The Dominus Project

Episode 9: A Family on a Mission, Part 1 with Dr. David and Alicia Whidden

Dr. Brian Pedraza: All right, friends, welcome to another episode of Holy Habits in the House. I am Dr. Brian Pedraza, Professor of Theology at FranU and Director of the Dominus Project.  

Why Dominus? Because Domus is a Latin word for House and Dominus is the Latin word for the Lord, and we want to help people make Jesus the Lord of their homes and families. I am joined by my good friend, Father Josh Johnson.  

Father Josh Johnson: This great because I thought it was Domino's the whole time.  

Dr. Brian Pedraza:  Yeah, $5.99 for a pizza!

Fathe Josh: That’s what I'm saying, everything on it, thin crust with other stuff on.

Dr. Brian: Yeah, it's not bad.

Dr. Whidden: But we just had the worst pizza this past weekend.  

Father Josh: from there?  

Dr. Whidden: No, no, no, no, no, not from Dominos, we were at the beach and this place that was highly rated, It was like 30 bucks and it was a really terrible pizza.  

Father Josh: Aw, it is heartbreaking.  

Dr. Whidden: You shouldn't be able to mess it up, but they messed it up. Really expensive-ly.  

Dr. Pedraza: Well, we're going to serve up something fresher right here. Who is it that we got.  

Father Josh: Oh, that's so fresh!

So, we have Dr. David and Alicia Whiddon. The Whidden's are Christians, Sacred Heart of Jesus power couple!  They are definitely a holy spirit power couple and we're talking about Jesus today, but before we talk about Jesus and the church and discipleship and all that good stuff, I want to know more about y'all.  

Alicia, whenever you're at the house, and you have got music on in the background. What is Dr. David Whidden's go to dance move, when nobody's looking.  

Alicia Whidden: Oh, I do have a wonderful story.  

Father Josh: Oh, yes. This is gonna be good.  

Alicia Whidden: We almost did not get married because of me.  There was one point at a restaurant where, what song came on?  

Dr. Whidden: I don't know, but it was Robot worthy. It was Robot worthy!  

Alicia Whidden: He started doing the Robot and I’ve never seen that at a sushi restaurant. And I looked at him and I was like, “I've never seen that at a sushi restaurant before!” Oh, but now it's kind of a joke and so even, like, at our wedding and stuff, my brother busted out the robot.  

Fathe Josh: That’s romantic, it is.  

Alicia Whidden: You never knew that about David Whidden....no words.  

Dr. Whidden: Surprise to see a stiff white guy.  

Father Josh: Yeah, I didn't see you, but now I can!

Dr. Pedraza: Friends, this is the first part of a two-part special, and we wanted to bring you all in to introduce it. This is all about a family being on a mission. So, I mean, it's really important to us to talk about the home being an important place of formation and clearly that's a part of what we're doing. but like Pope John Paul II likes to teach us, the way that you grow into yourself, who you're supposed to be, really take self-gift, towards other people and one of the important ways that Catholic families do that is through the works of mercy, through service in the community.  

So, we're really interested in how that sort of thing plays out in your family, and your family's life, whether it's service in the home, outside of the home.  Maybe something to kind of get us thinking about this is, I've been writing an article on Just Wages, and I came across this passage from St. Augustine. Remember, I shared this with you a bit and Augustine is talking about paths to Heaven, and he basically says, to paraphrase him,  

“For some people, there's Martyrdom, dying for the Lord. For other people, there's the following of the counsels; religious life, poverty, chastity, obedience”. He says, “For everybody else, there's Matthew 25.”  That's the passage where it says, when did we see you, Lord?   What are you talking about?  You fed me when I was hungry. You clothed me when I was naked.  When I first read that, I was kind of like, Ouch! How much emphasis do we put on serving the poor when the Lord says this is going to separate the sheep from the goats?  With that as the backdrop for what we're doing, let's hear about it. Like in your family, what role does service really play for you?  

Dr. Whidden: We were talking about it as we were walking up. I remember, it's been baked into our relationship from the beginning. When we first started dating in Dallas, the church that I was a part of fed the homeless on Friday nights, and that's actually one of the things that we did as we were dating.  

Dr. Brian Pedraza: That’s a good date, right? It's a good date.  

Alicia Whidden: And I think what I'm trying to instill in my kids is like, those moments where you're serving others is such an important time to come together. It may be a mundane thing that you're doing, but it brings you so much closer to each other and so much closer to the Lord and it's just been great to see that progression as we matured as a couple, and as we're maturing as a family, hopefully in our faith as well.  

Dr. Pedraza: No wonder you fell in love with this guy, if it wasn't the dance moves, seeing him serve?  

Alicia Whidden: Yes. Yeah, definitely.

Dr. Whidden: It was a really important, I think, experience for us as a couple and then Matthew 25, we were talking about the Bible verses and I mentioned that one, that's the one that's really inspired me. I say to our students all the time, the longer I work at FranU, the more I really have begun to believe, that the only way you can become what God has made you to be is by serving others, by living a life outside of yourself. I think that's essentially what Matthew 25 says, be who God has made you to be by serving the poor and by serving Christ in the poor and that's oftentimes a lot harder to do! It's easy to say, but it can actually be really difficult to do, and I don't want to gloss over that.  

Father Josh:  One of the things that convicted me, when I first met you, was you told me that you had your students do service projects at FranU and then they write a paper on it, and then afterwards you’d ask them, you'd say, “Oh, I don't see the person's name in here. What was their name?”  If their name wasn't in there, you're like, this isn't good. Right, because it's all about the relationship and the actual person.  

Dr. Whidden: Because it's easy to serve people at arm's length. You can just give them food and never relate to them. Yeah. It is a whole other thing to give to somebody AND to find out their name AND to give them your name because, once somebody has your name, they have a claim on you, they can demand your attention just by having your name.  

Of course, God, He does that in Exodus, in that encounter with Moses and the Burning Bush, Moses is like, “tell me your name.” God gives him this name, and by God giving man his name, this Yahweh name, it gives man an ability to call on him. Names, I think, are actually an important part of the service. It's like, how do we it and not just tell me what your name is but my name is David, my name is Alicia. Tell me your name...that's the beginning of the real relationship!

Dr. Pedraza:  The humility of God. Right? Because when you first started that story, I was about to say that God was going to lord it over Moses because he claimed his name, but it's the other way. Moses is like “God, tell me your name”. The humility of God to say this is how to call me, that's incredible!  

Dr. Pedraza: I love that you all started your relationship in service, and now that you're married, take us to the point where you start having kids. How did you start thinking about how service is going to be an important thing, not just for us, but for the kids that we're raising?  

Alicia Whidden: Well, I think it's grown and developed as our family has grown and developed together. David and I have talked a lot about hospitality and how we want to integrate that into our home life. That might mean inviting the neighborhood kids over, having that open house, always having friends and family come over for dinner, sharing a meal.  

Dr. Whidden: There's always room for an extra.

Alicia Whidden: There's always room for an extra, “Come on over.”

I think that's just progressed, a few years ago, we opened up our home in a very intimate way and started fostering children in the community. That's a very intimate form of hospitality, before we did that, we talked to each of our kids and said, this has been placed on our hearts or mainly my heart.  I feel this calling that we need to explore this as a family and what do you guys think? It's like we each have our own individual missions, but as we've grown as a family, we have our family mission right now that's taking form of fostering and developing relationships.  

Father Josh: How have you seen your children, your biological children change from their experience of living with your foster children?  

Alicia Whidden:  I think they've grown in grace  

Dr. Whidden: and patience.  

Alicia Whidden: Patience, yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's been such a blessing, the biggest blessing, I'd say, for our family unit because we've just been able to create an intimate relationship with other people outside of our home and invite them into our house and into our lives.

Dr. Whidden: It's a form of witness, too, because people ask us, why do you do this? How do you get into this? and we can talk about our Christian faith with people like we're Christians! We feel called to do this because we're Christians. So, it allows us to have a lot of people, just know, and they're not surprised by it, giving the work that we do. but it's a form of witness.  

When Augustine talks about martyr, you know, our martyrdom we always have to remind people that the word martyr just means witness. There's lots of ways to witness, right? Yeah, and there's ways to sort of physically die, but there's a way of dying to oneself, too. I mean, you know, fostering is not easy. It's a genuine labor of love.

Alicia Whidden: It is.

Dr. Whidden: Yeah, and I never want to romanticize it with people. It's also really difficult and so it forces us to get out of our comfort zone, to put aside our own selfish desires and things the way you think your life might go and all of a sudden it may go in very different direction, so it's good for our kids to see that too. It helps them understand, I think, sort of, the position of privilege that they actually start with, but also to see here's one way to act out the faith. I mean, we bear that with us all the time.

Dr. Pedraza: Yeah. Can I, I want to tread lightly on some sacred ground by asking you this question, Alicia, right?  

Because you said that the Lord really put it on your heart, so there are some people who are thinking about fostering or adopting, and it could be for a whole host of reasons, right? There are plenty of couples who struggle with infertility, there are plenty of couples who just feel it on their hearts that they need to grow their family by adding more love and putting more self-gift in there. What was it like for you? What was the Lord doing in you, that you felt like this was something that you all needed to discern?

Alicia Whidden: So, during COVID is really where I started to feel a call towards fostering. It breaks my heart that there's kids out there, that don't have the family support that they need in order to be with a stable group and so, it's funny, because we started doing our classes online during COVID and I remember turning to my husband one time because I thought I had registered for the fostering online courses, and He wasn't out on board yet with the fostering program. But I turned to him and I was like, I think I registered, but I can't find my registration, I need your help, and I started crying.

Dr. Whidden: It was like 30 minutes before the classes started,for that class, it would be months before we’d get to do it again.  

Alicia Whidden: and I said, “David, God has called me to Nineva, and I can't get there, like I just need your help!” And he was like “I got this. I got this. Let's do this!”  and after that, I feel like our paths aligned, and that kind of led us into fostering. We have, we have fostered multiple kids and one long term.  

Father Josh: We love, one of your foster kids who I call Baby J. He is so cool, yeah. We love Baby J at Sacred Heart, and I see him at mass, and even the way he interacts with us now because he's used to it, and you run around the entire mass..

Dr. Whidden: She never ever hears your homilies.  

Father Josh: Yeah, I don't say anything wise, so just read the Bible. That's sufficient. But it's so beautiful seeing your family unit and then also seeing other families at Sacred Heart who have also adopted over the years, and I just say, it's a beautiful thing. So, it's just a gift.  

Alicia Whidden: And he's a gift, he's a gift.  

Father Josh: He's so beautiful.  

Dr. Whidden: Yeah, and even to step back. So, you know, we started off serving the homeless in Dallas, and we've done that as well in Baton Rouge at some places, some of the churches and opportunities here. some of that, I think as well! You have to figure out where your kids are developmentally. There are places and there are things that you can do with a 9-year-old or things you can do with a 15-year-old that you may not be able to do with toddlers. I think finding a way to share that service with your children is going to depend on where your kids are, how many kids you've got and so on. We've done different things and there may, sometimes, have to be a pause for people.

As a domestic church, the first ones you're called to serve are the children that you have, that you already have. Alicia does that in other ways, too. I mean we home school; we're serving our kids educationally that way, but also other kids the co-ops they we engage with. We talked about, there's a little girl who we are almost like her second family, who lives near us, but her dad died, and it was a really sad time in her family. She spent a lot of time in our house and recently, her mom's like, all saved and, you know, just by sort of being a place that she could come when she was scared or happy, you know.

Father Josh: I thought, I do think it's very important for families to recognize that erving your kids IS a mission. We don't ignore them to go to the soup kitchen or to do service, we can't leave our spouse and go to a foreign mission for a super long time when we have our own family take care of at home and your neighbors as well.  

That really is a mission, that there are people in the neighborhood also who maybe, they have needs also and they need meals.

Dr. Whidden: Bring meals, see what I mean, that happens all the time and when we brought Baby J into our house, our neighborhood served us. People will bring us meals, bring meals and come together. There's lots of ways to do that.  

Dr. Pedraza: If you want to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, that's called having a baby.  

Father Josh: Empathy in prison as well. That's right!

Dr. Pedraza:  One thing I'm thinking about, is whether it's the amount of self-gift it takes to foster a child or even just the amount of self-gift it takes to say, we're going to go down to St. Agnes and go help at the women's shelter and feed the hungry.

How are the ways that you prepare your kids for that, because you're asking something of their hearts, and you don't want it to be at arm's distance in things. What are you saying to your kids?  

Alicia Whidden: With fostering and everything, we come together in prayer first because it has to come out of a foundation of love and then you move out into the community and that has looked different throughout our family time. When they were younger, our kids went to St. Agnes and we come together and ask, how do you want to serve? How do you want to express Christ love in the community? It might look different. Sometimes during Lent or Advent, we give them some money that they can distribute in ways that they see fit throughout the community. It's when they're younger, it does look different. but I think as your family forms a mission, like I said, I think David has his mission, I have my own mission, but we also have a family mission. You talk about it, and you pray about it, and then you reassess always, but it's always as a family unit, and you come together and say, are we ready to do this? Are we ready to explore things in this way, our prayer life for this deed....

Dr. Whidden: They learn a little bit about sacrificial love, that way because there's a lot of things that they'd rather do sometimes. Thinking about that. I very much think fostering has really helped them think about, “Okay, this isn't that just about me.”  

Here I've got this infant toddler who is sometimes an agent of chaos, like any toddler is, right? I’m like Okay; they've really given into it.  

I think it's also opened their eyes up to a part of the world that for them, they haven't been exposed to. They've been very fortunate to live in the house, that at least I think, very fortunate to live in house will have to ask them if they think that way, but to also realize, ok, there's a lot of kids who don't have the advantages and things that they have.  

Dr. Pedraza: So, there's the before the act of service, where you really help your children prepare and think about. I love how you're calling upon their freedom to engage. How do you want to be creative in doing this?  

What about, after the fact, because at least in my own family, when I'm asking my kids, like, “Hey, what do you think of that experience?” No matter what it is, it could be a baseball game, it could have been serving at St. Agnes, and they are always like, “It was pretty good.”  I’m like, I know there's things that you're thinking of, I saw your face while we were doing it and I know there are things you're thinking of.  

So how do you help your kids reflect on “what happened” and “what was going on inside of them”. How do you help them bring that to the surface?  

Dr. Whidden: I'm not sure we've developed that as well as we probably could have. I mean, any of this stuff, nobody's ever got it all perfectly worked out. Sometimes it's just like, how did you feel? Especially with younger kids, what did you feel? is probably a better question more than what did you think? So, whether they were uncomfortable or challenged or whatever.  

Alicia Whidden: I think also those discussions need to happen about how did you feel, and then would you want to do that again? But even if it made you feel uncomfortable, why? Sometimes that uncomfortable place is where our growth comes through. It's finding that balance of I felt uncomfortable, but I'm going to grow and learn from this, whereas you don't want to overwhelm a child as well.  

Dr. Whidden: To use an analogy, there was a study about sports and parents. They asked the kids what the worst part of sports was, and they said the ride home because this is where parents start debriefing on the game. Say what you did wrong, and sometimes I think even with these service opportunities with younger kids, if you get into, how was it? How do you feel? versus organically having the conversation, if you've got this ongoing relationship with your kids, you can talk about it and sometimes it comes up in different ways.  

Most of our conversations are that way.

Dr. Pedraza: Much more organic than sort of pointed, I think. I love that, I love that study. That's a great analogy, because kids don't like hearing the criticism right after doing the thing.

Dr. Whidden: Every phase, if they bring it up that's one thing, but it's when the parents bring it up that can be a bit of a problem for kids. Yeah.  

Dr. Pedraza: One thing in my family that I've found to be helpful for reflecting on stuff like that is, normally like bedtime, softens them up. There's something about tucking the kid in that provides opportunity to be like, anything you're thinking about for today? and all of a sudden, the thoughts start flowing.

Alicia Whidden: Yeah, yeah, I agree. Bedtime is a good time.

Father Josh: I think the takeaways, for our families, who are going to be watching this.  I think that one thing that they can do is become aware of places and spaces that they can serve in that region. We obviously heard about St. Teresas Nuns have their Soup Kitchen and the woman’s shelter. We have Vagabond Missions right here at Sacred Heart. We have our new food pantry and our coffee shop and our cafe that they can serve in. There is the St. Vincent De Paul Homeless shelter, there's Angola Prison Ministry and we can learn more about fostering in our parish, so I would encourage families to first and foremost, become aware of what's out there. Maybe this month, test out a few different ones, and then come together, after the experience, as a family and pray with it and discern one that you want to commit to for the next year or two.  We can go consistently to that one particular mission to form a relationship.  

Dr. Whidden: For relationships, absolutely!  It's funny thinking about when we first started dating, we were serving the homeless in Dallas. There's this one guy I've never been able to forget his name, it is Freddy. Do you remember Freddie?  

Alicia Whidden: I remember Freddie.  

Dr. Whidden: So, he was maybe on the spectrum, maybe a little schizophrenic, and you could just tell, he was this beautiful, big, black man, but just like his brain wasn't working, right.  I've always wondered, whatever happened to him, he was just a little paranoid schizophrenic. It is really often that I thought about that guy, but I knew his name.  

Dr. Pedraza: One thing I'm thinking about, for that challenge for families, that I think would be good to clarify, because you brought us to this place where there's discomfort and it can be such a powerful place for the Holy Spirit to help us grow, but just to clarify what we're not saying is there's a bad discomfort where it's like this is unsafe, this is too dark places or whatever. Then there's that good discomfort where you feel like the Lord is like, you could grow here if you step out of yourself.  

Finding that place can be really good for family discernment, to be like this is going to take a little bit of courage to do this, if we do this.  

Dr. Whidden: I mean it's the challenge of love. So, I think one of the hardest things for me to realize and to really sort of lean into with fostering is developing relationship with our foster child’s mom who, you know, who's had a very tough and a rough life of her own and just thinking about it's not just him I'm called to love, but because he exists, I'm called to love her too, even given the various difficult things that might have happened, you know. So, you really learn to love, not just sort of serve people, but to genuinely love and sometimes people that you serve can be difficult to love, right? I mean, it's not always easy. Sometimes people have their agency, and they may want to push back and may not like the way you serve them. Yeah, and they'll let you know.  

Father Josh: Yeah. but that's love.  

Dr. Whidden: That's what makes it difficult, right? To be really good for those people, for their sake.  

Father Josh: This is the call of love. So, thank you all for your witness of love. I think it is super inspiring, and I hope it motivates more families of Sacred Heart and beyond to also give themselves. Thank you. You are all a treasure in our community, thanks for joining us. Thank you.

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