Kitchen Sink! + How Souls Go to Hell

Volume XXIX, Number 3
February 11, 2025

Friends, Catholics, Countrymen, Troublemakers,

Welcome to my first bent, scaffolded, baffling, scintillating, fluffy, spun, welded, rhymed, scratched, and otherwise adjective-laden Everything But the Kitchen Sink edition of the year!

For new readers, Kitchen Sink messages are when I publicly purge a bunch of stuff that's been piling up in my Cathoholic hind-mind. There are "only" fourteen today, with the 13th being the traditional "short short story" before the brief finale.

Of course we'll end with a prayer, but why not skim the headlines, and like a bumblebee, alight with delight upon whatever promises pollen?

Without any further leafy greens (whatever that means)...

Everything, Including the Kitchen Sink

1. A So-So Finance Plan

So... we need a few bucks to help Our Lady make America the most Catholic nation on earth. Our four-year plan requires a fifty million dollar investment, including a few million to set everything up in 2025 and 2026. Which, of course, we do not have.

So... asking Our Lady beforehand to guide you, consider buying a lottery ticket. Promise her you'll give most of it to our Treasure in Heaven project (along with helping your family and other good Catholic causes you love, of course). If twenty thousand of us buy a ticket and just one pops, it would speed up the timeline dramatically, saving more souls.

This was not my idea—kudos to your fellow benefactor who emailed me about how she enjoys getting lottery tickets for us.

2. Monster Summer Movie

Produced and directed by my very devout Catholic friends, the Henri family, the movie Monster Summer, starring Mel Gibson, was released in theaters last October and can now be rented on Amazon Prime. It got good reviews as a not-too-scary young adult mystery thriller. It has an amazing twist. Set in the 1990s, and better and less cosmologically problematic than the Stranger Things television show, preview it before you let your older kids see it.

3. Stuck + Friend + Resolution = ???

As shared in my last message, to be a saint, we must begin each day by praying the Francis de Sales' way. However, for many reasons, it is very difficult for most people to establish the "every morning" meditative prayer habit. Happily, Our Lord gave me—and thus you—an easy hack:

Invite a friend to join you (no matter where they live). After you finish meditating, text a brief summary of the topic and resolution to each other.

Months ago a close friend and I started swapping texts. It especially helps us pray on those inevitable days we are tempted to skip. Even better, the very act of writing the texts reinforces our resolutions while making it much easier to return to "spiritual retreats" during the rest of the day (as De Sales advises). This will not only help you actually meditate every morning, it will help you do it well.

Jesus fell three times while carrying the cross and needed help. Some days your friend will be your Simon the Cyrene or Veronica. Some days you will be the Veronica or Simon for your friend.

4. The End is Near

Jose Pulido's amazing new book, How to Evangelize Anyone, comes out next week—with plenty of time for you to get 'em before Ash Wednesday!

5. Neighborhood Rosary Group?

Last summer when I spent weeks outside painting my house and rejuvenating a lawn that had been neglected for decades, many neighbors stopped to introduce themselves or chat during their daily walks. I got to know a bunch of dogs (animals love me), and received frequent compliments on the dramatic transformation of my little bungalow.

A prompt kept coming to me to start a monthly Rosary just for my neighborhood. Most of the folks aren't Catholic or have long-since left the practice of any faith, but they're an amiable bunch, and some are probably curious about our unique Catholic ways.

I am a very private person, so it would take a lot out of me, even though just a few personal invites and flyers could get the ball rolling. Should I? Should you?

6. The Secret to My Success: Xeroxing

My father is an IQ genius super-talent, which gave me undeniable proof that I was not one, although he went out of his way to teach me his creative principles and methods. A key workaround for my average mind was planted at age fourteen when I came across a Psychology Today magazine profile of Thomas Edison and other geniuses at the school library (while searching for cool-looking automobile ads to tear out and sell to my best friend's car-nut older brother).

A light bulb (pun intended) went off that even a mope like me could copy the habits of geniuses. Like most of us, I will never have the intellectual horsepower that even a typical engineer has—but we can all copy the one universal trait that virtually every extraordinarily successful genius and history-changing hero shared: perseverance.

In New Jersey patois, "If you want to stop me, you'll have to kill me." And remember, as a Catholic, even if they do kill you, you can keep going for eternity, but now with divine firepower beyond any IQ or natural talent.

7. Sounds Like an Action Movie

The ultimate genius to imitate is Jesus of Nazareth, of course. He is The Multiplier. Obviously, loaves and fishes. For me, his most profound multiplication was the priesthood. He can physically be anywhere in the Eucharist they consecrate. He can absolve sins anywhere through his priests.

Our Lady bringing you to the Mary Foundation follows this principle. I can personally only give out a limited number books, medals, scapulars, and booklets—and only in limited places. With you and through you, Our Lady has influenced tens of millions all over the earth. We are multipliers.

8. The Bell Tolls and Teaches

Over twenty years ago, after miraculously being saved from certain death when the Hand of God pulled me out of a freezing cistern, I began ending my phone calls with my close friends and relatives—in a genuine and manly manner—with, "I love you, brother."

At first, I was not comfortable, although I may have sounded casual. It is usually well-received, and sometimes reciprocated. We do not know the appointed time of our deaths, so you will never regret telling the truth for what may be the last time you ever speak to a loved one.

9. Consider the Odds

Hard work never killed anyone, but why take a chance?

10. Applies to the Ladies, Too

What is a real man? The one who does God's will.

11. Double Up for the Priest

Because I went under the knife last week, I went to Confession the morning before—why take a chance?

Every day I pray for "all the priests who have heard my Confessions—past, present, and future—including those in purgatory, the one who needs it the most today, the last priest to hear my Confession, and the next priest to hear my Confession." (Feel free to xerox this prayer.)

On advice I picked up from Taylor Marshall years ago, I "doubled" my penance, offering the second set for the priest who had just absolved me.

12. Speaking of Geniuses

"Not long after reading the man's writing, no Catholic thinker or writer has been less surprised than when he is surprised by the surprises of G.K. Chesterton. There is both the sense of wishing you had thought of that first, and the certainty that you never would have in the first place."
- Bud Macfarlane (me)

"To be in the camp of the weak is to be in the strongest school."
- G.K. Chesterton

13. I Saw the Holy Spirit

Forty years ago, alone on a two-week business trip, first time in California—one year out of college plus four months in a seminary—on my weekend off in Los Angeles, I drove my rental car to Hollywood Boulevard because I love the Kinks and their Celluloid Heroes song.

It was dingy, a let down. A few minutes later, I hopped back in and headed north because I was curious to see what was over the nearby hill. By the following morning, I was in Santa Clara, an hour south of San Francisco. Stopping for gas, I called my dad on a pay phone—remember those?—and my life changed forever. Eventually, so did yours.

First, Dad told me that a priest from my seminary had contacted him to ask if I would bail out their spartan high school boarding school in northern New Hampshire, which had started the school year short one history teacher. I called the priest and took the job, recklessly, boyishly. Then I called my terrifying, big-hearted boss to resign from my exciting, high-paying, way-over-my-head national marketing gig (he was graciously supportive).

When my dad found out the unlikely place I was calling from, he urged me to stop by a nearby parish, which happened to be less than two miles away! My father had been a speaker there. He asked me to say hello to its pastor, Father John Sweeny, and to visit the giant statue of Immaculate Mary which had recently been erected on parish grounds.

I first spotted the enchanting, silvery statue of Mary from the highway. In the parking lot, before I entered the relatively unadorned church I was blanketed by the haunting sound of acapella chanting in Vietnamese.

Our Lady of Peace, founded by transplanted Texans—including a direct descendant of Sam Houston—was an oasis for the famous "boat people" who had fled war-torn Vietnam. And there inexplicably was I, a twenty-one-year-old from New Jersey. Only in America, right?

When I entered a side door of the church, I beheld these believers adoring the Holy Eucharist, exposed in a monstrance, in the main body of the church. Father Sweeny had established 24-hour perpetual adoration in 1976.

At the rectory, Father Sweeny warmly welcomed this stranger into his office. He sat behind a big wooden desk and told me about the history of the parish. I was rapt, and asked many questions, which he answered as if I were the only person in the world—as if he had all the time in the world.

I learned from his example. Never be in a hurry when you're with people.

He was a year younger than I am now. What made the biggest impression on me, and I can still see it in my mind's eye as I type, was the light of the Holy Spirit streaming out of his gaze. I was fully aware that I was in the presence of a saint. I had no doubt that this man would be canonized someday.

Then, almost casually, he told to me how people go to hell. Over the decades, having been called by relatives to the deathbeds of countless souls, he was still disturbed by how many of the dying refused to see him, or upon seeing him, refused the final sacraments—he described one recent harrowing story about a man who screamed and threw fits to prevent him from even entering the room on multiple visits.

Father told me that people end up in hell after countless small choices over many, many years. This was how Satan gradually ensnares a soul—through thousands of small sins flowing into serious sins until the person's conscience was deadened. They live life without repentance, and so they die unwilling to offer it.

Sweeny observed that people become very comfortable through this almost imperceptible ratcheting-effect Satan uses to lure them into stubborn indifference.

I learned from that. People are not aware, after years of degrading their consciences, that they are on the path to eternal damnation—even all the way to their deathbeds. We must take this into account when reaching out to them.

I cannot quote him perfectly, but he told me, sorrow in his voice, "People die the way they live. If they do not pray, receive the sacraments, and ask for God's mercy during their lives, they will be unlikely to do so at the hour of their death. If they love God in life, they will have the love of God at the end, and experience a peaceful death." He was deeply troubled by the prospect of anyone going to hell. I learned from his example. Saints care deeply about the eternal destination of everyone.

Back then, Santa Clara was a quiet, almost rural town, a handful of miles east of sleepy Cupertino, already home to a fast-growing little company called Apple.

Thirty-eight years later, during the Operation True Cross pilgrimage, I returned to Our Lady of Peace for the first time since my life-changing hour with Father Sweeny.

It was now a national shrine. I prostrated myself before the same Eucharistic King to begin the first day of the gnarly four-and-a-half month "third beam" with my fellow Cyrene, Peter, and a dozen fellow pilgrims, led by another holy old priest named Father Mickey—twenty-four hundred miles from our destination in Indiana.

The shine's modest grounds are today burrowed in the bosom of globally powerful Silicon Valley, surrounded by skyscrapers filled with tech companies and banks and a pro football stadium. These structures block the sight of Our Lady's statue from the highway, yet our queen remains bright shining as the sun.

My strange joyride from the diabolical global power center of Hollywood in 1985 was part of a very particular plan, the details of which would become clear only decades later.

Less than two weeks after I met Father Sweeny, I was living in New Hampshire, on the other side of the nation. I was the only lay teacher at the impoverished boarding school, living in a tiny room, and paid such a pittance that I literally took on debt to keep working there.

During the next two years, I was lonely, side-tracked, overweight, and frustrated while teaching aspiring seminarians from all over the world, despite the beauty of the place and the hard blessings.

But Our Lady had guided me there to teach me about carrying the cross, to prepare me for an impossible walk decades later—and then sent so many people like you to walk with me. So we could slay dragons.

Learn from this story. God plays the long game. His plan for you is finely detailed.

"When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise, than when we first begun."
- Amazing Grace

Always remember, friends, countrymen, and troublemakers, that generations before our dark times, marked and often accelerated by dizzying Silicon Valley technology offering tens of thousands of constant little corrupting choices, that Immaculate Mary, Sovereign Queen of the United States, had already called a few Texans and Father Sweeny to get her Eucharistic Son there first.

14. My Kitchen Sink (There it Is!)

Since November, a dozen times a day, I trek to the lovely, large kitchen sink in my "new" 1951-built home. It's even got a sturdy faucet with one of those ingenious yank-out spray-thingies. After decades of tiny mold-basins distinguished by the cheapest leaky faucets landlords are seemingly required by the universe to provide, I almost regret having a nice sink because I never noticed how many times one uses it every day until I started enjoying this one.

Thus, our final Saint Francis de Sales "good thought" today is that spontaneous prayers can be akin to kitchen sinks: often-used, cleansing, and appreciated.

Pray with Tens of Thousands

Let us begin this superlative prayer composed by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit...

Remember O most gracious virgin, Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, we fly unto thee, O virgin of virgins, our mother. To thee do we come, before thee we stand, sinful and sorrowful. O mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not our petitions, (name your intention) but in thy mercy, hear and answer them. Amen.

My messages are snow, meant for skiing. Hey ski bums, did you make it to the end?

Fear nothing.

Aim for the soft white underbelly.

Victory is ours.

With the Queen of Peace,

Bud Macfarlane
The InSinkErator

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