the Name of the Trinity,
Invoking faith in the Threeness,
Confessing might in the Oneness,
The Three in One, the One in Three!

I bind myself to He, to Them,
Who had His birth in Bethlehem;
He was baptized in Jordan’s stream,
And bled and died on a crossbeam,
That man’s sin could not man condemn.

By His ascension from the tomb,
By the returning Judge of Doom,
By the love of the Cherubim,
By the devoted Seraphim,
I bind myself to the Bridegroom.

For only You, O Christ, can save;
O, spare me from the drowning wave,
Protect me, Christ, from poisoned shaft,
From wound, and burn, and witches’ craft;
Be with me that I might be brave.

Christ in my body and my mind,
Christ high and low, before, behind,
Christ on my left, Christ on my right,
Christ in the day, Christ in the night,
Christ in the hearts of all mankind.
Amen.

Now that's poetry.

Thanks for reading and for being a part of it all. And for being my friend.

With Guardian Angel USA,

Bud Macfarlane
Founder

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