One day last winter when I was skiing with my family, we were sitting outside on a deck eating lunch. I started people watching, and as I looked around at everyone eating and talking, I started to imagine how God saw them. All of a sudden, I could feel His immense love for them. The tenderness in their eyes, the way the light hit their auburn-gold streaks, the way their hands moved when they talked. They were each a creation. Beautiful, unique, sacred.

We are made in His image. When you look closely, you can see the divine.

I remember reading somewhere this grace of seeing God in others is a mark of being a Catholic. When you come to see another person as Imago Dei, a soul created in the image of God, you can’t help but love them if you love God. You can’t help but love humanity. They are you. You are they. 

The greatest commandment makes so much sense then: To love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.  Because we are all beloved by God. There is a part of God in us, and there is a part of God in them. 

In its description of the four marks of the Catholic Church – that it is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic – Loyola Press writes about the mark of Holiness:

 “Through the Holy Spirit the Church leads others to holiness. The holiness of the Church is seen in the love that the members of the Church have toward one another and the many sacrifices they make for the sake of the world.”

We’re all called to this holiness, and I’ve found that looking for this in people instantly shifts my perspective in dealing with them. The checkout girl, the radical protester, my husband in the middle of an argument. My interaction radically changes when I try to see God in them. 

We are made in His image. And yet, we are fallen. 

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” We find the divide out there, in the world. And we find it in our own hearts: the fault line that exists between the good we possess and the sinner that we are, and the potential for either of these to grow. 

This all can lead us right to the brink of an existential crisis, unless we remember God’s love and mercy. He loves his creation. He loves us like a father loves his child, and like a father he made us like him. Genesis 1:26-28 tells us three times that he made us in him image.

The first lie ever uttered was denying this.

Right after God said ‘let us make man in our own image’, the devil shows up and makes Eve doubt God, saying he doesn’t want you to eat of the tree of knowledge because ‘he does not want you to be like him.’ (Genesis 3:4-5). His cunning is so apparent. He stokes Eve’s mistrust precisely over this part of her identity because our Imago Dei is so important, and because the devil hates it.  

Of course God wants us to be like him. That is the whole of the Christian life. To put on Christ the way that Jacob put on Esau’s clothes to gain the blessing of his father Isaac, to share in the father’s inheritance (Genesis 27).

This awareness has helped me so much relate to myself. And relate to others. The spiritual life becomes trying to let Him increase, and let our brokenness give way to Christ’s healing. And in the midst of trials, I remind myself that God allows pain and suffering and brokenness because he can transform our hurt into something that yields greater life than if it had never happened. It leads to a greater good than if the suffering had not been there at all. This leads to surrender and trust and peace.

No matter where we are at in our relationships, we can always try to locate Imago Dei. Find that part, and you can find compassion. For yourselves, for others, and for humanity. 

Then everyone becomes our teacher. Either they show us how we can be more filled with God, or they caution us how to not be broken off from the vine. All we can respond to them with is compassion then. 

Christ came to meet the dysfunction of this world, and to respond to it with peace. So when other people hurt us, and deny the Imago Dei – in us and in themselves – it can be intensely painful, but God is at work in that suffering. He is teaching us forgiveness, but he is also teaching us to stand up for our own worth, because we are made in his likeness. This requires us to have healthy boundaries, and to try to live up to the parts of us that are like God, and to remember the parts of them that are too. 

Remembering this about all the people God has put into my life helps me to treat them with charity and respect. They are a reflection of his imagination. He dreamed them up, and created them, and put a piece of himself in them. When we remember this, we are quicker to forgive, quicker to reconcile, quicker to find peace.

As Catholics, we are striving to be like Christ. He hungered for wholeness and healing. This is what authentic love looks like. And when we fail at authentic love, there may be wounds, but they are always an invitation, an opportunity, for Christ to bring out an even greater good.  

This Lent I had big plans. Big plans. I was going to stare down those things that held me back from being who God made me to be. I was going to conquer those habits, those sins, those pesky human weaknesses once and for all. 

And once again, I am reminded that I don’t conquer anything. He does. On his time table. 

I just finished the beautiful book The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing the Divine Love that Reorders a Life by Seth Haines, and of the many books I have read over this Lent, it was the one I needed most. 

Because it reminded me of what I need most. Divine Love. Putting it first. Putting all creation, all created goods second to that love. Drinking from it when I feel pain, loss, and fear. It is always there, waiting for us.

Have you ever noticed when God is trying to hammer home a point, when he really wants you to understand something he sends it in multiple ways? This ordering in our hearts point has been every where I look. I found it as I finished Searching for and Maintaining Interior Peace by Fr. Jaques Philippe, where he quotes several saints and spiritual directors that echoed this message of turning to the Divine love quickly after we fall. From Fr. Francois Libermann:

When we always see the same faults in ourselves, let us remain in our lowliness before Him. Let us open our souls to Him so that He may see our wounds and our scars that it may please Him to heal us when and as He desires...

The more we are dependent on him, the more our souls acquire grandeur, beauty and glory, so much so that we can heartily glory in our infirmities. The greater our infirmities, the greater, too, our joy and happiness, because our dependence on God becomes that much more necessary.

From Padre Pio:

Peace is the simplicity of spirit, the serenity of conscience, the tranquility of the soul and the bond of love. Peace is order, it is the harmony in each one of us, it is a continual joy that is born in witnessing a clear conscience, it is the holy joy of a heart wherein God reigns.

When I started the Bible in a Year podcast with Fr. Mike Schmitz, right out of the gate, the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis echoes this truth too. All sin comes from enjoying a created good, a part of God’s creation, in a disordered way. The apple was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and it was desired to make one wise. 

All sin is just substituting something for that apple: kids, jobs, sports, or as Haines writes, a coping mechanism like food, shopping, drinking, Netflix, Instagram – and putting it ahead of our God. But it can never satisfy, because our hearts were created to love and be loved by Him. 

Then we are like Adam and Eve after they ate the apple. We hide from God in our shame, and we see our vulnerable state, our nakedness, and try to cover it up. Before we know it, we move farther and farther away from God if we are not aware of what’s happening.

But when we can quickly turn back to the Divine love, to God who wants to brush our sins away and keep loving us, then we stop feeling shame, and our hearts are filled to the brim once again with Divine love. When we recognize that to be weak is the human condition, we can quickly turn to compassion for ourselves, and compassion for others. Because when we are filled up by Divine love, we have more for everyone else. 

Basking in that love has been the joy of this Lent. Even when I fall, even though I caved and ate popcorn last night at 10 pm, the awareness of how much he desires to be with us and walk with us and how much he loves us is so clear right now. Nothing can stand in his way if we open the door to God, not even our sin. 

Talking about sin is always unpopular (see John the Baptist’s head on a platter), especially with teenagers. They see the world upholding all these created goods that are good in themselves but are valued above God in our culture. So we go back to the beginning, to the Garden. God created you for love. He wants to walk with you. He wants to spare you the pain of evil. But when we keep choosing to eat of it, when we live our lives for ourselves, by ourselves, instead of trusting him, trusting that he will take care of us, we end up shutting him out. So we just keep opening the door. We just keep sitting with Divine love, asking it to fill our hearts. And it really does satisfy, and it has been filling me with peace and joy and love and that grandeur Fr. Liebermann wrote about.

So if that’s all I do this Lent, if I turn back to God quickly and lovingly after I fall, if I keep sitting with him and drinking in his Divine love, then it will be more than enough. It will be everything. 

I wrote my eulogy when I was 22. 

It was part of a course I took for my job in investments, to help develop personal growth and time management. It was an exercise that was meant to focus you on your deepest longings, goals and desires. 

When I wrote my hypothetical eulogy, my dad had died three years before. So to me, eulogies weren’t hypothetical. They were real things like baseball scores and sunsets. 

It was perhaps a bit ironic that writing that eulogy made me want to quit my job and write. I realized once I got a job in the real world, and took that course, that my longing to think about what was true, to touch people’s hearts about what matters most, was the loudest truth I could hear. 

And that is the thing about eulogies. They make us listen to our deepest longings and dreams. And our world so desperately needs us to hear them. Writing mine pointed me towards grad school in philosophy and writing novels and being a mother. I can’t imagine going back to the girl I was before I thought deeply about my death.  

Tomorrow marks one year ago when the world shut down due to the Coronavirus. Over 500,000 people have died. Death is on our minds now in a more technicolor way than ever and so many people have had to grieve loved ones. Our lives have turned upside down in unimaginable ways and we are still not back to the normal before. I can barely picture a time when my car wasn’t covered in masks.

It was Lent then, as it is now, a season where we focus on memento mori – a Latin phrase that means ‘remember our death’. 

There is this paradox that exists where remembering our death leads us to living life more deeply. If we can remember that we are ashes and to ashes we return, and we realize there is a great God who loves, despite our limits and weakness, it can set us free. We are liberated from a paralyzing fear of death. With that clear picture, we can make the most of our lives. We can love others well. We can prioritize, discover what is most important to our hearts, and let the rest go. If we put our lives into the hands of the one who conquered death, it yields peace and joy for the present moment – always our tangent point to eternity – and the awareness of storing up forever treasures in Heaven by offering everything we have and everything we are. We get to put into perspective how this life is so, so short compared to eternity. 

St. Theresa of Avila said, “It’s Heaven on the way to Heaven, and Hell on the way to Hell.” 

There is such a peace that comes from prioritizing loving Him, and then loving others. From the understanding that he redeems not only the broken parts of us but the beautiful parts too. The whole story is not just death, but also the Resurrection.

The season of Lent is a reminder of our death, and a Pandemic Lent reverberates even louder. Through the last year I’ve thought of a quote a lot from General John Stark, (who happens to be my husband’s great-great-grandfather and my son Andrew Stark shares his name). He wrote a letter from which the line ‘Live Free or Die’ is taken, which New Englander’s recognize as New Hampshire’s license plate slogan. What I thought about a lot is the other half of the quote which often gets forgotten:  

Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils

And that seems to be exactly what we need to remember. 

The unfulfilled potential, the prisons we spend our life in, the fears that hold us hostage. The unexamined life where people stay unconscious to their hopes and dreams. There are worse things than death, like a life not lived.

If you haven’t already I highly encourage you to write your eulogy. Almost every growth course or life coach I have looked into has you write one because it is powerful. What becomes urgent when we do is what we give to others. Service, love, compassion, being present. Everything else fades and makes you want to eliminate it from your life. Selfishness flees and ego-driven pursuits become glaringly obvious under the searing fire of the truth.

I hope that this year has taught people a taste of what matters most. What sustains us and ways we can find joy in the present moment, in loving others despite a lot of limits on our lives. I hope everyone can say that they can’t imagine going back to being the person they were before the Pandemic, before they thought deeply about their death.

I’ve since written more eulogies. I wrote one for my funny, gregarious brother eight years ago who died of MS. My sister wrote a beautiful one for our sweet sister last year. I know death stings. Jesus wept when Lazarus died. But that isn’t the whole story. 

Death is not the worst of evils. 

If you have been to college, you have probably studied Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. But in case you haven’t or your memories of your Philosophy 101 class are fuzzy, here is a recap: The Allegory is Socrates’ depiction of the effects of education on a soul. Picture a cave where people are chained to the wall, and all of their lives they have been facing another blank wall. In the center of the cave, behind the people, there is a fire. In between the fire and the people, objects are passing by, so the people live watching shadows of these images on the wall and they think they are so real, they give names to them.

They don’t know about the fire. They don’t know about the people parading the images. And they really don’t know that above them, there is an exit out of the cave that leads outdoors, into sunlight.

The person who is in the cave thinks that the images are reality. But when they are unchained – and Socrates holds that education of the soul has the power to break these chains – then they see the reality of the fire and the objects around it. If they move higher in their learning, they see the sunlight and are drawn towards it, for they see that this is truly reality.

I was thinking about this description of ‘enlightnment’ ever since our world has been transformed by our smart phones, and our eyes have constantly been watching images on screens. It’s a testament to the grasp Socrates (and his student, Plato, who recorded his thoughts) had on human nature that it is still a very relevant explanation for the distortions of reality we face. One only needs to think of a teen who is driven to suicide due to online bullying or the grandmother who succumbs to rampant dissatisfaction and depression based on the images, the false reality, gleaned from social media’s images of other peoples vacations or grandchildren.

Lately I have been reading a lot about the brain, and the allegory is also a fitting description of our minds. The cave is the unconcious mind and the sunlit outside is the freedom we have in the conscious mind. We are in prison by our subconscious mind due to the beliefs and habits it holds onto, and these can very much feel like chains and shadows. Social media and the images it feeds to our unconsciousness keeps us locked up to the degree that we have wounds and limiting beliefs in our unconscious mind. When we are set free and can move beliefs from the unconscious to the conscious mind, the chains are broken, the truth of the reality of our wholeness is revealed, and we are set free.

How then are we supposed to use our technology, if it so easily generates shadows for us that clearly trigger thoughts and feelings from our subconscious mind that are hanging out in our basements like boogey men? I think about my 14-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter who have just started out with their own smartphones, and all the other children who are being handed these rectangles, not knowing that with out the proper education, they will become shackles for them?

The key word in this whole allegory is education. Plato believed in the correct formation of a soul, so taking into account the whole of our lives and habits helps us see the ones that are good for us and the ones that aren’t. Learning about makeup, cooking, and gardening on social media? All good things. But constantly being bombarded by images and voices when we haven’t already filled our souls with strong foundations of truth and beauty can mess with even the strongest social media user.

During my own social media fast I have found that my education has shifted from mindlessly scrolling to reading more books, diving deep into particular works of writers and thinkers. It has been really wonderful to sit with one voice for a period of time, to digest it, to get to know it, and to inform my thoughts in a meaningful way instead of stay in my mind for a fleeting moment, only to be driven out by the next stream of ideas and voices. I have so much respect for people finding their voices on social media, but the thing I personally struggle with is I can’t hear anything amid the sheer volume of them. And I know it really stunts me from sharing writing there because I don’t want to add to the noise. I want to be reflective, and then share. And to do that I need to study.

I also really struggle with the weaknesses of our brains that get exploited by social media. After watching The Social Dilemma which details this exploitation, it is hard to un-know how these weaknesses operate, and that everyone is being primed to be a consumer, to give over their most precious commodity – their attention. In Phenomenology, a recent modern branch of philosophy (which Pope John Paul the Great wrote his dissertation on) our attention goes by the name of intentionality. It is the core of our experience of living as conscious beings. It is the root of mindfulness, of meditation, of prayer. If we are giving all of that up to the hands of an algorithm, what does that mean for our experience of being alive?

For me, one of the most troubling parts of consuming social media has been having this distrust of what I am consuming. I am constantly asking, is the person creating this content looking for attention? Genuinely trying to share goodness and truth? Trying to sell me something? There is a lot of goodness, joy, community and humor to be found on social media. But the ways in which real life filters me from judging people – even just connecting to their basic 3-D humanity – are sometimes stripped from me on a two dimensional screen. This is why we see so much online vitriol. People forget that the other person is a daughter, sister, friend because of the apparatus they are using to connect.

On social media, there have also been many people who I start out enjoying, but when they start to post every single day about intense experiences and insights, they get watered down because of the platform I am consuming them on. Their thoughts look less like pearls of wisdom and more like shadows meant to manipulate my feelings and pull my attention by their confessional quality. I start to fatigue of the intensity of knowing their thoughts so up close, especially when they are louder and more frequent than those of my husband or my sister or my best friend. Without even being fully conscious of it happening, because it happens lightening fast, social media makes me judge others poorly at times. Not always, but the few times it does makes me happy to be taking a break.

Right after I wrote the first draft of this post I read this article on the Paradox of Abundance (which I found via Mama Needs Coffee blog). It arrives at these same conclusions about the abundance of information. Much like food, people are realizing that they need to think about what they are consuming if they want to be better, and they need to be consuming less. With so much abundance, more people are consuming more while a few elite are forgoing the surplus, using discipline and getting fitter/smarter. The idea of being free from the information overload sounds very appealing.

It all makes me glad to be avoiding social media and whittling away at my book stack on my nightstand/Kindle/Audible. It makes me want to stick to listening to voices that spend time in reflection instead of posting every day to please algorithms. If they have lasted the test of time, even better. And I know I am not alone. In fact I think people are on their phones hungry for something, and they want to know the truth about reality. Our eyes are watching screens because we are craving light, we just need to make sure we remind ourselves that all we need to do to find it is step outside.

The day after Christmas we went away for two weeks to the Bahamas.

Our neighbors have a house and a boat there, and our families always have fun together – the dads love to fish, the moms love to laugh, the kids love to play Among Us. Plus, 80% of both of our families have ADHD and the requisite understanding that brings makes us good travel partners. They have been asking us to go for years, but the twins always made it seem impossible.

But one day in early November, we got an email from the schools that they would all be remote until January 18^th, and they texted they were going to their island and did we want to come? We talked it over at dinner and decided let’s go!, a declaration that even now, nearly two months later, I can remember like a giant exhale. When would we ever have this chance again?

We carefully thought through our decision. All of my doctor friends thought going to a house on an island with very few cases wasn’t crazy, though one suggested we Med-flight home if anyone became sick, so we got insurance. (May we all be delivered from the desire to judge people who are taking the pandemic less seriously and more seriously than we are.)

As most families with young children will tell you, life during a pandemic isn’t that different than normal life. Going anywhere with two babies is hard. During the past three years we rarely ate out or took the kids to a store. We chose activities carefully, knowing that being in our own space was the easiest place to be between napping and baby proofing.

Having our own house on a remote island with our neighbors nearby seemed low risk and doable. It was, as you would expect, both hard and magical.

The list of things that made the Bahamas hard includes: sand fleas, sensory issues that can’t tolerate small amounts of sand and water (it has to be all or nothing), a few children routinely waking up before 6am, a flat tire for three days, the food stores being closed for three days, lots of power outages, and restaurants. To be fair that last one is hard at home too. 

But the list of things that is magical in the Bahamas includes the sunrises, which I wouldn’t see without those earlier risers, the sunsets, the fun in the water and the sand (once we are fully immersed), the snuggles, the little tan toddler legs running through the house, their sheer delight at creature comforts like cold apple juice or pizza or fresh jammies after a bath. A spotty Wifi is both as hard and wonderful as you can imagine. There was bonding with teens and toddlers who couldn’t understand why their show kept stopping.

The highlight for everyone was our friend’s boat, where the guys went deep sea fishing and caught massive fish. We went scuba diving in aqua blue water and sat on the deck drinking rum punch and watching flying fish. The memories made here were so worth the travel to get there.

The Bahamas is like a massage for all your senses. The bright pink bougainvillea draped around the yard, the birds’ melodic notes floating through air that is the perfect temperature all the time. Seriously, they don’t even have windows just slits on the doors that let the ocean breeze drift gently in all the time. The air makes you dreams extra vivid. The turquoise water and pink sand, the sea dotted with the gentle white-capped roll of waves, the ink-black night with the electric white glow of the full moon and the stars. The courtyard lined with conch shells like glossy pink and white kisses greeting you. 

But the real fire-works show, the real magic, is the people. Their houses line the streets in every shade of sherbet, mirroring their bright and colorful spirit. They showered our kids with affection and good cheer at every turn. The gas station owner – a grandfather to twenty-five – blew kisses to the twins and said “love you!” as we pulled away. The gentlemen selling melon and tomatoes at the market who adopted the twins the second they got out of the car, with high-fives, affectionate banter, and a gentle tsk-tsking when they ran away from me – you have to stay by your momma! – and even helped me to get them back into the car. The guitar player on New Year’s Eve brought Ronan right up to have a turn strumming.

Our friends have a couple that help them care for their house and they showed up on New Year’s with a turkey dinner, conch fritters, and a salad still warm from their garden. Spending time with them has been the best reminder of what matters most back at home. Their lives are built around their beautiful churches overlooking the ocean, their families, gardens, and kitchens tables. On Sundays everyone is together, dancing to a boom box or a guitar, and everyone waves at you when you drive by. 

The air made you crave well-being and I got to move and breath and soak up vitamin D. We all went to sleep at 9, since there is no Wifi then, and had the sleep of angels. If I need a reminder to not stay up late watching TV when I get home, I will remember these two weeks.  We ate a ton of fresh caught fish, and local produce sold from the back of cars.

We had a long day of travel home, involving the smallest airplane I’d ever seen, and a three year old who had decided he was very over traveling halfway through the day. We were ridiculously tired but as we turned onto our familiar street, I felt so grateful. Walking through our door, our house felt so comfortable – our sink, the cat, the creak on the stairs. Everyone was sighing with happiness as they slid pizza slices out of a box from our favorite place. It almost makes you think that maybe the best thing about going away is remembering how great it is to be home.