Freedom of Faith

"'Sunday mass obligation' is a contradiction in terms."

Oh, the fruits of pouring through texts on liturgy to construct a take-home midterm essay...

Trying to discuss the (dis)continuity between the Jewish Sabbath on Christian Sunday, I came across this little gem. Our challenge was to discuss how Christian celebrations on Sundays are not simply a renewal or fulfillment of the Jewish Sabbath. A major way to distinguish this, through the reality that Christ is the new sabbath, is by discussing the freedom that Christ wrought.

God's becoming man, suffering, dying, and rising from the dead is the most powerful action that has ever occurred. Christ defeated death; by dying sinless in the sinner's stead, death lost all power to slay. Christ died to set us free, so our lives of faith and hope in Him basically become an exercise of freedom--a freedom that is truer and deeper inasmuch as we become more and more able to realize the perfect freedom of Christ that comes with aligning one's will exactly with the Father's will.

The celebration of the mass, through the Church the Christ established, the Word that He was and is, and the Sacrament that He instituted, is a celebration founded centrally on the dying and rising of Christ. Since this was an action of perfect freedom, Christ has liberated us from the restrictions of narrowness and shadows of doubt. We no longer need to wonder if we are interpreting the Law and the Prophets correctly because Christ has brought the fulfillment in fullness. So as we celebrate Him, we cannot help but take part in His freedom.

When we practice our faith, the fullness of our practice is connected to the freeness of our love, the extent to which we opt to share in the freeness that Christ has and offers to us. So when it comes to mass, it is a beautiful thing when one can make that small decision to go and celebrate freely and manifest the wonderful freedom of Christian faith.

It is a boon to my faith when I am surrounded by young pious adults who eagerly seek out opportunities for daily mass, desiring to freely integrate the offering of the mass into the flow of their lives. I also love that daily masses are a totally free endeavor. Sunday is more of an entrenched element in many Christians' lives, but I find the daily mass to be a great ornamentation to that life flow.

I am not much for scheduled and routinized prayer--Spiritual Direction, regularly scheduled grotto trips, and I've even shied away from slotted Eucharistic Adoration--so the whim or impulse or inspiration to catch a daily mass and have that encounter with Christ in such a way is how I like to complement my days. Maybe this a approach is an analogical indicator of how I haven't made Christ ubiquitous enough in my life, but it suits me well for now to let my spontaneous spiritual urges direct me to these things. It's not sustainable, but it works right now.

It's a current element of the freedom I am feeling in Christ. I feel a deep sense of piety about His presence, the Eucharist, and the Word we hear. And I have a steadily flowing undercurrent of desire to engage Christ in my life. But I don't feel the urge to specify the times and places for it very much right now. My home base in the Sunday mass, the weekly grounding point that brings us back home to Christ in the Word, the Sacrament, and the Church. From there, it is a case of the Spirit's guiding me and my trust and self-check to know the difference between my wishes and God's. I'm trying to deepen that freedom because an obligation to faith in Christ is a contradiction.