I’ll be moving to Florida next week, and the next few weeks are going to be crazy, so I don’t think I’ll be posting much here (if at all) during that time. And after I begin my new position as the Director of Evangelization for the Diocese of Venice, FL, I’m not sure what my blogging status will be – I hope to blog for the diocese, but it might be a while until I’m settled in. But whatever happens, I’ll let everyone here know.

A couple of links for your perusal in my absence:

• I often reflect on the dangers of getting consumed by today’s technology. Here is a good article about the importance of time alone, away from such technology.
• Two weeks ago I was on Radio Maria discussing my book Who is Jesus Christ? Unlocking the Mystery in the Gospel of Matthew. Here is a podcast of the interview.

Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput has a hard-hitting, insightful column this week on the Archdiocese of Denver website. In it, he challenges us to consider how we spend our free time: do we vegetate in front of the boob tube, or do we meditate on the divine Word of God? Our choice determines who we are:

In Muslim countries like Pakistan, many of the young men begin studying the Koran as soon as they can read. In fact, many of them learn to read using the Koran. They read and discuss the Koran every day, for hours each day, every day of the week until they know it by heart. Many of them can recite whole sections of the Koran without thinking. Little by little, like water dripping on a stone, it shapes their whole view of the world—what’s right and what’s wrong; what’s important and what’s not.

Here in America, we have a similar kind of training. It’s called television.  The typical American spends between three and seven hours a day watching TV and sees well over 2 million commercials in the course of a lifetime.

That’s a form of education. And most of what we see on TV teaches us that buying a lot of products makes us happy; that young is good and old is bad; that we should eat whatever we want but that we also need to be thin; that suffering doesn’t have any meaning; that relationships never last; that most families are dysfunctional; that authority is dangerous; and that religious people are hypocritical.

None of us lives forever. Or rather, all of us live forever, but only for a very short time in this world.  If we lose our money, we can often earn it back.  But if we misuse our time, we can never get it back.  Where we put our time shows the world what we really value and believe. What we really believe shapes our choices.  And our choices shape our eternity.

Muslims didn’t develop their admirable piety in a vacuum.  They borrowed their reverence from Jews and early Christians, who had a profound love for the written Word of God in the Old and New Testaments.  The lesson for us today is simple.  American Catholics have the one true Word of God in the Bible.  If we took just one hour of the time we waste on television every day and used it to study and pray over the Gospels, we’d be fundamentally different people, and our country and our world would be transformed.

We were made for better things than silver and gold.  We’re more than what we own or think we want.  We’re children of God bought back from slavery by the blood of God’s son.  Somebody infinitely good, willingly died to make us free.  That’s how precious we are in the eyes of God.  God loves us infinitely.  That’s the source of our faith and hope.

God’s love is not something anyone can buy.  It’s a free gift.  But it comes with consequences.  If we really believe that God raised his son from the dead in order to raise us along with him, then we need to act like it.  We need to submit our time and our actions to what we claim to believe.  A meaningful life is a life conformed to imperishable things.  And a futile life is a life that puts its time in the wrong places—into things that perish; things that lead us away from conforming our lives to Jesus Christ.

Those are the two options.  We get to choose.

TV is such an accepted part of our culture that such an article appears radical. But the truth is that we have become so enslaved to television that it is difficult to see the wisdom in Archbishop Chaput’s words. What is especially true about his article is when he says that what we do shapes who we are. Almost four years ago I got rid of my television, and it was only after that act that I realized what an impact TV had on me. It shaped me and formed me in ways I would never have imagined.

For example, recently I went to a movie at the theater and saw the inevitable commercials before the main feature. Of course some were offensive, but what struck me was how inane and devoid of any value they all were. They presented the world in a way completely at odds with reality, yet everyone simply imbibes them with little or no thought – and I would never had noticed this myself if not for the fact that I almost never see commercials anymore. This is what Archbishop Chaput means when he says that TV is a form of education – it forms how we look at the world, even when we don’t realize it.

So what do we want forming us – TV or the Word of God?

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism. St. Benedict is most famous for organizing monks into a community, thus establishing the basic form in which all Western monks have lived ever since then. But St. Benedict originally wanted to be a solitary monk – i.e. a hermit – not someone who lived in community. It was only after other men followed him that he begin to establish an order for them to live in community.

That got me thinking about the difference between solitude and community, and which is the calling which leads us closer to God.

• On the one hand, many saints, such as St. Benedict and St. John of the Cross, craved solitude so that they could be alone with God – with no distractions and nothing to keep them from intimacy in prayer. Compare that to today’s culture which inundates us with noise and constant chatter, thus preventing us from entering into real meditation and contemplation.

• On the other hand, we are to be the one Body of Christ, a community which works and prays together in order to glorify God and be with him in heaven. Catholicism does not value the “lone ranger” who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps – it sees us as a united people who pray to “Our Father”, not “My Father”. Compare that with today’s culture which glorifies individualism and preaches the doctrine of self-sufficiency.

So which is it? Are we to strive for solitude or community? Each seem to have both their strengths and their dangers. I think the solution is found in communion, which is the proper integration and ordering of solitude and communion.

Communion always begins with our union with God. No human gathering can be a true union unless it is first based in union with God. This is why the saints craved solitude, because they wanted to strengthen their communion with God. This is also why the world screams so loudly today, to distract us from this communion with a flurry of the irrelevant.

From this union with God flows communion with our fellow men. A merely human group – such as the Elks club or a political party – might have a certain value, but ultimately it is meaningless without being based in our one common Father. Those who think that they can make it to heaven on their own are just kidding themselves. We need each other, but we can only help ourselves in proportion to our own communion with God.

This need for communion is universal across all vocations. The contemplative nun might spend eight hours in personal prayer a day, and a stay-at-home mom might only get in 30 minutes in a day, but they both need to base all their work on a deep and personal union – a communion – with God. Likewise, all of their dealings with others – whether it be other nuns, their children, or those in their parish – will only be fruitful and unitive if it is based on this communion with God.

God, in His great mercy, has given us a beautiful way to strengthen both types of communion – the Eucharist, which of course we call “communion.” In the Eucharist, we are personally and directly united to our Lord in the deepest way possible in this life. And in the Eucharist, we are also mystically united with our fellow brothers and sisters who receive this great sacrament. What a great gift God has given us!

No matter our vocation, let us pray for a deep communion with God which will then lead to a deep communion with others.

St. Benedict, pray for us!

I am very excited to announce my next book:

Holiness for Everyone
The Practical Spirituality of St. Josemaría Escrivá
Foreword by Scott Hahn
Spring 2012, Our Sunday Visitor

Holiness for Everyone is a guidebook which gives practical advice on how anyone can become a saint. Since I am not a saint, however, I cannot write such a guidebook on my own, so I instead use the teachings of an actual saint – St. Josemaría Escrivá – as the basis for the book.

When Catholics hear mention of St. Josemaría, too many think, “Oh, he’s the Opus Dei saint,” and then relegate his life and teachings as applicable only to Opus Dei members. What a shame. As you will see in Holiness for Everyone, St. Josemaría developed over many years of work and prayer among laypeople a spirituality whose goal is the sanctity of every man and woman. He insisted that every person could, with the grace of God, achieve holiness through ordinary life and work. In other words, he did not intend his spirituality only for an elite group, or for those separate from the world, or for a select subset of laypeople. He intended it for all people, no matter their state in life.

The spirituality of St. Josemaría is for everyone – laborer, executive, mother, teacher – regardless of your state in life, the teachings of St. Josemaría can help you draw closer to God in ordinary life and grow in holiness. In this book I hope to make St. Josemaría’s teachings accessible to non-Opus Dei members so that they can benefit from them just as so many members of the apostolate he founded have for decades. St. Josemaría is a canonized saint of the entire Catholic Church, not just one segment of it.

I was honored to have Scott Hahn, a member of Opus Dei, write the foreword to the book. Here is an excerpt of his foreword:

My family within the family is called Opus Dei (Latin for “The Work of God), which was founded by St. Josemaria Escriva in 1928. The teachings of that saint are the subject of this wonderful book by Eric Sammons. I myself have written a book about “The Work.” It’s titled Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Journey in Opus Dei, and it’s a personal account, an insider’s view, though addressed to anyone who might be interested or curious.

I could not have written a book like Eric’s. Perhaps I could not have written a book as useful as Eric’s, for he sees my family inheritance from a different perspective. He is not a member of Opus Dei — though he has studied its spirit and learned from it — and so he sees it from the outside. Sometimes that means he sees it more clearly and more attentively and more appreciatively. He has helped me to gain a better appreciation for the family life to which God has called me.

Eric knows that the heart of family life is the parent-child bond. In natural families, that heart is not always healthy. In no natural family is it perfect. But the heart of Opus Dei is something greater. Opus Dei draws its life from the fact of divine filiation — the fact that all Christians become children of God through baptism. That doctrine took hold of St. Josemaria Escriva as God inspired him to spell out what it means for children of God to live in a material world…

Eric Sammons shows that St. Josemaria has recovered the most powerful truth of classic Christianity and restated it in a way that is compelling for men and women (and children) of our time.

And to give a taste for the book, here is a detailed Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Called to Be Saints
• A Modern-Day Saint
• Laying the Foundations
  • Abba! Father!
    • Our Father God
    • Heirs to a King
    • Sons in the Son
  • Free to Love
    • Created Free
    • Limits Lead to Freedom
    • Many Paths to Holiness
    • “The Truth Will Make You Free”
    • Free to Surrender
    • Free to Start Anew
  • Ambitious for Holiness
    • “Zeal for Your House Consumes Me”
    • Excellence in All Things
    • Fighting Lukewarmness
    • Hating Sin
• Building a Saintly Life
  • Be a Contemplative in the Midst of the World
    • Live a Life of Prayer
    • Recognize the Presence of God
    • Make a Plan of Life
  • Make Your Work A Way to Heaven
    • Offer Your Work to God
    • Make the Secular Sacred
    • Take Flight from Fantasy
    • Work Out Your Salvation
  • Live in the Family of God
    • Follow the Pope
    • Love Mary
    • Honor St. Joseph
  • Proclaim Christ to the World
    • Be a Faithful Friend
    • Be an Apostle Not an Activist
    • Be Transformed
• Conclusion: “This is God’s Will for You, Your Sanctification”

I hope and pray that this book will help many people to grow in holiness and become what we are all meant to be: saints.

Last Sunday, one of my friends, Dr. Nathan Schmiedicke, was a guest on Fr. Benedict Groeschel’s TV show and they discussed a topic dear to my heart: how Catholics read the Bible. Nathan took as his starting point a question asked by one of his former professors: When did we stop reading the Scriptures like the Fathers read them?

When you have time, watch the entire show – it is well worth it.

In honor of the 4th of July, I want to share with you an interview with a top American history scholar, Dr. Raymond Fitzmyer:

Divine Life: Happy 4th of July! What are you doing to celebrate the birthday of our country?

Raymond Fitzmyer: Well, of course nothing really happened on July 4th, 1776 – it is just a date the early American community later chose to represent their feelings of tolerance towards others.

DL: So I guess you are not doing fireworks?

RF: No, I’ll just be listening to NPR as I usually do most evenings.

DL: So you are an expert on the Declaration of Independence. What do you think is the greatest strength of Jefferson’s famous work?

RF: First of all, Thomas Jefferson didn’t write the Declaration of Independence. It was written by the Jeffersonian community over the span of about 50 years and didn’t take its final form until about 1830 CE. In fact, some of the latest critical scholarship is even questioning if there ever was such a person as “Thomas Jefferson”. Most likely, the figure of Jefferson simply represented the early American community’s desire to be tolerant of England.

DL: Well, what do you think is the greatest strength of the “Jeffersonian community’s” famous work?

RF: The Declaration of Independence was formed in an ancient culture, so of course it contains all the biases and antiquated notions of that ancient culture. For example, it talks about “truths” being “self-evident”, which we all today know is simply not true. Truths are based on our perceptions, and what is true for you might not be true for me, except of course the truth of the statement I just made, which is always true. We now understand that nothing is “self-evident” to anyone, except for the self-evidence that there is nothing self-evident. Furthermore, the Declaration speaks about a reliance on “Divine Providence”, which reflects the superstitious culture in which the early Americans lived. We know today that our only reliance is on government, not some figure in the sky looking out for us.

DL: So, is there anything you actually like about the Declaration of Independence?

RF: Of course, of course! After all, I’ve spent my whole academic career studying it! I think the Declaration of Independence is a fine example of pre-modern American literature.

DL: That’s it?

RF: Well, we must remember that humankind has advanced greatly since the time of the first Americans, and there is very little we can learn from those primitive peoples. But their writings do make for fine symposium topics as well as good subjects for journal publications.

DL: Thank you for your time, Dr. Fitzmyer. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

RF: Yes, I’d like to tell everyone that I have a new book coming out about the Constitution. In this book, I prove that the Constitution actually wasn’t completed in its final redacted form until after the Civil War and was the result of the Northern community’s desire to justify their actions towards the South. It’s sure to get me on TV…I mean, it’s sure to advance American scholarship greatly.