The Moderate Catholic

Topics that deepen faith and inspire action.

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The Moderate Catholic makes space for people who live out their Catholic identity in a way that engages yet transcends secular frameworks and political agendas with a focus on deepening one’s spirituality and commitment to social justice. christinagebel.substack.com

Aug 5

Episode 14: A Faith-Filled Lens on International Adoption

Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode 14, “Taking a Faith-Filled Lens to International Adoption.” So, welcome everyone. Welcome back to season two. I know that we have talked about adoption already on season two, and now we’re going to take it in a slightly new direction with Shauna and Sankalp, who are here today. Also, very good friends of mine, near and dear to my heart. People I look up to, both as friends and as faith-filled people that try to discern their path in life. And I’m so pleased to have them here for this conversation to talk about how they made the decision to adopt internationally. So, with that, [00:01:00] Shauna and Sankalp, would you like to introduce yourselves? Shauna Morin: Yes. Thank you, Christina. We’re so happy to be here. My name is Shauna Morin. Sankalp Ranji: My name is Sankalp Ranji. Shauna Morin: We’ve been together now for almost nine years and met actually through your prior guests, the Currans. So, there’s a connection, too. My background professionally has been for a long time in higher education. That’s actually what brought me down to the research triangle in North Carolina. I was here to pursue my doctorate in higher education. My work there led me into a nonprofit space focusing on interfaith engagement and pluralism in our democracy. And I am very recently a stay-at-home mom with our 2-year-old, almost two-and-a-half-year-old son, Kiran. Sankalp Ranji: I moved to the U.S. about 12 years ago now, or it’s been a long time, and came here to study at UNC. I [00:02:00] work in the tech sector. I work as a product manager, and I’m just loving every minute of the last one year, specifically that 2-year-old. Yeah. Christina Gebel: Absolutely. Thank you both for making the time, and perhaps we’ll get right to our conversation. I know that I already said that you internationally adopted your son, but perhaps you could take us back to the beginning. Tell us about that time in your life when you were discerning whether to adopt and what those conversations were like as a couple. Were there any elements of faith or spirituality that came up? What kind of reservations or hopes did you have? Shauna Morin: I think, pretty soon after Sankalp and I met, we both felt pretty quickly that this relationship was going somewhere permanent. We were both a little bit older, and we had a lot of these conversations on the front end of dating. At that time, [00:03:00] I shared with Sankalp that I had actually never been too certain that I wanted to be a parent. I have a very distinct memory, actually, of being around 12 years old and telling my dad that I wasn’t going to have kids because there was too much wrong with the world, and I didn’t want to bring a child into a world that was so broken, something along those lines. My family will tell you, I was never really a child. I’ve been an old soul, and maybe that is reflective of that truth. But I remember very vividly my dad’s response being that we make the world better by raising good humans as parents. So that was always in my mind. Fast forward to the two of us having these conversations, and I wanted to be honest and upfront that this is something I was never really certain of. And also that a path forward that seemed viable to me was adoption and having the opportunity to care for somebody who [00:04:00] was already in the world. So that was not my hard and fast only way, but that’s where I had historically been and was bringing sort of those leanings into our relationship. Sankalp Ranji: Yeah. And I’m from India. As any Indian person would say or tell you, you have pretty big pressure from your family, extended family. Everyone wants you to have a child. And also, I think, I never imagined a scenario where I would not have a child of our own. So having a family, it just was like, yeah, that is definitely a thing for me. And when I met Shauna, that was one of the first things that we discussed. Yes, I am interested in having children. Whether it should be our own child, whether it should be an adopted child, was not a point in my head, but I knew that I wanted to have a family with Shauna. Eventually, once we got married, once we started, we obviously wanted to have a little bit of freedom in the beginning, taking her parents all the way to India and did a lot of different things. But once the dust settled down, [00:05:00] like we did realize, oh, the clock is turning really fast and we are almost like running out of time. So, we started having discussions about having children, and that’s where, okay, do we want to have our own or adoption? For me, personally, I’m Hindu. Not really practicing Hindu per se, throughout Hindu mythology and all, there have been plenty of examples where people have had adoption and stuff. And so it’s not really an alien thing. Once I started having the conversation with Shauna, that’s where I like, okay, this is this is it. This is an important conversation, and I’m glad we landed on this. Shauna Morin: To fast forward a little bit to the conversation point Sankalp is talking about, so at this point, we’re married, we’re really thinking about like our lives potentially changing and growing our family. And by that point, I’ll echo Sankalp in saying that I really felt this is something I want to do with Sankalp. So this is an interesting learning for me. It’s one thing to have feelings about parenthood when you’re on your own, and it’s another thing when you’re part of a couple and you see how the two of you function together. I had this growing instinct that this is something we would do well together and that I wanted to do with him. So I think that was a big part of the conversation. We talked about having a biological child versus adoption. I think, although I wanted to be open to that, I had a lot of reservations, some practical, related to my age and what it might require of us to try to go down that path. So, the reservations I had were not inconsistent with the sort of thought process I named earlier. So I was really grateful that Sankalp was so open to that being a path we could pursue and it could be a chosen path for us. And that’s ultimately where we landed. Christina Gebel: Thank you so much for sharing that. And as you all were doing your intros and talking about these early stages, I kept thinking about all the things that Raman and I have in common with you both, of course, Indian culture being in our interreligious or intercultural marriage. But there’s also, Shauna, you and I have talked a lot about feelings going into parenthood. And I personally have had feelings where I wasn’t always sure. I was also an old soul growing up, but my reservations stemmed from probably really a lot of bad babysitting experiences. So, I didn’t have younger siblings, but when I went to babysit, I remember having a lot of anxiety about that. And just also being older and getting married, slightly older than maybe other peers and wanting to have that time where you are child-free at the beginning of your marriage and you can be married and go on the trips and be unencumbered in those ways. So yeah, there’s so much there that I resonate with in my own personal journey, and I’m grateful for the both of you in sharing that. Moving along to the choice to adopt internationally, I’d like to hear about how you intentionally chose international adoption as opposed to other routes that people come to adoption. Shauna Morin: I think I was the first person to propose adopting from India, and retrospectively I don’t know if this ended up mattering as much as I thought it might. Sankalp’s whole family, extended family, nuclear family, they’re all in India. My thinking was we live here in the US; by default, my family will be very involved in this child’s life in the process of us bringing this child home. And I thought that if we went through the process in India, that would facilitate Sankalp’s [00:09:00] family also getting to be intimately part of the process because it would require us to go there. And that would actually be our first meeting point someday. Also, there will be a lot of cultural connections, and we might talk about this more when we explain the process to you, but there’s a lot of focus, rightfully so, on when you adopt internationally, how you’re going to help that child understand the culture of origin. And so those connections are baked into our family. So, in some ways, it’s almost like it’s not a strictly international adoption for us. It will be for Kiran, right? He lives here; he was born somewhere else. And so surely it is an international adoption. But we’ve talked with folks who have gone through this process when no one in the couple is from the adopting country. And for them, it’s very different; like, you swoop in, you swoop out, you’re probably only in that country a few times. There’s a lot [00:10:00] more work that needs to be done to fulfill that role of cultural stewardship for your child. And this felt more possible and feasible for us. We were familiar with traveling there. We knew we had a home base, and we knew we would be able to provide some supports pretty readily even though it was a quote unquote international adoption. Sankalp Ranji: Shauna has answered that question very nicely, as nicely as she could, but there’s no other way to acknowledge the fact that within the Indian culture, adoption is still not a very acceptable thing. As we were going through the process, we learned that, yes, domestic adoption in India has increased significantly, and that actually has led to a sharp decline in international adoption from India, which is great. That means that children are getting a loving home. And so that’s awesome all over. No doubt about that.
Jun 29

Episode 13: What does Catholic Theology Say About Modern Families?

Christina Gebel: Welcome to The Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode 13: What Does Catholic Theology Say About Modern Families? Welcome, everyone. We have two very special guests today, both of whom I deeply admire for their work in the field of theology. We have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Julie Rubio and Dr. Jake Kohlhaas. They have done much work in the field of theology as it relates to family. As we know, season two is focusing on the family. It’s called Radical Family, and it’s about families making bold choices to live out their faith. I thought, what a great [00:01:00] time in the season to zoom out a little bit and see what the Catholic Church has to say about families living out their faith. I couldn’t ask for two better people to talk to about this topic. So, with that, Dr. Rubio and Dr. Kohlhaas, would you mind introducing yourselves? Julie Rubio: I am currently a professor at the Jesuit School of Theology, which is part of Santa Clara University, but currently in Berkeley, California. I’ve been here for about eight years, and before that, I was at St. Louis University for about 20 years. Family has been central to my work from the very beginning, even as I define myself as a social ethicist. It was really in planning my own wedding liturgy and my wedding that I first started developing an interest in marriage and family. It was the liturgy that really [00:02:00] opened that up for me, and ever since then, I’ve just been fascinated with this tradition and excited about the possibilities for families in Catholic social ethics. Jake Kohlhaas: Yeah, and I’m Jake Kohlhaas. I am a professor of moral theology at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. I’ve been here for 12 years and have a couple books and edited volumes on family. It’s been what I’ve been doing since my dissertation back at Duquesne University, particularly around parenthood and trying to think about a theology of parenthood. More recently, that’s taken me—yeah—a bit more into social ethics and definitely into history, which is an endless investigation that you can keep going forever if you want. So that’s where I’m at now. Christina Gebel: Yes, thank you. And that’s a great segue to the first question I wanted to talk to you all about today. So, I put two and two together when I cracked open one of the edited [00:03:00] volumes about church teaching on the family, and I met Julie when I was a theology student at SLU. I don’t think theology has ever truly left my brain, and I was so thrilled to see that volume, and it definitely scratched a theology itch that I’ve been missing for a really long time. You both contributed. Jake, I believe you were one of the editors of the volume. And what I liked about it was the commentary on different encyclicals or church teaching on the family, but it went quite far back, and it goes pretty far into the present too. So I was just wondering if you could start us off by distilling that volume into kind of where the arc of theology has been in the church. [00:04:00] What has the Church focused on in its messaging, in its theology on the family? Jake Kohlhaas: I can start. So I was co-editor with Mary Doyle Roche on this volume. The idea of Catholic family teaching is something that kind of came up in my book, Beyond Biology. It’s in the later chapter of thinking about teaching on marriage and family in the parallel way that we think about Catholic social teaching as a developing body of doctrine that grows and expands over time. The challenge is that the documents around marriage and family, you have to read them against their own protesting that they do not in fact change. But if you read them like social documents, there is quite a bit of movement and development going on through their history. So that’s what I set out to do, and it was just so great to be in a field where we found lots of collaborators who were excited about the project and wanted to do it. The way it’s structured, it starts back in 1880 with Arcanum [Divinae Sapientiae], which was by Leo XIII, and then moves forward [00:05:00] throughout time. And one of the things that’s obvious right at the start is if you start stacking up the documents on marriage and family alongside Catholic social teaching documents, it’s the same popes, roughly the same years writing them. They really fall pretty neatly in order. It gets a little more complicated in more recent history, but I would say just the overall short summary arc is that when you start in the late 19th century, most of the concern is really the papacy attempting to assert itself in the face of new liberal democracies that have spread throughout the world. And so, a lot of the concerns are political. They’re trying to really stake their claim in education, stake their claim around marriage and divorce, and insist that these are the purview of the Catholic Church, and that secular states have other legitimate areas, but not these. And so you get a lot of that in the early documents around the place of [00:06:00] education, marriage, and regulation of divorce. And quite a bit around women’s particular place connected to children and home life. By the 1930s, though, you get more interest in actual love in marriage, and the relationship of marriage, and that’s really the part that grows into the 1960s and Vatican II. You get some really remarkable changes with marriage as no longer a hierarchical relationship, but as a more mutual relationship. You move from a Pope Leo, who says that women’s place within the home is part of divine law, to John XXIII, who says women have discovered their own dignity, and it’s different than what the popes had thought. So, there are some really interesting developments. And then as you move towards the present, one of the things I pick up is I think in the 1960s things really take a sharp turn towards reproductive moral issues with Humanae vitae and artificial contraception and things like that. So, family becomes much more concerned with reproductive ethics than it had been. Then more recently it becomes more about sexuality and gender issues, and then as we know at the present, issues of same-sex relationships and how that affects parenthood and inclusivity in the church. And that’s really up to the present, where these questions of who’s included and how are they included and what counts and why remain pretty significant issues for the church today. Julie Rubio: Yeah, and ... The volume is a great contribution. It’s just wonderful to even have the words “the Catholic family teaching” that we didn’t have before. And there are so many great people writing in the volume. I wrote on Familiaris Consortio, so, Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Exhortation from 1981. But I largely agree with the trends. One thing I would start with is that what to me is really unique about Catholic social teaching, Catholic family teaching, is that family is always seen as a part of what is called the social order or society. So it’s never understood as this private, nuclear, romantic, whatever all of that is. That’s just not our teaching. So it’s always seen as one of the many intermediary associations, is the word, in society similar to, or like churches and schools and clubs and nonprofits and that kind of stuff. And it’s prior to government, or the state has its own reality, which means it has its own rights that government has to protect and its own responsibilities. So I think that’s constant, and yet what grows is the sense that not only is it just an important part of the social order, but it has a social mission, and that particularly comes to the fore with John Paul II. It’s not enough just to love and procreate. That’s just the beginning. And he’s really explicit about that, and I find that’s even surprising to people who think they’re JP II Catholics, right? And because they’re used to reading Theology of the Body. No, he really underlines that, and then that just carried [00:09:00] forward with Francis and beyond. And the other part Jake already alluded to this, is about love. I think you can always from the beginning see this idea of mutual support and growth and holiness. So I think sometimes people will say, Oh, Catholic teaching on family is only about procreation. That’s never been true either. It’s always had something else there. But love, th- this was actually a debate. - Is love necessary for a legitimate marriage? Before, no it wasn’t. But it becomes essential, and then we have the, that beautiful language of the intimate partnership of life and love, and I feel like we’re still exploring, honestly, what that intimate partnership is and what it means. This to me is something that we say but, beyond the language of self-gift, which I think is both helpful and not helpful what does that look like over a lifetime? I think we’re still figuring that out and we’re figuring out a new way only really since the 1980s have we had married theologians who can speak to this with experience. And then the [00:10:00] other part is the growing egalitarianism, that’s just really clear. Sometimes I hear younger traditionalist Catholics citing Casti Connubii, and it’s yeah, you can’t do that. That is just not our teaching anymore. Male headship is not our teaching. There is a real egalitarianism which is really actually evident in the marriage rite, which I would argue is less gendered than a lot of our social marriage rituals, including engagement rituals and things like that. You have to read that stuff and put it into the liturgy ‘cause it’s not there except for in few little places. But I would also agree that especially since the 1990s and concern over same-sex marriage, and more recently gender identity, there has been an assertion about gender difference. I would s
Jun 5

Episode 12: International Faith-Based Service as a Family

Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Moderate Catholic. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode 12 in our second season of Radical Family: International Service as a Family. So welcome, everyone, back to season two. I am thrilled to be here today with two very good friends who have made bold choices in living out their faith as a family. Both are medical doctors, Dr. Anne Berry and Dr. George Stablein. And while that is their professional title, I affectionately know them as Anne and George, and we have a lot of really cool overlaps in our life. But I’m going to let them introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about who you are in the here and now, who your kids are, how old are [00:01:00] they, and then we’ll jump into this amazing choice that you made as a family. Anne Berry: Thanks, Christina. It’s very exciting to be here with you, too. I’m Anne. I am a family doctor and also have a second specialty in preventive medicine. Our kids are Susanna and Louisa. Susanna is 15 and a freshman in high school, and Louisa is 12 and she is in sixth grade. George Stablein: And I am George Stablein. I am a community pediatrician in the area, and that’s my only specialty. Christina Gebel: It’s good. It’s a good specialty. So, George Stablein: thank you. Christina Gebel: Having it is great. So we have had some interesting overlaps, and I officially met Anne and George at the commissioning ceremony for [00:02:00] Maryknoll Lay Missioners. And could one of you start us off by just telling us a 10,000-foot view? What is Maryknoll? Anne Berry: Maryknoll is a hill in New York in Westchester County, named after Mary on the Knoll. And that is where the Maryknoll priests and Maryknoll sisters both have their headquarters. Those are orders of Catholic priests and sisters that they’re kind of focus is service in different countries. And then Maryknoll Lay Missioners grew out of both the Maryknoll priests and Maryknoll sisters. It started off that they invited lay people to come in service alongside them in different countries where they were serving. And then over time, that grew into a formal lay service program. And then that, over time, grew into its own separate organization, which is [00:03:00] still very closely affiliated with, always partnering together with both the Maryknoll priests and the Maryknoll sisters in New York and all over the world. But it is its own separate organization where lay Catholics like us can serve in different countries. Christina Gebel: Awesome. Yeah, I actually didn’t know the fact about the hill, so that is something I learned today. I didn’t know that it was actually a knoll, so that’s good. Mary on the Knoll. Okay. Anne Berry: Yeah. Christina Gebel: I love that. So we met at this commissioning ceremony in Ossining, New York, and I didn’t officially know you before that, despite the fact that Anne did the same residency program as my husband, although prior to his being there. Tell me a little bit about your lives before you officially got to Maryknoll Missioners. Like, what was happening in your life? What were some things that led you to that path? Anne Berry: [00:04:00] It really started before I even met George when I was a volunteer with Jesuit Volunteers International at the time, JVI, in Managua, Nicaragua. And I did that after I graduated from college, before I went to medical school. And while I was there, it was when I first learned about Maryknoll. There was a community of Maryknoll sisters. My Jesuit volunteer community made a retreat one time at the Maryknoll sisters’ community. And they were wonderful and lovely. And while I was there during the two years, I was in Managua through the Ben Linder community of like international volunteers and like faith-based volunteers and people working in faith-based organizations. I met a married couple who had young children and they had also previously been with Maryknoll. They weren’t at the time when I met them, but that’s how I first learned about that. And I also met another family that was not with Maryknoll, but I think they were with the Mennonite Central Committee, but they were also from the US and they also had [00:05:00] young children and were living in Nicaragua and living there with their young children. So, it was really those two families, especially, that I always really admired them. I just thought, “Wow, that’s such a great thing that they’re here.” Not just like me, “Oh, I’m just here for two years.” I’m before I then go back to my regular life kind of thing.” But they were doing this as like their regular life and their kids were there and they were living there and growing up there. So that kind of planted that idea in my mind. And from that time, I always had a dream to one day be a Maryknoll lay missioner. And especially I thought if I ever do end up having a family and having kids, I would definitely want to do that. George Stablein: And Anne and I met in medical school in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Penn State. When we were early on in dating, we had a conversation one night and Anne said, “If you are interested in us being a long-term couple, just know that I’m going to be living internationally again someday.” And so, consider yourself [00:06:00] forewarned. I was going to be the small-town pediatrician, going back to my home area where I grew up. Just what I had always envisioned for myself. And so, yeah, there was a part of me that was, “Oh, maybe she’ll forget about that.” And then there was a part of me that was just that kind of could be interesting. But I don’t know, I couldn’t see myself doing that. I don’t know. And, fast forward quite a while, we did get married. It was about 10 years after we had gotten married, and she reminded me of that warning that she had given me. And that’s how it unfolded. I honestly do give her a lot of credit for me being a part of that experience, for me having that experience, because it wasn’t something that I had really ever envisioned for myself. But I can say on this side, and even while I was there, I was very glad that I did do it and that we did do it as a family. Christina Gebel: Yeah, that’s incredible. That’s bringing up for me not only some things I laid on the table very early on when I met my husband, which is maybe a topic for another episode, but also just we have an overlap with Nicaragua [00:07:00], too, and I have spent time in both Managua and León. And León is such a beautiful city. So that’s really cool. And so, as you’re telling this, I’m drawing up vivid images of when I was there and was also there in the capacity of Catholicism and faith. So y’all made this first big commitment, what was it about that particular point that made you say, Okay, now’s the time, now’s the right time to pursue this in earnest. Anne Berry: I had been waiting a long time, and so I really wanted to do it as soon as possible. One of the things I wanted to do most was bring our kids and have this be an experience as a family with our kids, so we had to have kids first. So, we had them. That took a couple years, because then we had one, we had to wait a couple years. So basically that was it. It was like, okay. Now after our second child was born, we decided to wait until she was a little bit older, I guess for different reasons. But one of the biggest [00:08:00] reasons for me was I knew, Maryknoll’s a three-and-a-half-year commitment, and I knew that that may be as long as we would do it. I wanted both of our kids to be old enough to literally remember it. I didn’t want it just to be like something that Louisa kind of thought, yeah, that happened when I was a baby. I don’t really remember any. So when we arrived in Tanzania, she was three. Christina Gebel: Anne, you really had these examples that you had encountered earlier on in your life of families that had done this with kids. I’m curious for George. Obviously, you said yes in a very big way to what had been brewing in Anne for quite some years, but who did you really look to or draw from as you approached that period? George Stablein: That’s a great question. Honestly, that was a bit of a challenging time for me. I didn’t really have any other examples of this in my own life other than Anne. And I knew Anne had done it. I saw how clearly it affected her and how [00:09:00] deeply moving for her the experience was in Nicaragua. And so that was inspiring to me, but it was quite different for me, such a radical change in my plans. I was baptized Catholic, but didn’t really attend church at all except for weddings and funerals and baptisms, essentially, until I was in college. And so, when Anne and I were planning on getting married, I decided to go through the RCIA, or I guess OCIA now, program. It was important to me to be able to take Communion at my own wedding, so I do feel like, as a younger adult and kind of through our early marriage and time together, I would say I was inspired by my church community as well. We went to a small kind of mission parish in central West Virginia. That’s where we were living when we decided to go to Maryknoll. And there were some families that were very devoted Catholics; their children were very much involved in the church. And when we told them about our consideration for [00:10:00] Maryknoll, they were very supportive. Christina Gebel: Yeah, that’s great. Even if this was like writ on your hearts, and as part of your mission as a family, I imagine that it was a little bit daunting during that time period, too, because something that you were saying Anne earlier about your youngest, Louisa, being able to remember it, so some people say, I’m going to delay going to the national parks till my kids remember it, but this was a, this was a bigger journey, so to speak. How did you approach this with the kids and your own families and your own professions also that yo
Apr 28

Episode 11: Attending the Synod as a Family

Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is Episode 11: Journeying to the Synod as a family. So, I am really excited for this episode today. I have a good friend here, Casey Stanton, who wears many incredible hats, but I will let her talk about all the incredible things that she does, and she was so kind to come on the podcast today to talk about not only just the work she does, but how it relates specifically to her family life. So, with that, Casey, welcome. Would you like to introduce yourself? Casey Stanton: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited. I’m Casey Stanton, Co-director and Co-founder of Discerning Deacons, which is an [00:01:00] organization seeking to serve the discernment in the Church about women in the diaconate. So, we’re trying to grow the imagination and serve this question, which has been alive and studied in the church for the last 50 plus years. Christina Gebel: Amazing, and we could have a whole episode series archive of audio, just discussing the tremendous efforts that are going on with Discerning Deacons right now, which if you haven’t gotten in touch with them, you absolutely should. But we’re actually here today to talk about that work in light of a decision that you made, and it directly relates to the Synods that were happening globally. And so maybe you could just start us off, first of all, what is a Synod? And then in true Church language awesomeness, what is a Synod on Synodality? [00:02:00] And tell me how you came to be involved. Casey Stanton: Great question. So, this was very much at the heart of Pope Francis’ vision for how the Church was being called to live its mission in the world today, to try to invite the Holy Spirit to be heard through every corner of Church life and out in the world, and to ask the question afresh: What does it mean for the church to journey with you in your life wherever you are, whoever you are, whether you’re in the Church or not, if you’re outside of it? So, it was a process and a path to try to open up a space for renewal in the Spirit. The first Synod is in the Acts of the Apostles. It’s really constitutive of the church. It’s saying, okay, once Jesus left, how do we continue to discern together what is the will of the Spirit for the community of those seeking to follow the way of [00:03:00] Jesus? And so, a Synod is a path of gathering, discerning together, and trying to find the way forward. So, in the Council of Jerusalem, there’s this debate about will new members have to be circumcised. And it’s really a crisis of identity for the community. And the miracle of it is, they come to this kind of middle way, they’re negotiating their life together. What are we gonna do? And what’s funny is that in the next chapter, they do something very different. It just shows that Church politics has always been messy. Doing life together has always been messy. But the beautiful part about doing life together, inspired by and grounded in the witness of Jesus and the Gospels, is that we do trust that we’re not doing it alone, and that it’s not a purely human endeavor. And so, I think what was pretty bold and faith-filled was when Pope Francis called for a global Synod on this theme of Synodality. It was really rolling the dice on the Holy Spirit and the people of God and saying a Church structure that has a lot of distance between bishops and those who make decisions and the people of God in their daily lives and their struggles isn’t a Church that’s walking together. And so, it was really a journey that, you know, in the wake of abuse scandals, in the wake of so many challenges facing our world and humanity, was an invitation for bishops, especially, to turn their attention towards an intentional exercise of listening to ground their own leadership. And as Pope Francis would often talk about, he wanted bishops to smell like their sheep. And so, as Pope Francis has since passed, I think one of the miraculous things about the election of Pope Leo the 14th is that Pope Leo in his previous role as the head of the Dicastery of Bishops, was deeply involved in the Synod. He participated in all the sessions, and there was a sense that Cardinals had elected someone who was going to continue on this path of Synodality. Pope Francis is onto something. This is the way the Church is called to move in the world, that it can’t just be bishops in diocesan offices making decisions that then people follow, but that actually, there’s this more complex dynamic of how we are discerning how we are living the mission today. So that was the Synod and Synodality, and Pope Francis called for it in 2021. It kicked it off, but he had been on a steady path of this, transforming this entity of the Synod. It had been a Synod of bishops, and he was encouraging it to be more participatory all the way up to the Synod on Synodality, where he was really saying we need to reflect on this as the way we move in the world so that we can hold difficult topics. We could learn to have conversations without canceling each other or resorting to enemy camps. I think it’s an invitation for the Church to be a model for humanity, for [00:06:00] how to live with conflict and how to move as a global community in all its complexity. I think the Synod I could talk about all day, which is part of what we’re talking about today, but I could just see the imagination of that, like what Pope Francis was doing throughout his papacy as I was following it. And it felt like a thing worth trying to trust in. And we’re at a time where it’s hard to trust in institutions. It’s definitely hard to trust in people that have power and in our leaders. And part of what was remarkable as the Synod began was that it was truly an invitation to everyone. Everyone was invited to try to find a way to participate, to initiate participation, and to participate. That, to me, rings of the Gospel: this radical welcome and invitation to meet everybody where they are and hear where they are and figure out how we’re connected. And that’s a good use of our time to try to do that. And I [00:07:00] think in the US, there’s skepticism. I think some people felt that this was going to lead to changes that we want. And other people were afraid, oh, this is just some Trojan horse kind of process that’s going to make the Church wildly more progressive and change all these rules and stuff. And it was neither of those things. Instead, it really is an invitation to try to become the people of God and try to learn in this generation what that means. So, I was deeply compelled by the vision and just went all in. As we were just getting started with Discerning Deacons, we went to the opening mass of the Synod around October ‘21. And we were journeying with women who had participated in the Synod on the Amazon, and that really was like them starting to carve the new path of deeply participatory processes that surface what are the needs and hungers of the people of God that need to be [00:08:00] addressed and prioritized for us to move forward. And so, meeting these women who’d led the process across the Amazon and who’d participated in the Amazon Synod as observers—non-voting members, but part of this experience—I just really felt, “Oh, this feels like a way to let the Spirit in.” And it invites us to think of ourselves more as a people on the way, as a pilgrim people as opposed to a people that have all the answers or as just part of an all-knowing church that already knows where we need to go and what we need to do. Christina Gebel: Yeah. Yeah, that’s huge. And thank you for laying the groundwork for explaining that because as somebody who wasn’t as closely involved or even, I think I was aware that it was going on, but the Synod on Synodality piece, I could see my Catholic nun elementary school teacher being like, “You can’t define a word with using the word!” I was stuck on this, what does it mean. I love the part when you brought up that Pope Leo was in attendance. I remember Father Jim Martin saying, Oh, Pope Leo was at my table at the Synod. At the time, he was a Cardinal. Wow, what a great person to have at your table, because he then became Pope! Great seating arrangements. So, Casey Stanton: Yes. [laughs] Christina Gebel: So you, Casey, were just really onboard with what the vision was, but then you made a decision to be a part of it in a really tangible way. And that also involved your family, which is what this series is about. Many families just sat in the pews and said, Okay, what do we need to do? Sure. Great. Maybe they had an opinion, but your family is special. And that’s what I would love to hear about from you in your own words. Casey Stanton: Yeah. So, in terms of our family in this season, my kids were eight and 10. So my husband and I had often dreamt of could we do a missionary season in our family life? We both want to root our own family life deeply in the heart of the Church, and we want our kids to see that the Church is bigger than our local parish, as much as we love and are anchored in our local parish. I think we both were deeply shaped by immersive experiences abroad. My husband spent some time in El Salvador when he was pretty young. And it really deeply shaped his whole worldview and his understanding of the urgency of the Gospel around people’s material needs. And the work of peacebuilding is not abstract. So, it was a dream in the heart of our marriage, and we just weren’t ever sure when the time would be and when to disrupt your life. You’re raising your kids, you’re doing your jobs, you’re trying to do right. And, actually, I was on a retreat with a group of women—it’s a dangerous time—just with some dear, close, old friends. And at the same time, one of my oldest friends from chil
Apr 2

Episode 10: Fostering & Adoption through a Faith-Filled Lens

Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode 10, “A faith-filled lens of fostering and adoption.” Welcome back, everyone. I am really excited to be here with you today, still in our second season called Radical Family, where families are making bold choices to live out their faith, and I am so pleased today to have two dear friends, local to where I am in North Carolina, who have made the faith filled decision to grow their family, and I think you will really love to hear their story, hear them reflect on that time in their life. So with that, I will hand it over to Heather and Patrick Curran. Would y’all like to introduce yourselves? Heather Curran: I’m Heather and I [00:01:00] am a nurse and a lifelong Catholic. I was raised in Southern California. I had the pleasure of meeting Patrick in college when we were both at the Jesuit University of Loyola University Chicago. Woo. And then we married and moved to North Carolina where we have been for a long while now. And we have been married creeping up on 20 years, but about 17 time really flies. I’ll pass it on to Patrick. Patrick Curran: Thank you, Dear. Christina, yeah, it’s great to be doing this with you. I’m Patrick Curran. By way of introduction I’m Heather’s husband and in the foster care journey. I have to say she’s definitely been the leader, but I’m certainly an avid and willing participant so glad to be doing that. As she mentioned, we’ve been married for almost 20 years. And I think for this context, it’s relevant to say that our faith is maybe part of what brought us [00:02:00] together. And our faith is what led us to our faith community here in North Carolina when we moved here in 2020 and our Heather Curran: In 2010. Patrick Curran: Thank you. In 2010, too many zeros. Our decision to become foster parents and the journey through all of that has been supported by that faith community in incredible ways and continues to be so I’m grateful for all of that. And I’m sure we’ll obviously unpack that more and a little bit about our background and how we came to that. Christina Gebel: Yes. And absolutely we will unpack it ‘cause I know personally, just by the pleasure and honor of knowing both of you, that there’s a real discernment journey there and a great story. And I would say a very happy, not ending, but a very happy present that we will get to, certainly Patrick Curran: Ongoing. Christina Gebel: Yes. A very happy ongoing presence. But perhaps you could take us [00:03:00] back to the beginning. I knew you all when you were. In one of the 17 years, and you were think thinking about growing your family and you were attempting to do that. Can you tell us about those years and share as much or as little as you’d like to about your journey to starting a family? Heather Curran: I think from the beginning, both Patrick and I were very interested in having family. That was always a part of our conversations when we were dating. Our way of dating, I think, was always thinking about the future and I don’t think either of us were good at being casual daters. From the time that we were growing in our relationship, what would a family look like if we were to marry, was always a part of the conversation. I knew beginning in college that there was potential that it would be a challenge for me to get pregnant. [00:04:00] So that actually was a conversation that we started having before we were even married. And if that were to be a reality, what would that be like for you, Patrick. And would that be something we could maneuver together? In our marriage at the time, both of us very easily said yes, adoption would be a very reasonable choice for us. And something that even if we were able to have our own kids, we would be open to talking about. And I think that really helped when later on down the line, that became a reality. At least for me, it was very comforting to know that this is something that we had been in alignment on, from the get-go. Fast forward, we’re married, we were open to having kids from the beginning. It was just something both of us had always wanted and imagined for our lives. And it was not happening. And not happening. So the first year, nothing, but that’s okay ‘cause we’re trying to figure [00:05:00] out how to be married, and that’s its own challenge with its own ups and downs. And fast forward probably five years we had settled in North Carolina and we were really in a place where we felt stable as adults. We had a home and well before we had hoped for a family, it was fine that we weren’t, ‘cause maybe we weren’t totally prepared, but now we felt we were in a place where we really were ready to be moving forward with that and it wasn’t happening and we were ready to investigate the next steps are there things that we can be doing to make it happen. So, we went to a fertility specialist and did some workup. And for women out there that have been through this, that piece has its own emotional journey. I think for me, I went through HSG ultrasound. It’s a very vulnerable experience, and I feel [00:06:00] comfortable sharing that here because I know for other women, this is also a point at which a reality you’re afraid of can become very real. And for me, while I was in the ultrasound, I just, I knew based on what was happening with the people around us and the healthcare professionals, that there definitely was a challenge. It didn’t even feel right for me while it was happening. And I was like, okay, this is this is a reality. And I think I had that nagging feeling for a long time, but it was in that moment on the table, and I started to sob during that experience and Patrick was right there, and I could see it in his eyes that he could see the pain. For me, I’ll say it was grief. There was a lot of grief in that moment. And then it completed. We didn’t talk about results. And Patrick and I just went to lunch together in Chapel Hill, and he just created space for me to be grieving and listened and received that. And I will always [00:07:00] be grateful to him that through this whole process, he has had his own things to process, but has always let me have my space and listened and been patient and asked first what it was and I needed what I needed in those moments and what was it that I felt comfortable with or was hoping to do next. In a relationship, that has given me lots of peace and made it, I think, a much easier, hard journey than it could have been. When we got the results, we had a great physician who is an expert in his field. But he started talking about IVF and for me, it has just been a gut feeling for me that was not a route that I wanted to take. And in that conversation I had said that, and he immediately said, is this a [00:08:00] religious thing? Because it doesn’t need to be. And I really bristled at that. Because for me it was a faith piece. It wasn’t [that] my religion has this rule. It wasn’t about I can’t do this as a Catholic. For me it was, I spiritually, feel, my gifts need to be used in a different way and our resources and how I want to move forward, I want to put in a different direction. So it was a negative experience for me in that moment. And again, Patrick, let me lead in how we moved forward from that, which was a wonderful gift. And maybe I should give him some space now that he offered all of that to me in those moments. But that was the point at which the conversation about moving forward with adoption [00:09:00] or foster care became very real, and we had to start making decisions about what that journey forward would look like. Christina Gebel: Yeah, Patrick, before you jump in on your reaction to that, I just wanna first thank you, Heather, for your vulnerability and sharing that, and for folks who know me personally, I can relate to a lot of what you’ve said. Just being on the fertility journey myself with my spouse, and also opting to not do IVF, not simply because it’s a rule, but just because it wasn’t for me, and having a supportive partner in that is just everything on that journey. Patrick, I’d love to hear what all that was like for you from your perspective. Not only accompanying, but witnessing everything that was happening and for me at least, in a very bodily way, [00:10:00] it’s happening to one spouse. But in your case, what was going on in your mind and in your faith conversation? Patrick Curran: Yeah. Thank you for that, Christina. There’s a number of things there that I’ve want to maybe touch on, and I appreciate you recognizing as a spouse, as a partner as someone who tries to live as a faithful person, I believe that God calls us to honor other people, right? And particularly in a Christian marriage, there’s a way of doing that. I think it’s very easy for the husband, for the male partner to be lost in that conversation. And to say I’m doing all this for my wife, or I’m like Christ calls us to sacrifice yourself for your bride. And I think it’s important that we not overlook the fact that men come to their marriages with dreams and ideas and [00:11:00] what all that is. So, maybe I can share a little bit of that. Going all the way back, as Heather mentioned, we had talked about this when we were dating and just the one little piece of color I would add there is that we both had at least in conversation, talked about wanting to have a big family. And, Christina, you know me well, you know that I love things that are big and chaotic. Yes, I can take things that are small and make them large very quickly. And I have 19 first cousins, and I love each of them in strange and unique ways, and always had dreamed that we would have a large family. And, in my own discernment process of my life and my career, that was a big component. I love the idea of big fam
Mar 24

Episode 9: Living in Intentional Community

Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is Episode 9: Living in Intentional Community with Others. So welcome, everyone. This is our inaugural episode of Season Two on the Moderate Catholic. We have wrapped up Season One, and we are now moving on to Season Two. And I teased the topic a little bit earlier, but it is radical family, and the topic, radical family, is about families making bold choices to live out their faith. And I’m so excited to kick off this season with four very dear friends of mine whom I met at a stage in my life and continue to be inspired by. And they’re going to talk to us today about what it means to live in intentional community with others. So, with [00:01:00] that, let’s get right down to it. My dear friend Jonathan will introduce himself and his wife, and then we’ll pass it to Carla. Jonathan Wittig: Good morning. Thanks for having us here. I’m Jonathan, and this is my wife, Lisa. And we have three children: Caroline, who’s 11, Ben, who’s nine, and Katherine, who’s seven. We were longtime Chicagoans and are now new residents in Minnesota in the past couple of years. So, I’m excited to be here today. Carla Lents: Hello. Thanks, Christina. We are Ryan and Carla; we actually grew up together in Indiana and then moved to Chicago and have lived here for over 20 years. We have two sons, Caleb, who is 15, and Micah, who’s 10. Yeah, really excited to be here and talk about this. Christina Gebel: I am really excited to have you here. So, the reason that I know these folks, these awesome folks, is through a program that I continue to hold near and dear to my heart, which is Amate House program in Chicago. It’s a [00:02:00] faith-based service program where folks who graduate college can decide to dedicate a year or more as a fellow in service at a job in Chicago. And I was blessed to do that between the years 2007–2009, and that’s how I got to know Lisa as one of my house coordinators and eventually Ryan came on as program staff. I’m really glad that our faith connected us in this way, and what a better launching pad to discuss the topic of living in community. So, the first thing we’re gonna talk about is just how y’all came together. How did you get to know each other? What time period in your life? What were you doing? Enlighten us into how this all came to be. Lisa Wittig: Yeah. So, as Christina mentioned, I was working at Amate House back in 2007 when she was a fellow with the program. I had recently graduated from the program myself as a volunteer. That’s actually where Jonathan and I met. We both volunteered [00:03:00] together for a year, and I was working at Amate House. And then a few years into that, there was a staff transition. Ryan actually came on staff and started working at Amate House. We were in the same role, working with the program, supporting the volunteers. Ryan quickly became a good friend, and Jonathan and I met Carla and hung out with Ryan and Carla a few times. And at one point, Ryan came to me, and he had this crazy idea. Would you be interested in living in intentional community again? Certainly, a unique situation because we were married, and Ryan, I believe at that time, you had Caleb, who was a baby. And so just thinking about that idea, I was like, oh my gosh, you’re crazy. I wasn’t completely opposed to it, but I was like, you know who you should talk to? Jonathan has actually mentioned this before in our relationship to me as something he is interested in, and he’s also the dreamer and the doer in our relationship, and I am like the planner and executor, so I was like, Ryan, you need to connect with Jonathan. You two need to talk because I don’t think I’m the one to carry this dream to fruition, but it sounds exciting. Ryan Lents: Maybe I can pick up from there. I would say, for me, I think part of the curiosity of this was that a big part of our role at Amate House, Lisa and I, was being these house coordinators, and so it’s a very unique role. It’s like being a campus minister and an RA, although we didn’t live with the fellows. But we were a primary point of contact for them and would do things like office hours, community nights, retreats. So, we really accompanied them throughout their experience, and I would say vicariously lived through their experience of community, all the ups and downs. And it made it very rewarding and very challenging, and as Lisa mentioned, we had transitioned from a life stage of being right out of college where we had lived in community. I had not done Amate House as a fellow. I had been at a different program called Nazareth Farm in West Virginia, and that was a deeply formative time in my life. And I would also say I was pretty immature. There were a lot of things I needed to learn about life and about living with other people and about just how to grow up, and community was so deeply shaping in that way. I came to really realize how much I had missed it by being in this role where I was walking with people that were experiencing those ups and downs. Initially, I thought this is just something that you do when you’re not tethered to marriage and children and mortgages and things, but then I interrupted that presumption and said, what would it look like to actually go on this type of journey? And to think about this stage of life. And so that was the launching point of some conversations with Jonathan. We became fast friends, bonded around a lot of things that we had common interests around, but I think that idea of saying, hey, what would it look like for us to discern together and to think about how we could live out our faiths and our commitments as husbands, as wives, as friends in this unique stage of life as we’re starting family where there are a lot of just really big pressures and challenges and difficulties. It’s hard to live in the modern world. There can be a lot of really unhealthy messages that we get about individualism and doing things on our own. I got those messages really loud as a twenty-two, twenty-three-year-old. And those messages are just as powerful when you’re twenty-eight, twenty-nine, especially as you’re thinking about some of the real adult things that come on at that stage of life. I think we found a lot of common challenges and ideas that really started to make this thing seem like it could be real. Jonathan Wittig: Yeah. Just adding on to that, when I was in college, I was involved with a lot of intentionality within the campus ministry department at my university. And so, my roommates and I would try to live out community together in our own ways, even counting the toilet paper squares to see how much of stewardship we were living out on a day-to-day basis. A little crazy. But my year of Amate House was a challenging year where our sense of community was difficult. The service in the community was wonderful. Amate as a whole was wonderful, but I had a very [00:07:00] challenging year. But the concept of community living—I believed in it strongly. My simple explanation is Jesus lived in community. He was with these other guys, and they just went around together. And I’m sure that some of the disciples were frustrating to live with on a day-to-day basis. But they found the goodness in it. And they probably rose higher from the challenges that they faced on a day-to-day basis. And that’s how I hold community living, even when we chose to do it, or even in college or in Amate House, like there were a lot of hard days. But I think that those, like, you learned patience, and you learned kindness, and you learned self-reflection. And you hopefully are growing and not just so self-involved all the time. And I share that perspective with Ryan. I think that’s one of the many challenges we face right now in our common societies, that we’re all kind of self-involved in. But yeah, that made me want to continue to live this beyond this ate volunteer year because it makes total sense. I wanted to be able to have that community as we raise our kids. And there’s more to that, but I’ll share that [00:08:00] later. Christina Gebel: Yeah, so I really love what you all have been saying, and Ryan, I was like, you and I did Amate House. I can relate to thinking like this is something you do in your mid-twenties, and then you do other things and include other people and even little people and bills and all that stuff. And as we were talking, I’m realizing that we were kicking around this phrase “intentional community,” and the five of us have an idea of what that is, but to anybody new to the concept, maybe just a few reflections from you all on how you would define that. We use this phrase, “intentional community,” in conversation, but what is it? And in this pre-decision period of making the bold choice, how were you thinking about that? What kind of values were coming up for you? Ryan Lents: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that phrase, “intentional,” is really important because I think with so many things in life, we can have a lot of hopes and dreams for things. But for me, the piece about intentional is, what are the routinized kind of ongoing daily practices that reflect a commitment? And I think the same is true in marriage. It’s like you could talk about intentional marriage. Just because you make a commitment on one day doesn’t mean that on day 1725, that it’s gonna be as easy. It takes an intentional effort and commitment to say, yes, today I will love my spouse and animate those commitments that we made on the day that we exchanged rings. I think the same is true in community. Our experience was one of a lot of active discernment where we would do a good job of framing big questions that we were living into with our lives. We didn’t just say yes one day and then cut a check
Mar 3

Season 2 TEASER: Radical Family - Coming Soon!

[00:00:00] Hey, everyone! This is Christina. I am tuning into today with some exciting news, and that is that Moderate Catholic has officially wrapped its first season on acedia! I hope y’all had a good time listening to the episodes and exploring the bonuses. And believe it or not, it is now actually time to move on to season two. So, what started at a sub podcast, which was kind of like, yeah, we’ll see where things go, has now grown up into toddlerhood, and hopefully it won’t be the terrible twos! So, we are approaching season two, and I’m just dropping a quick note to let you know that the theme of season two will be…Radical Family! [drum roll sound effect followed by applause sound effect][00:01:00] Now, you might be saying, okay, what is that? “Radical Family” is a phrase that came to me as I was starting to think about season two, and it was inspired by a homily that I heard when I was living in Boston with one of my favorite priests there, and he was talking about how radical means “roots.” And so, if you think of like a radish, right? Radish…grows underground. It has roots, soil, earth, that sort of thing. That’s the extent of my Latin connecting the dots. So radical means to get to the root of something. And he was saying that, on its face, radical seems like extreme, right? Like we usually use radical as someone or something that’s like way [00:02:00] over on one end of the spectrum or defies all the typical paradigms when really. Radical means to get to the essence of something if we’re looking at those Latin underpinnings, and I got to thinking about that. What I realized was our faith is radical in both ways, right? What does it mean to be a radical Catholic? One, it could mean those big, huge bold ideas that we use when we talk about being radical secularly, the big ideas, breaking the norms, all those things. But it also could mean, like, getting down to the essence of our faith, and if we really distill down to the root of our faith, what emerges is ironically actually something quite radical To follow Jesus, [00:03:00] really in a true way, the essence of what He taught, upending what had been taught up until then to get to the root of Jesus’s message is actually to live a radical life. So, I started kind of playing with that double meaning of radical, both bold, but also foundational essence, and I started thinking, you know, what would it mean to be a radical family in today’s world? And I’ve always had an interest in family since I am a birth doula, and have studied a lot of marriage and family ethics and theology, and I started to think about what would it mean if a family was radically living out their faith? On the one hand, it would be families that are making really bold choices. So maybe it’s they’re living [00:04:00] their home life a different way, or maybe the way that their family comes together is different, or the service or the mission or the social justice that they’re committing themselves to as a family looks a little different than your average family in society, but also, if we’re talking about the faith aspect of all of it, it also means like how is this family really embodying the essence of what Jesus was calling all of us to do, but in this case, as a family unit. When I put those two together, that phrase “radical family,” I started to think about families who I know who I would point to, to say, hey, they’re doing something a little different. They’re not just doing the norm. Not that the norm is necessarily bad or lacking, but they’re inspiring. They’re trying to do things with intentionality. And when I [00:05:00] was an undergrad and really into marriage and family ethics, I really looked up to my theology advisor and how she was intentionally living out faith in her family, and when you walked into their house, you kind of knew in little and big ways that this family had something that they were really committed to. So, using that inspiration, I started to think about other people in my life who were doing similar exemplary things, inspirational things, faith-filled things. And I started coming up with a short list of people I knew I wanted to interview, but then I started talking to people and asked, hey, if you were to pick a radical family, and this is what that kind of sort of means in my head, who would you think of? And it was really inspiring honestly, to hear from people as to who comes to mind when they think of that phrase what resulted was [00:06:00] just a lot of really cool, interesting conversations. I have somehow whittled down all those amazing conversations to the episodes that you’re going to hear in this season. But I hope that you’ll hear it and not think of it as like, oh my gosh, that is so amazing, [but] there’s no way me or my family could ever do that. That’s not the point! It’s not to make it seem impossible, but maybe what they’re saying or how they’re saying it will spark something in you to allow you to dream bigger or dream a little bit farther or nudge yourself a little bit more on how you can intentionally live out your faith with the people who are closest to you, your loved ones, however you would choose to define your family. So, that is where we’re heading. And I think you’re gonna be really just inspired by these [00:07:00] stories of faith. A lot of times we hear stories of faith about the individuals: saints, exemplary people, et cetera, et cetera. But to do it in family life, I think, personally, is an above and beyond commitment because it involves other people in such a deep and intimate way. And like individuals in our modern-day world, families also have a lot going on when it comes to wrestling with the modern-day kind of autopilot, and it takes a little bit to break out of that and think really intentionally, especially when it comes to faith. So, if any of that was like, huh, that sort of makes sense, or that might be interesting, I hope you’ll join me in season two. We have a lot of really great people and excellent conversations ahead! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christinagebel.substack.com
Mar 2

Episode 8a: BONUS An Examen for Acedia in Our Modern Time

Introduction to the Reflection Welcome to the Examen on Acedia, produced for you by Christina Gebel with The Moderate Catholic. As we enter into this time together, think about how you might want to use this Examen. You could use it with a retreat, after a month’s time in your life, during a Church season - like Advent or Lent - but for the purposes of our time here, we will be using it to reflect on a week that has passed in our life. Reflection Part I So, with that, I invite you to sit and rest, find a comfortable spot, perhaps have a pen or paper nearby in case you want to write down a [00:01:00] thought. And very gently invite yourself to settle your spirit and try to just turn down the volume of your mind. As you’re turning down the volume of your mind, try and turn up the awareness of everything presently around you, of the body that you’re in, the touch, the sound, the feelings around you, and slowly quiet the mind and become fully present.[00:02:00] To open our reflection, we’ll use the quote from Psalm 46, verse 10. We’ll repeat this quote a few times, slowly, so that we can invite God into this space with us. Invite the Holy Spirit, invite Jesus to be with us in our time today: “Be still and know that I am God.” This next time, try taking a series of deep [00:03:00] breaths and we’ll read again from Psalm 46, verse 10: “Be still and know that I am God.” “Be still and know that I am God.” Now that you’ve gotten to a still place, think about the last week or whatever time period that you want to reflect on today. [00:04:00] Think about all the ordinary or special things that might have happened in that time. Think about the ordinary ways you might have spent your weekdays. Think about the evenings. Think about the weekend Recall the people, places, and things that came up in that normal progression of your day, [00:05:00] of your week. And now kind of float above those memories. Kind of be a mindful, neutral observer of everything that’s coming to mind and ask yourself, what was your energy feeling like? Was it energetic? Did you feel excited about something? Maybe you felt bored or a little bit like autopilot? Were there [00:06:00] times when you might’ve been lethargic or maybe tired? Not feeling very motivated, Or perhaps you are a little jittery, maybe a little bit distracted, feeling like you’re going from one thing to the next with barely a pause. Or maybe you had times when you felt weary. Maybe you had a hard time feeling hope. Maybe some despair crept in. Maybe the time or hours seem to drag on in parts of your day. [00:07:00] Parts of your week or maybe time just kind of felt like it stopped altogether. So, take a moment and just think: how was your energy? Jot down some thoughts or take some mental notes about all the variations in your energy. Keep holding those thoughts in your head, those feelings, those memories, and ask yourself, did you doubt yourself at all? Did you have doubts about what you’re doing in [00:08:00] life? Did any questions come up as to what you are meant to do? Did you have a time when you might have felt unworthy? Did you have a time when you wanted to escape or get away or evade something? Did you find your mind wandering, daydreaming, wondering if there was something better, maybe a better job, a better place to live, [00:09:00] a better program, a better path? Did you seek the stimulus of something new? Did you neglect something that maybe you said you’ve committed to? Or perhaps push off something that you’ve been meaning to do to another day? Another time?[00:10:00] Did you sit down to do something and maybe felt overwhelmed? Maybe you decided to stop before you even tried? Now, think of times that you were totally alone. What were those small moments of silence or small windows of time when you were just with yourself? Did that feel uncomfortable? Did you [00:11:00] find yourself reaching for something to occupy your mind? Maybe it was your phone. Scrolling, shopping, social media, turning to the news, playing a game, texting someone… Did you find yourself seeking comfort in distraction? Were there times that you were alone, but maybe you were multitasking?[00:12:00] Eating while working? Talking while driving? Now, think about your body. Were there times when you became, maybe, frustrated or impatient with your health? Impatient, maybe, with the limitations of your body. Did you have that feeling of there’s just not enough hours in the day?[00:13:00] Did you have a time when you found yourself drifting back to the past? Did you find yourself with a sense of longing for days when you were younger, felt differently, life was simpler, you felt more happy, maybe more free to do what you chose?[00:14:00] Was there a time this week that you tried to talk yourself out of something? Maybe you had the thought that you were “too” something to try. Maybe you felt too young, maybe too old. Too inexperienced, Too far along down [00:15:00] one road already. In too deep already. Too busy. Or maybe it was that you felt that you just have too many people depending on you in the current situation. Take a moment now and pause and just let those thoughts, those feelings, those memories kind of bubble up to the surface and just simply sit with them. Sit [00:16:00] with them like you would find yourself sitting across from someone at a table, on a bench. Hold those memories, those moments, those scenes, those feelings. And accept them as part of your story… Without judgment. [00:17:00] Without feelings of less than, or unworthiness or screwing something up… Just accept them for what they are without judgment in a space of peace and neutrality. Reflection Part II Now once you’ve sat there with all of that, [00:18:00] I want you to just sit up, reposition yourself wherever you are, and just start taking some deep breaths in and out. Deep breaths in and out. And on these next breaths, breathe in and out with a spirit of openness. Now I want you to go back to that same time period that you’ve been [00:19:00] recalling the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, and now we’re going to turn to a different set of questions. Was there a time that you felt joy? Was there a time that you saw yourself laughing authentically? Was there a moment in there that you felt your load lighten? Did someone or something [00:20:00] make you feel really excited? Did something spark your curiosity? Did something come up and you questioned was that a coincidence or was it a sign? Did someone say something to you that really stuck with you?[00:21:00] Did you have moments when you felt like you were in “flow”, when all your systems were firing in the best kind of way? And you felt this kind of energy, even if the task was mundane or simple, Did you have a moment when you felt fully present or immersed in something? Did you feel like you never wanted it to end?[00:22:00] You could have sat there, stood there, listened, or learned all day feeling totally absorbed. Did you have periods of gratitude for where you were, where you are in your life, or who you are? Did you experience a profound or surprising moment of clarity?[00:23:00] Did you feel the depth of an unquestionable commitment to something, even if it was hard? Did you find yourself dreaming? Daydreaming? Wondering? Even if you or someone said it was impossible and probable or could never happen, did you find yourself wondering if maybe it could?[00:24:00] Did you have a time when you felt like you were tempted to flee or distract yourself, but instead you just stopped and stayed? Did you stop worrying or dwelling on something and choose to trust God instead? Did you sit with discomfort or not having an answer?[00:25:00] Did you persevere in prayer or making it to church or showing up at a church event, even when you didn’t feel like it? Even when it might’ve felt impossible or that nothing seemed to be going your way to get there? Did you have any moment when you remembered why you felt called to do something? Why you felt called this job, this vocation?[00:26:00] Did you remind yourself why you love doing something so much? Did you relish in something that you’ve really missed? Did you persist in hope, even if everyone and everything around you said otherwise? Did you do any of these things and find peace and joy on the other side?[00:27:00] Maybe you found a renewed commitment, A fond reminder, A surprising curiosity, A deeper gratitude, A clear vision, A greater sense of trust [00:28:00] in God, A greater comfort with who you are, A belief in your own unique gifts, your fundamental worthiness. And now I want you to gently rest a hand on your shoulder and bring yourself back. [00:29:00] Gently, slowly return to the present moment. Be aware of your breathing. Be aware of your body. And take these last moments to just sit with a question. What stayed with me, what’s still lingering there? Nudging you stay with that whisper, stay with that nudge, and let it speak [00:30:00] directly to you. Maybe you want to stay there and be with the quiet of those feelings, those messages, those Divine [00:31:00] revelations. Or, if you want to gently bring yourself back, slowly open your eyes and reenter the world that God has given you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christinagebel.substack.com

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The Moderate Catholic makes space for people who live out their Catholic identity in a way that engages yet transcends secular frameworks and political agendas with a focus on deepening one’s spirituality and commitment to social justice. christinagebel.substack.com

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