We recently had a funeral for a family member.  I was a bit annoyed by how much the priest talked about Jesus and how little he talked about the person who had died.  Isn’t the funeral supposed to be more of a celebration of the person’s life?

How much weight should I give to my past?  I mean, I’ve been told that I need to forget the past and move forward, but it seems like there ought to be something more to it.  

I sometimes just wish that I could run away from the life that I am living.  There is nothing terribly “wrong” with it, but I get this feeling that I should just leave this behind and try something new.  Is this a sign that I should?

I sometimes get so down on myself.  Even though I want to do good, I keep messing up.  The problem is: I know that it is my own fault, so I feel bad about asking God for help.

God approves of so much joy!  God approves of so much good!  He made a good world and then sets His beloved humans in the midst of this world and bids us to enjoy it! Our problem is not that God has prohibited joy.  Our problem is that we do not know how to enjoy the good things God has given.  Every one of us tends towards using good things in the wrong way or at the wrong time.  We find something that gives pleasure and we will binge on that thing until we no longer enjoy ourselves.  And then we find that we can’t stop.  Isn’t this a common phenomenon in our lives?  Students tell me about the entire season of a television show that they watched over one weekend on Netflix or Hulu.

Think of any great story. Every one of them is built upon this premise. If they weren’t, there is no real conflict; instead of fighting courageously when one encounters overwhelming odds or faces an impossible situation, the characters would simply die. The reasonable thing would actually be to take matters into one’s own hands and end one’s life. If they’re going to die eventually, why not simply face death on one’s own terms?

For the first time in history, we exist in a society that has reduced human life to the individual. While this movement has a grain of truth and goodness to it (the human person truly does have great intrinsic dignity and goodness), it has also resulted in exalting the individual to an absolute level.

In his book, “The Power of Habit”, Charles Duhigg points out that we often adopt a “habit loop”.  It consists of three parts: the cue, the routine, and the reward.  Virtually every habit we have follows this pattern. The cue is typically a person, place, or thing.  For example, a person might have the habit of logging on to Twitter (I work with high school and college students) every time they have to wait for something.  The “cue” is “waiting”.  The routine is to pull out their phone.  And the reward they are looking for is some distraction while they wait.

First, praise God for the fact that He placed that desire in your heart!  Too many of us are content with the idea of “show up on Sunday, put something in the basket, and you’re good”.  I think that that might have been the vision of Catholicism that certain people might have had in the past, but this was never an authentic perspective of what it means to be a Christian.

This is a very good question.  The fact that you are asking this already puts you ahead of most people in our current culture.  For many people, the very worst thing that they could be accused of is “being fake”.  But I would like to make a distinction between “being authentic” and “having integrity.” Why is this distinction important for us to make?  I mean, it could seem an awful lot like I am just splitting hairs or axe-grinding by spending so many words on what might seem like an insignificant definition.  But I maintain that a great deal depends on understanding the difference between being authentic and having integrity.  And yet, it wasn’t always this way.