La Lupe is probably the best nagger on the planet. Everyone around her is poked and prodded to change certain habits. Of course her constant corrections come from a place of total love. She has lived 82 years and knows a little something about habits and what happens after a lifetime of them.

The two things she is always hounding me about are to sit up straight and to drink plenty of milk. Between having eight babies and breastfeeding all of them, La Lupe knows a thing or two about the logistics of motherhood. Whenever I talk to her on the phone she asks me if I’m drinking enough milk because if not then those babies are going to take all my calcium and make me jorobada like her. And as for my posture, moms in general always have bad posture. If we’re not holding one baby on our hip and trying to drag another away from imminent danger, then we’re lugging loads of baby gear around or stooping over to pick up toys or looking for a lost sock or something. You get it. Moms = bad posture.

I’ve never taken any of this seriously. I’ve never actually been careful about taking care of myself physically. Our bodies are resilient. Our ancestors hunted and foraged and migrated vast distances, surely my body can stand what I am doing. It’s not like I’m working in the fields or building houses or working out eight hours a day or something.

But I’ve done it nonetheless. I’m only in my mid-20s and my body has decided to pay me back for not taking care of it. I need to see a chiropractor, an eye doctor, a jaw masseuse (no joke, they exist), an orthotist, and a lactation consultant all because my body has decided that it has had it with me.

This week I’ve been thinking about how badly I treat myself. Physically speaking. As I go through my rolodex of memories I come across time after time when I knew what I needed to …

Watching the news often depresses me. Murder. Kidnapping. Cyber bullying. War. Natural disasters. Very rarely is there a positive story. While I tend to avoid the news for my own well being, it just so happened that last week I was glued to the TV for Diane Sawyer’s exclusive interview with Jaycee Lee Dugard, the girl who was kidnapped and lived for 18 years in her kidnapper’s backyard. A haunting tale, the more her story developed, the more upset I became with humanity.

Oprah’s episode on Chelsea, a 21-year-old who was abused by her parents and lived in a cage for the first seven years of her life, followed the two-hour Jaycee Lee Dugard story. And there I sat, for three hours glued to the couch in disbelief.

How is it possible for such evil people to exist in this world and get away with these atrocious things? Chelsea’s parents only had to spend one year in jail for child endangerment and they were let free. Jaycee’s captors have life imprisonment, but the man who kidnapped her was previously in jail for a long sentence before he was let out for “good behavior.”

While I sat there wondering how God allows these people to exist, the women in each story brought me back to reality. You have a choice to be a victim and throw your entire life away or you can stand up, move forward and make a life and learn from your experiences. If you do that, you can live a great life, Chelsea told Oprah. I was speechless.

Each woman chose not to hold hatred in her heart and move on with her life. In all honesty, I don’t know if I would be able to do the same.

Now a mother to a two-year-old, Chelsea said she felt the experience is making her a great mother. After all she’s been through; she works extra hard at making sure her son has the perfect childhood she never had.

While the Casey Anthony trial still remains a heated debate, regardless on how you feel about the verdict, I think the overall message throughout these …

Revisiting Old Heroes

“Are they my poor?  I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.”

When I first read those words by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay on Self-Reliance, I was a junior in West Morris Central High School and—coming of age in upper-middle class New Jersey—had never met a poor person and didn’t really know anything about poverty.  What I did know a lot about was being an awkward teenager who cared way too much what others thought of him and spending a lot of time by myself, so when I read further in Emerson’s essay, a chord was struck.  “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.”  At that moment, more and more of my “psychic eggs” were placed into the basket labeled “individuality.”

Don’t ask me what a psychic egg is; I’m just trying to make a point.

I carried a book of Emerson’s essays with me when I went off to college in Baltimore.  That same book followed me to Arizona after college, then to El Paso, then back to Baltimore, and eventually to Washington DC when I started seminary.  In the beginning, the book would regularly find itself of my nightstand, having a couple of its pages flipped through before going to sleep.

But as the years went by, I slowly began to see the limits of a philosophy governed so strongly by the importance of the individual, the value in sometimes “going along to get along,” and that sometimes it is more important to trade in a personal value if it makes the life of the whole a little better.  I also encountered people over those years who could be classified as poor…and while I don’t know if I would use the words “my poor,” I would say that I gained a deeper appreciation of the fact that …

I go out in hopes of forgetting, thinking about something else, anything. Music, poetry, who got wasted last Saturday night. No such luck. Going out for hookah can never be just that. All encounters result in talks of Moshiach (messiah), do rabbis believe in aliens, angels, devils, prophecies, evolution.

I should want to talk about this. I should get off on this discussion. But I can’t, because 10 years later I just accept that which I have accepted. My desire to question and debate is less innate. I just want to talk about the mundane. That which is not holy. But I am denied this. I can’t run away from it.

And I find myself just wanting to get away. To be somewhere else. Israel, where I don’t have to wear my Judaism on my sleeve because it’s a given. Where it’s an afterthought. And I can be something else: a poet, an activist, a free-thinker, a music-lover, a creator, who in all of this – despite all of this – is Jewish.

My physical needs tug on me, and I leave our outdoor bubble back indoors to a different reality. With a diverse people, with secular music playing, and I wonder which reality is truth. Which would make me happy. Which is the way my life is supposed to be.

I confess. I love celebrity gossip. I love all those magazines that crowd the checkout aisle at the grocery store. I love the fashion. I love the makeup. I love the gossip. But with kids, our budget made me decide between diapers and Us Weekly. Assuming that the girls wouldn’t enjoy their bums being swaddled in pictures of Alicia Silverstone’s new baby, I choose to go with diapers.

But this past weekend we took a mini-vacation and visited my parents in Houston. So I splurged and bought the juiciest looking mag I could find.

As I flipped through the pages I was not disappointed. Beautiful dresses and gorgeous handbags. The newest trends in shoes. I was almost giddy. But then I started reading about couples that have separated or divorced. While this isn’t new — celebrities not having long-lasting relationships — I read about some couples I thought were going to be together forever. Courtney Cox and David Arquette? When the heck did that happen? I thought they were rock solid. I had to run to the computer and look up Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr. just to make sure they were still together so I could feel a little better about the state of marriage in the celebrity world.

I kept reading and found an interview with Blake Shelton about his recent marriage to Miranda Lambert. Ok, this has to be a happy; they just got married. But then they asked him how he had dealt with a previous marriage and divorce. He responded, “Life isn’t perfect so you find what makes you happy and you do it.” That’s it. I threw the magazine across the room.

I hate that. I hate it when people say, “You’ve got to do what makes you happy.” There’s no commitment in that statement. There’s no maturity. There’s no room for another. It’s just plain selfish. Now I know there are situations that come up that are grave enough to warrant separation or divorce as the right course of action. But what I …

“Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.” -C.S. Lewis

I know that Lewis was probably referring to God loving us too much but I think this works for us as well. I am always too embarrassed, and sometimes even scared, to love people the way I know I should because I don’t want them to think that I love them too much.

The women in my family have taught me how to show love through affection, hospitality, and generosity.  There is not a woman who so openly shows her extravagant love as La Lupe.  Everyone that crosses her path is well-fed, hugged, kissed, maybe scolded a bit, but definitely knows her love.  She is a great role model in this regard.

For some reason, while I know what I need to do to show people love, I really struggle with actually doing it.  When I attend weddings, I get so nervous about talking to the newlyweds that I actually avoid them. I tell myself that they have more important people that they want to talk to than me so I avoid them to not take up time. (I know, pretty self-deprecating. Welcome to my head.) It’s such a load of crap. What I’m really scared of is showing the couple that I love them. I am scared that they will reject this love. That they will think I expressed too much love and not consider me as good a friend as I might consider them.

I know what scares me is the vulnerability of loving another.  Of giving them hugs, of congratulating them, of complimenting them.  To express such a real emotion makes me open to rejection and I sometimes cannot handle the possibility of this so I don’t let myself be vulnerable to begin with.

But the more big life experiences I live, the more I realize how silly I am being. At our wedding, every single person we invited was important to us.  There was no one that was invited that we hoped would …

I’ve been anxiously awaiting my trip to Nashville for what seems like forever. Since my first visit there two years ago my life has changed dramatically. No longer a recent college graduate, I’m not unsure of my future and my answer to the once dreaded question, ‘What do you do?’ Finally, I can say I’m a music journalist and not hesitate while thinking, ‘Well, I work here during the day but I write here and intern here.’

Sitting at Tin Roof for lunch (and sweet tea!) in Nashville by myself after David Nail’s fan club performance, I’m reminded that he was the first country artist I interviewed just two years ago. A lot has happened since then.

Overhead, Third Eye Blind is blasting from the speakers. Next, I hear Boys Like Girls and Taylor Swift’s “Two Is Better Than One” before the DJ segues into Train’s latest single. It’s here that it hits me. I have interviewed every single artist just played on the radio. Hard to believe exactly two years ago I was here for fun, covering the CMA Music Festival writing for free and now I’m getting paid to do what I love.

Sure, there have been some dark days where nothing seems to make any sense. But if the past few years have taught me anything it’s that if you stick with what you really love and follow your heart anything can happen. Carrie Underwood seems to think the same way. During Billboard’s Country Music Summit she talked of her experience acting in the film Soul Surfer and whether or not acting would remain in her future. What she said struck a chord.

“I just take my opportunities as they come. I feel like if you try to force anything, then it’s not going to be good. I see what’s going to happen and I say my prayers at night. ‘Just lead me in the right direction! And give me good things that I should be doing and give me opportunities to branch out and have fun with things and just do …

Father Dave interviews Emmy Award-winning NBC News correspondent Anne Thompson — for our “Real World Catholic Leaders,” segment, where we profile lay Catholics who have made a significant impact on their community and profession while proudly living their Catholic faith. As the Chief Environmental Affairs correspondent for NBC News, Anne Thompson has covered a variety of national stories, including filing reports on women in business, the birth of the McCaughey septuplets, the school shooting in Paducah, Ky., the Columbine school shooting and the attack on the World Trade Center. Her reports appear across all platforms of NBC News including “NBC Nightly News,” “The Today Show,” MSNBC on cable and on msnbc.com. In 2010, in covering the Gulf Oil spill which she covered extensively, she had the most on-air screen time of any NBC News correspondent. She’s also been recently elected to the Board of Trustees for the University of Notre Dame.Father Dave talks with Anne Thompson about where her Catholic life meets her career life, the benefits and challenges of both the job and the faith, and the biggest stories of her life, including being at Ground Zero for 9/11.

The Busted Halo Show with Father Dave Dwyer is on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio, Sirius/XM 129, Monday through Friday, 7:00pm to 10:00pm EST. Give us a call with your questions and comments: 1-888-3-CATHOLIC, or at bustedhalo@thecatholicchannel.org. Go to www.sirius.com or www.xmradio.com to get subscription information.

We’ve all been there. Your husband is spilling his heart out to you and the only thing you want to do is yell, “Freakin’ suck it up and deal with it!” Ok, maybe it’s just me. Sometimes I’m too tired to offer a sympathetic ear. Sometimes I’ve heard the same thing over and over, and I just don’t want to hear it again. But mostly I want to tell him this because I don’t think what he is complaining about is all that bad.

When Brandon complains about having a hard day, I have to bite my tongue from saying, “Hard day? When your client poops all over your last clean t-shirt and knocks over a canned food display in the grocery store then I will believe you’ve had a rough day.” I feel like I have it harder than him so I don’t feel like his complaining is justified. More likely than not what actually comes out of my mouth is, “Pick yourself up by your bootstraps and keep forging ahead.”

Talk about breaking the first rule you learn in Marriage 101. Listening and being compassionate are pretty high on the list of necessary communication skills. So while I knew I lacked these qualities in conversations with my husband, I didn’t quite understand his plight until recently.

As I made clear in my June 8 post, I haven’t been teaching the girls about Mexican culture. What I failed to mention is that I haven’t even been teaching them Spanish. It’s just so hard. It is difficult enough keeping our family fed, house clean, and everyone wearing matching socks much less remembering to call an apple a manzana.

I have been stewing in guilt about this but of course some people find it necessary to stir the pot even more. Every time I talk to La Lupe she reminds me that my kids better be speaking Spanish when we go visit. One acquaintance that I see often always has to rub it in by asking if I am teaching the girls Spanish and …

The thing about studying theology, especially Catholic theology, is that you have to learn all of these new words…Greek words.   Have you ever heard the phrase, “It’s all Greek to me?”  Well, after three years of graduate study to become a priest, I am now convinced that that phrase originated with a theologian.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the Greek language in and of itself…it’s just that after a while, it’s hard not to wonder why one has to know so much of it in order to grow in one’s relationship with God.  I mean, when I first heard the word “exegesis,” I originally thought it meant those times when Jesus left the building.  When my Scripture class threw the word “hermeneutic” at me, I was confused because I originally thought that the word meant the study of quiet, solitary people.

So what does all of this have to do with Clarence Clemons?  Well, it’s because he helped me to understand one of the words added to my theological vocabulary this past year: anamnesis.

The word—which is a Greek derivative—means “to remember,” which might beg the question as to why those in theological circles don’t just use the phrase “to remember.”   Well it’s because, as I’ve learned over time, that the meanings of words between languages often do not have a six-of-one half-dozen-of-the-other relationship.  The word anamnesis does mean “to remember,” but not in the way someone might avoid forgetting to pick up the dry-cleaning.  It means to remember in such a way as to make the “rememberer” fully present to that which is being remembered.

The word “anamnesis” was used in my Eucharist course in order to describe what happens to all of the faithful gathered during the Mass.  In essence, during the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, we remember the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in such a way that the saving event of his cross is made present to us…even if we weren’t physically in Jerusalem in the year 33…so that we can participate in Jesus’ saving action for …