Lent Archives - A.J. Cattapan | Stories with Heart & Hope

My latest giveaways!

March 8, 2017/0 Comments/in Angelhood, Giveaway, Lent, Speculative Fiction, young adult/by AJ Cattapan

I have several giveaways going on right now, and I wanted to make sure everyone knew about them.

First, I’m super excited to announce my very first Instafreebie giveaway. For the next few weeks, I’m giving away preview copies with the first five chapters of Angelhood for free. If you haven’t purchased a copy of Angelhood, but you’ve been wanting to check it out, now’s your chance! Click here to claim your copy today.

On Instagram, I have two giveaways going on. The first ends this Friday. I’m giving away two copies of Matthew Kelly’s Resisting Happiness. Visit my Instagram account here.

For my other Instagram giveaway, I’ve joined with fellow YA author Leslea Wahl for a double book prize. We’re throwing in a claddagh bracelet just for a little St. Patrick’s Day fun. This giveaway is happening over here.

So be sure to check out the Instagram games, and don’t forget to claim your free preview of Angelhood right here!

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Happy Easter Week!

March 29, 2016/0 Comments/in Lent, Writing/by AJ Cattapan

Hope you are enjoying a great Easter week! I successfully pulled off co-hosting Easter dinner with my dad. We had 19 people for dinner. For those of you keeping track, I’ve now hosted Thanksgiving dinner and Easter dinner in less than a year. Who knew I was such a domestic diva! 😉

I even made Mom’s famous lamb cake even though her cake mold didn’t come with any instructions! See my Facebook page for video.

In case you missed it, I was honored to write the Gospel reflection for Holy Thursday over at the CatholicMom.com website. Here’s what I wrote:

A number of years ago, I taught at a Catholic school where I also ran the student council. This school had a beautiful tradition for Holy Thursday. Every year, the student council members would “play the role” of the twelve disciples and have their feet washed. However, instead of the priest or deacon washing all twelve sets of feet, he would wash only the feet of the student council president. Then the president would turn and wash the feet of the vice-president, and so on down the line until each student council member had washed the feet of the next officer or homeroom representative.

Every year, I got the same reaction from the kids: “Huh? We have to do what? I don’t want anyone touching my feet!” I would smile at them and tell them they were doing this to show that they were not just student leaders, but actually student servants meant to be of service to their classmates. But the truth is, I’m not sure which freaked them out more: washing someone else’s feet or having someone else wash their feet.

Let’s be frank, it can be rather humbling to have someone touch your dirty, smelly, and/or funny-shaped feet. We’re an independent kind of society. If our feet need to be cleaned, we can do it ourselves, thank you very much. But that’s not what Jesus is calling us to do. He’s calling us to be humble servants and to let ourselves be washed clean by the good news He has to offer. We need him to wash our feet as much as the apostles did—and that takes some humility.

May the rest of your Easter holidays be filled with joy and peace!

Random Acts of Mercy–a Lenten Reflection

February 15, 2016/1 Comment/in Lent/by AJ Cattapan

This year, I was once again asked by my parish to write a couple reflections for our Lenten reflection book. Here’s my first entry for this year. It’s based on Matthew 25:31-46.

Every year, instead of making a New Year’s resolution, I choose a “word of the year,” something to focus on during the coming months. This year I’ve taken a cue from Pope Francis and chosen the word mercy. Perhaps that is why today’s Gospel reading resonates with me so much. Within this passage, we see Jesus extolling many of the corporal works of mercy: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick and imprisoned.

Sometimes these acts of mercy are easy for me. As a Dame of the Order of Malta, I serve meals at Catholic Charities and visit nursing homes. With my friends, we pack food boxes at Feed My Starving Children. The times that are hard for me to be merciful are the “sudden” moments when I encounter a homeless person on the street. So this year, I’m going to try being merciful in a new way. I’m going to carry around with me a few gift cards to grocery stores or fast food chains that I can hand out to people I meet on the street. In what ways can you practice “random acts of mercy” this Lent?

Gotta Guatemala Days 9 and 10

March 30, 2015/1 Comment/in Lent, Travel/by AJ Cattapan

Day 9 started with an hour and a half boat tour around Lake Atitlan. We left from the dock at our hotel. As I’ve said before, Lake Atilan is reminiscent of Lake Como in Italy. The beautiful blue lake is surrounded by green mountains and three volcanoes. Some people (clearly relatively wealthy) have built some beautiful homes along the lakefront. Due to the steep mountain slopes, some of these homes are only accessible via boat. No traversable road could be built through, around, and/or down the mountain to reach them.

An expensive home along the lake

Some of the more typical Guatemalan homes on Lake Atitlan

One interesting story our tour guide told us during this boat ride is that the author of the French book The Little Prince once stayed at Lake Atitlan. If you’ve read The Little Prince, you might remember that the boy kept showing people a drawing that everyone claimed was a drawing of a hat. However, someone finally told him it wasn’t a hat. It was a snake that swallowed an elephant. That shape was inspired by a hill that the author saw while visiting Lake Atitlan.

Do you see the snake that swallowed the elephant?

During our boat ride, I tried to find the cables for the zip lines, but we were unable to spot them.

I ziplined somewhere along this mountainside.

After the boat ride, we got in the bus for the three-hour ride back to Guatemala City, stopping once for a lunch break. When we arrived at our hotel, we found several workers making one of those colored sawdust “carpets” for Holy Week.

A gorgeous Holy Week “carpet” in our hotel

We had time at our hotel to rest for a while before the farewell dinner. I have to say that we had a really nice tour group. You never really know what you’re going to get when you sign up for a group tour. However, I think one of the benefits of going to a place like Guatemala is that you don’t get newbie travelers. Everyone in this group was a seasoned world traveler. We were never waiting on the bus for someone who was late. In fact, we were almost always at least five minutes early. Nobody complained. Nobody snubbed their noses at witnessing a different way of living. Everyone was appreciative of the lovely scenery and the good people we got to meet.

Day 10 was just a long travel day home with nothing too exciting to report, so I’ll just share with you a few final thoughts on my travels and what I learned on this trip.

1. Caravan is an excellent tour company. We were very well taken care of. Basically, we paid about $120 a day, and that covered hotel, transportation, museum entrances, tips for bellboys, a very knowledgeable tour guide, musical performances, and three yummy meals a day. And the hotels were top-rate (they are listed at running from $150-250 a night!).

2. Travel reminds me that experience really is the best teacher.

3. God created something large and beautiful and awe-inspiring when He made the world. I’m so blessed to have seen the few parts I’ve been to. I am even more blessed to have met the people from those places.

4. We may come from different lands with different climates, cultures, and languages, but we’re really not as different as you might think. Most of us believe we were created by a higher power. Most of us want to please that higher power. And we all just want to feed our families and enjoy good times with the ones we love.

And finally . . .

5. If you enjoy a springlike climate and want an exotic-type vacation that will make you feel a little like Indiana Jones, well then . . . you “Gotta Gautemala”!

Monday Book Review: The Tomb by Stephanie Landsem

March 23, 2015/3 Comments/in Book Reviews, Historical, Lent/by AJ Cattapan

Normally, I review middle grade and young adult books, but today I am super excited to bring you The Tomb by Stephanie Landsem. This is the the third book in Landsem’s The Living Water series. I enjoyed the first book The Well, I adored the second book The Thief, and I’m absolutely in love with the third book The Tomb! Somehow Landsem’s books just keep getting better and better!

Title: The Tomb

Author: Stephanie Landsem

Genre: biblical fiction

Synopsis: Martha is the good girl. She follows all the laws, as is proper for the daughter of a respected Pharisee. However, it’s her sister Mary who gets to marry the man of her dreams, a poor man who makes her happy even though he has little to offer her. Martha is also in love with a poor man, but he’s a pagan, and there’s no way her father would ever consent to her marrying anyone other than a proper Jew. Even the righteous Simon can’t seem to convince Martha’s father to let him marry his eldest daughter. Martha is such a good cook and law-abiding woman, no man seems good enough to marry her. However, Martha is hiding a secret, a sin that could get her stoned in her hometown of Bethany. And to make matters worse, her brother Lazarus wants to run off and follow their cousin Jesus, whom many (but definitely not all) are claiming is the Messiah!

The back cover of the book gives away far more than I am in my synopsis, but I’d actually recommend not reading the back cover before you read the book. I didn’t, and I’m glad I skipped it. I enjoyed the many twists this story took along the way.

If you follow me on Facebook, you may already know that this story brought me to tears–several times, in fact. Landsem has a way of making Jesus so real. Any Christian is familiar with the story of Jesus coming to Martha and Mary’s house for dinner, and how Martha complains that her sister won’t help her with the food preparations. But what Landsem does is flesh out this scene for us, so that we get a clearer picture of what it might actually have been like. In doing so, she illuminates Jesus’s human nature. I think we tend to focus mostly on his divine nature, but it’s wonderful to spend some time thinking of Jesus as the guy who comes over for dinner and the children run to him and throw their arms around his legs.

I could go on and on about how much I liked this book, but I don’t want to spoil any of it for you. I highly recommend all of The Living Water series. You can read them in any order, but at the end of The Tomb, there is an epilogue where Landsem brings together characters from all three of her stories.

You can find the book on Amazon here and at Barnes & Noble here. You can also follow Stephanie on Facebook and Twitter or visit her website.

Lenten Reflection and an Unexpected Rant about Confession

March 3, 2015/0 Comments/in Lent/by AJ Cattapan

Here’s another of those Lenten Reflections I wrote for my church’s prayer book, followed up by a bit of a Lenten/Confession Rant.

Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent – March 3

Isaiah 1:10, 16-20

“Though your sins be like scarlet, they may become white as snow.” Maybe it’s because I’m an English teacher, but this line always reminds me of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter. Sometimes I feel like my sins are a big red letter that I’m wearing around for everyone to see. That, somehow, everyone will know the horrible things I’ve done and shun me for them. That’s when lines like this in Scripture comfort me. What a gift we have in the Sacrament of Reconciliation! I don’t have to wear my sins on me like some scarlet letter. God forgives me, and He’ll make my “crimson” sins “become white as wool.”

An old friend recently requested advice about going to confession because she hadn’t been in many years. My advice? Go! Don’t be afraid! Simply tell the priest how long it’s been, and he’ll guide you from there. I’m sure helping us realize God’s infinite compassion and mercy must be one of the most gratifying aspects of a priest’s vocation.

***

So after I wrote and submitted this to my church, several interesting things happened that have me ranting a little. First, one of my neighborhood churches has decided to cut back their confession times from every Saturday to every other Saturday, and they’ve moved it from a reasonable hour on Saturday mornings to 8:00-9:00 a.m. Who except the holiest among us are going to get up that early for confession? And what happened to Pope Francis’s request to have *more* confession time so that more people would come?

Then I found another neighborhood church that only offers it for a half-hour a week. What? A half hour?

Then a friend, who hadn’t been to confession in a long time (not the same friend mentioned in the passage) told me she went and had a horrible experience. The priest made her feel like she was judged instead of forgiven, and now she probably won’t go again for a really long time! This is all in direct contradiction to Pope Francis’s request to priests.

I swear, poor Papa Francesco must be banging his head against the walls some days.

On the bright side, I had a mostly positive confession experience myself this weekend. Archbishop Cupich decided to start a “Festival of Forgiveness,” during which churches would stay open for 24 hours for confession. (Yay!) Now this is more in line with Pope Francis’s requests. However, only a handful of churches participated. (Boooo!) I headed off to one during the last hour of the Festival. The line was 25 people along, and there was only one priest who was taking 7-8 minutes per person. (More booing.) Thankfully, a second priest arrived and started a second line. (Yay!) He wasn’t a priest I knew, but he talked with me for a little while and gave me a simple prayer to say when I ask God for forgiveness: “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.” Simple. I like it. 🙂 Now if only all priests could be good confessors.

Lenten Reflection for Thursday, February 19, 2015

February 19, 2015/1 Comment/in Lent/by AJ Cattapan

My parish puts out a daily Lenten reflection booklet with passages meant to help us ponder the day’s readings. This year I wrote three of the reflections. Here’s my first one. It’s based on Luke 9:22-25.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us, “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” Well, who on earth wants to take up a cross? They’re heavy, cumbersome, and painful. They slow down our progress on the path we want to take, but perhaps that’s the very point. I have all sorts of plans, but God keeps sending me these crosses–unwelcome illnesses, sudden requests for help from friends and family, added expectations at work—that keep getting in the way of what I want to accomplish.

And that’s when I’m forced to remember the first part of Jesus’s directive. If I’m going to follow Him, I first need to deny myself. As the band Mercy Me sings in their song “So Long Self,” I have to say good-bye to me: “Well, it’s been fun, but I have found somebody else.” That somebody else, of course, is Jesus. And if I really want to follow Him, I have to keep “turning outward” as Pope Francis has been reminding us to do: to deny myself, to turn toward others, and to pick up whatever cross God asks me to bear today.

* * *

The reflection booklet obviously doesn’t include video, but that doesn’t mean I can’t include video in my blog post version! Here’s the video from the song I mentioned by Mercy Me. It’s kind of a silly spoof on the idea of saying good-bye to yourself, but I still really like it.

Got any other great songs that put you in the mood for Lent?