I don't have a question really, just a mention of what we are currently going through as Catholics living in a neo-pagan world.  

My H's 86 year old grandmother had a stroke last week and ended up in the hospital.  She had been living on her own, but now that looks like that is at an end.  She has been recovering slowly, bits and pieces and is doing better.  She was transferred to a rehabilitation / convalescent home a few days ago and it looks like that can't be tolerated by her or anyone else in the family.  It's a state run institution filled to capacity with sad souls, suffering pains and humiliations and terrors associated with old age, infirmity, disease and being heavily medicated (and alone, the worst of all).  Apparently Grandma is scared and all the family wants to get her out of there.

So the next conversation is about moving her into her son's house and hiring nursing care.  How long and how much this will cost is unknown.  

Now here are the spiritual difficulties: Grandma was raised Mormon.  She converted to Catholicism in the 1960's, when her eldest daugther (my H's mother) also converted.  Grandma also had at least one of her two sons baptised in the Catholic Church as well.  This son received First Communion and was even an altar boy.  (I don't know about the middle child, a son also ... he probably was I just don't know the story).

Grandma has been married 4 times.  I believe there were 2 divorces and 2 deaths.  Her last husband was Mormon and Grandma attended Mormon services, etc.  She lived in another state with her husband, then he died, she stayed on there for a few more years ... and then was persuaded to move to the town where her two sons and (and their second wives) lived.  She has lived there, on her own, for a few years .. she joined the Seventh Day Adventist Church that her older son belonged to with his wife (he's an Elder now) ...

The younger son left his second wife about 2 years ago, and ultimately has moved in with a fellow co worker, a woman he met and worked with for some time, who is about 20 years younger than he is, has two children of her own and was also married and living with her husband at the time she and this brother began becoming "friends."

This son is living with this woman and her two kids (he has two grown children with his first wife, and two grown step children with his second wife) ... and now the plan is to move Grandma into their house.

Isn't that amazingly complicated?

Oh, and just another little happening with another friend.  My H is friends with a former co-worker who was married and divorced.  He's been divorced for a while, less than 10 years I think .. and now he's ready to marry someone else.  He looked into getting an annulment so he could marry in the Catholic Church (he was married in the Church the first time).  However, he discovered that the annulment process could take at least a year and has now decided to marry outside the Church, because he doesn't want to wait.

There's much more of this in our siblings and aunts and uncles ... but I'm only describing the recent stuff ..

Life is so chaotic and crazy without the faith.  And we're stuck right in the middle of it all.  We're put to the test of being nice about everything and tolerating every little bit of it.

Life IS amazingly complicated! I'm a convert to the Faith, grew up protestant and most of my family is still protestant. I have one sister who is a Byzantine Catholic convert, one that is Novus Ordo Catholic-in-name-only convert, and one evangelical protestant brother, a father and stepmother who are "devout" protestants, a mother (married 4 times) and a stepfather who watch Joel Osteen on Sundays together, a mother-in-law who is a traditional Catholic and a father-in-law who never got an annulment but went ahead and married another woman last year and they like to attend Mass without receiving the Sacraments. How are we supposed to explain all of this to our children one day?!

You know, since I first wrote this lament, I seem to have been given some clarity on the situation in a way that I hadn't experienced in these last 10 years or so.

As I stated in the original post:

This was a tough issue at first because in order to visit Grandmother, we have to go to this house.  And so last week, we drove up there and visited for an hour.  It was awkward, but I was really thinking about how sad these people really are.  All of them with the pain of their broken lives.  How these two are currently trying to build some relationship on the wreckage of past marriages.  They know no peace, and have never known any peace.

I was able to really see how important it is to be a good example of kindness and helpfulness in this situation.  Everyone knows we're Catholic and have been married only to each other for 20 years . We've actually known each other for 25 years .. .since we were basically "kids." And this means something.  This is something, thanks be to God, that gives us "status" as far as the Faith goes.

We need to live our Faith and to encourage these people to turn their lives around by our example.  If we shunned them, this would never be possible.

Plus, how can we live our lives saying "These people are sinners ... I can't talk to them, see them .. " ?   We're all sinners in various degrees.  How to people evangelize if they don't talk to people?  What if people stopped going to prisons to talk to the people there because "they sinned" ?

There's a difference between condoning people's sins and just interacting with them .... being CATHOLIC in their presence is extremely necessary and POWERFUL.

So, I'm praying, as I have been for a while, and I'm trying to figure out how to be better about charity and humility.  And please forgive me for rambling on somewhat.  I'm not being very careful this morning with how I'm writing.  I just wanted to get it out there.

We need to help sinners.  We need to be a shining light of Faith and we can only do that by letting them be around us and get to see what having Faith looks like.