Welcome to 2018! Whether you fully subscribe to the idea of a new calendar year as an opportunity for renewal, or simply prefer the excuse for celebrating the passage of time, I pray that your calendar year may be blessed as the beginning of new things.1 In liturgical terms, this freshest day of the year is also the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God… which is nearly every year a “holy day of obligation.”
Obligation. Ugh. Everything else about today could be so exciting, and the Church has to throw in the term which draws from lips young and old the phrase, “Do I have to?” A hesitance to acquiesce quietly might resonate especially with anyone who was awake anticipating midnight and/or imbibed a bit much the evening prior.
Obligation has an unfortunate connotation in our modern parlance. In the terms of moral theology, Catholics specifically do not subscribe to a “morality of obligation,” where the laws of morality exist arbitrarily, merely so that there may be laws or authority established. As I tell my RCIA or Confirmation candidates, ours is rather a “morality of happiness,” where the rules exist in order to bring us all to a joy intended for us by the Lawgiver, who most definitely knows more about joy than we do. So into which category does the “holy day of obligation” fall?
It is fitting that we celebrate these great feasts in our Church with offering the Mass -- a week ago, Christmas; today, the feast of Mary, the MOG2; in six days, our weekly day of the Resurrection. What better celebration is there than the source and summit of our faith, and the communal offering of the Body of Christ? Where else should we be on a day made sacred? It is what is best for us. It is the nearest we come to heaven on earth, even when we fail to recognize it. It is what builds the Kingdom of God, especially if we do it with a joyful heart instead of dragging our feet.
It is fitting that we are obligated to confess to a priest to receive absolution (except in the most dire of situations), because we are physical beings who need to physically speak aloud our sin to another person to fully acknowledge it, and who need to physically hear the words of Christ, “I absolve you from your sins.” The obligation is for our benefit, not God’s. It is to make full use of our whole person as we were created. The sacrament is most fruitful when we do it with recognition of the physical catharsis as well as spiritual forgiveness it is intended to be, instead of dragging our feet.
Nothing universally mandated within our faith is a requirement merely for its own sake. The obligation is the Church’s way of telling us just how important and beautiful and joyful the occasion should be, and it is up to us to have the attitude to match.
Mustering that attitude is hard. As C.S. Lewis puts it in The Weight of Glory, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” 3 Truly accepting my Catholic obligations requires the humility to say to God and to his Church that I trust the obligation is intended for our good; indeed, for our great benefit; in fact, for a benefit greater than which I could have imagined. This is a concept at which we tend to recoil; per modern wisdom, no one knows what is best for us better than ourselves.
When in Echo, the program mandated that I have a spiritual director. I am sure that was the wisest practice, but the mere fact that it was obligatory seemed to me a huge overreach into my personal and spiritual life. I lost any joy in the process of finding one, and delayed it over and over again.
Now, as I find myself telling my two year old in my head, “If you would just listen to me when I ask you to do something, things would be so much better for you! For instance, we could have spent more time at the park if we had spent less time fighting the obligation to put on our shoes to go there.” Then I reflect on how God must feel this frustration constantly with us.4
I’m sure there are many things the average person would be perfectly pleased to do with the hour they’re obligated to spend at Mass, even those of us who should know what’s offered by the Mass. It was especially difficult to explain to the RCIA group -- i.e., those who are soon entering the Catholic Church and previously unused to such obligation - that this year’s abbreviated fourth week of Advent meant that two Masses “in a row” were required for the solemnities celebrated both on December 24 and December 25. There was even some general confusion among the parishioners.
“Really? We have to go both on the 24th and 25th?”
“Well, you could do the Saturday vigil on the 23rd and then a vigil on the 24th or during the day on the 25th, but essentially, yeah.”
Per the Catholic Memes Facebook page:5
We don’t ask for this double-decker offering at any other time (mainly because the only greater feast, Easter, is always a Sunday), so the fact that Mass was obligated both for Sunday and for the adjacent Christmas solemnity should not be seen as a burden which may interrupt our usual family traditions, but rather as an indicator of just how important are both our weekly oblation on Sunday and the extraordinary Christmas solemnity.
The Church likes to interrupt our complacency -- to surprise us out of worshiping our lesser idols -- even when the idol may be as well-meaning as “family time” or “tradition.” The fact that we are so pedantic as to maintain these Mass obligations as obligations when “people have stuff going on” is not pedantic at all, but radical. And radical is by nature difficult to accept. It’s hard when you’ve never seen the ocean.
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| This picture is of my niece and nephew exemplifying what is meant by the offer of a "holiday at the sea." |
There were those at the time who couldn’t accept Christ’s obligation to lay down his temporal life for their eternal lives, because it wasn’t what they had hoped from the promised Messiah. It certainly was not the nationalistic champion for which they hoped - it was better. The plan of God was less instantaneous in gratification, but infinitely greater in value than they could have dreamed. In their disillusionment, they blinded themselves to the incredible possibility of the full Kingdom of God. They preferred their mud pie. While they saw themselves as radicals, they could not accept how radical the Messiah actually was.
Accepting our obligations cheerfully is a road to where we can see with new eyes. Saint Paul references Psalm 19 as he prays for the Ephesians (as he is wont to do with all his Christian communities): “May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call, what are the riches of glory in his inheritance among the holy ones, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power for us who believe.”6
If you are in the habit of making resolutions at this time of year, perhaps resolve to find the joy intended behind the practices you currently do out of obligation.7 And next year, when the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God is again obligatory, go and celebrate with even greater fervor than you rang in the New Year.
1 For me, possibly the beginning of all sorts of things - I’m three days away from my due date, which any doctor or mother would simply put in probability terms as “could be any day now.” Perhaps it is this day where our family grows to four persons easily visible.↩
2 If this acronym makes you balk, it probably should. Our parish secretary once found BVM as the acronym for “Blessed Virgin Mary” in our liturgical desk calendar, and thought Mary deserved better than the appellation “BVM.” So naturally, we joked about her other titles, such as the MOG… a shorthand which often appears in a different context entirely. Yet... Mary is also very much the Mother of the Groom, if you think about it.↩
3 Based on previous RH footnotes, this quote is apparently a shared favorite with Rob.↩
4 Then I realize I have compared myself to God, and feel terribly uncomfortable. He is the one who gave us the image of God as a parent, though, so I’ll let it be.↩
5 This meme would be a bad example for me personally -- I enjoyed organic chemistry both in high school and college.↩
7 Honestly, I'm grateful for the clear direction provided with this particular obligation of Mass. Christ and his Church also obligate us to serve the poor, steward creation, and recognize the human dignity of each person, and I have a far murkier picture of how best to go about fulfilling those.
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