Franciscan at Home

I come here often. Sometimes I come in gratitude. Other times I come here to beg. I come alone. I come with my wife and our kids.

Growing up, it took thirty minutes to get here. Back country roads. Flat. Everything level and straight. Fields speckled with the occasional woods, a barn, a farmhouse. It was practically in my backyard. But then I moved. Now, it takes about three hours. I drive up the long interstate to those familiar country roads that lead into the village.

The sleepy, two-stoplight town is something of a time warp. Life just moves slower in Carey, Ohio. The rural way of life is simpler than the suburban variety.

I stay for hours, or for twenty minutes. Being here is all that matters.

Yes, I come here often. It’s in my blood.

I am a pilgrim.

Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation

In June of 1873, Fr. Joseph Peter Gloden was entrusted with the mission in Carey, Ohio: thirteen families and an unfinished church building. The people were discouraged. But Fr. Gloden rallied the small band of Catholics, and the nascent congregation finished the construction of the church. It was given the title Our Lady of Consolation, for, as Gloden said, “We are not yet at the end of our difficulties and we need a good, loving and powerful comforter.”[1]

After the church was dedicated, Gloden, originally from Remerschen, Luxembourg, sought to obtain a copy of the statue of Luxembourg’s Our Lady of Consolation. The statue was made of oak and adorned with a fabric dress. The replica of the statue from the Cathedral of Luxembourg arrived in Carey in March 1875. To give Our Lady’s statue a most solemn entrance into her new home, Fr. Gloden and his parishioners decided on a seven-mile procession to the church in Carey from the nearby parish in Frenchtown, Ohio.

The big event was to take place on May 24, 1875. The day before, a heavy storm swept through the area. On the morning of the proposed procession, another storm threatened. Lightning could be seen across the horizon. Gloden urged the crowd not to scatter, calling out, “Let the procession proceed; there is no danger.”[2] And so they charged into a thunderstorm. The rest is history. Rain poured all around the procession, but nobody in the procession got wet. Once the statue reached the church and was safely inside, the rain pelted the earth.[3] From the beginning, the whole thing was viewed as a miraculous event—a light prelude to events that would happen in Fatima some decades later. On that day in rural Ohio, Mary protected her beloved little ones from the elements.

When I close my eyes I can still see her. The woman who had just stepped to the front of the room preferred not to use the microphone, but her soft voice just didn’t carry in the small meeting area seating a posse of teenagers. We were on retreat, one of the few required prior to our confirmation.

In prayer after receiving Holy Communion, I recognized in my heart the voice of God the Father. “I want you to be radically available.” As Director of Religious Education in a large parish, I had an idea of what it meant to be radically available while working full time. It meant being available to God by showing up for daily Mass and prayer. It meant being available to my family for quick phone calls or spontaneous lunch meetings and for celebrations and vacations. It meant planning ahead but holding my plans loosely so I was interruptible. It meant keeping my office door open, welcoming parents or catechists who needed to talk.

Available to Rest in God’s Love

But why, I wondered, did God speak this phrase to me as I was retiring? I concluded that I was not to make any ongoing volunteer commitments but to trust God to lead me each day. For a couple of weeks, I delighted in unhurried phone conversations, invitations to travel, writing letters, cleaning neglected closets and corners, and catching up with friends over coffee after morning Mass.

Yet, I wondered, had I rightly understood the call to radical availability? Wasn’t it selfish of me to say no when my calendar was empty and I was qualified to help? What if I was taking the idea of radical availability too far? When I took my doubts to my husband and my spiritual director, they affirmed my discernment and encouraged me to stay the course.

During the summer after my senior year in college in 1990, I experienced a return and deepening of my faith through the intercession of our Blessed Mother. The following January, as a 23-year-old seminarian, I began attending Mass every day. Today—32 years later—I have since gone to Mass and received Holy Communion over 10,000 times. Little by little, bit by bit, these 10,000 Communions have transformed me. Only in retrospect can I appreciate how much I needed to be transformed. Today, I am still a work in progress, but the Eucharist is the center of my life, the daily event around which I plan all things. It is probably not surprising, then, that most significant events in my life somehow seem to get intertwined with my relationship with Jesus in the Eucharist.

The fact that I had a heart attack in 2021 is nothing extraordinary. People have heart attacks all the time—over 800,000 in the US every year. What makes mine remarkable are the circumstances surrounding it.

On Ash Wednesday that year, I went away on a three-day silent retreat with a friend. I fast during Lent and find it helpful to get my Lent started at a place with perpetual Eucharistic adoration and no food temptations. While praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament, I often pray using symbolic images of my heart. Sometimes, I sit silently and ask our Lord to make my heart beat in sync with his. Sometimes, I ask him to heal it. Oftentimes, I imagine him reaching into my chest with both of his warm hands; together, they completely cover my heart. I then imagine him lifting it out of my body and bringing it toward his face, where he carefully blows on it with his warm breath, melting the ice and making it healthy again.

As I spent these days in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, I received an unexpected and confusing thought during my prayer. While I prayed, I kept hearing that something was wrong with my heart. At first, I took this to mean a reference to my spiritual heart, so, naturally, I prayed for him to heal and transform it. But instead of a comforting, satisfying prayer, I felt increasingly agitated and unfulfilled. This was very frustrating, and it led me to question what this message meant. As we drove home on Saturday I shared this experience with my friend, and we concluded that I should schedule an appointment to get my heart checked out. At the time, I had no conscious awareness that anything might be wrong with it. Both of us agreed, however, that given my medical background—three bouts of cancer, two stem cell transplants, thirty lifetime surgeries, eighteen years of constant hospitalizations, etc.—it was probably a prudent thing to do.

How tempting it is to want the Lord to provide grace far in advance! Yet, in the Our Father we have the petition and the promise that our loving Father will give us our daily bread. While there are many layers of meaning, one implication in these words is that he will provide the grace we need in the specific circumstances of our day. In a world where self-sufficiency and independence are praised, we can easily forget this basic truth. It is a truth of which the Lord reminds me almost daily—sometimes even multiple times a day—to shift from my natural self-reliance to childlike trust in him. 

Mark your calendar for the upcoming 2024 Steubenville Conferences for adults, held on our beautiful campus in Steubenville, OH. Registration will open in late January, 2024. NOTE: The St. John Bosco Conference for Evangelization & Catechesis is being postponed until summer of 2025 because of our involvement with the National Eucharistic Congress. Hope to see you there! Questions? Call 740-283-6315.

After I graduated college and joined the military, I started volunteering for a parish youth group. I figured it would be a perfect way to dissociate myself from the hustle of work and diversify my friend group beyond my then-insulated circle of “sailor-mouths” and military-focused individuals. Having helped out with my college campus ministry for the past four years, I was certain that I had enough experience to help these kids fall in love with Jesus. Volunteering for a youth group would be a positive and easy way for me to pass the time.

My pride and passivity had never been checked so quickly.

I had been volunteering for all but two weeks before Fr. Michael, our parish priest, invited all the parish volunteers to a catechist formation retreat. I was not enthused. Even more than my hesitancy to give up an entire weekend was my hesitancy to open myself up to other people about my faith. I was entirely intimidated.

“If we can nurture in a [person] the emergence and the victory of spiritual liberty, we have accomplished our task. If not, all is lost and the Christian life will weaken into childishness; it will harden into formalism; and finally it will disappear.”  —Jean Mouroux, From Baptism to the Act of Faith 

Testimony 1: Lessons from Hallmark

I taught religion to the whole middle school, from sixth to eighth grades. I was also the homeroom teacher to the sixth-grade boys for most of the years I taught there. I was always on the lookout for anything I could use for my boys or for teaching in general. One evening at the convent, we watched a Hallmark movie, and I walked away with a one-line golden nugget that the Holy Spirit told me to write down for my boys: “A boy with courage grows up to be a man with courage.” I wrote it on my board the next day, and it stayed up all year long—and for all the years following. When the boys made good decisions like telling the truth, owning up to their mistakes, or encouraging each other, I would say something like, “Praise the Lord! I’m so proud of you. A boy who owns up to his mistakes will become a man who will take responsibility for them as well.”

. . .

Testimony 2: Am I a Missionary Disciple?

I was freaking out. I had been asked to give my first talk to the high school youth group, a group of about eighty teens. It was a talk on being a missionary disciple, and I didn’t feel like one. Mostly because I had recently graduated college and come into the Church through RCIA, and so most of my experience of the faith up to that point had been very “mountaintop,” full of consolation. But for the past two years, I had also worked a job as a waitress—a job I had started while still in my undergraduate studies and which was now my full-time job. This work environment that would consume hours of my day could make it very challenging for me to live like Jesus. Foul language, even a culture of sexual harassment, was everywhere. Though I wasn’t swept up entirely into all the sinful behaviors, it could be suffocating at times.

A popular saying that was making its way around social media was “bloom where you are planted,” but I felt as if I was wilting. Now I was supposed to give a talk on how to bloom, and I felt as if I didn’t know what that was like! Luckily, I had ties to a good community, and the overwhelming advice of my sisters and friends was to go to prayer and ask Jesus to show me where he had been working. So, that’s what I did.

. . .

My husband and I met George a few years ago through Marriage Encounter. He was a navy pilot. While his wife was Catholic, George was not religious. We were George and his wife’s prayer couple during their weekend