Matins and Babies

From Fr. Cantalamessa's fourth Lenten homily for this year:

"I am speaking from experience here. I belong to a religious order in which, until a few decades ago, we would get up at night to recite the office of Matins that would last about an hour. Then there came a great turning point in religious life after the Council. It seemed that the rhythm of modern life—studies for the younger monks and apostolic ministry for the priests—no longer allowed for this nightly rising that interrupted sleep, and little by little the practice was abandoned except in a few houses of formation.

"When later the Lord had me come to know various young families well through my ministry, I discovered something that startled me but in a good way. These fathers and mothers had to get up not once but two or three times a night to feed a baby, or give it medicine, or rock it if it was crying, or check it for a fever. And in the morning one or both of the parents had to rush off to work at the same time after taking the baby girl or boy to the grandparents or to day-care. There was a time card to punch whether the weather was good or bad and whether their health was good or bad.

"Then I said to myself, if we do not take remedial action we are in grave danger. Our religious way of life, if it is not supported by a genuine observance of the Rule and a certain rigor in our schedule and habits, is in danger of becoming a comfortable life and of leading to hardness of heart. What good parents are capable of doing for their biological children—the level of self-forgetfulness that they are capable of to provide for their children’s well-being, their studies, their happiness—must be the standard of what we should do for our children or spiritual brothers. The example we have for this is set by the apostle Paul himself who said, 'I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls' (2 Cor 12:15)."

Read the whole thing.

Der Osterhase

I saw this over at WDTPRS and couldn't resist the re-post.






Now, this is not as bad as it looks. Not that my German is good enough to really tell what's going on, but it seems like the Easter Bunny's speech is devout enough, and my best guess is that he is invited to speak after Communion instead of giving the homily, which would be inappropriate. (Bunnies are not valid matter for ordination.) Also, he doesn't give out candy until after the blessing and dismissal, revealing that he respects the integrity of the Mass and the communion fast.

My Pears

The other day I got into a conversation that reminded me of one of my early experiences of religious people.

Folks like to make fun of St. Augustine and the big deal he makes about stealing the pears in the Confessions, but I get it. I get how childhood experiences become ways into an understanding of the depth of the problem of sin.

I was in the first or second grade. Some earnest religious kid asked me if I was 'saved.' Partly curious and partly making fun of him I answered his question with another: "Saved from what?" The kid didn't have a ready answer.

When I think of having said what I said, it fills me with awe before the mystery of sin. For that from which I needed to be saved was with me always: I was a sad and anxious kid, and already at that age I felt--felt, not knew--that there was something very out of sorts with my particular being-in-the-world.

Sin is not just the unreality that robs us and our societies of the good that ought to be there, but it also clouds our minds and perverts our thinking so that we lose our sense of the most fundamental thing of all, our need for salvation. If we were well aware of our need for God and the deliverance that God wills to give us, we would immediately become filled with such devotion and missionary zeal as to become like the saints. Indeed this is what sanctity is; not that we should conform ourselves to some religious standard by agonistic effort at 'personal holiness,' but that we should surrender to the need and desire for God which is our own deepest identity.

Even for us who are baptized and have been delivered from the burden of the guilt our first parents earned for us by their sin, the injury left by original sin remains in us. All of the actual sins of our life have kept the wound festering. The whole rotten business makes it hard even to think straight about things, which is something that should teach us theology students a lot of humility.

Even in my unhappiness I could ask from what I needed to be saved. That's the mystery of sin in its deepest and most sinister.

This is not to say that the purpose of salvation is to make us feel better or to help us arrive at a better mental health situation. The purpose of salvation, at least as long as we remain in the Church on earth, is to get us free from carrying our own selves around as a burden so that we can give ourselves to each other in love, open and responsive to how God wants to make use of us for the salvation of others.

Loving Precision

At the parish where I went for Mass this morning, I was simultaneously edified and amused by the altar servers. A team of brother and sister, self-reporting to be nine and ten years old respectively, they were, as my mother sometimes says of me, somewhat 'precise.' As I say, I was impressed and amused by the precision of their service.

I got to church before anyone else (that's how I like it) and saw that the altar sacramentary was set up on the credence, open in the Order of Mass to the beginning of the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Knowing those prayers by heart (and being in the practice of saying them in Latin anyway when there's an offertory hymn--the new translation won't bother me here!) I turned the page over to the orations for the day.

When the servers set up the altar, the kid who brought over the missal stand (with the sacramentary on it) noticed my adjustment and corrected it, turning the page back to where it was. Not wanting to dismiss his effort to correct the situation, I read the prayers from the book. A lot of ministry is hospitality, after all, and it goes both ways; being a good guest is important too.

The next funny bump in the road came at the end of Holy Communion. For the Communion procession, there were four ministers: me and an extraordinary minister with the Host and two others with the Precious Blood. Thus, when I returned to the altar after the procession, I had some work to do. I had to consume what remained of the Precious Blood from two chalices, purify them, and then combine two ciboria into one for returning the Sacrament to the tabernacle (which is some distance away in this church.) All the while I was doing this, praying quietly my Quod ore sumpsimus...the two servers stood patiently at the corner of the altar, waiting to take things away. Since they seemed eager for something to do, I re-dressed the two chalices with their purificators, and the principal one also with the paten and pall (I didn't have a veil or burse.) I didn't fold the corporal and put it on top of the pall, because the Sacrament was still resting on the altar. As I turned to take the ciborium to the tabernacle, I saw that the servers quickly took the two chalices to return them to the credence.

I figured that I would return to the altar from the tabernacle, fold the corporal, and then either leave it on the corner of the altar or return it to the credence myself on my way back to the chair for the Prayer After Communion and the end of Mass. (This happened often enough when I was a parish priest.) The servers, however, seeing me going back to the altar, jumped up and took the re-dressed chalices off the credence and brought them back to the altar, so that I could put the folded corporal on the chalice pall, como Dios manda, as they say. Then they re-removed them to the credence.

As I say, I found this all very funny, but I was edified by their attention and effort at the same time. In the practice of our faith, the boundary between loving attention to detail and scrupulosity sometimes gets very blurry. These kids were certainly on the former side, and I pray that their example keeps me there too.

Jesus

It seems like every Sunday I come back from Mass with a post to write about a conversation with some child or other. It helps me to notice that one of the things I miss from parish ministry is the presence of children in my daily life: the chance to work with altar servers so as to build their confidence and pride in doing something well, the natural desire for goodness in my young catechumens, the challenge and privilege of preaching to the schoolchildren, the funny little boy who liked to imitate the gestures of the priest at Mass, the very proper little girl who would politely present her gluten-free altar bread before Mass and then wait patiently for her little personal pyx to be returned to her afterward.

But on to today's edification from the young. In the sacristy before Mass, one of the altar children showed up and placed a folder on the vesting table. "What's in the folder?" I asked.

"Stuff for CCD,*" she answered.

"Oh yes," I continued, "and what are you learning about?"

"Different stuff...but mainly about Jesus."

Amen.


*I never cease to be amazed by the sticking power of the term "CCD" for programs of childrens' religious education in general. As Fr. Kselman, who taught us Old Testament and was one of our favorite teachers, always liked to remind us, sacred language is conservative in nature and tends to preserve itself.

Local Celebrity

I love when someone meets a celebrity but doesn't realize it for the ignorance of unworldliness. It happened to me once when I was first meeting the Capuchins and I met Jason Patric. When I mentioned it to the young women at work, they were all excited and scolded me for not realizing what a privilege I had been given.

Well, it happened again. Remember my recent 'examination of conscience' post prompted by the little girl who gave me a picture she had drawn of the Sunday gospel?

I didn't know that I had met a celebrity. It turns out that she's the poster child for this year's Catholic Appeal here in the archdiocese of Boston:



Click the poster to support the Appeal!

Extra Miles and New Girdings

I received an encouraging gift after Mass this past Sunday: a little girl presented me with a drawing she had made in crayon. I didn't quite understand what it was supposed to be, so I asked her to explain it. It was the person going the 'extra mile' from the gospel of that day, she explained.(Matthew 5:41) Here were the people, and there was the road--complete with cars, trees, and a little pond with fish in it.



I put the picture up here above my desk. I had been thinking of putting a crucifix there, to help me remember to work hard at my current obedience and unite its trials to the Lord's Sacrifice, but this picture of the extra mile is just as good. Of course it reminds me to pray for the little girl and her family, in thanksgiving for their devotion and good example, and to remember the basic goodness of children, but I think that God is also inviting me to reflect on the hard teaching of this gospel.

I remember going to one of my very first meetings with a formation director in a very agitated state. I had only been in religious life for a few days, but I had already seen a lot that had confused and scandalized me. The director gave me some saving advice: in each case I should ask myself what the Holy Spirit had asked me to look after, and leave the rest to God. If some aspects of religious life did not seem very religious, or even appeared irreligious, I should remember that the Holy Spirit had not asked me to be a superior or a spiritual director, and that only my own soul and my own religious life was my worry. I need not be scandalized by anybody's behavior, because it wasn't my concern.

This bracketing strategy saved my vocation, and enabled me to finish religious formation (on the second try) to become a perpetually professed friar and ordained priest. But many times strategies and behaviors that we learn in order to survive at one moment of life become maladaptive later on. I'm wondering if this is what God is telling me through the little girl's picture of the extra mile. I am grown-up religious now. I am a priest. Perhaps it's no longer enough to limit my attention to a narrowly defined set of concerns in my own personal obedience, to what, specifically and formally, the Holy Spirit has asked me to look after. Thank God that I have not (yet) been asked to be a superior or a pastor, but I do have a certain voice, a certain obligation to give good example in a way that I have not had before. Perhaps it's time to let go of interior bracketings and boundaries that help me to preserve my recollection and protect me from being scandalized, dismayed, or having to fight about things all the time. Perhaps I should look at my letter of obedience and ask myself what the 'extra mile' might be.

It edges into another reflection I've been having lately. I'm aware that statistically, I'm at a moment in my vocation when many guys leave. It's a well known phenomenon, and has been well-researched. I never understood how religious or priests could leave just a few years after final profession or ordination, but now that I find myself in that moment in my own life, I think that maybe I understand. Or at least I understand what would be the nature of that temptation for me. I'm not thinking of leaving, or, perhaps better, my temptations in this regard aren't relatively fierce for me at this moment. But maybe now I get it.

In religious formation and study for priesthood there are a ton of trials. They aren't the trials you had imagined for yourself, and nor are they the ones you would choose. But there is also a lot of reinforcement, and there is an increasing freedom and facility with the life as you move on. There are ceremonies that mark every little movement and achievement. Sure, you get up there and announce in your vows that you are renouncing this and that, and giving yourself over to God in this or that way, but there can still be some ego in it. I make this big, counter-cultural, glamorous decision to enter religious life. There are vows of renunciation and the ordinations of service, but they are still my vows and my ordinations. They are things that I do on some level.

Two or three years after all that, as all of the being made much of and the big days of ceremony and celebration fade into the past, a new challenge to self-renunciation begins to come into focus. God continues to invite me into a deeper renunciation of self, but now without the natural and supernatural encouragements that went with the initial training and initiation into this life. The experience reminds me of another gospel passage, Jesus speaking to Peter in John 21:18-19:

"Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." He said this signifying by what kind of death he would glorify God. And when he had said this, he said to him, "Follow me."

Being in my second assignment out of formation feels something like that. The challenge is to remember that the invitation to the deeper renunciation of self is an invitation to glorify God through such a death.

A Child's Questions, Lovecraft, and God

Like a lot of people, I received an Amazon Kindle e-reader for Christmas. I've really enjoyed it and have found several uses for it. One of my favorites is that it is for me like an ever-accessible version of the bin of random paperbacks at a used book store. So I've used it to pick up--mostly for free--all kinds of random old things I might want to read or read once again. One of these was a big collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories for only a couple of dollars.

I was really into Lovecraft for a spell in my middle teen years, and as I've read a few of these odd stories once again, full as they are with both fantastical beings and pointedly conservative old New England prejudices, I have wondered why they were once so enjoyable for me. I think I have an idea.

When I was little, like during recess in elementary school, I used to wonder idly sometimes about a lot of questions I had. Some of these were cosmic. Why was there something instead of nothing? What would it be like if there was nothing? I used to be fascinated by how hard it was to think about it. Others were about how the world seemed to be set up. If fog was the same thing as clouds, as I was told, why did the two look different? Did the water in the ocean go all the way to the bottom? How come you could sometimes feel the air, and sometimes not, but you could never see it? How come if you thought about it, you had to breathe on purpose or hold your breath and die (as I was told) but at other moments you realized that you were breathing all along without thinking about it? Still other questions, and in some ways the most interesting and frustrating ones, centered around my experience as an individual self-consciousness. Could this particular self-consciousness--which I am--have been born in another place or time? Or could it only have come to exist in these particular historical circumstances? When I was dead, I was told, it would be just the same as before I was born. But could that be?

I don't mean that I had the proper language for these questions at the time; mostly I felt them more than I was able to articulate them. Not having the language, my attempts to ask adults about them were mostly pointless. I remember in particular that when I tried to ask questions about the 'individual self-consciousness' I only had language to talk about particularity in terms of location and vision, and so I talked about my 'outlook.'

All this is just to say that ever since I was little I have had a kind of sense that there is more to the story, that we live in the midst of a much larger reality and history of which we are only dimly aware in our day-to-day lives. This is very much the sense one gets in Lovecraft; there is much 'more to the story,' to the history of the earth and the cosmos, and it is very, very sinister and will threaten your sanity even to become aware of it for a moment.

A few years later in life I would realize that the 'more to the story' of which I had always been aware and curious about at some level, was the Ground of all being that religious people call 'God.' Far from being sinister, this 'more to the story' was entirely benevolent. As one of my professors likes to translate what the medievals call the benignitas of God, it is 'aggressive goodness.' I was grateful to discover that this reality, which turned out to be more a reality than anything else, could be stepped into through the Word made flesh. And so I got to be the Christian.

The Original Blessing

Yesterday I spent some time with a couple of friends whom I've known since elementary school. Both have families now. The one whose home we were visiting has two children: the older one is a rambunctious toddler and the younger is only five months old. Almost every space in their home is overtaken with child related stuff and the atmosphere is generally chaotic. They are very happy. It's interesting to see people with whom you grew up, both friends and family, as parents themselves. They are the same people, of course, but are somehow transformed. They are renovated by the original blessing God pronounced on our first parents: "Be fruitful." The original blessing is on all of us, because we all derive from the compound marriage of the will of God and the bodies of Adam and Eve.

Perhaps it's when we forget about all this that we celibates get ourselves into trouble. Marriage is an option, but generativity is not. If we do not care for our spiritual lives and cultivate our own re-creation in God, we will be sterile, unable to conceive spiritual children. If we lose our missionary edge, the command of the Lord to make disciples of all nations, we can easily turn in on ourselves in eccentricity, comfort-seeking, and entitlement. All of these are disaster for the celibate soul, which is why we always need to remember that our vocations are not given to us for ourselves, but for the sake of those to whom God wishes to give us as spiritual mothers and fathers. Here the chaotic house filled with toys and childcare equipment is a good reflection for the celibate. Am I willing to surrender every space in my life to God, or do I hold back certain areas for myself?

2nd Holy Communion

This morning it was my luck to have the grade school children for Mass; they are always a delight, especially singing with their enthusiastic choir. While I was preaching, I remarked to myself that among the children were the first communicants from this past Sunday. Presuming that they did not assist at Mass yesterday (which I think is a good bet) today would be their second Holy Communion!

It was really beautiful to see them again, much more relaxed this time and not having to be dressed up, as each devoutly came forward to receive the Host, making the proper bows and stepping to the side so well. I am very grateful for the privilege of such moments.

Right Lisa, a Wonderful, Magical Animal

So responded Homer Simpson, disbelieving his daughter Lisa's claim that bacon, ham, and pork chops had a single origin.

Today I was using one of the classrooms at our grade school to host a meeting. While I was waiting for folks, I enjoyed reviewing displays that the children had made on the countries of the world. I was impressed by the diversity of countries, as well as the care and effort that had gone into the work. I was proud of our kids. The original assignment could be discerned from the displays: one was to report on the government, culture, religion, dress, and food of each country.

One little text box caught my eye:

The most popular delicacy in England is fish and chips. In the United States it is referred to as Chicken Strips and French Fries.

I have advised Fr. Pastor to review the science curriculum.

Explicit Triduum Paschale

Let it never be said that I am so into sacramental liceity or liturgical decorum that I'm afraid to have a little fun, especially when it makes for hilarious catechesis.

After greeting the people after the last Mass this morning, I was walking back to the sacristy. Examining the baptismal font and its decorative waterfall were two little kids, a brother and sister in the range of four or five years old. The sister had a little baby doll under her arm.

I asked her if her baby had been baptized. She replied that she wasn't sure. When I asked her if she would like for her baby to be baptized, she wasn't sure about that either, but accepted it with the encouragement of the "grandparents." (How much like real life!) After extracting from the brother some consent to his godfatherhood, I baptized the "baby" with just a tiny bit of water and wholly defective intention. By this time the little girl was getting into it, and smiled as I charged her with her new duties of Christian motherhood.

Protecting God's Grammarians

It's a beautiful day here in the City of Gracious Living, so I went out for a walk. I stopped into a local church to pray Sext, and I saw something curious on the vestibule bulletin board. On a large piece of paper a contract was presented: I agree to fully participate in the process of preparation for the sacrament of Confirmation.

Undersigned were the confirmandi, presumably. What a neat idea, I thought. This way the children are reminded each Sunday of their public commitment to the fullness of their sacramental initiation, and the rest of the faithful have the chance to know their fervor and pray for them by name.

However, some solicitous soul had tacked this note to the contract:


"Please don't split infinitives, especially in front of children." I laughed out loud.

My mother, who has some professional authority on such questions, says that the preference for integral infinitives in written English comes from the former prejudice for the normativity of Latin in academic and scientific writing. In Latin, of course, it is impossible to split an infinitive even if you want to. Since this normativity no longer obtains (except perhaps in Latin rite Catholicism) one no longer has to strictly apply the rule against splitting infinitives, if you know what I mean. In fact, my mother says that there is an age limit, which I have unfortunately forgotten. Those younger are allowed to willfully split infinitives, while those who are older may not.

Unclehood

In becoming an uncle, I realize that I have entered into a new moment in my religious life and priesthood.

For several weeks now I have telling my Latin gag about how though an uncle I have no obligation to be avuncular. When one woman I know got it and laughed out loud, I wanted to quote one of the great anti-heroes of my youth, Henry Rollins, and say, 'I will follow you on bloody stumps through the snow,' but that, of course, would have been inappropriate. The sentiments were there, though, in a chaste way.

When I first came into the culture of religious life, I was surprised by several aspects of how religious related to their families of origin. First, I was relieved to discover that it was entirely normal to have family members who were hostile to the religious vocation; in fact, it was often the ones from Catholic families who were given the most trouble! Second, I was surprised to see sets of siblings in religious life. I guess I had thought that a religious vocation was such an odd thing that there would never be more than one from a single family. My intuition about this was entirely wrong. I have met several sets of brothers in the Order and have known many who had sisters in religious life. Just the other day I met a young diocesan seminarian with a twin brother who is a cloistered Carmelite.

But most of all, I noticed the way religious and priests talked about their nieces and nephews. It was sort of like how other people talked about their grandchildren, rejoicing in the milestones of their lives and providing a curious, extra-parental connection to the preceding generation. When I ever had a spare moment to have a thought during the three days of obsequies for Fr. Bernard last week, I would reflect also upon his unclehood. His nephews formed a kind of inner circle of family as it related to him, and their griefs and gratitudes were so strong. One of my prayers for his passing has been to ask his prayers to obtain the grace of good friar-uncleness for me.

Drink The Cup, If You're So Special

Today at Mass (Mt 20: 17-28) we hear about one of my favorite supporting characters in the gospels, the unnamed mother of the sons of Zebedee. I appreciate her anonymity, because she is a character one meets over and over in the ministry. Even my favorite Wikipedia article of all time--"List of names for the Biblical Nameless" doesn't provide a name for her. I suppose that down through the ages parents have been calling up schools and churches to push for the advancement of the children. Their kid is the smartest, so she needs to be in the highest academic bracket. Their kid is the best singer or the best looking, so he needs to be given the lead in the play. I'm sure anyone who is reading this has an example. Since it often works, who can blame them for the bad taste of their intrigue? After all, people who become teachers and clergy are helpers at heart and want to be nice to everyone, and they often give in. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, as is said. Everybody hates whining, but we don't hate it enough to not want to get rid of it the easy way and give in.

I love how Jesus turns it around, and uses this very human moment to show how everything is different in the Kingdom of God. For His Kingdom is ruled from the throne of the Cross, and to be ambitious within it is to want to place oneself below others as their servant and slave. This is why the Cross is the salvation of the world; It undermines and subverts all of the quiet and respectable violences by which we try to 'get ahead' of each other in the selfish mess of our lives. The Cross is the escape from the cycles of violence by which we build fleeting securities and comforts for ourselves at the expense of the flourishing of others. This goes for the smallest malicious gossip all the way up to the wars and genocides of profane history.

On the Cross, Jesus gives us an example but also blazes a trail. It is a path out of the futility of violence and abuse of power. All sin is an abuse of power, after all, a misuse and deordination of what we as creatures could be for each other. When we apply the Cross to ourselves as our relationships, we learn the salvation of forgetting about getting ahead of others, and seek to put ourselves below them. This is the salvation Jesus holds out to a tired world.

Great Moments in Spiritual Paternity

Like when you pray and explore the Scriptures with your 11- and 12-year-old catechumens, realize that they are cooler and already more spiritual than you are, and noticing this only makes you happy and pushes you to work harder out of reverence for what God is doing in them.

Non-Catholics in Confession

There are lots of things in the work of the parish priest that still throw me. One of them is non-Catholics who come to confession. This happens more often than you might think. It seems to me that there are three fairly distinct types, which I present in ascending order of difficulty:

There are the catechumens or (more likely) pre-catechumens, who have a desire to seek God's mercy and forgiveness, or at least experience sacramental absolution. Either they just can't wait, or are confused or uncatechized about how the sacramental economy works. These aren't too hard to deal with, because they desire the sacraments at some level--and sometimes very intensely. I pray with them, give them some spiritual counsel, and try to explain to them that they should desire baptism all the more because of the forgiveness of sins it will bring. Then, if they should--God forbid--sin after their baptism, confession is there for them.

Then there are souls who seek God's forgiveness, or at least the therapeutic act of confession on the natural level, but who just aren't Catholics or a member of any of the apostolic churches that retain the sacrament of penance. It's easy to tell them apart from the Catholics; confession is a private and individual thing, but it's also a fairly scripted encounter. There are many versions of the script, but chances are that you tend to begin your confessions with one formula or another, have a favorite version of the Act of Contrition, etc. When someone comes in with no script or even 'confesses' not knowing how to 'do it,' I know it's time to see if the 'penitent' is even a Catholic (It is necessary to check, as he might be a baptized but totally uncatechized Catholic.)

If the person is an adult I usually ask him directly if he is a Catholic. If not, I try to find out if he is at least validly baptized, which people rarely seem to know. With kids the question is more delicate. My experience with Catholic children and teenagers is that they often don't know how to go to confession (I think that some religious education programs teach it in such a way that 'first reconciliation' is a nice celebration, but doesn't leave behind a portable skill), so if I suspect that a young person is not a Catholic, I ask them if they have received the sacrament of Confirmation. If the answer comes back, "Huh?," or "What's that?" I'm pretty sure that I have a non-Catholic. Having found out what I can, I let the 'penitent' confess as she or he needs to, explain to them why we are either not celebrating a sacrament or doing so in a very occult way, pray with them in thanksgiving for God's mercy, and send them on their way.

The final category is the hardest. These are the non-Catholics who are sent into confession by someone else. It might be a devout, well-meaning, but ultimately controlling and misguided spouse or significant other who thinks the person needs confession, penance, and absolution. Many times it is an aunt, uncle, or grandparent sending in non-Catholic child or teenager in an effort to make up for a lack of or incorrect (in their estimation) religious upbringing. In these cases I hear whatever 'confession' someone wants to make, but I also explain to them that this not a good use of the "sacrament," that they really should neither be there nor let anyone send them back. If it's a child, I tell them to send anyone who tries to make them "go to confession" to me, and I promise to deal with them.

All of these procedures are subject to abbreviation and/or the request to move the conversation to another time and setting if the line for confession is long or if I have to get to something else right after the end of scheduled confession time. Baptized Catholic Christians have a right to the sacraments that other baptized or unbaptized people do not enjoy in the same way.

Giving Communicant Catechesis

This morning it was my joy to offer Mass with the students and teachers from both our grade and high schools. The younger ones come to Mass once a month, but the high school students only come a few times in the course of the school year. Because it's the ancient Christian feast of American Thanksgiving this week, we had a big Mass for everyone. It's good to see the church almost full once in a while apart from the Christmas Vigil and Ash Wednesday.

I really enjoy the kids, and I especially appreciate the preaching challenge at these Masses. Today I added an extra little homily. Normally I abhor the giving of instructions during Mass, but I just had to go over how to receive Holy Communion with the kids. We are blessed with some fine and diligent young people, but in my experience some of them receive Communion a little carelessly. I often surprise some kid who wasn't expecting me to 'go for the tongue' because they are holding their hands so low, 'do the pincers,' or present their hands with jacket sleeves over them. Inevitably I end up chasing some child or other down the aisle to make sure he has consumed the Host. Since this is embarrassing for the poor kid, and a little distracting for me--although I love having the reputation as a priest who does it when necessary--I wanted to give a little practical catechesis on being a good communicant at the end of my homily.

I meant to just give the practical expectations for those who choose to receive in the hand: how to hold up the hands, not to grab or pinch, and then to receive the Host before turning around, stepping to the side if one desires. But what I found was that it was hard for me to give purely practical directions; I couldn't do it without giving the theological catechesis that goes with it. I found myself explaining why we do what we do, what it means, and why it is critical to our Catholic faith and identity that we receive the sacraments diligently and carefully. This is, of course, a very Catholic way to experience oneself as a preacher; the lex orandi and the lex credendi go together. In Christ, God has emptied himself into our humanity and how we move and behave plays out who we are saying we are when each of us accepts our new Name from the minister of Holy Communion: "Body of Christ."

So there I was, committing one of the sins I hate most in preachers: giving two homilies at one Mass. But the experience confirmed for me what I am and desire to be: a catholic Christian.

Madisons and Isabellas

Continuing my anecdotal observations on baby names through the ministry of infant baptism, I notice that as of this weekend, an entire third of baby girls who have prepared for their baptism through me have been named either Madison or Isabella.

The Scopos of the Monk

One of our many kind parishioners passes her issues of First Things on to me after she reads them. Thanks to her I can watch the ALCS while I read beautiful things like this letter of Thomas Merton to a sixth grader who wrote to ask him about monastic life:

Monks are people who seek to devote all their time to knowing God better and loving Him more. For that reason they leave the cities and go out into lonely places where it is quiet and they can think. As they go on in life they want to find lonelier and lonelier places so they can think even more. In the end people think these monks are really crazy going off by themselves and of course sometimes they are...

...I suggest that you sometimes be quiet and think about how good a thing it is that you are loved by God who is infinite and who wants you to be supremely happy and who in fact is going to make you supremely happy. Isn't that something? It is, my dear, and let us keep praying that it will work out like that for everybody. Good bye now.