Faith Formation Begins at Home

"Beauty will save the world." Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Four of my daughters sing in the Catholic Youth Choir in our city. The magician, I mean, director, has the uncanny ability to take my four older children (ages 10-15) and make them sound like angels. Having watched The Sound of Music at least 300 times in my childhood, plus spending years in choir and band, I always hoped my children would love music. I didn't realize they would all surpass my talents before they were ten years old. We may or may not have had to make rules about the nice way to tell Mom that she is flat, sharp, or inadvertently changed key again. Music education has so many benefits which include the development of discipline and teamwork, not to mention fine motor skills,  brain development , and even some seemingly unrelated skills. Until he heard my children hammering out a piece in the back room before performing for my parents, my husband commented that he had no idea that choral singing was a c...

I'm not proud of it. At a Mother's Day event several years ago (but not enough years for me to not be completely humiliated by this story) I was jarred by the experience of watching several groups of women stand up and extol their mothers as the most wonderful, amazing, fabulous women in the entire world. A couple of my sisters and my mom were also at the event, but we did not (as I recall) stand up and similarly wax eloquently about our mom. I must have been in a major funk that day, because as I was driving home, I started having what my dad calls a POME  (loosely pronounced "Poor Me") Party, feeling sad that I couldn't say all of those nice things about my mom like all of those other women could. (Anyone who knows my mom is shaking his/her head in shock and dismay right now). It really was my most embarrassing moment. Sitting alone in the car that day, I knew I was missing something, but I honestly fit the part of "ungrateful child" pathetical...