Why I respect Lin Manuel Miranda, He did not throw away his shot

I will never forget the day that Lin Manuel Miranda changed my life.  This may be a dramatic statement but my secular dream job is to be on Broadway and those who know me know that I am animated enough to have made it. Jesus, however, knocked on the doors of my future claiming it for His own.

I digress.

It was a morning last October. “What do I even like anymore?” I asked myself. Two years serving college students followed by engagement, marriage, two job changes and then pregnancy left me lost.  I had given up so much of what I had once enjoyed and wanted it back. “I could listen to Rent or Wicked,” I thought. Nah, I need something new. So I did what any normal musical loving soul from Houma Louisiana would do and I texted my much trendier friend, Katharine.

“New Broadway musicals I should listen to?”

“HAMILTON!”, she replied.

Ok great. So I spotified Hamilton and a love affair began.

My friends, I LOVE this musical. My other secular dream job is history teacher so you can imagine that the marriage of my two loves would change my life (see, no exaggeration). Jared also enjoys the musical so we basically listened to it nonstop from October to March. We even played Hamilton in labor and delivery. Yes, little Penelope was born to the musical history of the American Revolution.

“Hamilton” has taken the musical world by storm and Lin Manuel Miranda, the genius behind this hip hop history is a brilliant man who is now somewhat of a Hamilton evangelist. As I read and listened to his interviews and speeches, however, I found myself torn. I liked him, but he also annoyed me just a bit. This bothered me and so I asked myself why a man who I would clearly be a friend with in real life would bother me. The answer I realized is that I am annoyed by Mr. Miranda because his passion, follow through and success reveals my laziness.

See, every time I heard or read an interview with Miranda he was fearlessly and passionately promoting Hamilton. This man is completely captivated by Alexander Hamilton. He is captivated by his inner struggles, his outer success and the drama of revolution that surrounded his life. Introduced to Hamilton by the biography written by Ron Chernow, Miranda ask himself,“ How has this not been made a musical?”. He then spent the next 6 years writing every single word rapped in the show.

He found a true story to be told and gave the very best of himself to tell it.

Today, anyone who likes musicals or history knows in almost completion the story of Alexander Hamilton and the drama of the revolution when before, most people might have known that Arron Burr killed Hamilton. It was Miranda’s unwavering, “ I don’t care if you don’ t like it because I do” passion that annoyed me. This man just won’t quit and that is precisely why the soundtrack landed at our little Penelope’s birth and in the ears of millions around the nation. His risk led to his success and I am jealous!

Miranda took a truth that was interesting, valuable and otherwise unknown and made it beautiful. He literally does not care if you don’t care. In this lies the indictment.

I, Mallory Bueche Smyth, contain a rivaling passion in my being. Everything matters to me and I too have found a Truth that is far more interesting, for more valuable, deeper, mysterious and despite our best beliefs, unknown. It is the drama of the salvation of human history. In the words of Frank Sheed, it is

"God, infinite and eternal, Trinity, Unity; humanity, finite, created in time, fallen and redeemed by Christ; the individual human person born into the life of nature, reborn into the life of grace, united with Christ in the Church which is His mystical body, aided by angels, hindered by devils, destined for heaven, in peril of hell"

The man of Jesus Christ captivates me. It is the Truth of His incarnation, the success of His ministry, and the façade of His defeat by death and the drama that surrounds our salvation. This is the foundation of our very existence. How is it that I have not yet given the very best of myself to this Man and to the telling of this story? Although we think we know it, we as a society know about as much about our salvation history as we did about Hamilton before Miranda told us more!

I hope to one day shake Mr. Miranda’s hand and thank him for sharing himself and his loves with the world regardless of any criticism or obstacle that got in his way. I hope to tell him that by his slight annoyance, he inspired me to get off my butt and join him. I hope to thank him for truly making my life better and I hope that by following in His footsteps I can pay it forward and inspire you the reader to give a second look to the most interesting story ever told and take your place in the narrative.

P.S. If you haven’t listend to Hamilton, do yourself a favor! It’s right here.

God and Mary in 2016. His relevance.

Every now and then I need just a little bit of Sister Act in my life. The 1990’s Roman Catholic Rock movie with Whoopie Goldberg arguably at her best and without a doubt at her most joyful. To my husbands delight, we rocked out to a few Sister Act songs this morning in honor of the Assumption ofMary celebrated today. I mean who doesn’t love it when the shy novice of a religious order surprises all with powerhouse vocal chords that put the cherubim and seraphim to shame.

Now of course, I would not be telling you about my Sister Act love, making myself irrelevant to anyone born after the year 1989 if there was not a very very profound point to be made about God’s ultimate coolness. We will get back to Sister Act my wish for religious sisters to turn up the jams in our churches today but for now, let’s talk about God’s realness and relevance. Enter… the Virgin Mary.

Regardless of how you feel about Mary, travel with me back to the beginning of God’s promise on her life. The first chapter of Luke gives us almost all that we know about her. After the angel appeared to her and told her, “Surprise you are going to be the mother of God”, she went to visit her cousin Elizabeth. At their greeting, Elizabeth gives Mary one hell of a compliment, “ Blessed is she who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled “ and then the climax. Mary recites a canticle giving all glory and gratitude to the God of Jacob in one of the most beautiful prayers ever uttered by human lips.

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior. For he has looked upon His handmaiden’s lowliness; behold, from now on all ages will call me blessed.  (Read the rest here)

All ages will call her blessed? ALL AGES?

Last time I checked all means all and so if God is real and He keeps His promises then we should be able to see this “All Ages” claim happening even now! So let us ask. Have all generations called her blessed? Is Mary in fact truly blessed for believing that what was spoken to her would be fulfilled?

My dear friends, I present to you a 2016 National Geographic cover. 

“ The Most Powerful Woman in the Word” 

What? A young woman from Nazareth who lived 2000 years ago was named the world’s most powerful woman in 2016 by a secular global exploration magazine. And what’s the article tag line? (you can read the whole article here)

Mary barely speaks in the New Testament but her image and legacy are found and celebrated all over the world.

Blessed INDEED is she who believed that what was spoken to her would be fulfilled. It is hard to argue that the God of Jacob who supposedly sent his son to us through Mary 2000 years ago is made up when His promises are still being fulfilled in tangible, visible, recordable history today. This article goes on to talk about the influence that Mary has had all over the world over the past and in the present. It is hard to say that this woman is meant to distract when she by her own words is constantly pointing us to the living God. He is real and she by her mere presence points to Him and His character.

Mary reveals to indistinguishable truths about God. First, God is real and He is a powerhouse. Second, this powerhouse of a living God is personal. He made a promised to a no name girl and He kept it. It was through that promise that He sent us the God man, all powerful but in the muck and the mud of humanity. He cares about the details of your life, He loves you and He is faithful. We can see this in history. Even Whoopie Goldberg, probably not on purpose, blessed Mary by the filming of Sister Act. God used Hollywood to honor His lady and they didn’t even realize it.

God. Is. Cool.

All generation call her blessed indeed and our blessed Mother will forever point us to a living and relevant God who wants to be in the details of your life. You can choose to ignore him but you cannot choose to block Him out of existence, He continues to prove Himself.

Happy Assumption Friends!

God reveals Himself in His Witnesses, let us stop missing it!

For most of my life, if I am honest, I have found the saints to be super boring. Frankly, they look bored. A standard saint card is a picture of the holy one with their hands in prayer center, eyes closed and face pointed towards the sky. They just look sooooo…. pious. Little did I know and only later did I learn that most of the saints were amazing and have accomplished way way more than 99.9% of present and past society. I used to complain about Mary not looking very relatable to women and then someone pointed out to me that in most of her statues she looks completely serene and yet is crushing the devil. She is literally defeating evil and not even breaking a sweat. Ok, that is seriously awesome and for the feminist, very pro woman!

It is actually our fault for making the saints look so unattractive because their lives were far different from the boring nature of their statues. These were men and women who were super feisty, joyful, and fierce. They performed miracles and achieved the heights of character and virtue that many of us only dream of.

I mentioned yesterday that we have compartmentalized God out of our reality. This is due mostly to the inconvenience of worship but also in part to poor marketing. If God is a genie, Jesus is a hippie and no one wants to look like a saint statue well then what’s the point? But what if we have been cheated on the story of Christianity? What if this boring faith that many of us reject is actually a huge, global story that IS REAL. What if God was so powerful that humans would die if they saw His glory? What if Jesus Christ was so radical that He actually rose from the dead? And what if the saints were total holy bad asses who cry out to us to join them? My friends we have been baptized into this and we are missing it.

As I walked into St. Peter’s Basilica last week, I was immediately surrounded by the statues of 140 early century saints and all I could think of was Hebrews 12:1

" Therefore since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off all that hinders and sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race that is marked out for us."

I, in 2016, stood amidst a cloud of witnesses who lived and died for the same faith that I profess. These 140 saints received a true salvation history from the faithful of the Old Testament, believed in Jesus and continued the narrative. Now, they are immortalized statues crying out to thousands of onlookers saying, “ It’s true, it’s all true! Love the Lord it is He who brings life and death”.

And it is not just the 140 saints that stand in this cloud of witnesses. It’s the good popes and saints who are buried all over the city. It is the painted faithful on the ceilings of the churches. Men and women lived as you lived and died as you will die but it was their relationship with our Lord that informed every single decision they made. They are not there so that we can be passive and think about how nice it is that they had a deep faith. They are a stark challenge. They are meant to inspire us cast aside our trivial pursuit of comfort for the sake of the living God for which our souls were made. They are so much more than art; it is in front of these witnesses that words of St. Iraneus can ring loud, “ The Glory of God is Man Fully Alive.”

It is God that makes us fully alive, it is He who has immortalized the saints who go before us and it is He to whom they point.

No matter your experience with Christianity, God is bigger, better, and more powerful than you can possibly imagine. The story of our faith extends far wider and far deeper than your most likely terrible catechesis and it is worth a second look. The saints did not reach their sainthood for Sunday school or a list of rules that many perceive as outdated. Their sainthood is for Truth and they are calling to us to join them.

God permeates reality, why do we keep missing Him?

Somehow, someway our word has been broken. In many ways, we never stood a chance, the nature of our world view follows the nature of our reality. We are compartmentalized and none is more obvious than when it comes to our general view of God and Christianity. For too long in our society, we have been taught in our schools, our religion classes and our family’s that God is separate from reality and the things that truly affect us. We have accepted this and live it out essentially stripping God of His diety and turning him into our feel good side dish to the American dream. If God is separate from our day-to-day lives and found only in Churches and unrelatable stories, then He is not real and it only follows that we should reject Him and we have. There are less people my age interested in knowing and worshiping a God outside of themselves than possibly ever before. This makes sense if we teach that God is separate.

But if God is real then should we not see him in reality? Should He not be so much bigger than a Church experience? A real God, a real creator would mark his creation at every chance. He would reveal His living tangible mystery, woven through out history for us to find if we only look. My friends, God was NEVER meant to be limited to a Sunday service. He was never meant to be separate from our lives. We did this to Him because true worship is inconvenient but when we actually grasp His grandeur, worship can be our only response! We are missing it!! But we don’t’ have to!

 I am almost always thinking about these things because when I found the Lord, I found that He actually permeates everything, inwardly and outwardly. It is He who should shape our worldview because it is He who shaped the world and I am sitting hear writing to you yet again hoping that my latest experience might just intrigue you enough to recognize the God who surrounds you!

For the past two weeks I have been running around Italy with my husband, brother-in-law and 7-month old. As you can imagine, we saw a ton of churches but none as magnificent as the mother ship, St. Peter’s Basilica. St. Peter’s is incredible by itself but if you are lucky, you can tour the scavi, excavations commissioned by Pope Pius XI underneath the basilica. So what is so great about the scavi? Well, a lot. See for many years it had been accepted on tradition that St. Peter’s was built on the tomb of St. Peter himself. There are documents that suggest this to be true but there was otherwise no real proof. Fast forward to the 1940’s when Pope Pius XI wanted to be buried in a small chapel that would require the floor to be lowered if it were to be open to the public. As construction began to lower the floor, Roman artifacts were found and a full on excavation was commissioned.

My brother-in-law and I walked through was used to be a Roman burial ground and were impressed as our very straight forward British tour guide walked us through beautiful mausoleums with frescos still visible. Some were pagan, some were Christian, but all were amazing and dated back to the 100s. As we walked deeper into the scavi there was a grave located directly under the tabernacle on which was found two older monuments and 1500 coins from around the world place by pilgrims. The excavators removed the bones to be examined it was found that these bones belonged to a man of old age, strong, wrapped in purple and gold linens (signifying importance), and interestingly enough missing his feet. Yes, these are the bones of St. Peter who died as an old man, worked as a fisherman, was revered by the Christians of the time and whose feet were chopped off after he was crucified upside down. The tradition is true; St. Peters Basilica was built right over his grave.

This was very cool for me to see the bones of St. Peter but something even cooler was revealed to me two days later. I was reading the gospel when Jesus says, “ I say that you are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church.” UPON THIS ROCK I WILL BUILD MY CHURCH! Yes, yes, the universal church was lead first by St. Peter but then there was a literal church built on him! Jesus said this and then it actually happened, in real life and we can see it 2000 years later! This is only one of the many many Jesus micdrops. My friends, there is a God who sent His son and there is evidence, true connections everywhere. The mystery is real; it doesn’t just disappear as we enter into a post Christian society. Truth doesn’t change according to belief or convenience. Open your eyes. Let yourself be wrong and be seized by the God who reveals himself in every generation throughout history and let yourself worship!