Three Ways Bishop Barron Blew My Mind at World Meeting of Families

We survived our first day as a family at the World Meeting of Families!

Had this event been held even twenty-five miles further from our home, we likely wouldn't have been able to attend as a family. We are ridiculously blessed in this matter. Perhaps I should say "clearly" blessed. Get it? Clearly? Because they gave us clear backpacks?

That was bad. Here's some of Philly's bad public art, to make me look clever by comparison.

I think that's supposed to be a monument to the Labor movement, but I think it just makes the labor movement look like a stack of assssss...

...sssssssI was saying, there were many highlights from our first day yesterday, but the one thing that still has me thinking, praying, and hoping is ~~Father~~ Bishop Barron's Keynote, "Living as the Image of God: Created for Joy and Love."

I know the world has seen Bishop Barron's Catholicism series, but we don't have cable. We barely have a TV. The only episode, and that one partial, I saw was playing in the background while I wrangled my wiggly four year-old at a parish Lenten luncheon series. In the past, I've liked Barron's work but sort of in the way I like the Psychedelic Furs: I love everything I've heard from them, but I don't own any of their albums, and I've never gone to one of their concerts.

I guess yesterday was my first Bishop Barron concert. He spoke on the words imago Dei, the image of God. I typed several hurried notes into my phone's notepad app, but here are three that stick out in my mind.

"Atheism old and new teaches that God is in competition with Man. This is inimical to Christianity."

As a recovering atheist myself, this really bloomed inside of me and put into words the essence of why I came back to the Church in the first place.

"When it comes to things we take seriously, we love the law."

Bishop Barron gave us the example of himself trying to learn how to golf. He just went out there at first and swung the 8 iron, no guidance. He was, essentially, just "being himself" as a golfer with no guidance or rules. Then a pro golfer gave him a lesson on the physics and kinesthetics of the game, and when the lesson was over, then-Father said, "No! Teach me more!" The law gave him success. When we teach ourselves, our children, and the whole world to "just be yourself," and that the rules don't matter, we rob them and ourselves of success--of joy.

"If things are going wrong, the wrong things are being praised."

I never put two-and-two together that the "doxy" in the word "orthodoxy" means "praise." If we are being "orthodox," we aren't just saying the right things. We are praising the right things.

There is so much more, but I have to finish getting myself and the family ready to board a train!

What have you seen about the WMOF? Are you there? Are you making a virtual pilgrimage? Comment below with your impressions and experience!