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.

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.

The Man in the Moon

I really like the moon. Ask some of my friends, and they'll tell you my penchant for pointing out lunar phases. A good waxing gibbous gets me jacked, man.

Brett Dennen has a cool song, a love song of course, called "Just Like the Moon." Instead of telling a girl that she's like the sun, he says, "You light up the night, just like the moon." It isn't to say that she's not awesome enough to be the sun; it's a fun, subtler way to say that someone is a source of light.

The moon has so many cool things going on. It's orbit is locked-in so that it spins in just such a way that we see the same 180º of it all the time - hence the alluring and mysterious dark side (a misnomer because sometimes - specifically during new moon - the side we see is completely dark) of the moon that is unobservable from earth. The elliptical shape of its orbit causes it to mess with the earth's shape and cause the tidal effects of our waters. It orbits around the earth every 28ish days, and sometimes, a new moon will line up just right to eclipse the sun and give us the awesome spectacle of a solar eclipse.

The awe of the solar eclipse comes from the "new moon," which happens at the beginning of the lunar cycle. Since the moon is between the earth and the sun, only the side that we never see it lit up; we can only "see" the dark side. It doesn't really appear to us, especially since the new moon rises at sunrise and sets at sunset. But we know it's there. It's still effecting the tides. Even completely shrouded in darkness, it's still the same side of the moon we see at first quarter, full moon, and third quarter.

No matter if it's a little sliver of a waxing crescent or the just-less-than-full waning gibbous, the moon still gives us its bit of light, its tidal effect, and the awe of its place in the sky. And the completely dark moon that we can't really make out in the sky is called "new" - it's about to return to light; the visible section of the moon will grow from tiny sliver on its right corner to fully lit up. The light will return, never to go away forever.

Somehow, there's a metaphor for the presence of God in here. God is always with us; He comes to us in the Eucharist and is with us there and to the end of time through the Holy Spirit. However, not every glimpse we get of God's presence is the same.

It can be the full moon of the Eucharist, like the communion at mass or Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. It can be the little crescent of a brief prayer during your day. It can the first quarter of seeing someone do a random act of kindness from afar. It's not to say that every moment you become aware of God or His love can be related to a phase of the moon, and different moments may strike you differently each time.

An even cooler way to prolong this comparison is the idea of the moon in the sky. Even if the northern and southern hemispheres see different constellations and directions in the sky, the moon appears the same to everyone in the world. If the moon is full, I'll see it in Ireland from my sunset to my sunrise just as you in the US will later today. So, too, with Christ: he comes to us in the Eucharist to give the Body of Christ to the Body of Christ, no matter when or where. Christ transcends time and space, so we who make up His Body are connected in communion with all others celebrating this awesome mystery today, yesterday or 100 years ago, and tomorrow or 100 years from now. I see the same Christ in the Eucharist, in others, in Adoration, that you see in your lives of faith.

So when I'm far away, I can look at the moon and know that my loved ones all over the world see the same moon in the sky. And when I look to Christ in the mass and throughout my life, I see the same Christ you see; I am in the same Christ as you.

Oh, going to mass...

Sometimes (a lot of times?), the issue of going to mass seems to be the greatest one facing our Church and its believers, and lapsed believers.

Personally, I love mass, and I've never really had any time in my life when I've thought about suspending my attendance. I even made a habit of going to a daily mass once or so each week while I was in college, and here as part of community life, I go to daily mass almost every morning.

The question at this point for me is "what are you doing at mass?" I've been dealing with some feelings of getting "massed out" by the how often we go to mass. It's hit in little spats, but for the most part, I'm not plagued by it. Some weekends, the three masses in an 18-hour span can be a bit much, and that's the only major time I start to feel troubled.

We are here to bring an outside perspective of joy and commitment in our ministry, and we have to, sometimes tenuously, toe the line between accepting ingrained norms, whether "right" or "wrong," and challenging or reshaping them. Sometimes my place at the mass in the context of how I am trying live my faith and ministerial call here in this community gets skewed by questionable motivations.

We have a laptop that's connected to a projector, which enables us to project the lyrics to the music for mass, and we have added the new responses for mass to the slideshows, too. For one mass each weekend, I sit in a pew with no one else, just a computer, and run the slideshow of responses for a music-less mass. In addition, we take turns running the slideshow during masses with our choirs.

The issue isn't so much running the slideshow while trying to be present to the mass and/or the music we are leading - that comes with the territory of our job, and it's something we try to do with the most grace and focus that we can. The issue is moreso that I sometimes feel like an auditor, judging the confidence and unity of the congregation's response as I sit there administering the most helpful tool there really is toward learning the responses. We have this blessing of the laptop-projector system, but it doesn't create 100% unity. Some people can't snap out of the old words while others just space or blank on the changes. The repetition of doing this job has jaded my perspective, and I have trouble leaning toward giving the benefit of the doubt after months on end.

Part of is having to come to an extra mass just to press the spacebar 30 times in a half hour and struggling with finding it useful and necessary. It's affecting my desire to consider the beautiful cornucopia of motivations, inspirations, prayers, and pieties that people bring to mass and compile into the Body of Christ. I enjoy looking around to discover a wide array of humanity in the congregation, but the struggles with the new words, the task of running a slideshow, and the habitual indifference, laziness, or short attention span of people (sometimes I forget how I am thoroughly included in these categories) toward the words of the mass and our music (which is meant to be participated in by everyone!) skew my perspective of mass.

Then, I come to daily mass, where I am immersed in a sea of crusty, grey-haired piety. I am surrounded by people who could (and maybe do?) pray rosaries in their sleep and concelebrate the mass under their breaths, a gesture toward a lost piety of praying with the priest and for the prayers he speaks to be effective in inviting Jesus into our midst.

The mass can blow by too quickly sometimes - for example, the priest amalgamates the Gospel, homily, and Prayers of the Faithful into a tight unit that spills over into the preparation of altar. However, here I can look around and be less distracted, less jaded. Aside from lectoring once a week or so, my community and I are free of responsibilities for daily mass; we just go and be.

This morning, I found myself not only looking around but also look in and through the Eucharist. As ideas for continuing my career of ministry next year swirl - two exploratory/pre-interview conversations with retreat centers, a cover letter and resume sent on to a Catholic high school, an application to a service corps started by my favorite order, and an application for full tuition for an MAPS and a stipend-supported ministry placement - I was feeling around for a sense of those opportunities and their potential in the Eucharist. I spent most of the Eucharistic Prayer with my eyes closed and head bowed, reflecting upon the nature of these opportunities in light of the Church that they all share with me and the Eucharist before me right then and there.

I was finding bits of peace and light in the embarrassment of riches that are potentially in front of me in my formation, career, and life. I enjoyed how easily I could find that all in my heart, in my prayer. However, I have been trying to keep my foot on the brakes to keep myself firmly grounded in my current situation and the five months of work and life that remain here in Ireland.

A good friend of mine told me that she prays and thinks and reflects better in the environment of the mass. At times, it can feel too formal or feel boring or have music not everyone like. But the mass gives us a thorough, rich, broad, and deep opportunity to pray. The expanse of the Body of Christ provides so much of that for us, but that's not it. Even if I didn't do it as well as I could of, the Eucharist gives us room to see all at once the Body of Christ in the communities we've belonged to, the ones we celebrate with today, and the ones we will join with around the table in our futures. And there's more, between the opening and the sending forth rites and the richness of the Liturgy of the Word (sometimes, I feel like I kind of swing on a faith pendulum between being more drawn to the Word or the Eucharist, not in mutual exclusivity but in different ratios of complementarity).

The whole of the story is that there's no shortage of opportunity for frustration, criticism, distraction, and spacing out, for speaking, singing, and thinking, and for looking around, looking down, looking up, and looking within. And if you let that all happen honestly, offering yourself in good faith while trying to grow closer to God amid all the desolations and consolations, I'd say it all adds up to a helluva opportunity to be with God and grow closer to Him and build a better, stronger relationship. Sounds like pretty full prayer to me.

His Primary Point

I came across this opinion piece posted on CNN by a comedian/personality named Dean Obeidallah - I've never heard of him either, but that's no reason to discount him. Per usual, the headline of the piece was eye-catching and sucked me and many other readers in: Santorum wants to impose "Judeo-Christian Sharia." Ok, let's see.

Since Obeidallah opted to use such an extreme and loaded term to characterize Santorum's positions, I'll go ahead and label Obiedallah as a paranoid, polemic secularist who's out to insure that religion finds no place in politics. Ok, that's done now.

Read the short article for yourself before I launch into my reactions...

Obeidallah suggests Santorum's desire that legislated laws be in accordance with natural law - "a higher law" or "God's law" in Santorum's words - is on par with Sharia Law. He calls it "Judeo-Christian Sharia."

This is outlandish and wild, but I get it. The basic concept is the same for Santorum as for Islamic leaders: leaders of a country explicitly cite their religion in order to justify the laws they make. Straight forward enough. The problem comes when you realize that Obeidallah never affirms or advocates religion at all.

He goes after the specific ramifications of how Santorum's positions can be justified by his Christian faith and spells out the aftermath: rape victims have to carry the child to term; gay marriages would be annulled; no funding for birth control; outlawing pornography. I'm not saying I agree with all of these potential actions that a President Santorum would take (for example, I wish rape victims could be supported and helped in a way that would encourage and embolden them to have the child but it shouldn't ever be legally required). However, I give Santorum a lot of credit for asserting his faith and admitting outwardly that his positions on issues are informed by his faith.

The trouble comes when you realize not all of America is Christian. Even if a good majority of it is Christian, not everyone is. You can't legislate an official religion; you can't shove a form of belief down Americans' throats. Furthermore, it's dangerous to claim that you have a conclusive understanding of "God's law" and use that to produce layers of legislation.

However, to an extent, this country has a centuries-old tradition of a civil religion - a vaguely Christian, sort-of Deist God who benevolently protects the country and is invoked by its leaders, without tension, in times of trouble and joy alike. I couldn't articulate the specific correlating religion to that God, but surely, there is some kind of consensus Christian values and sensibilities that are inherent within it that Americans would affirm.

There are disagreements on specifics of beliefs and positions on social issues between religions, between denominations, and even within a specific denomination (yay Catholicism!). But there is a solid overlap in the middle of all these venn-diagram-circles. Again, I lack the grounding to specify what all is in there, but I'd venture to guess that most Americans - secularist, spirituals, atheists, and non-Christians - can get behind a lot of what's there in the middle.

My major beef with Obeidallah comes not with his connecting Santorum to Sharia Law and not even with his disgust toward the policy ramifications of Santorum's positions. My beef is that Obeidallah is hostile toward any influence of religion on political activity, and that's a horrible shame.

Goodness doesn't come from the thin air; it comes from our Creator God who made us in His image and gave us gifts and talents with the hope that we'd freely use them to share Love in our world and grow closer to each other and to Him.

To those who would demonize religion in such a way: criticize a candidate if you think the specifics of the way his religion influences his policy are alienating to American people, but don't fault a candidate for having faith and a religion. Fault yourself for attacking religion's influence on public and social life. Fault yourself for thinking that reason can stand alone and find ways to justify laws without faith or the Truth of God. Fault yourself for becoming too much of the world and demonizing the joy and light that others gain from faith in God and the community around them that joins together to celebrate and support one another.

My hope is that Obeidallah is actually a religious man and is just keeping his faith private. If so, if that's his principle, then good for him for sticking to his guns. But in a personal opinion piece complete with your thumbnail picture and biography, can you not even let your religion in then?

JtB

In Advent, we hear a lot from Isaiah and John the Baptist. Isaiah has big time prophecy about the coming of the messiah, and John is the prophet who directly precedes the messiah. So their testimony is pretty relevant.

Shocking as it may be, I'm not super learned on Old Testament matters, so I'm going New Testament on this one. Let's talk Jay Tee Bee.

John was not the Light, but He came to testify to the Light.

There we have it.

Well, let's backtrack.

Jesus Christ was and is God. The Son is a person of the Trinity. Jesus is God-become-man, the Word-made-flesh. Jesus' ministry and preaching is distinctive because it is literally the words and actions of God. He is unmediated, direct revelation. Jesus Christ was and is God.

John, on the other hand, was not and is not God; he is a prophet, a human preaching and acting humanly on his faith. His contemporary, Mary, is a beautiful model of human service to us as well (fun fact: did you know Mary is the only person assuredly present in all three eras [The Law and the Prophets, The Life, Ministry, Death, and Resurrection of Christ, and The Church] of salvation history?). She is an example in her contemplation, her motherhood, and her 'yes' to God's will, but her immaculate conception is an element of special grace that distinguishes her a bit. It doesn't make her less human; it shows us how someone can integrate one's own faith and heart with God's grace to realize the peace of freely aligning one's will with God. But John is yet another of the many amazing models we have in our tradition of faith.

A wise man once concluded, "On a basic level, John the Baptist was a faithful follower of Christ, ultimately martyred after being jailed. So, as someone who almost certainly died in faith in Christ, he is someone Christians should hold as a saint, 'part of the one holy catholic church comprised of Old Testament and New Testament believers alike.' John’s life and mission were righteous and fulfilled the prophecies of the messiah’s forerunner. John’s answering this call to prepare the way for Christ and faithfully serving God through his preaching and baptisms are evidence of John’s goodness and his obedience to God’s will. His service to God prompts Jesus to call him 'the greatest among men.'"

Hey, I had to quote my thesis.

The greater point with John is that he wasn't Christ, and he knew that. No matter what people wanted him to be, no matter how many people badgered him, he insisted he was just preparing a way for his Lord.

John had disciples following his lead. He had throngs of people coming to listen to his message. He had people piling in to receive baptism. However, he remained committed to the reality that what he was pointing toward was greater and bigger than him.

It's a beautiful reality that John baptized people into what would become our Church because baptism into Jesus' life, death, and resurrection is an initiation that commits a person and his/her life to the reality that they are part of someone and something bigger than themself. Just as John kept humble in anticipation of Jesus the Lord and Savior who was to bring salvation to humanity, we too must embrace the call to service and ministry in the name of He who gave us life.

Christ is God, so His example is perfect. Jesus' words and actions show us perfect mercy, compassion, and love. Idealism is helpful to us because the effort to try to be perfect calls us to constant self-reflection and improvement toward the perfect love of God. However, we ultimately cannot be Christ. We are not Gods but rather God's - mediators of the grace of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In this reality, where we are conduits for the grace of Christ through our faith and our relationships, John gives us a model: John was not Christ but persistently pointed the way to Christ and cleared a way for Him in the world and in hearts.

We must strive to be like Christ. Though we are imperfect and cannot be Christ, we can be vigilant in prayer to grow into being fuller mediators of God's love and grace. Additionally, though, we can completely be John the Baptist's. This is not an idealistic pursuit that cannot be fully attained; it is a realistic and realizable goal for our journeys of faith. We can always be pointing to Christ in our words and actions, and we can make a way for Christ in the world.
_______

Added @ 5:10pm, a post-script - from the conclusions of my thesis' section on John:

"... [There is] great responsibility placed in the hands of everyone invited to Christ’s Kingdom: John’s imperfections amid his righteousness were excused in part due to ignorance; the citizens of Christ’s Kingdom have the fullness of God and His revelation in the prophecies of the Old Testament and their fulfillment in Christ and the New Testament, Christ’s Church, and its Tradition. In the Old Testament, earthly promises were the focus as the fullness of the Kingdom was yet to come. Now that Christ has come, “that man from the time of John the Baptist is assured of a speedy entrance into such an everlasting and blessed Kingdom, [and] it is no longer necessary for those promises of earthly well-being to be brought forward.' Given the fullness of God in the Incarnate Word that is Christ, Christians can access the fullness of God and taste the Kingdom through Christ. The unique actions of God with His Chosen People in the Old Testament are historically past—God’s love and care has been newly offered through humanity’s redeemer. It is up to the faith of God’s renewed people to embrace the fullness offered in Christ and grow to realize and experience His Kingdom."

Don't Knock It 'til You Try It

So here we are: Advent 2011. The dreaded new translation of the mass is upon us in full force, with all of its (con)substantial changes and roof homecomings.

We who have gone seeking have heard so much from many angles, decrying the archaicness of the text, the misguided efforts of the Church dedicating attention to something that isn't that important, and how we don't even know what these new words mean. There's plenty of truth to a lot of these opinions.

Some of the wordings aren't as smooth as we might like; restoring the balance of Latin and Hebrew poetic structure and faithfully translating a no-longer-spoken-conversationally language is not going to sound conversational. The Church does have bigger problems, from the lingering shadows of the abuse scandals to the tensions between clerical and lay ministry/leadership. Some of these wordings are confusing- consubstantial? God of Hosts? under my roof?

My question is, "so what?" At the end of the day, it's all part of an effort to be more faithful to the liturgical tradition of our Church, which stands on the two legs of Scripture and Tradition. It's a way for English speakers to say words that more closely follow the Latin that is the basis for every language's translation of the mass, so that from east to west - er, I mean, from the setting of the sun to its rising - we all have as similar a mass as our universal church can have across borders and language barriers. One of my favorite practical effects of our transition: smaller language groups that lack the resources in terms of Latin scholars and studies translate their mass from English to their own language rather than directly from Latin. So by giving them a more faithful English translation as a starting point, we are coming closer to their celebrations of the mass as well.

Something to not lose in all this: the priests, part of the hierarchy so often criticized and derided, the hierarchy that approved this change, have even more than us to learn and review. Their parts have changed more than ours, and new things have been added to the giant Roman Missal that guides them through their celebrations of our masses. Don't overlook the beauty of some of their new words.

My two favorites:

1. As the priest lays his hands over the gifts to call the Spirit over them, he prays, "Make holy, therefore, these gifts, we pray, by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall." What a beautiful image to use! It is a mystery of our faith that Jesus becomes present in the bread and wine as His Body and Blood through the Eucharist, and part of the prayers that effect this is this calling of the Spirit. How can we explain this loving action of our God? What if we just invoke the image of dew in the morning? When we awake, the grass and lawns of our neighborhoods are damp with the gentle, benign moisture of the morning, water that hasn't come from rain or storms that we can see and hear or from hoses or watering cans when we tend to our lawns; it is water that appears through a fairly easily explained process but nonetheless invokes some childlike awe and wonder for the simple splendor of it. So give this new imagery a shot - the Holy Spirit coming over the gifts to prepare them for Christ like the morning dewfall!?

2. After the gifts have been presented and the altar has been prepared, the priest invites us to begin the prayers over the Eucharist with him. This change to the invitation is so subtle that you might miss it, but when you catch, it will change your 'tude. "Pray, brothers and sisters, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable..." That's right. No longer is our participation in the sacrifice of the Eucharist only implied or understood; it is explicitly invoked in prayer. Our sacrifice - our self-offering of our sins, our penitence, our prayers, our gratitude - is invited specifically to the altar. The reality that we are united in our baptism in Christ as we gather as His Body to celebrate the Eucharist invites us to share all of those things of our self with each other in the Eucharist. Then, we, like the bread that is His Body, Jesus and His people, are broken, shared, and sent forth. It begins with this invitation from the priest. So listen and let your heart be drawn in anew as you're specifically invited to the reality of the Eucharist that has been there all along but not spoken so specifically to us until now.

I could go on and on about pros and cons of the new words. The major point is that no one should really be too opinionated either way. People should talk with one another to share their feelings in community, but the point is for us to continue to deepen our spiritual commitments and live our faith. The mass - the Word and the Eucharist - is the basis and rhythm for doing this. So let's engage it prayerfully, but remember the end we all are working toward is relationship with ourselves, with others, and with God. And hey - give it a shot and spend a few Sundays and daily masses with it before you get to fired up either way. Don't knock it 'til you try it.