Transcript of CS#65: Kimberly Hahn Graced and Gifted

Transcript of Interview with Kimberly Hahn about Graced and Gifted. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Graced and Gifted – Biblical Wisdom for the Homemaker’s Heart is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1004167/Graced-Gifted-Biblical-Wisdom-Homemakers-Heart/

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Chris Cash:  This is the Catholic Spotlight, the podcast where we talk about what is new, cool and exiting in the Catholic marketplace.  I am your host, Chris Cash, Director of E-Commerce from CatholicCompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs.

Today in the spotlight, we have Mrs. Kim Hahn.  It is always a pleasure to have you on the show Mrs. Hahn.

Kimberly Hahn:  Thank you, great to be with you.

Chris Cash:  Today we are going to be talking about the second book in Kimberly’s series on the Proverbs 31 woman.  It is called Graced and Gifted.  I have to get that straight in my head because now that there is two I am going to get them jumbled I am sure.

Before we get started on talking about the book though, I do have a listener feedback question coming from Javier Plumey of the Hands and Feet Show.  He had a quick question for Mrs. Hahn.  It says, “We as Catholics believe in the sanctity of marriage and should stand resolute to define marriage as that between a man and a woman.  In this day and age, the institution of marriage is constantly under attack and increasingly these attacks are making their way into the public forum.  How can we as Catholics reconcile our need to defend and protect marriage when our clergy are encouraged to stay out of the political process, especially those that have a direct impact on the future of marriage in this country?”

Kimberly Hahn:  First of all, priests and bishops have a very specific calling and that is to father us.  That runs the full gamut of teaching us the truth, explaining why we believe what we believe.  Encouraging us in our prayer life as married couples and families and then, inspiring us to truly take our faith back into the world, the marketplace of ideas, the political form and to share truths.  We do not have our Catholic reality and then there is a reality for people who are not believers but all men and women were created in the image and likeness of God.  Marriage is God’s idea not man’s so it cannot be recreated in man’s image.  So whether or not a priest can speak in a political forum is not the important question.  The question is will Catholic men and women do the work needed to understand what we have been called to and then to faithfully proclaim that to our culture.  That is up to us.

Chris Cash:  Yes, ma’am, our divine call to action there.

Kimberly Hahn:  Absolutely.  It is a reality we need to understand, principles we need to understand for our own marriage and family life and really apply that and not rush to the political forum but we also cannot ignore it no matter how busy we are at home.  Again, we are back to the question of balance.  Unfortunately, there are many wonderful Catholic families who are so busy working on their marriages and families that they do not have the discretionary cash.  They do not have the extra time to be running around doing the political things that some people who would like to dismantle marriage are doing but that is one of the ways in which families and couples really need to assist each other in performing associations where they can speak in the political and public forum.

Chris Cash:  I think it is also important just to remember that we are out to win hearts.  The more hearts that we win for Jesus Christ the easier these political debates are going to become for us because the harder it is going to be for politicians to continue to force these un-Christian ethics down our throats.

Kimberly Hahn:  Yes, that is very true.

Chris Cash:  We want to talk now about Graced and Gifted.  I keep want to saying Chosen and Cherished.  Chosen and Cherished was the first book in these series on Proverbs 31.  That was geared on the marriage relationship and how a Proverbs 31 woman should be as a spouse, conflict resolution, child rearing and many of those issues.  This new book, Graced and Gifted focuses more on the homemaking and the important issues of what a Proverb 31 woman needs to do in her home.

Kimberly, can you talk with our listeners just a little about how this whole project started back?  I think you were saying was it 18 years ago?

Kimberly Hahn:  The first time I taught it as a Catholic was actually 18 or 19 years ago to a group of Franciscan University women who really wanted to understand what it was that I did as a homemaker and why was that important.  They were hearing this is a really, really important vocation and yet were being urged to pursue their careers and their education and have it all fit together.

I had taught a lot of material in a couple of different protestant bible studies so I myself was curious now that I actually believe marriage is a sacrament and that there are more sacraments which we can draw on for the grace that we need to be fateful in this vocation.  What difference does all of that make in understanding being a wife and a homemaker?

It was a great privilege to go through and teach this material and see the women really catch on to a very positive, new picture of what it was to be home with little ones.  To create an environment that had beauty, order and peace.

The impression so many of us get is any dumb nut can watch a kid.  Any dumb nut can just clean a house, women should be doing something wonderful with their minds, with their hearts and with their talents and not be stuck at home.  As one college girl said, “When I think of homemaking I feel like someone would have caged me and thrown away the key.”  I mean such tremendously negative terms.

What my hope and desire and I think what the Lord’s desire is, is to free women to see what the possibilities are if they actually could commit to being home.  Then, the complementarity with the kinds of service that her husband is doing for the family outside the home with what a woman is doing inside the home.

As my mother used to say, “I think of being in the home as you guys are out throughout the day at school or at work” and she said, “I am preparing to welcome you back from the storms of life.”  This is a harbor; this is a place of sanctuary.  A place where you can truly know that you are loved for who you are and not what you do.  A place where you can have your children welcome their friends and to reach out to other people drawing them in as well.

The picture is so beautiful because these are on the one hand just very practical topics we discuss and Graced and Gifted – providing food for our families, providing clothing for our families.  Providing an orderly environment and how do you clean your house effectively, how do you organize your time effectively, how do you decorate your home.

I am sharing a lot of insights from other authors.  I am sharing things that I have learned over the years but always I want to underline, I am not sharing like “This is the expert.  Come to me.”  It is like I am a fellow struggler.  I am a fellow traveler and these are the insights I see but not only all of this practical stuff.  I included an appendix in the back that I have developed about key questions to ask when you are buying a new home.  I just want to be very nitty-gritty and practical.

On the other hand, there are spiritual lessons for us to see.  Through the mundane tasks of homemaking, I think the Lord has actually given us wisdom and insight into the sacramental life, into prayer, so that we can go deep in our faith at the same time that we are just doing the practical work of homemaking.

Chris Cash:  I know that there is a lot of deep spirituality that can come from doing the simple mundane things.  Of course, St. Therese Lisieux demonstrates that quite well in her little way.  Even my sister, when she went into the convent, she spent practically the first three years of her novitiate just cleaning the convent.

Kimberly Hahn:  Absolutely.  I have a whole chapter that deals with gardening.  It is interesting that here you have monasteries and convents that people have given up their whole lives to go and to live in community and pray.  While they are there, it seems like every picture you ever see of convents and monasteries they have gardens.  Why would they take the time to garden?  Should not that time be prayer?  I think one of the insights you get is that gardening can be very contemplative.  There is something about touching the earth, the stuff that God made, that helps root us and ground us in who we are as a person God has made and you cannot rush a garden.

In spiritual life sometimes, we want to sprit ahead.  We want to just take on sanctity full-bore and there are a lot of very small steps that have to happen.  So just as in a garden, you have to pick up the small weeds.  You do not wait until they are massive.  You need to get at the root or it will come back.  You have to cultivate it.  You have to give it time to grow.  As I have gardened over the years with my children, I just feel like there have been tremendous insights in just little ways here and there of seeing the spiritual life reflected in this activity of gardening.

Chris Cash:  You also cannot garden without getting a little dirty and getting mixed up in the world as well.

Kimberly Hahn:  Right.  There was one day that we were out in our orchard and we turned over some soil that had just – we had just piled up leaves probably for eight or nine years.  I mean years, the whole time we had lived there to that point.  At the bottom of it, it was the most beautiful black rich soil.  I just turned to one of my children and I said, “That is confession.”  They were like, “What?”  I said, “We bring what is much fouler than just dead leaves.”  That is what we would bring to confession and just the heart, the longing to change and the Lord turns it into the mulch of our spiritual life so that we do not just get forgiveness but it is even greater.  Through our penance, we get to help rebuild some of what we have torn down.  He turns that over and enriches our lives even through that whole experience.  It just was such a beautiful image for me.  It really enriched my life and enriched I think my children’s lives as we were sharing those moments.

Chris Cash:  One of the topics you cover in this book fairly well is food preparation.

Kimberly Hahn:  Yes.

Chris Cash:  I am really curious.  How is the spirituality of food preparation rooted in biblical wisdom?

Kimberly Hahn:  First of all, it is understanding the gift that food is.  The joy it is to prepare it and to share a meal.  When I video taped the bible study, we do this with about 100 women at Franciscan University and that is also available along with the book.

I talked about the family meal, of drawing the family together at least one meal a day where you are sharing – we always share a good thing which also helps give a particular positive focus to the conversation.  It also gives every family member an opportunity to share so that even really little ones have that experience of everyone stopping and listening to them.  Showing them a measure of respect, also how you set the table, the beauty that you can add to the atmosphere because you have taken a few moments to think through a table setting and then drawing together.

One woman came up to me afterwards and she said, “My husband works a little late and so we go to McDonald’s every night.”  This is a woman who is married 10 years, she already had 4 children.  She said, “I have never known a family meal was important.”  She said, “Every night I drive through and we bring it home…”  Excuse me; she did not even bring it home.  They went to a McDonald’s.  She decided recently, right before she talked to me that she would bring it home but none of her kids knew how to do dishes so she did not want to be stuck doing all the dishes.  So they just ate on paper plates so that they can throw it out.

She said, “You have given me such a different picture.  My family life will never be the same.  I am going to go home, I am going to train my children how to set the table and clear the table and do dishes.  We are going to have a family dinner every night.”  I believe that is going to have an enormous impact on their family.

Chris Cash:  Absolutely.

Kimberly Hahn:  The Eucharist is at the very heart of our faith and of course, it is the sacrifice of the mass.  We never want to downplay it by simply saying, “This is our family meal” but it is our family meal.  It is our sacramental, sacrificial gathering together at the table of our Lord and being fed as his children.

Just to give you one other small thing, one of the things that we had done for years and it came out of our protestant conviction about the Lord’s Day.  For the first 20 years of our marriage, we had a very simple, cold lunch on Sundays.  Now to be honest, we were trying to minimize my work in terms of food preparation and to make it easy to increase the numbers at our table because it was just you slice one more tomato and you get another loaf of bread.  We had a lot of wonderful Sunday celebrations as a family and including a lot of friends but it was very simple.  We used all paper plates and cups, it was the only day of the week we did that.  So that we can throw it away and get to the rest and relaxation we wanted for Sunday.

After 20 years and at that point being a Catholic for several years, I said to my husband, “We go to mass on Sunday morning and we receive the Eucharist and I want to come home and feast.”  We never used our China.  We never used our silver.  We have not used our dining room table hardly ever.  So we had a radical change in how we did Sundays.  Really, from one week to the next, after 20 years of paper plates and cups and simple things we went to having roast or turkeys or very big special meals.  It was a real thanksgiving.  It was to reflect the glory of what we had received at mass and coming home as a family continuing that celebration.

We switched it to the dining room.  We used China, silver, and crystal.  Besides the fact that I think it has helped now train my older children.  Before they felt awkward outside of our home, how to be at a more formal meal.  There are some training you need to do besides that.

Chris Cash:  This is true.

Kimberly Hahn:  It just elevated our experience and the timing was precious because two years ago my son Gabriel began to seriously court Sarah.  It was so natural to have the two of them join us most Sundays of that year of courtship and then engagement, to welcome them and already know that the pattern of our life was to linger.  It drives my nine year old a little crazy but we linger a couple of hours and we share our good thing of the week.  We write it down in a journal and we just lavish that time on each other and what a tremendous way to get to know a future in-law.

Then this year, after Gabriel and Sarah got married, they moved to South Carolina but then this year my son Michael was courting Anna Hummel who he just married a week ago.  So to have them come almost every Sunday and be a part of this meal through their courtship and again, through their engagement was just so special.

On the one hand, it is just a practical thing – a homemaker cooks but what can we do that communicates a sense of communion and community of person?  How do we gather around a table and turn eating into more than just correcting manners or trying to keep conversation positive but enjoying each other company.

Of course, that takes effort and not everyone does it perfectly but I think a lot of young women do not even know where to begin and that is part of why I wrote this book.  To try to be that voice of encouragement and say, “Do small things.  Maybe you cannot jump into that but what are the small steps you can take to make food preparation and food service something that ministers to the soul as well as the body.”

Chris Cash:  Okay, we are going to take a real short break here to hear from our sponsor and we will be back in a few minutes with Kimberly Hahn to talk more about Graced and Gifted.  This is the Catholic Spotlight.

[scoring]

Chris Cash:  We are back on the Catholic Spotlight with Kimberly Hahn talking about Graced and Gifted.  I keep wanting to say Chosen and Cherished.

Kimberly Hahn:  That is okay.  I have read them both.

Chris Cash:  That is right, and they are both great books.  At least even if I mess up people will find something good there.

I am sure you have encountered this quite a bit as well.  How do you talk to someone who is a new wife, a new mother and they feel like they have to be out working?  They are too restless a soul to just feel comfortable being at home, even if they know that that is the best thing for their family.  I am sure, especially after coming out of Steubenville and spending a few tens of thousands of dollars on their education, there are probably quite a few restless spirits there just trying to pay off their college loans.  How do you approach somebody like that and help them to see the beauty of being a mother in the biblical sense?

Kimberly Hahn:  One of the things that I have done over the years with this study is I have offered it in my home.  I have one little gal who came to – the first time I presented it here in Steubenville and after two or three weeks she came up to me and she said, “I am Catholic but I am seriously dating a protestant at home who wants to be a pastor.  We have already talked about it and my career is important too so, I am going to work for the first five years of our marriage and then I will have one child and he will stop being a pastor and be home with that child because I will earn more money.  Then we will have one more child and we will plan on sterilization because two kids will probably be all that we can afford on my salary.”  She said, “I am beginning to get the impression from these first couple of studies that you have a real different vision in mind.”  It was like where do I begin?  I just looked at her and I said, “I hope you will keep coming.  I hope you will keep coming because I think there is a lot for us to share.”

At the end of the year she came up to me and she said, “I went home and I broke up with the young man not because he is not wonderful but because I want someone who gets Catholic family life.”  She said, “I want to pursue my education enough that I can really understand my faith well and live it.  I want to be home and I pray that God will bless us with as many as children as I can have in those child bearing years.”  I mean she had caught an entirely different vision.

One of the challenges we have is even in our Catholic schools, I do not know how much we really present a vision for what it can be to create a home.  Home is like a stopping point.  It is like a pit stop where people just come in.  Husband, wife, kids, they dump their stuff.  They refuel, retool, get off to the next important thing and homemaking is about relationships.  It is about time that is ordered in such a way that you can enjoy each other, that there is time to teach and to train in the faith, to experience the faith together.

So I think the first thing I would say is if you are listening to this and you are thinking “I am committed to this but I do not know how to impart this vision.”  I would say offer a bible study in your home.  Get the videos and play them.  There are outlines to the videos in the back of the book.  There are questions for discussion and see if you cannot help capture the hearts of the young women to see what could they do if they were free to be home.

There are a lot of practical tools young women do not have.  They may not have been taught how to clean.  They may not have been taught how to prepare food.  So one of the things I think that women and older need to do is to be available as mentors.  To see in what ways can we assist.

One of the books that my sister recommended to me – and I did dedicate the book to m sister Carrie Harrington who has.  Though she is younger than me, has sort have been 10 steps ahead of me in all kinds of areas and has given me wonderful, wonderful recommendations.  She gave me this book about preparing a large number of meals ahead of time.  It just set me free.  I got a number of college women to come over and volunteer for one day.  It is called Once a Month Cooking but when I do it, it is once a season.  We cook about 80 or 90 meals and we have all of those meals…

Chris Cash:  That is some deep freeze.

Kimberly Hahn:  Yes.  I am telling you it is just one normal freezer.  That is all it takes because you use gallon sized Ziploc bags.  Each of these meals would feed between 8 and 12 people.  It opened up new opportunities for hospitality for me because all I had to do was cook two meals instead of one.  It gave me an option of helping out young families who had just had a baby or people in need because of hospitalization.  It is a tool to provide for the practical needs of my family and hospitality and caring for others and all I needed was that book to explain the vision and then I was off and running.

There are lots of recommendations like that in the book, wonderful book on home management by Julie Morganstern, a fantastic book that really has assisted me.

So I think women really need to help mentor women.  To make recommendations of resources, to offer lived wisdom.  This is one other thing I really wanted to mention about this series, my hope is to open up the dialogue inter-generationally.  I think women my mother’s age who are in their 70’s and 80’s in some ways have felt sidelined as if they do not have much to say to young women but these women have been faithful in marriages for 35, 40, 50 years.  They have raised their families well and they have a lot of lived wisdom to share.

My hope has been and my prayer that as women of various ages gather around, watch the video, and talk that it would give a forum for older women to be able to share the insights that they have, then a heart for the younger women and the older women to pray for them, to encourage them.  To let them know that they are not alone.  I think part of what a lot of younger women struggle with is feeling very isolated as if they are all off on their own especially since so many have moved away from family.  As older women, we need to give them that sense that we are coming alongside them, encouraging them, holding their baby who is fussy, giving them ideas about time management or home management.  We can do this.  This is part of the apostolate of married couples to each other.  It really is.  I think it is very important for the next generation for us to care for the young mothers.

Chris Cash:  One thing that I see is that because we have lost that sense of community, women are turning to books and the internet to try to get all of that wisdom.  They are doing it after the fact, once things have already gone crazy in their lives and how much of a difference could that make if there was an older mentor who just could come in and help out a little bit.  You are absolutely right.

Kimberly Hahn:  Absolutely.  I think what a lot of the younger mother’s need is a mother figure, especially if their own mothers are not equipped to help them, if they have not had a model of a mother who is home.  What do you do with all those hours?  Every once in a while someone will say to me, “I am home and I am so bored.”  I think that word never crosses my mind.  I think if you can catch a vision for what home life can be, you can find a way to use every talent that you have, every mental ability that you have and to enjoy it with your family.

It does take catching a different vision than either clocking into a job or pouring into books in your education.

Chris Cash:  Now I am sure that you have occasionally run into somebody who has been hostile to the ideas that you present.  Even if you are not running into them, I am sure people putting on these bible studies are going to run into them.  How do you suggest people deal with those that come into the bible study environment or even into the conversation about these topics with a hostile attitude toward the stay at home homemaker?

Kimberly Hahn:  I have to be honest, I had never had anyone be belligerent to me about being home.  I have had people ask questions like – one girl asked me when I was home first with my first-born Michael, she said, “Are you taking a class or how are you using your brain?”  She really could not imagine that it took brainpower to do what I was trying to do.  I said, “Nothing has challenged me more mentally, emotionally, physically or spiritually than having this little boy and wanting to teach him everything that I can find out about life and love.”

So I do not think there is hostility.  I think people genuinely look at it and say, “If only I could manage finances I would be home too.”  I think when I was in high school people were really were promoting the idea of supermom, that you can be fulltime at work and fulltime caring for your family and it all works.  I think one generation later, now that I am in my early 50’s more women are admitting supermom does not work.  You pour the best hours you have into your workday and hope that the leftover is enough to help you do all the work you have left at home.  I do not think a lot of women if they were free to be home or free to work that they would necessarily choose work.  Some would but I think many women would choose to be home.

So that is part of why I think the work on finances that I talk about in Chosen and Cherished need to happen.  In other words, if what you know would be best for your family is for you to be that anchor, that person who is constant presence in your home, if that is what would be best for the peace of your home and the peace of your children and security, what will it take financially for that to happen?  You begin looking at it from that standpoint.  How do you live on one income?  How do you not go into debt?  How do you plan a budget?  Of course, with rising gas prices people can set up a budget and three months later have to revise it but what will it take to be able to work toward that as a goal.

I think it may mean not purchasing a home as early as a couple might choose too.  You lessen how much debt you pile on before you have this little one so that you are free to make that sacrificial but beautiful decision to be able to be home.  Then hopefully people around you will encourage you, especially your parents.  Hopefully they will see the value of not having to set up a nanny cam and wondering what is happening to your baby while you are away or not worrying about what is happening at daycare, are other children harming your child because you know that your child is safe in your own home with you.

Chris Cash:  Sounds like excellent wisdom Mrs. Hahn and I believe we are running out of time here because I know you have to get going here in a few minutes.  Did you want to mention something real quick about the many chapters you have on the sacraments relating to homemaking?

Kimberly Hahn:  Yes, just a little bit.  Of course, it is like a mother’s guide to the Eucharist.  That is why added a couple of chapters that deal with food preparation and presentation.  It just gives some insights into our understanding of the Eucharist as this beautiful meal provided by our Lord to sustain us, to strengthen us, and to send us forth into all that he has called us to do.  In the area of gardening, I make the comparisons with confession and I mentioned a little bit about that.

The last one is one of my most favorite studies to give and it is on the strength of the Lord.  It comes from the verse that talks about her girding her loins with strength and making her arms strong.  So we talk about how much physical strength is needed to do the task of homemaking but even more the spiritual strength.  If the Lord is the one calling you home, if the Lord is the one calling you to be in that role of serving your family from the home, He will give you the strength.  He gives me the strength to do those tasks day in and day out.

It can be mundane, it can seem menial and yet it is done for Christ.  As you mentioned the little flower, little things done with great love count, they count.  Of course, we are there to really prepare their souls for heaven and so the work of cleaning and cooking and caring for their clothes and all of that plays a role because these are little things done with great love that builds them up.

So that corresponds to the sacrament of preparing us for death.  I just found it really rewarding to contemplate with the readers the sacraments and how just the ordinary work of homemaking can really result in extraordinary grace.

Chris Cash:  Thank you so much for coming on with us today, Mrs. Hahn.  It is always a pleasure to have a chance to talk with you.

Kimberly Hahn:  Thank you.

Chris Cash:  All you listeners out there, if you have feedback or questions for future guests, please be sure to e-mail those over or to send them in to our voicemail at (206) 312 0069.  We would love to hear from more of you in the future.

Coming up in the future I am also going to start sending out guest list more often over at our Facebook group in the Catholic Spotlight.  So if you are interested in being on that list just go on over to Facebook, join in the Catholic Spotlight Fan Group and we will be sure to get messages out to you about who is coming up and what kind of topics we are going to be talking about.  Also, be sure to vote for us over on Podcast Alley.  It really helps to get us in front of more viewers.

Thank you so much, Mrs. Hahn.  I look forward to hopefully talking with you again next year when the next one comes out.  I know you have already started working on that one.

Kimberly Hahn:  Right.  Thank you, Chris.  Thank you very much.

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Transcript of Interview with Kimberly Hahn about Graced and Gifted. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Graced and Gifted – Biblical Wisdom for the Homemaker’s Heart is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1004167/Graced-Gifted-Biblical-Wisdom-Homemakers-Heart/