Donate

Editors Service About us Advertise Italian Spanish Portuguese German NCRegister

A Conversation with Scott Hahn,

News Resources Columns CNA Podcasts CNA Blog
CNA Newsletter CNA Video

Author of 'Signs of Life: 40

Catholic Customs and Their
Biblical Roots'
Kate Wicker

We’re chatting on the phone when my baby

begins to cry. “I’m sorry,” I say, “but I have to take
care of my baby.”

When I return to the conversation, I apologize

again. “Please,” my interviewee says. “You’re a
mom. You’ve got to make your baby a priority.
This is an example of taking our faith from the
theoretical to the practical.”

These words of wisdom belong to Scott Hahn,

Ph.D., and it seems tting that he should speak them during an interview about
his most recent book, "Signs of Life: 40 Catholic Customs and Their Biblical
Roots."

Dr. Hahn is a renowned apologist of the Catholic faith. A Catholic convert, he’s
penned dozens of books, some recounting his journey to the Church, others
defending Catholic teachings. But his newest book isn’t about chronicling his
conversion or defending Catholicism. It’s more than a theoretical treatise for the
faith. At its heart, Signs of Life is about enriching the lives of the faithful.
 “The book is designed to help ordinary Catholics - whether cradle Catholics or
Donate
converts - to discover the inexhaustible riches of what it means to live life as a
Catholic,” Dr. Hahn says. “The Catholic faith is certainly meant to be studied and
understoodEditors Service
but even Aboutitus
more, AdvertisetoItalian
is meant Spanish
be lived and Portuguese
enjoyed.” German NCRegister
News Resources Columns CNA Podcasts CNA Blog
CNA Newsletter
The CNA Video
genesis for the book began some 20 years ago when Dr. Hahn realized that
while his roots in Catholicism were planted in Biblical and theoretical ground, he
needed something more in order for his faith to blossom to its fullest.

“All of our beliefs can be grounded in Scripture, but it’s another thing to discover
that our faith o ers a culture with customs and all sorts of traditions that once
seemed alien to me,” he explains. “You can’t become an American by reading
and studying the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg
Address. It’s a life lived by people, and it has been for so long that you really
have got to step into the middle of it. The same is true with our faith. I became
motivated to really become a Catholic - not just in my head but in my heart, not
just in my soul but in my body. Not just in my career but in my marriage and
family.”

To this end, "Signs of Life" illuminates myriad rites, customs, and traditional
prayers - from the Rosary to praying with icons - inexorably tied to the Catholic
faith. Each chapter covers a single topic and reveals the Biblical and historical
foundation of the custom, as well as answers to some of the common
objections and misconceptions about the practice.

But, as Dr. Hahn reminded me during our phone conversation, the theoretical
has to become practical. So the book also o ers ideas for applying these
Catholic customs to everyday life.

After all, our faith is not just a set of rules; it’s a way of life and a path to joy and
peace. “Being a Catholic is not just about believing certain things to be true. It’s
about celebrating,” says Dr. Hahn. “In a family, you don’t just gather together at
one address because you have the same last name. It’s about birthdays and
anniversaries and vacations and all those things that really create the memories
that make you a family. The same is true with holy water, making the Sign of the
Cross, the rosary, Advent, Christmas, and Easter, discovering the saints, all these
so-called popular devotions - none of these are mandatory, but Catholics are
 discovering there’s something about the timelessness and the eternal that these
Donate
traditions and customs embody that bring stability, joy, peace, and consistency.”

When writing  and researching the book, Dr. Hahn found one of the most
Editors Service About us Advertise Italian Spanish Portuguese German NCRegister
News interesting
Resources “signsCNA
Columns of life” to be CNA
Podcasts relics.
Blog
CNA Newsletter CNA Video
“Every Catholic parish in the world has a relic in the altar where the Mass is
celebrated. Why do we put bones of dead saints in altars? How do you explain
that? Relics are one of those things that non-Catholics might just screw up their
faces and roll their eyes and say, ‘Ewwww,’” says Dr. Hahn. “But in the Book of
Revelation, John describes how he sees the souls of the martyrs - those who
have been beheaded - under the heavenly altar where they’re crying out to God
in prayer. It occurred to me that the martyrs who have died for the faith are not
really dead. They’re more alive than we are. They are awake and alive in the
presence of God 24/7 where they’re constantly praying for us."

"There aren’t two churches - one in heaven and one on earth. There aren’t two
liturgies - one for the angels and the martyrs and one for us. The altar is the
intersection of heaven and earth," Dr. Hahn explained. "The Mass is something
that is being done on earth as it is heaven. We’re surrounded at every Mass by
angels and saints and martyrs.

"So why not have a visible reminder of this invisible reality embedded in every
altar where every Mass will be celebrated?”

Relics are just one of the many customs Dr. Hahn illuminates in his book,
o ering a window into the mystery of what it means to be a Catholic.

Luckily for me, we not only talked about Dr. Hahn’s book, but my baby’s
meltdown proved to be a perfect segue to an uplifting conversation about living
the faith as a wife and mother. As a mom of three little ones, my own “signs of
life” are nursing babies,  de ant toddlers, and curious 5-year-olds. And Dr. Hahn
assured me that’s perfectly okay. God meets us where we’re at, and teetering
baby steps toward Him are steps in the right direction.

“How can wives and mothers better build their domestic church? How can we
marble in some of these beautiful customs into our homes?” I asked Dr. Hahn.

“From my own experience as a husband and a father, every single morning

before noon, you’re already beyond Plan A. You’re on plan F. You’ve had to
 adjust your schedule so many times. One of the things Kimberly [his wife, who is
Donate
also a successful author] has helped me see is that we need prayer markers in
our day,” he says.  “At noon, we try to do the Angelus. This marks the midpoint
Editors
of the day with Service We
prayer. About us try
also Advertise
to makeItalian
it a Spanish
point toPortuguese
a pray theGerman NCRegister
Rosary. When
News Resources Columns CNA Podcasts CNA Blog
the kids were young, we started with an after-dinner decade. Later we went
CNA Newsletter CNA Video
ahead and took a step out in faith and began to pray a Rosary. We started to
experience such a shared sense of peace and calm.”

Even if you don’t make it through a full Rosary, he says, don’t give up. God hears
all prayers - even the toddler-interrupted ones.

I shared with Dr. Hahn that I’ve stopped trying to follow a strict prayer schedule,
but instead have tried to embrace a rhythm of prayer to our day. He agreed that
this is a good approach for busy moms. “Start with a morning o ering, have a
prayer around noon, and pray grace before meals. Just try to nd a way to have
a day where you regularly meet the Lord.”

But even when we stumble, even when our lives and pure exhaustion mu e
our prayers and good intentions, God is there. He is the ultimate source of life
and strength.

“God’s strength is made perfect by our weakness. Life is just punctuated by all
these periods of dryness and of weakness. We start feeling those are the lonely
deserts, but we know from those footprints in the sand that God is doing so
much more with our less,” Dr. Hahn says. “Our problem is almost always that we
fall back upon our own natural resources rather than trusting God’s
supernatural resources. He’s always going to call us to something more than we
want and take away what we think we want to show us what we need.”

And I thought I was just going to get a good interview about a book. Instead, I
received spiritual direction - a real life example of God giving me what I needed
more than what I thought I wanted.

To learn more about Dr. Hahn and his works, please visit
http://www.scotthahn.com.

Topics: Books , Culture , Faith , Family , Motherhood

 Kate Wicker is a wife, mom, speaker, and author of Weightles: Making Peace
Donate
with Your Body. When she is not looking for God (and runaway baby socks) in
the trenches of motherhood, she writes a health column for Catholic Digest.
Editors Service About us Advertise Italian Spanish Portuguese German NCRegister
News Visit her
Resources websiteCNA
Columns at KateWicker.com.
Podcasts CNA Blog
CNA Newsletter CNA Video

View all articles by Kate Wicker

Copyright © CNA All rights reserved  

Privacy policy
Email us at: [email protected]