Journey Home - 2017-10-02 - Leila Marie Lawler

[Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program 20 years of journey home programs have reminded me of something unique about the way the Holy Spirit works in our life because we are each unique people with unique journeys unique needs and maybe the program's over all these years have shown us that the Holy Spirit does work with each of us in unique ways and I particularly have been drawn to from these programs to know the importance of humility and being able to respond how the Holy Spirit works in our lives that draws closer to our Lord and to his church and so every week I pray that these programs are an encouragement to you our guest tonight is Leila Marie Lawler a former front urge for a want of a better title Lila welcome to the program I mean it's good to have you here I guess I should say finally have you here because when you and I met a number of years ago I had at the time I just finished reading your book the little oratory which I strongly recommend beginners guide to prayers in the home and I know you've had a chance to discuss this on Doug Kix bookmark and Jim and joy and so some of the EWTN audience might already be familiar with your work but welcome to the dream paint cans good to have you here let me shut up and get out of the way and invite you to take his way back and let's hear your journey well I think it when I explain to people how it is they became a Christian I was like to remind them that maybe they remember growing up in the household where Jesus Christ was mentioned or where there was some worship or whether they celebrated Christmas or some part of the faith was handed on to them they were baptized but none of that was true for me I grew up in a very highly secularized progressive place my father was and he was Egyptian he was a Muslim and at that time the Muslims who were here were highly trained professionals so he was a professor of engineering he had had a very westernized education so he considered himself to be a secular humanist he considered himself to be a refined educated a bright person who knew a lot about science and was not interested in religion about that religion was superstitious but his background was Muslim for him was becoming West or not Western his eyes a purging of that religious path today we don't realize that the Muslim world has become extremely fundamental eyes and that back in the 50s I was born in 1960 back in the 50s when he was in school it was especially in Egypt in where he went to school in Alexandria and Cairo was very cosmopolitan the upper classes had went to very Western schools either he went to an English school a French school a German school you spoke those languages from the beginning there was a very secular idea of progressiveness of getting the good things in this life at that time no woman even wore a headscarf it was just a very different we've almost lost touch with the historical fact which is that unlike what we're used to which is that the idea that things start out fundamentalist and become somewhat more moderate that is not the case that we're looking at now with the Middle Eastern world so anyway that's just the background that we're talking about it very Hyo it wasn't even there so it was a very cosmopolitan person he studied in in Hungary and then he studied in actually studied here in Ohio he went to Ohio State and he went to Cornell so he was very much a very well educated sophisticated person of very mild and scientific ideas but his temperament was strong and and he met my mother and my mother I like to say was a following fallen away Methodist she's now a really good devout Catholic at the time she was someone who had fallen away from her Methodist upbringing and she had gone to the city and during the late 50s she had become a person very much involved in the warrant psychological views of life that you know it's all about being happy and finding happiness and in a sort of psychological kind of a way so anyway they met they had me and they were married and they had me and they divorced when I was very young so it's hard for me to explain to people because now you look at me I kind of have a lot of white hair but the world that I lived in was so progressive since my father was a university professor I lived in New Haven Connecticut the schools that I went to the public you girls separated they were divorced and I was with your father I was with my mother okay although my father was a very big presence in my life until later when I was an older teenager but the divorce was extremely decisive to my well-being and I was very unhappy because my life fell apart with my parents divorce at the same time the world that I was living in in the early 60s in New Haven was a very progressive world it was a world where all the theories which we think of I see people talking about these things as over these things kind of happened in the 90s know in the 60s people were trying to go into the schools they were trying to remove all traces of religion prayer all those things may be out in the heartland those things still obtained but in a place like New Haven Connecticut the progressives were raining so there was no there were vestiges and I'll talk about that but things were in turmoil as well because politically I think you're probably the same ages of him then you remember that there were the Bobby Seale you know the riots the trial there were the all those racial riots that were happening in the 60s the Vietnam War so I was kind of in a kind of a pressure cooker of a lot of philosophical change a lot of cultural change and a lot of real turmoil riots happening two streets away from me I'm just a little girl and to me those external things mirrored is something that was going on in my psyche and in my soul your family the old the old image of a piece of cloth begins fraying at the edges well as I say that that was our country at the time well many people I might say 80s and 90s would it was fraying at the edges on the east and the west coast's than the 60s is your time where you were living out there in Connecticut so all that's happening in the culture at the same time your fame your family yourself our frame being knows no I mean no family extended family to step in and give any guidance you know my father's has left his family behind there in Egypt so he's completely an independent actor and my mother consciously leaving behind her family to live this you know much more sort of open to these new ideas and so for me my life line as a little child was just gonna sound funny but it was really the fairy tales my father was very because he loved books and he was considered himself an intellectual he was very careful to give me beautiful books so I had a lot of fairy tales a lot of beautiful stories that have now disappeared but were then very carefully I think handed on to children so I had that and at the same time my mother had purchased an entire set of the Chronicles of Narnia which had just come out so I had the Chronicles of Narnia and she started reading them to me actually I can still remember as a little girl sobbing and sobbing when Ashlyn died and I wouldn't let her finish and she tried to tell me that it would be all right and I could not let her finish it was too much for me well you have to understand I feel like most people many people who would be watching this might say but you knew what happened at the end of that story because you knew the story of Jesus Christ but I didn't I had never been told the gospel I had never known that story I had never read it I've never been to church so I didn't know it so that was very devastating to me I don't think when I read the books I knew that Lois was Christian and I knew that that was the background I wonder what it would been like to read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and have no clue I didn't understand the resurrection I didn't know inkling of it and I knew eventually I did force myself when I learned to read I forced myself to read them and it was kind of a harbinger of this this thread that's in me which is to make myself pursue whatever it is however uncomfortable I have to pursue it I did make myself read it and then I went on to read the other books I knew there was something transcendent here but this is to tell you how impoverished the spiritual part of my life was I was not sure I thought Aslan could be good or he could be the president so here I am this is the forming my imagination these stories are forming my imagination my parents love of beauty is forming my imagined but there's a huge kind of schizophrenic divide because at the same time there's a lot of bad influences coming into my life a lot of confusion and a lot of disorder and a lot of ugliness because it was a time when people were consciously moving away from other traditional idea of beauty and embracing real ugliness and there was a lot of emotional ugliness for me so that's kind of where I was and the confusion was really very almost I would say almost complete to the point that emotionally psychologically I was really in turmoil and that I considered to have a real philosophical underpinning really comes down to the idea of being because if you're taught as I was taught that your being is self generated that you are who you want to be and that you can be whatever you want to be that there's no givingness to who you are that's profoundly detaching from reality and that has a psychological it has psychological ramifications so it ironically it leaves you completely open to the elements literally so to the point that if you happen to be the kind of person who low pressure affects you you know the kind of thing where you is a little pressure front is moving in and you kind of get a headache that's the time' that's how I am sort of so you know on a day like that where it was raining and there would be low pressure I had no sense of self-worth because my sense of self-worth wasn't based on however I felt because what people don't understand when they make everything about feelings they don't understand that for a child your feelings come and go so some days if I woke up and happen to have enough sleep and the Sun was shining I felt okay if it happened not to be that way or something bad was happening or somebody said a bad word to me or somehow disturbed me I had nothing to fall back on so there was a lot of distress in my life but I always had the books that I have been given I always had that the other thing I like to say to remind people of is that one thing that progressives are people who like to want to undermine Christianity they didn't realize right off the bat that they needed to address the educational system and the content of the educational system they contented themselves with telling children a lot of things that weren't true but they've left a lot of the books and the process of education in place and I was the recipient of that so it did have a lot of things that today they have since learned and so now they've there's been a process and I would say that that did occurs in the 90s that page couraging the educational system so that there isn't even a book that you would have recourse to that would give the light shine the light so I did have that now one thing that I noticed as I got older I mean this time my mother and I had moved to Princeton New Jersey in your mother's influences I could does write that whenever you would think whether there might be a spiritual reality her influence would say that's psychological she did have a very psychological way of looking at things and the value that I was in basically ascribed to all of the desires that a person has a sexual meaning so the idea that you know which is meant to be free so that we can express ourselves the way we want to but primarily in a sexual way that that's where that you know greatest I mean it's understandable because the the sort of greatest we are such a creatures and the way made male and female our bodies have a nuptial meaning so there it is and of course our sexuality also mirrors some very important realities about God's love for his church his fecundity all those things that I later learned but this idea that is prevalent and was very prevalent than and they thing continues to be very prevalent that it's all about releasing yourself from all these ridges the rigidities and the the the oppression of the structures which just completely prevent you from expressing yourself from having free love and from expressing yourself in finding contentment that way now my mother also is a person who loves beauty and also does have a certain common sense so there were some things she always viscerally reacted to certain things in a way that that helped me but I would say that she too was a victim of you know the divorce culture that all these things so the two of us are making our way kind of continuing in this kind of agnostic way and I mean not caring about religion basically seeing it as a repressive superstitious all those things we moved to Princeton but I continued to have an education that was both in some ways grounded in the classics and the great works of literature and ideas of the past but also very progressive so very schizophrenic so and various things were happening in my life one of the things that was happening was that as one does when one reads has loved some books from long-standing one says well let's go to the library and find something written by that author that I would also maybe be interested in I just needed something to read so I went to the library I was maybe 15 at the time and went to CS Lewis found where there were his other works found mere christianity and began to read that now I think that probably you have a lot of guests say that they read mere christianity and that really helped them along their journey and one of the things in that book that helped them was louis basically putting very starkly you have to confront the reality of Jesus Christ that you know it's not just if he was an okay wonderful guy like the other okay wonderful guys with a lot to teach us either he's crazy or he's who he says he is well that is not the part that got me because I did not know anything about Jesus Christ I knew that right I knew he was born on Christmas Day I did not know about the cross the deaths the suffering I did not know about the resurrection I do not know about any of that for me what mere crush Christianity did for me was to express in simple terms what the natural law is and that there exists outside of myself something that is unchanging and against which unconsciously I'm always measuring my ideas of something being better or worse or not right all those things that he talks about furthermore there's another section than mere christianity where he very very subtly and very almost in passing addresses all the things that I struggled with that or that had become the furniture of my mind the idea for instance that the fall that the the the popular imagination / progressive mentality ascribes to the fall a sexual meaning that Adam and Eve were somehow prevented from knowing about their sexuality and the fall represents their attainment of sexuality and he almost in passing and parenthetically says but this is a mistake because actually it seems that the sexual part of it is a result of the fall and the fall is actually about something much more elemental much bigger than sexuality and that really struck at the basis of what I had been taught up until then and then he goes on to mention other things he or he has a whole chapter about psychology so he's talking about whether you know it's true that simply pursuing our own field as a pleasure are going to be the things that are gonna make us happy so he's addressing all these things about the secular humanist culture particularly the one precept that I have been most in nerd with which is you can do whatever you want to do as long as you do not harm anyone else this is the Creed of secular humanism this is what I was taught by my parents unfortunately by my schooling by the people around me do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt anyone else Louis takes this and demolishes it because he says there's so much more to morality than that and the two other aspects besides just how we delete it with each other harmony fairness and justice the two other aspects are what is within each person which I've never confronted and what is the ultimate goal towards which all this moral activity is tending so around this time I wanted to make sure that I mentioned the science of fact they remind the audience that this is violent but you really emphasize something else want about CS Lewis's mayor Christianity it isn't primarily an apologetic about Jesus Christ it's primarily more what you're talking about it deals with the the secular cultures idealisms that it's bought into and he slowly addresses that in the apology for jesus christ as a part of that well that's really what you're talking about the natural law and which is the natural law the idea that there's I can given standard outside of myself and that gives me my definition so it doesn't matter whether it's raining or sunny this thing is unchanging this was huge for me huge now after some you have to realize I'm a feminist I'm super super open to all sorts of things I'm very Pro abortion and they meet I'm just like a kid in high school who has all the dumb opinions that kids in high school have the adults in their lives are simply turning them out and they're just accepting them every teacher every person you meet every book magazine you read I read miss magazine and at the same time I had met this fellow who was to later become my husband he's 10 years older than I am so he's a young man he lost his hair very early on so I did not I'm like oh the bald guy you know you're doing considering him to be you know wasn't romantic at all when we met he worked in the same office as my mother he was a journalist and she was the secretary and it was a very conservative magazine at Princeton University and it it's it's just funny because politically I was very conservative but in all other ways I was very liberal so here's this guy and he was on his own journey maybe someday you can ask him he's was Catholic and he was coming back to the Catholic Church and that and he went to daily Mass and my mother told me that and it was kind of like he must be really repressed if he's going to Mass every day I think we're going to pause there well we'll haven't there and come back do we need to take a break and they'll be interesting to hear more about I mean first of all it's an amazing work of grace that's that mare Christianity awakened you from what you were but also to be open to to this man and you're in your mother's office so we'll come back to that move that our guest is Lila Marie Lawler mo back in a moment to continue her story [Music] [Music] welcome back to the journey home I'm your host mark scrote I and our guest is Leila Marie Lawler she's the author of the little oratory which is available EWTN catalog and also she has a website like mother like daughter court in case you want to find out more about what she does so let's pick it up where I am rudely interrupted you a moment ago you were just talking about you you've met this guy who's a cowboy this guy was a Catholic and also the smartest person I had ever met so you know that's a challenge because here's somebody really smart but you know he goes to daily Mass and that just does not seem right well anyway one time I did get into an argument with him about abortion and I was just saying you know what don't you see all the reasons why very important that women have this right etc etc give all the talking points and the thing you have to know about my husband unlike me he's not that he's not actually that interested in arguing and she just couldn't said yeah but it's just wrong and I had never heard anybody say that about something that I thought was important it's just wrong I was kind of fed up with him and she wouldn't argue and he wouldn't engage it just kept saying it's it's just wrong and I went home and I really had an epiphany because I really said there are some things that are just wrong now at this time had a friend who had gotten pregnant and it's really rather sorted because her parents allowed her to go out with this guy who was just not at all a respectable person they allowed the person in to her their home they allowed him into her room they were very progressive they didn't allow him to spend the night but she got pregnant and then they took her to have an abortion and to me that was just you know there is a problem and you have a solution and that seemed fine to me and I thought it was great and that was part of the background the baggage that I had when I was talking to this young man and as kind of like yeah well we were very very close friends and here's another incredible thing that happened was that the reality was that she was devastated it was not a question of anybody was making her feel bad about it her own parents took her it was all great and fine and just the way it should be in terms of everyone supporting her I certainly saw nothing wrong about it she told me that it hurt like hell that she was devastated she knew it was the right thing to do and every time we got together she was in tears after a few months had gone by she started saying my baby it would be three months old it was incredible to me this challenged everything I had thought the reality was that something life-changing and death-dealing had happened to her and I had to take that reality and bring it into line with my thoughts and when this person said to me this young man said to me it's just wrong I had to say that corresponds to what I'm observing that's something really wrong has happened here so I don't even I can't even things were in such chaos I can't even look back and say say first I read this and this happened you know I can't even say that all I can say is that these things were happening and that they were challenging me and I was having to question everything that I knew but at the same time the inkling that there was something outside of myself that was unchanging and that possibly was very benevolent was making me feel a lot of joy now at this time as I told you in the high school that I went to we still read many very good works and it was very interesting to me by now I'm about sixteen going maybe almost sixteen and I had a very good English teacher who was actually a secular Jew he taught us all the Shakespeare and all the you know Moby Dick and all the great works of literature and he always said so this is this illusion in the Old Testament who knows what this is but of course in the public school you were never allowed to read the Bible you are never allowed to talk about the Bible one day in class we were reading a poem of Emily Dickinson and she mentions Calvary and he says does anybody know what that term refers to Calvary and here we are a bunch of I mean this is in Princeton it's all professors students you know children that's all you know elite super educated high powered kids who went off to Harvard and Yale and whatever and only one girl knew what this referred to and she was the evangelical Christian in our class we all knew that she was the evangelical Christian we all looked down on her because the poor thing was so benighted and so somehow wrapped up with this superstitious worldview and yet she's the only one who knew the answer to an intellectual question a question about literature a question that was actually crucial to knowing what this poem was empowered she's the only one who knew so this struck me as ridiculous how can it be that you're studying works trying to delve to the meaning of them and nobody's allowing you to find out what is the key to the meaning I actually kind of got mad and I went home and I said that's it I don't care I'm reading the Bible so of course my mother being a good falling away Methodist had a Bible and again everything so confused I can't even tell you how I knew that where to begin at the New Testament I opened up that afternoon I opened up the Bible to the book of Matthew I sat down and I read the book of Matthew as a purely intellectual exercise to do better in my studies I want to God to the end I believed could I tell you what my part is not really intellectual something I would say that looking back at this girl who now is very you know far from me I can say I did have an openness to the truth I was willing to pursue whatever and you know even though if I knew that I would be devastated I had to go to the bottom of it so why was I ascending to I could not really tell you that the phrases that stuck stuck out in my mind were asked and then will be answer to you knock and it will be open to you I think the Sermon on the Mount may be stuck out to me I can't even tell you I got to the end and I just said whatever this is it fits into this world this home that I have and that it had recourse to so many times in the turmoil of my childhood the world of gnarnia the world of talking the world of the fairy tales you know fairy tales are very much less sort of if there's a Shorter Catechism fairy tales I think of as the shorter gospel the sort of the seed that has to die before it will bear fruit the the idea of the the good and the true being hidden so this shorter gospel or this this little hidden gospel which I had carried around this real gospel fit with that and that's all I knew so I began talking to this fellow your Frog Prince exactly was willing to talk to me about everything I would go after school you know when your parents are divorced you go to your mom's office you don't go home there's nobody at home so I went to her office it was just I could walk there and I just sat and did my homework in her office after a while I started doing my homework in Phil's office and he was always he does his work really fast so he was always willing to be distracted by me and I've been talking to him about some of these things and he said you know well if you like CS Lewis you're gonna like GK Chesterton and he handed me orthodoxy and of course in orthodoxy there's the chapter the ethics of Elfland which bring together these two strands of the natural law or this law that is somehow outside of ourselves to which we are adverting whether we realize it or not and this a fairyland world where the Wonder and the joy of the world as it is is so magical to us that we don't have to make any other crazy things that in itself is enough so I'm I read orthodoxy and I said well if you like GK Chesterton you're gonna like Thomas Aquinas now I'm sixteen years old and I read it I mean I read certain things that he gave me I can't remember exactly what he gave me I read certain questions and answers and that and I thought this is order this is this is I mean I can't even understand this but it's so amazing it's it just to me seemed so true and the truth to me was just what I needed I needed the truth and without realizing it on my life that's what I had been seeking so we had all these conversations talked about all these things and one day he said to me you know we should go - you should go to church you should go to I know this Minister I think you would really like so at this time not to tell someone else's story but he was going to daily Mass but he was not going to mass on Sunday he was going to the Princeton University Chapel to listen to I don't know if you're familiar with at the time the Dean of the chapel was Ernest Gordon have you ever heard that name and he was a man who found his faith in the prison camps of Japan in the Second World War he was a he called himself a Scottish playboy he was in the Navy he was captured he found himself in this officers prison camp he was dying he was put in the hut for the dead I'm sure people have seen the movie the bridge over the River Kwai Dean Gordon's book is called through the valley of the cry he was there and he became a Christian when some men who were there shared their pitiful nations they they crawled into this Hut for the dead and then dying he was laid out there next to the corpses and they shared their rice with him and he said to them why are you doing this and they said because of Jesus Christ and then they shared with him so he became a Christian and what he realized - all this incredible thing that he went through and what he shared at the Princeton University Chapel was that man had succumbed to relativism and had lost the idea of the truth that there exists a truth and when he left the camp he said my mission is going to be to preach the truth that there exists absolute truth but here's me little me this is the gospel that I needed I needed to hear that there is the truth and that you have to detoxify yourself from this life of relativism that everything depends on you that you create your own reality it takes a long time it's a long process so we went to hear him he preached so I mean he was the Dean of the chapel at Princeton University his his sermons were very intellectual very and they were always about Jesus Christ being the ground how man comes to know that there exists an absolute truth so after we had gone there for a while man it's soon someday to be husband says to me and we still didn't really realize this ourselves we were just really good friends and he says to me you you probably should be baptized so I said well you should talk to Dean Gordon so I talked to Dean Gordon he talked to me he was a talker and I sat with him many days across just just as you and I are sitting and he instructed me on the Christian faith and he baptized me on October 23rd 1977 so I'm coming up on May 30th anniversary of being a Christian and he baptized me into the church so he was a Presbyterian but he believed very much in that church and as the Dean of the chapel he tried to keep things you know somewhat ecumenical or whatever you would call it so denomination nondenominational exactly so I was baptized as a Christian and then I think both Phil and I began to actually go a little further along the what is the church that we're actually looking for and the time went by and we started to I said to him Dean Gordon at one point as my baptism time Clint came closer I said you know Phil and I are we're thinking about that you know I'm getting to be 17 and doing everything that maybe would get me right oh yes I know anyway but that was a long way off still but we were doing things together and my husband-to-be was also looking to see where is and he said to me there's something missing at that University service I was like something missing what's missing I mean there's beautiful hems there's the gospel there's a wonderful sermon it's very beautiful on the chapel is very beautiful and I don't know what it is that you think you're missing we had also started going to evensong which was held at the chapel and the Piscopo group had had I don't know if they still have it but they had a beautiful traditional evensong service and for me this was my entry into a real liturgical life which is so striking to me that that seed was planted so long ago I did not know anything in the ensuing years really about the liturgy of the hours or I only knew the vaguest things but for me that is worship the Liturgy of the hours is worship even song is of course the best bars and the prayers are Vespers the beautiful chant of the Magnificat what's decisive for me but it's in English they chanted in the old english chant that was really decisive to me for opening up the liturgical world the world of Our Lady the world of that there exists this ongoing worship that we simply participate in and enter into so we began to look around and he said well let's go to the episode also in boring so I have a friend who says they weren't up to Episcopal so so the darling little Episcopal Church in Princeton it's perfect it's beautiful it's charming it's just everything a church to me and we went in there and you know it was beautiful the music was beautiful and it was nonsense it was just nonsense I mean I need to say it but it was a celebration of self we were just we were kind of laughing and saying well this isn't it so so then a particular particular one was just and at that time okay so we have to understand that this is the seventies where if you were going off the rails liturgically you were going way off the rails and it was a you know printing around the altar and really celebrating the self and who we are and how wonderful we are and there was nothing there for us so but I will tell you something and you say that particular church at that moment I turn to fell and I said someday was after the moment when we were talking about that and he was saying I think I just need to go back to the Catholic Church and they said someday I am going to celebrate in a church that is an Episcopal congregation that became Catholic well flash forward 25 years this actually didn't happen because in st. Mary's in Dedham where we lived not to jump around but we lived in st. Mary's and denom with our at the time six children and the congregation on the East Coast that was discerning to become Catholic was in the convent chapel of st. Mary's and when we found ourselves worshiping with him I turned to my husband and I said see I told you that what I would have and we did actually worship them with them for quite a while so at this point now time has gone on I'm getting starting to think about college I went off to college for on my freshman year and during that time we decided we would marry and he had told me he had said you don't have to become Catholic because I'm Catholic but as soon as I had ever read Chesterton and Aquinas and then had seen that there was something missing what was the same thing that was missing in this basically high presbyterian worship that we did at the chapel they said what is it that's missing and he said well the Eucharist I don't even know what that meant I didn't know I was like well it's like yeah once a month to pass around you know the grape juice on the bread that's not that's not it like really big what is what are you talking about then they Episcopal well there was something not quite right there and then unfortunately there there just was a lot of liturgical confusion in the Catholic Church at that time in that place so it was very hard to find what it was but once having decided I knew that this was I had to become a Catholic I had to go I think in mere christianity Louis says God reality is much hotter than you think it is and I think actually he without realizing it I'm saying something about mere christianity this idea that he has that somehow you can distill something that would appeal to everyone and I think actually it's it's almost like a challenge to him that no you're gonna go deeper and it's gonna be harder than you think in more particular than you think and that is where I knew I was headed so actually I had instruction with that priest who was the chaplain that I did not attend Princeton I went to a source more college but I had just was friends with people there and the priest there gave me instruction and I mean he was very he was very confused and the instruction that he gave me was not clear instruction but somehow I I persevered and two weeks before we were married I did enter the Catholic Church but I always say I wasn't because of him I would have even if I were going to not marry him and and then two weeks later we were married and that's when I realized when the children came I realized I have I am not even a beginner I'm not even up to beginner and only you know the journey of learning I mean coming from nowhere learning about the Bible learning about the faith learning about everything learning about virtue which really if it and start when you're young it takes a long time to figure that out so that's an ongoing process so I love that yeah that is that is basically my journey our guest is Lila Marie Lawler it's interesting today when people are entering the church we've we've come out of the confusing time in many many ways you know we have a catechism that wasn't there for you it was handed the Dutch catechism which was a goofy one there's a goofy one and basically this priest who since left the priesthood said to me you're smart you can read this so there was no there was no give-and-take there was no so it was a very confusing time yeah that's I was wondering though if you look back what was it in time that brought both you and your husband Phil and to wade through all that confusion to find the trueness that you know the true diamond in the midst of what was becoming a rough at the time not because of Vatican 2 but by the way it was applied yeah I think there were a couple of things one thing was that I mentioned in passing that we were politically very conservative and I think conservatism at that time was a very a movement you know you had Bill Buckley you had Russell Kirk you had a lot of very intelligent well-formed people who whose political interests were grounded in causes so they were concerned with the causes of things which ultimately goes back to reality what is the reality be how is it that people act not how would you like them to act what is the fairy tale that you want them to live like Oh sharing the goods together or whatever but how do they actually act how can you help them to act you know for the common good what is the common good so a lot of the things and this I really credit you know I mean my mother actually with all the crazy theories that she was pursuing she loved Bill Buckley so there were good in that way also for instance this is the intellectual decay of our time when you realize that in those days for instance the book-of-the-month Club had amazingly good selections so yeah she belonged to the book-of-the-month Club and the books that I were arriving in our house were Solzhenitsyn you know I mean Jane Austen like truly worthwhile very grounded books that either were culturally flourishing or were in some way intellectually demanding and my husband's parents were very involved with they were very interested in for instance supporting Thomas Aquinas College so at that time there were those initiatives where Catholics were coming together and saying you know we have to we have to really work we have to do these initiatives to help people they have to have a place to send their children to go to school so we would get there they would get their publications and my husband would have them and at this time just my friend so one amazing moment for me was National Review for instance published as a separate little booklet Dorothy Sayers the lost tools of learning when that I had one time gone over to my friend Phil's apartment we were gonna go to something at Princeton and I looked over this coffee table in here Dorothy Sayers last tools of learning oh can I read that so at this time I'm kind of getting this informal education of in causes now at the same time so then you know becoming Catholic people were starting to for instance the National Catholic Register there were there were columnist in that newspaper which Phil did get who were decisive they would just simply say here's what the Catholic Church teaches about contraception you're reading this column you're saying oh my goodness I had no idea that this was the teaching we have to we have to follow this we have to follow what the Church teaches so people were really beginning that apostle of of promoting the actual teachings of the church you said you were born in 60 you came in at church when you're eight here in 1917 with us baptized and I was nineteen when they entered the church which means that you became a Catholic about the same time john paul ii became pope so a 79 yes and then that was that year we got married and he was pope and and that was extraordinary as well because even yeah he began to proclaim that he really I think understood that the secular culture had taken over because of his background because of what he knew and the universities and everything he was no longer it was no longer a case of being kind of in your own world about what the world out there was like he knew and he did cut through and people were excited and energized by that yeah for sure yeah you know John Paul was you know he spent the next four or five years after his becoming Pope focusing on what we call life the theology of the body but as soon as you finished that time his audiences began for ten years of catechesis of the Creed because he said this world needs a systematic catechesis he saw the need for starting from scratch and bringing the whole world because all that confusion that was going on I'm wondering you wrote the little oratory a beginner's guide to praying in the home which he talked with Keck on the bookmark and Jim and joy but how was this book kind of an outflow of your own journey well David Clayton is my co-author and he and I agreed that this is the book we wished we had had when we were starting our life as a Christian there's a theologian John Carbone and he says the question for the person is how does life relate to liturgy how do I as a Christian now I have come to know that God is God and I must follow him now what how do I pray how do I live my life a question that you start to have children and you say how am I going to pass along the faith to my children when you come to a church in this very intellectual way that I came the mistake is that you think I'll just explain it to them and that's not the way and it's also not the way to say I'll just get a program that's not the way either when I came to know I took me a long time and sadly my poor children had to be the lone guinea pigs and because so many of my friends so many of the people I knew were in the same position of not having something to fall back on in terms of tradition we've had to really make things up ourselves and we made a lot of mistakes but really what it comes down to is you must live the liturgical life you must live the liturgical year along with the church and that has it happens in the home and it you will live your faith and then your children live it with you yeah interesting you adjust yourself to the liturgy the liturgy is the teacher and we put all that in the book so the book is not something new its traditional and it has that it's because I call it a kit for having your own we say that the the place in the home the little oratory is the organizing principle so you'll have this beautiful place in your home and the beauty the beauty of the life in the church of the liturgical year helps you to live your faith with your children your own personal faith your own personal prayer and then with your children it's interesting to reflect on this being the 500th anniversary of the start of the Reformation and in many ways the Reformation was a flip-flopping of that adjusting the literature that the liturgy to me I become the judge the planner to the point where maybe there's nothing left of any liturgy because I'm the one that decides how I worship but it exists it's out there all we do is we just it's the River of Life that the tree is planted on its roots go deep into it and this is the home the connection between the home and the decorative marriage and the Eucharist as it celebrated in the church there is a connection and this oratory that we make in our home helps us some it's a physical beautiful manifestation of the faith and then organically and traditionally we will learn I only learned this later and David and I are like well yes we wish we had had that this is the book that we wish that we had and I will tell the audience a beautiful book and I encourage it's a little oratory and if I want to find out more about it is available on DW in catalog but also like mother like daughter or brain for joining us on the program and that night I pray that your book as well as your story encourages a lot of other folks thank you and thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home I do pray that Lila's journey is an encouragement to you god bless you see you next week [Music] you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 15,971

Rating: 4.9183674 out of 5

Keywords: JHT, JHT01586

Id: CQarO1HdU00

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 02 2017