Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Sacrificing in Solidarity

Lent is a great time for Catholics to wear their faith on their sleeves.

Ash Wednesday - which, surprisingly to some, is not a holy day of obligation - allows us the chance to wear the ashes, a sign of repentance and our beginning and end in God, as a badge of honor that celebrates our faith outwardly and visibly to those who see us. My friend tells a great story about life at Notre Dame and the social pressure of having ashes - long story, short, we recycle the line of a student who has to defend themself since it's mid-afternoon and they don't have ashes yet: "I'm going later!" Basically, you better have ashes on your forehead if you think you're a Catholic.

And from Ash Wednesday on - especially during the first week, when resolve and boldness are high - we love to talk about what we're giving up. The conversation trends almost toward being a late-winter New Year's Resolution at times, but it's at least a chance to come up with a change you can make in your life. I mean, ideally, we keep the sacrifice of Christ at the heart of our own sacrifices - it's meant to be a struggle throughout the Lenten season that helps us be in solidarity with Christ who became man and suffered on His way to the ultimate sacrifice.

That's the ideal; it's tough. The absolute expectation is that you back up the early-Lent talk and turn it into more than just the thing you say in order to be included in the conversation. It's that you see it through to Easter and in some way realize a fresh taste of the thing you sacrificed on the great day of victory. Another ideal - you let the lesson of that sacrifice take root in your post-Lent-life.

What's the point of this all, idealized or not? We have a faith that supplies us a baseline, a steady cycle to frame our days and years. Our lives of faith as baptized Christians in the Catholic Church have inherent rhythm. Sometimes the institutionalism and tradition of our Church is the object of great scorn and criticism, but I embrace it as a crucial part of what makes me Catholic. And the primacy and prevalence of Lent and its practices are a beautiful opportunity that we have every year without having to do anything conscious or adjust our schedules - just like the glory of three-day weekends for Columbus Day or Presidents' Day that get you a day away from school and a shortened week to come back to, Lent pops up each year, as winter turns to spring, to invite us to repentance.

At tons of points during our years, throughout our lives, we have a moment, make a mistake, have an epiphany, make a vow - we want to affect some kind of change and adjust something in our lives. But whether it pops up during some random days or at the cusp of a new year, these things often don't stick. Luckily, our faith tradition gives us the blessing of this season of repentance, a time when we can tap into the extra something - the transcendence - of our faith to provide the motivation that is missing in New Years' Resolutions and other unsuccessful vows.

We can have this movement in our hearts toward the opportunity of Lent, to put a concrete promise toward our faithful repentance and seize on this opportunity that our tradition gives us. But it's not just Tradition: it's our community, our Church.

Social pressure - and I don't mean the "everyone's jumping off the cliff" peer pressure - is a healthy and purely interpersonal way to encourage behavior. It's knowing that other friends have dropped pop or coffee for Lent and that you're not alone in your potentially bold struggle; it's knowing that you promised your two friends that you'd keep to a jogging regimen together, so you can't leave them hanging.

The solidarity with Christ in a Lenten sacrifice, or even in the taking on of a new practice, is solidarity with Him in His being driven to the desert and His passion, and it's also solidarity with all His people. We enter this season banding with one another in a spirit of penitence, joining our sacrifices together in the Eucharistic life we live as the Church. Our verbalized sharing of sacrifices gives a clue into just how we bring our struggles and challenges and sacrifices together in the Eucharist. We have so much in common if we only talk to each other and pray together a little. We can deepen the bonds within our Church by developing relationships that are open and welcoming to faith-sharing. That starts in the family and grows outward into our adult faith lives and their friendships.

Most importantly, we can realize this in an less directly-conversational yet transcendent way through our being taken, blessed, broken, and shared in the Eucharist. This is why we must keep the Mass at the center of our faith lives. The sharing of our Lenten sacrifices can start from a desire to belong and be involved in the conversations, but it takes deeper and more profound lasting roots in ourselves if we tie it to a dedicated Eucharistic life. We can build on the foundations of interconnectedness and shared pilgrimage by joining in the mystical Body of Christ, that community to which Christ has called us all, to pray together, around the Word and Sacrament, and go forth as His hands and feet.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Having Lost the Bliss of Ignorance

Notre Dame students will hear, at least a few times, during our four years there that the rest of the world isn't like it is on campus. We know all too well that we live in "The Bubble": a student center with its own (way too expensive) convenience store, Subway, and Burger King; our two awesome dining halls; dorms that are either great communities or pretty nice buildings to be living in; everything we need well-centralized to a beautiful campus; oh, and a really strong, great, and pervasive sense of Church.

Notre Dame gives you thorough permission to be Catholic and even critical or skeptical. And, though I don't have the personal experience, apparently gives you solid permission to be Christian, non-Christian, or even areligious. You get the a sampling, even if it's small, of the whole range.

You have your chapel-in-every-dorm faith that gets people to mass who might not otherwise go and gives you a chance to hit mass when you otherwise couldn't have; from your raucous, packed-to-the-walls Sunday night masses and often-criticized-by-me but usually crowded weeknight gimmicks to your sparsely populated but solemnly pious weeknight masses, you can find a solid dose of formal spirituality and stability right in the building you live in. We even have a basilica on our campus. Ridiculous. And there you get the range, too: midday and pre-dinner daily mass on the weekdays and then your Sunday morning choice of chanty and traditional stuff at the 10am and congregation-focused folk music at the 11:45am mass.

While you're there, you know that the dining halls and the general convenience of life on campus are fleeting. When it comes to the spirituality, it hits differently when you're gone. I knew that Church life on campus wasn't a realistic yardstick for the rest of the world, and I knew I couldn't have the same standards for post-grad life. However, I didn't appreciate the specificity and magnitude of the tension that would result after I moved on.

Working in a parish, in some grey area between super-active parishioner and actual member of the church team or pastoral council, I have some influence on the way things go around here. However, I am a foreigner on a limited clock, and I'm engaging with norms that are cultural and social, tracing back a generation or two or even for centuries on end.

Our parishioners kind of mumble the responses while racing through them because they like mass to be quick and fast, but they also remember their ancestors who celebrated mass in secret on mass rocks in the countryside with people serving as lookouts to warn them of others who would come slaughter them for practicing their faith. We have people who won't sit in the middle section of the church or the front bunch of rows because they are generally sheepish and shy, but they also live int he shadow of a time when the place you sat in mass reflected the confidence you had in your relationship with God (how do you even measure that?) and/or your wealth - some people still think they're too spiritually poor to hold their own in the front or middle. We have priests in our parish who want to encourage and empower lay involvement, but they are trying to lead a Church that as a whole still treats priests as holier and on a pedestal, meant to be alone in the sanctuary to execute all the offices of the mass and lead the parish.

It's tough because most frustrations have an explanation that usually carries a solid level of legitimacy, even if it's cultural and beyond my complete appreciation.

The question here is something along the lines of how do you engage with the tensions? The approach would be different if I weren't actively involved and vaguely influential, so maybe my response won't be exactly applicable to yourselves. However, the tensions will likely come up for anyone who found any kind of levels of growth and comfort with liturgical and spiritual life on campus.

I wonder if it's really our place, even if it's my place in my role, to be effecting change in those kinds of norms. Almost six months into being here, I almost feel like all I can and should do is talk about what I see and how it doesn't jive with what I'm used to and what I believe is right practice. If I think the second reading should never be skipped, should I put up a big stink about it? If I think the lectors (who move up to the ambo during the opening blessing) and EM's (who are in the sanctuary before the Our Father is even over) should wait longer to get up for their ministries, should I be complaining? If I think mass ministers should sit in the sanctuary and altar servers should be more active, should I say something?

It's tough to know what the answer is, especially because we function as something in between official people and really active volunteer parishioners. I feel like at home, if I saw something and said something, the response would likely be, "Then, you do something about it." And I probably would. But here, things are stickier, slower to adapt, and when changes are suggested, they're mulled over for a long time and often shelved.

So, I'm settling more into a mindset of wanting to find a way to simply air my "grievances," simply throw around the observations of this stick-up-his-ass church-goer. I don't think I can effect change, and I don't necessarily want to. But it'd be nice to find a way to say something more often. I'm not even sure that it's saying something to the people in charge here; I think it's informal conversation, with my housemates, with the friends I've made here, with friends back in the states. I think it's cataloguing all this stuff to put in my liturgical file cabinets. And I think it needs to take on the formula of observation/criticism-hearing of response-affirmation of their response. Drop the need for constant rebuttal.

And another question for me is, "what next?" What happens when I do go back and potentially am establishing myself as a parishioner at a new place? I've always been wary of the idea of church-shopping, but there may be some merit in it. I am still not a fan of choosing your mass or your parish based on a particular priest, but maybe I just need to exposed to a situation where a priest and parish just don't fit together at all.

I think the key for me will be finding a place where the snobbish liturgist that lives within me can be at least mostly content with the norms in place because the thing I've discerned most in my time here is that being at mass cannot be part of my job - if I lector or EM or usher, it'll because I want to and I've volunteered extra time. I want to be ignorant, at least for a few years, of the decision-making processes that shape parish life and liturgical norms. I want to come to church not knowing the music and never having practiced it, so I can just be a confident congregational singer and not a musician watching a director for consonant cutoffs.

Notre Dame ruins your life in so many ways. It educates you so holistically that you don't get the chance to be ignorant about a lot of stuff anymore. Liturgy and church life is a realm where, theology major or not, a lot of us have, do, and will struggle.

In the meantime, amid the frustrations over decisions, I take solace in the fact that Jesus still comes before me, right in my face, and one of my brothers or sisters proclaims, "The Body of Christ." I get to say Amen, because I believe. I know that this is the same Jesus, the same God, coming to be with His people all over the world, throughout so much space and time. So then I return to my place, kneel in prayer, and bask in the delight of watching hundreds of other people, and knowing millions elsewhere, do the same.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Some Word Vomit about the Eucharist

I recently finished Why Be a Catholic?, a reflection on modern Catholicism by an Irish scholar and believer named Mark Dooley.

Dooley comes on strong from the offset, seeking to rouse the reader to life and commitment toward rejuvenating the Church. He seeks to motivate that by encouraging Catholics to focus on taking what we know and have already and doing it well. I loosely assert that the following quote could be his thesis:
"If, in other words, the Church is in the midst of a terrible predicament, it is in large part because everything that once kept Catholics focused on Christ has been repudiated in favor of liturgical 'innovation.' This, to repeat, is not to say that the liturgy cannot be adapted to the age. But it does mean that when it comes to timeless things, we ought to tread carefully lest we lose sight of the sacred." (p. 9)
He refers to this tendency to innovate and divert from tradition as the "culture of rupture." Dooley's vision for the renewal and increased vitality of the Church is a recommitment to the beauty of liturgy, specifically the centrality and transcendence of the Eucharist. He draws upon a beautiful quote from Pope Benedict XVI as well: "Being a living manifestation of the sanctity of Christ, the liturgy is, in Ratzinger's beautiful expression,  the 'common homeland' for a Catholic, the very centre and 'source' of his [or her] identity." (p. 53)

He goes on at length about the importance of a thoughtfully celebrated Eucharistic liturgy as the heart of the faith, the heart of lived faith, of parish life, of the Church as a whole. Dooley seems to understand thoroughly well that the Eucharist offers us Catholics a wonderful rhythm for our lives.

Not all of us can practice the piety of daily-mass-going or regular Adoration. However, we are all called to come together on Sunday mornings for the Eucharistic liturgy.

I feel like we can refer to Mass as such because, though it is about equal parts Word and Eucharist, the whole of the action in our mass is Eucharistic - thanksgiving, memorial, and communion throughout each of the four pieces of our celebration. Moreover, the ritual action of the Eucharist - the bread is taken, blessed, broken, and shared - is what summarizes why we are drawn to celebrate in this way and how it sustains and renews us. Look closely.

We come together to be taken in by Christ, by Jesus Himself but also through His people gathered together to welcome one another and celebrate together, under the Holy Spirit, guiding His Church.

Christ blesses us - the priest leads us in invoking the Trinity to bless ourselves with the sign of His cross; we bow for blessings before we leave sometimes; we bless ourselves with holy water to manifest the profundity of our baptisms when we enter and exit the church.

We are broken: we process up to the altar table to receive Christ, each coming from our pew or section in the congregation, coming with our family, friends, and other brothers and sisters, but ultimately encountering Christ in a personal moment when you, as one person, say your Amen to Christ before you, adding it to the sea of belief that swims around you.

Christ shares us: the mass is ended; let us go forth glorifying God with our lives. The mass inherently requires a temporal and spatial end in one way - the rite of dismissal prompts us to leave the physical place we are in. However, the spirit of the mass, the renewal we feel from receiving Christ into our hearts and realizing His presence both in the body and blood we receive and in the people around us, goes on. The mass is never ended.

Christ takes us in, offers countless blessings, breaks us into individual persons to come to us personally, and then he sends us forth, to be His hands and feet as individuals and as part of something bigger.

I'm appreciative to Mr. Dooley for sending me off on such a nice Eucharistic-living tilt. It added more depth to the beautiful light of such an understanding. I have Vision 2011 to thank for giving me the most thorough example in my life of living Eucharistically, each step, bit-by-bit as well as all-at-once in our awesome final mass together when I saw, more than ever before, a people being taken, blessed, broken, and shared and sent forth.

However, I'd be remiss if I didn't engage with Mr. Dooley's closing point. He builds on the centrality and primacy of Eucharist, of beautiful and diligent liturgy, with a critical analysis of modern participation norms.

Without criticizing it explicitly, he rails a bit on lay involvement in liturgical exercises. He talks about his grandfather, a faithful man, beloved by his home parish for his piety, loyalty, commitment, and service. Through stories of grandpa's words and actions, Dooley talks about how grandpa diligently collected the envelopes in the baskets on Sundays but would never deign to be a lector. Jobs like that are reserved for priests, and lay people shouldn't be thinking about going up there.

Dooley carefully and intelligently argues that "active participation" should be understood more as "authentic participation." For him, that comes in the form of passionate commitment to the people's responses and gestures during mass - the words but also the sit-stand-and-kneel, the genuflection. To his credit, Dooley doesn't treat priests as sacred cows. He criticizes the poor leadership in increasingly liberalized seminaries and priests who don't take care to vest properly for sacraments and masses. However, I can't support his opposition to lay people taking on mass ministries.

He did pretty well to quote and cite church documents, and I failed to go to the sources and understand the context of his citations. I can only say that in response to reading the whole of his argument that lay people serving as lectors, EMs, cantors, and altar servers is a natural and appropriate part of celebrating the mass.

Now that does need qualification, too; namely that (1) the sanctuary can't become a zoo. It's a sacred space, set apart for the ambo and altar. It must not be flooded with people and distraction. It should be arranged that ministers can be seated appropriately in a way befitting to the sacred space. (2) Ministers need to be trained, not just in their ministry but in proper reverence for the altar and sanctuary. And lazy catechesis is just not excusable here. Watch Notre Dame's basilica masses on mass cast to see how a diligent rector/MC, who is a priest, handles this with grace and inclusive consideration.

As long as you can account for those two major things, I think lay people, especially lay women, need to have a fair opportunity to be involved in the mass and be present as ministers, even in the sanctuary. Christ tore the veil of the sanctuary in two with his victory over death; it isn't just for high priests anymore. Lay people aren't there just to kneel, say prompted things, bring the gifts to the bottom step, and collect the envelopes. They're there to be full and active sharers in the whole of the Eucharistic liturgy.

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that masses lacking such lay involvement are lesser or inferior because they are still The Mass. However, I think active denial of such involvement of lay people is dangerous and alienating. If I were smarter, I'd rifle through Vatican II docs and find the stuff that supports this. Mr. Dooley isn't wrong, and he's got the goods to back it up. I don't think our understandings are incompatible either. I think authentic participation and active participation can be one in the same, and that my lectoring enhances my experience of being present for the Mass.

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