Whether Paul or Apollos, or Charismatic or Latin

In 1991, when I first responded to the Lord's call to enter the Catholic Church, I belonged to an interdenominational charismatic fellowship. My first bridge into Catholic life was through a charismatic prayer group which was led by the parents of the worship leader at my fellowship (who was an ex-Catholic). The members of that prayer group befriended me and walked with me through my 18 month journey into the Church, and celebrated my Confirmation with me. 

But what formed me the most deeply during that time was my attendance at daily Mass. Going to daily Mass was something the Lord impressed on me within days of my saying yes to Him. As I recall, though, it took me the better part of a year to be obedient on that point. I finally began when I realized I could go to Mass after work. Most of the time I went to Gesu parish on the Marquette University campus, but sometimes, when I got off work early, I went to St. Bernard's in Wauwatosa. From the time I began this practice until I moved to Japan in September of 1994 I was stunned over and over again by how much grace the Lord could pour forth in a 25-30 minute Mass with no music, no fanfare, no lector, especially in the very plain basement church at Gesu. Time and time again, the Lord met me powerfully from the moment I entered the door. He met my miserable heart and began a radical transformation of my soul and mind. 

When I planned to leave Japan and had no idea of what to do next, I came to Steubenville in part because of its reputation as a focal point of Catholic charismatic renewal (and in part because I didn't know of any options for graduate school.) And while I mentally associated the charismatic renewal as something that led me to the Catholic Church, I knew full well that the destination of my soul was... the Catholic Church, or rather the kingdom of God through her. I did not like to label myself as a charismatic Catholic because this is redundant. Being Catholic is the fullness. As John Michael Talbot says, to be Catholic is to be "full gospel."

These days I see a trend that reminds me a lot of the charistmatic renewal in both its good and bad aspects, and that is the Latin liturgical movement. I believe that it is an authentic prompting of the Holy Spirit to draw Christians closer into conformity with Jesus Christ, to purify them for belonging to each other in the Church and bringing the lost to salvation. 

But I hope that these won't become "Latin Mass advocates." I hope that they will become disciples and apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ and of his gospel. I have always cringed hard when I hear people equate the charismatic renewal with a certain style of music, of worship, of prayer, or of anything external. It is about the person of the Holy Spirit, the one who overshadowed the Virign Mary, the one who guides us into all truth, the one sent by the Father and who establishes our identity in His Son. We can and do have our aesthetic tastes, and we do have documents from the Church guiding us in valid celebration of the liturgy. But earthly spiritual attachments form us in beginning stages of growth. St. John of the Cross teaches us that even these need to be surrendered. We long for our senses to be richly engaged in worship, and that is right and good, but we also must eventually leave the world of the senses and die to this to rise to deeper delights directly from God. 

I loved, and was deeply attached to, the powerful way we worshipped in my charismatic fellowship. But God called me to surrender that and to trust He could meet me in liturgy. I grew up with Lutheran liturgy and thought I was entering greener pastures when I left it -- and in some ways I was. All I knew of it was lifelessness. One form of worship or another is not, ultimately, where we find life. Liturgical or free, Extraordinary or Novus Ordo -- it isn't about that. It is about following Jesus Christ in obedience.  

Let us all, together, enter into life.

The Church as Mother

Today is the solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul, apostles. As I read the entry for the feast in Divine Intimacy by Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen I was struck by two oft-repeated quotes: "He cannot have God as Father who does not have the Church for Mother" (St. Cyprian, † 258) and the dying words of St. Teresa of Jesus, reformer of my Carmelite order: "I am a daughter of the Church."

I don't feel like I'm going far out on a limb to say that in this generation, we are undergoing a shift in what it means in lived experience, and subsequently in Christian understanding, to have the Church for Mother. At the time and context that Fr. Gabriel wrote (as a Carmelite priest and academic in Rome in the 1940s), one gets the distinct flavor that to have the Church for Mother involves being a faithful, fully-initiated member of the Roman Catholic Church. And he is not wrong.

The Second Vatican Council had not yet happened, but when it did, it also did not pronounce Fr. Gabriel wrong is his view. But it certainly did bid faithful, fully-initiated Roman Catholics to lift up their eyes and take in a broader view of what it means, that we do not have God as Father who do not have the Church for Mother.

If we understand "church" as a juridical, political term that specializes in the observable external conditions that result in belonging, we miss dimensions of the words Father and Mother. I am a mother. My older child entered our family through the legal process of adoption, after he had called me Mama for three years. My younger child grew within me in the natural way. When the midwife handed her to me, her gaze penetrated mine with a knowing that was expanding, not new. Interestingly, we had finalized my son's adoption 15 hours before the midwife handed me my daughter. Legally, in one 24-hour period, I suddenly was the mother of two children. Strip away the growth dynamic, the nurturing, the bonding, the healing, the life of the matter, and this legal statement is what you are left with.

Drop a newborn and an almost four year old child into a new juridical arrangement with strangers (who may or may not have the wherewithall to provide for their human needs), and what do you have?

You have the the vision of the Church that the Second Vatican Council saw was in urgent need of expansion. It calls us to take a deeper look at what happens when being a faithful, fully-initiated Roman Catholic goes right.

There is a community where the love of God is made manifest. The truth of the gospel is spoken. We are told from Divine Revelation the truth about who we are, about who God is, about how sin is the cause of our brokenness, about how God's love is the cause of our salvation, about Jesus as the price of our redemption, about His act of love and obedience that opens heaven and that calls all people to follow Him and to share in His mission to announce this plan of salvation. The very dynamism of the gospel preached and responded to creates missional communities. And miraculously, because the source of these communities is the one life of God there is unity as each is united with the Lord who calls and empowers and sends and is preached. Those who have answered the call of Jesus share the call. They reproduce. There is a life dynamic. It nurtures, bonds, heals. This is why we call the Church our Mother when God is our Father. We receive new life.

Roman Catholics who get uptight about juridical belonging tend to have forgotten or ignored the life-giving dynamics of the Church's maternal nature to their own detriment, and the detriment of those they affect. It's a messy process for uptightness to decompress, recognize its own need, acknowledge the need of others. It's a death to self that can feel like the world, safety, right and good being destroyed before one's very eyes. But in truth, it is salvation. It is the love of God breaking through. It will be messy. Motherhood is messy. Family life is messy. Messy is necessary for real life and healing, and varying levels of messy can all be endured.

Enough of "failure to thrive" Christians. Enough of orphaned believers weighed by a sense of lacking belonging, siblings, nurture. Enough of harsh, one-sided law lovers.

I am a daughter of the Church. I draw my life from her. Let us drink deeply from the purity of Christ so that His living water wells us within us for the salvation of all.

Christian Unity Comes from This

It is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen, O.C.D., describes very well what is necessary for Christians to experience the unity that Jesus prayed for:

The intimate dispositions of Jesus toward God and His relations with Him are of the utmost importance to us. Jesus is the Son of God; herein lies all His greatness and holiness. By His very nature, He is the only Son of God; we who are made to His image, have become children of God by His mediation. This divine sonship, which belongs to Him by nature, is communicated to us by grace; hence, like Him, all our greatness and holiness consist in our living as true children of God. Therefore, as far as is consistence with our human nature, we should try to reproduce in ourselves the interior attitude of Jesus toward His heavenly Father.

First of all, we note an attitude, or rather a state, of intimate union. It is as the Word that Jesus declares, "The Father is in Me, and I in the Father" (Jn. 10:38). He is referring, of course, to the substantial, incommunicable union of the Word with the Father, which no one can ever imitate; this union is the prerogative of the Son of God alone. But He also made the statement as Man, because, as Man, all His love is concentrated on the Father and dominated by the Father. His whole mind is directed toward Him in an effort to please Him. This union of Jesus with His divine Father is the mode for our union, precisely because it is a union of grace. Grace in Jesus is "infinite," in the language of the theologians, and in this respect it differs from ours; yet even the grace we possess enables us to keep our souls directed toward the Father and our affections centered in Him. Jesus gives us the example Himself, and asks of the Father this close union for us: "As Thou, Father, in Me and I in Thee; that they also may be one in Us" (Jn. 17:21)....

O Jesus, what great treasures are hidden in Your words: "As Thou, Father, in Me, and I in Thee; that they also may be one in Us!" It is not enough for us to imitate Your exterior life; You want more than that. You want us to imitate, as far as mere creatures can, Your interior life, Your intimacy and Your unceasing union with the Father! It would be folly and arrogant temerity even to think of doing this, had You not commanded us to do so. But You have commanded it, and these words of Yours are particularly sacred because they form part of Your last prayer to Your Father, a prayer which contains Your spiritual testament.... (Divine Intimacy, pp. 169, 171)

The key to Christian unity is the all-consuming desire for union with God our Father. When our desire is fixed on God, seeking only Him, and giving Him permission to go into those areas where we can't even discern our own intentions and desires, and mess with us, then we are on the path of being one in Christ with other believers who also are inflamed with this same desire. And those believers who are not yet aflame, but who struggle with weeds and rocks and beaten-down paths? Jesus calls them too and we all journey up the mountain of holiness. Who desires God wholeheartedly who once did not desire Him but half-heartedly?

In this week of prayer for Christian Unity, let's allow ourselves to be caught on fire by one another, with the fire of desire for God and God alone.

It Takes All Kinds

This morning as I was driving home from Mass I was musing on this thought: I wonder how many of life's difficulties, big or small, are created when we presume that other people have the same perspectives we do.

I had been chatting with a friend about an idea. He is practical and his first thoughts are about how difficult things are and everything that could go wrong. I am ambitious and willing to work extremely hard to make things go well. It's not that one of us is right and the other is wrong. He presumes no one will pitch in and he will be stuck with lots of work. I presume everyone will pitch in, and by now I should realize that not everyone is as die-hard as I am. But I've seen things that he thought were impossible yield good results because people did actually come together and pull it off. And yes, some people just really enjoy doing difficult things! And some don't!


So I'm back at that pesky reality again in this post about how God has created so many different types of people with varying temperaments, gifts, strengths, and weaknesses. I used to really think I was just extremely defective, instead of simply different from others. (Oh, I'm defective, too, but not in the way I was thinking.) It is very, very good that my friend has the ability to make practical plans, and it is good that I want to pour my heart into a giant challenge, and we both need lots of other types to provide several other perspectives to really do something good to build up the kingdom of God. And that's what it takes -- each person offering who they are with humility, being no more and no less than who God has gifted them to be. If we really believe that God builds us living stones into a dwelling place for His Spirit, then we have to be willing to say "here's what I've got, now you show me what you've got, and you, and you, and you" and then, through us together, God does what only He can. Pride probably hides things as much as it boasts about things. Both are means of trying to stand aloof and keeping oneself untouched.

It has always impressed me that one of the first thing an authentic conversion produces is movement towards other people. Jesus calls Matthew to follow Him, then Jesus follows Matthew back to his own house and his own people. Jesus explains our judgment will be based on how we treat "the least of these, his brothers." Even a cloistered monastic who seems far removed from everyone is in reality praying and wrestling for the salvation of all and is in close union with the suffering of the world, because Jesus is.

If we were all the same, how could we love without simply loving only what we find in our selves? Perhaps humanity requires diversity simply because we require the exercise of humility and charity for salvation.

The Meaning Series: Sunday Morning

Unleashed is now finished, in terms of recording. Tomorrow we do the mastering, and then it is done!  And I have two songs that I haven't written about yet.

I wrote Sunday Morning on November 16, 1986 when I was a few days shy of 19. (It was so long ago I was still Lutheran!) This song came to me as sort of a surprise, and for that reason I've always had a unique kind of respect for it. That is to say, I remember vividly starting out to write this song primarily as an expression of self-pity. It is about a lonely person who goes to church. But as I wrote about my fictionalized self in the third person, it was as if in my prayer the Lord met me, right there, and asked me to look at my situation with different eyes. As a result, the ending of the song literally surprised me as I wrote it, and spoke to me at a very deep level of my need. Jesus essentially told me that I was not the real lonely one in a religious, communal, or social setting; it is He. He is lonely and aching for us to see Him.

Here are the lyrics:

Sunday morning and he walks into your church

He sits in a pew towards the back

He listens to the sermon and he sings the hymns and he prays the prayers

Why still does he feel like no one here really cares

We go to church and we sit in our separate private clans

Unaware of the need our brother has

Do you see a tear trickle down his face

Or are you trying to soak up all God’s grace for you

Don’t you know that Jesus died for that one you’ve refused to see

Jesus’ love isn’t only for you and me

Back in church again, and yes I see him sitting there

But tell me please, what should I say

I say “good morning” look at him and I even shake his hand

I’ve done my duty, now I can be through with this man

Just like that I left him in my church today

Never meaning to give him a second thought

Then I looked into the hand that I shook with his a

And I saw the blood from the wounds of the nails that held him high

Through the eyes of the least of them

Jesus searches us

What answer will you give when he asks “where is your love.”

I changed some of the phrases in the lyrics some years ago to better express the theological truth of the song (my original ending sounded rather harsh). But essentially the message is that the real measure of a Christian is his love for the forgotten ones who are right in our midst. For years and years I was quite invested in different avenues of spiritual pride, in making sure I looked very holy to myself and others. But acts of real love done in secret for needy ones? That kind of thinking or behaving wasn't even on my radar screen. There is truly nothing scarier than a loveless Christian. It is such a contradiction in terms. But if Christian formation is all about right doctrine, right information, and right experiences, and holiness is seen primarily in terms of keeping away from contaminants (namely, other people whose thoughts and experiences are not up to par with mine) -- that is pretty much a recipe for loveless Christians. The call to follow Christ has to be all about Him ravishing our souls, alluring us, awakening such a desire within us that we can no longer be satisfied with anything but more of Him. Let right doctrine follow, but let us not be skeletal and unenfleshed. Let us hang on His every word and cast ourselves into every one of His precepts not out of a prideful desire to be right, but out of a lover's abandon to her beloved: I don't care what you ask of me; everything and anything you say is the only place my heart can dwell in peace, but You who are all Good say nothing but that which makes me fully myself, so I also trust you completely....


The popular video of late by the young man who claims to hate religion but love Jesus has reminded me of this song. When I wrote this, I was quite in the thick of his thinking, and it was precisely because I was experiencing loveless Christianity. Catholics might rightly point out that going to church is not a social situation but a communal one; we are not there to love on each other, but to commune with Christ. As a Catholic, I know that now. But the missing factor is that if we do not have an experience of loving on each other we will not be able to enter into communion with Christ in the way He intends. Yes, God can and does supernaturally overcome all of our sin-created barriers, but His standard way of operating is using the love of the Body of Christ to bring sinners to repentance. Once upon a time, families came standard with a sense of communal love. In our culture I don't believe one should ever presume that today, even among "church" families. We can argue doctrine (and I believe fully that right doctrine is absolutely essential), but love must be the alpha and the omega. To love is to be holy. Period.  St. John of the Cross reminds us that our final judgment will be based on how we have loved. Period. And it is futile to think we can adequately love other people without surrendering our hearts in love to the Lover who seeks us and waits for access to our hearts, who awaits our surrender.

Anyway, these are some thoughts generated in me by this song today.

The Purity of a Child

I love to observe children's unabashed sentiments of friendship. My son is a popular, outgoing boy that everyone seems to love to be around. I've witnessed boys debating one another about which one of them was my son's best friend. And the disappointment on the face and in the voice of a boy who comes to our house to play, only to learn that my son is at someone else's house playing, tugs at the heart. The way my children will beg to spend more time with their friends and vice versa -- it's all so free and uncalculated. If I listen closely I hear a yearning in innocence for communion that makes my own soul glow in mystery.

What happens when we cease to be children? Or is it just me? Was it just me? I'm not entirely sure I was ever a child in the way I'm thinking about it here.

When we grow and mature, we become aware of more of what we were made for. And yes, it is communion. Profound communion. Mature hormones kick in to tell us we are made for a type of communion in which we give ourselves completely to one who is able to receive us completely, and we are meant to spiritually and physically reproduce ourselves in this world. Those drives can perfect us, and they can muck us up seriously, as well. We can become calculating. The pain of disappointment can become too much to bear, or feel, so we can start to push them down and divert ourselves from what we are made for.

But hold it. Kids can do that, too. I did. But just today I witnessed that purity I wrote about earlier -- that pure longing for friendship expressed by a child. Purity is possible, just like deformation is.

We're made for more than sex, more than marriage. The only one we can give ourselves to completely and the only one who is able to receive us completely is the One who made us, the One who holds us in life. We are made for God, for union, for unity with Him through the absorption of ourselves in Him, which makes us most perfectly the unique individuals we were created to be, free from calculations, from self-conceit.

But God has gone and created this as a sacramental universe. He comes to us, not despising created means, but embracing them, employing creation to woo us, to show us His face, to pour His grace upon us: the Incarnation.

Which is why I can look at the child at my door and feel my heart bursting with the mystery of God present with us, calling me to Himself.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

January 18 through 25 is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. In its honor, I thought I would "replay" a recent post on the subject.

Yesterday my children and I had the opportunity to attend Mass at St. Patrick's in Pittsburgh's Strip District. The structure of the interior of this church is a bit unusual as the seating area for Mass is at the second floor level. The entry level of the church seems to be primarily an area of devotional prayer. The prominent feature that catches your eye immediately upon entering through the front door is the Holy Stairs, a replica of the 28 steps in the Church of the Holy Stairs in Rome. (Read the rest here.)

Praying for Unity

Yesterday my children and I had the opportunity to attend Mass at St. Patrick's in Pittsburgh's Strip District. The structure of the interior of this church is a bit unusual as the seating area for Mass is at the second floor level. The entry level of the church seems to be primarily an area of devotional prayer. The prominent feature that catches your eye immediately upon entering through the front door is the Holy Stairs, a replica of the 28 steps in the Church of the Holy Stairs in Rome. Those steps were brought from Jerusalem to Rome by St. Helena and were said to be the very ones that lay between Christ and Pontius Pilate when Christ was condemned to death.

The custom, in Rome and in Pittsburgh, is to climb these steps on one's knees, praying as one ascends. In 1993 when I visited Rome, I did this with the vast crowd there present, and yesterday I did this with my children. It was a powerful moment. As we started up the steps, I remembered distinctly how I prayed back in 1993. As a brand new Catholic, so new I could almost still smell the chrism on my forehead, with each step I prayed for people of various Christian denominations to return to union with Rome. At first yesterday I began to pray the same way, but it struck me that differentiating people this way, by denomination, touched nothing of the depth of need we all have. Instead I prayed for the grace of conversion for those who have been repulsed by Christianity and organized religion because of the sins of Christians and those acting in the name of the Church.

Christian unity comes as we all repent of our sin and embrace the cross. Only in the cross will we all be drawn together.

May this be our aim in the coming year. May the world know that we are Christians because of our love for one another.

After Worshipping with the Presbyterians

I had an experience this morning that has the wheels of my interior processing going at full speed. For the first time in about 18-some-odd years I attended a Protestant Sunday worship service. My parish choir shares a director with a Presbyterian congregation in the area, and today we sang together at both their church and ours. Oh, I've been to ecumenical things here and there (where the service was kind of a no-man's land), but this was unique. I'm trying to grab some very powerful impressions and wrestle them into words.

The unity of all Christians is something I pray for every single day. My heart is all for acknowledging what is good and holy in every Christian communion, and for that matter in every religious or spiritual community. My heart is also deeply attuned to the need for on-going (or first time, for that matter) conversion to Christ in the heart of every person.

That’s where I am today. I think this morning's experience put me in touch with elements of my religious past that I can now see with much different eyes. I guess what really struck me today is the huge, gaping divide between religion and an encounter with the supernatural. I will say that we need both, but in very different ways. Religion, as I am using the term here, is a human, natural virtue. It is the natural virtue of being reverent, of knowing that there is a God and acknowledging His right over His creation and humanity. It is about a sort of natural justice and goodness. There are people, I know, who have no formal religious affiliation at all who excel at these virtues. There are probably lots of people in every church whose religious lives express these sentiments.

But it's not Christian.

I think there are other people who go through churches who aren’t strong in these natural virtues, and they look at the claims of organized religion and the actions of the people around them and they declare Christianity a bunch of worthless sentiment. They might believe there is a God, but find the practice of religion meaningless. And sometimes I think they might actually jettison religion as an exercise of virtue, because our somewhat crude culture emphasizes not so much to respect form but to seek what is real and what actually works.

Here’s the real kicker: The natural virtue of religion must have a supernatural encounter with the living God, or you can't call it Christianity. There is so much more than religious form, and you’d better believe it’s real and it works! Lived Christianity is supernatural. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, broke into our humanity in the womb of the Virgin Mary -- that is an absolutely reality-altering experience! God came to show us His face; this is what is above nature coming into what is our nature. As a result, He raised us up to be with Him. God makes us to "share in the divine nature" (2 Pet 1:4). The life we live is not one powered by warm fuzzies because of a great example of a good man, it is breath breathed into a corpse that resurrects! Christ did not come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live! This is that which is above nature blasting into life our fallen humanity. He raises us up, anoints us with His Spirit, and sends us out to participate in the same supernatural, miraculous ministry that He had.

That is Christian.

I have been in healing services and heard accounts of powerful healings. I have prayed over people to receive charismatic gifts. I have personally had various supernatural experiences happen to me in prayer services. And while fully acknowledging these, I will also say that the single greatest evidence of God's presence is love in the human heart. Love will do the humble thing; it will also care of the physical needs of anyone at hand, just as Jesus did. Is this not exactly evident in the fact of the Eucharist? There is no Eucharist without a miracle, without the supernatural breaking into our ordinariness. And then, Jesus gives Himself to each one, feeding us, loving us, and bidding us and enabling us to love one another. How absolutely perfect!

At times in my life, I have been toxically religious. By that I mean that I was deeply entrenched in a system of human efforts to reach God, but that I lost sight of the goal and became addicted to the system and the effort. And, I must stress, this toxicity is possible in any ecclesial community, for Catholics as easily as for Protestants. Today I am so thankful to God for exactly the path He has chosen for me. He never left me to drown but allowed me the grace to call out to Him for rescue. Thanks be to God for every painful step, for every bit of confusion, and most especially for the witnesses to the supernatural He has sent across my path to show me there was a way out being traveled by others.

Praised be Jesus Christ! Now and forever!!

Today's Thoughts on Communion and Liberation

This morning my prayer led me to contemplate the role, the meaning, the presence of Communion and Liberation in my life. There is a little bit of a sting in this for me, because how I relate to CL as a movement has changed rather significantly within the last year, and while its all good, good can also feel bewildering to me when it involves relationships with other people. In my mind I have often repeated the phrase I don't do people well, and while I believe this less as time goes on, I do sometimes wonder whether other people get as consternated as I over what is appropriate and inappropriate with regards to relating to other people.

Communion and Liberation is an ecclesial movement started in the 1950s in Italy by Fr. Luigi Giussani. It grew up with high school youth and then college students, and then blossomed over into a movement for adults, and it is all about living Christianity (Catholicism) not as an inherited cultural set of baggage but as a living encounter with Christ Who is present here and now. As my CL friends always liked to say, it is nothing other than basic Christianity re-proposed in modern times. But as with all movements there is a definite spirituality, a way of expressing these truths, of living them. When I was newly drawn to the Catholic Church it confused me just a bit that there were different spiritualities such as religious orders and movements. If it is a good thing to be a Franciscan, then why isn't everyone a Franciscan? I wondered. I suppose I could have just as easily asked If it really is good that I am me, then why isn't everyone me? which betrays the misbelief I had about myself, and my misunderstanding of God as the creator and lover of individuals.

About two years ago I proclaimed myself a devotee of CL to the extent that I joined the fraternity, which is simply an official way of saying one is following this way of life. This was a lover's leap, but it was an immature one. In hindsight, I can see that I was responding to a clear recognition that CL is centered on Christ. I suppose I still have a hermeneutic of suspicion when it comes to groups that are in some way ancillary to the Church. Ok, maybe they are legit on paper, but what's it like on the inside? I was so happy to find a true desire for Christ that I figured a desire for Christ was all it took to "be claimed by" a spirituality.

Let me just say plainly that in my personal judgment, not to mention that of the Church, there is absolutely nothing "wrong" with CL. I'm taken back again to this notion of religious orders. To a man called to be a Dominican, there is nothing "wrong" with a Jesuit or a Carmelite. But of course, the key is that we do not make our selves, we do not choose our way, really. We are chosen, called, embraced, and we respond. God is the orchestrator, and in the full but mysterious exercise of our freedom we become exactly the one He knew us to be all along. We are His.

So as I began to heed exactly what I was gleaning from CL, and following Christ as He presented Himself to me, I began to see that the way I adhered to CL itself was a problem! In many subtle ways, I found myself trying to follow something extrinsic to myself, as if I were eating a certain kind of food and insisting that it was delicious. At the same time, the Lord was calling to me strongly, wooing me with frightening intensity, in other directions. I started to feel as if I were being pulled in two.

After an intense struggle, in my mind I "let go" of CL. The collapse hurt, but at least I collapsed onto my Lord. It took time to incarnate this letting go and to have the strength to own it (because of the human affection involved with my CL friends, all fine people).

But this morning, to continue the story I nearly started, in prayer I was reading Scripture and was drawn to the Psalms, and I specifically thought to pick up Giussani's book on Psalms and read a few entries. This is a book I've had for a couple of years but had never read from at all. In the two entries I read, Giussani repeated familiar themes, of our need to see Christ with us, to be aware of Him. He asked repeatedly "where is this presence?" While the question itself is completely valid, I found my heart shouting out "Right here!! He's here!" Going to another random selection and finding the same question "where is this presence?" I suddenly started hearing it not as a provocation to delight, but as a nagging doubt. "Where is God? Is He really here? This is our sin, that we don't see Him. We need to see Him..." And my heart became sad.

I put down that book and searched out another that I read voraciously in the months after my "collapse" : Iain Matthew's The Impact of God: Soundings from St. John of the Cross. I opened it, again to a random chapter, and found my spiritual journey described, understood, and re-enkindled. In fact, St. John of course said the same thing: "Where have you hidden, beloved?" But somehow in this difference I caught the glimpse of the God who had called me, personally -- to me -- through and in my particular history and circumstances, and I could almost blush with the awareness of the intimacy of it. There is a world of difference between following truth because one acknowledges it is truth and submits obediently, and being gripped in a passionate love where life and death hangs in the balance of being with the Lover or not. Truth, acknowledgment and obedience are all involved, but passion .... ah, that's the ticket.

It is all about the Lover who calls. He is here! And I just want to be with Him and live as lovers live.

Vengeance: Who's Going to Pay for This?

This afternoon I heard a homily on forgiveness. Because my children were with me and there were noses to wipe and pieces of paper to retrieve and little chats to put a stop to, I was not completely glued to every word that came forth from Father's mouth. But my attention was caught by his last point, which concerned how to differentiate forgiveness from emotional or feeling-based responses. At times, people think that if they have any negative feelings toward a person, they must not have forgiven. Or, they think that forgiveness requires one to like an individual that one finds unpleasant. Father's point was that you can know you have forgiven when a) you do not seek revenge and b) you pray for the person.

I'm not sure why that struck me so, but it did. I don't resonate much with the word vengeance. (Though it reminds me of a video by Rich Mullins where he says "I know the Bible says 'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord, but I just want to be about the Lord's business!") What I resonate with  -- no, resonate is not the right word here. Resonate has too positive a quality to it. What I equate with vengeance is the feeling that somebody has to pay for this. And that somebody, somewhere in my gut, always seems to be me. There's something very wrong with that. And I think at heart, fixing it has a root in the need to properly forgive.

Really, not being vengeful is a matter of allowing justice to be carried out by the Lord. Entrusting injustices to Him. What is vengeance, after all? Is it not the idea that I will do something to replace what has been stolen from me, or from someone? And that someone that is done is generally another violation, another violence. Blame, a grudge, a punishment, a torment. A price. It is me declaring that I have the superior oversight of objective reality, and I know what a sin costs, and I know how to extract what it takes to heal.

In other words, I'm God; I'll handle it.

But in my heart, my own personal version of this, has never been really to unleash purposefully hateful or violent acts toward another, to get even. It has been to inflict them on myself. Maybe this shows an intuition of reparation or intercession, but it still really boils down to I'm God; I'll handle it.

And then there's when I see someone who can do this better than I can. Someone who feels the need to say "excuse me" when another person burps. The first person to stop to pick up things others have dropped. I'm sure it is possible for someone to do that because their heart is full of generosity. But I see an ability to say You've just made a mess in my life. This is really an injustice. Someone has to pay, and it has to be me. I have to absorb your fault. Not "allow me to help you" but "I have to."


In other words: God is not doing His job. I have to.

Nuances, nuances! There is such a difference between being motivated by the love to say "I would do anything to make you happy," and "I hate how this pain has disrupted my life, but I want to avoid the complication of blaming or wanting to destroy another (maybe because it doesn't make me look so good), so I'll take the vengeance inside myself, do the violence to myself, and try to make myself happy by letting you avoid pain."

Or, it could just be a child's magical thinking inside an adult psyche: if I pinch myself until I hurt, I can take away the hurt I see going on around me. The mind has habits, and this is why St. Paul admonishes us to be transformed by the renewal of our minds (Rom. 12:2).

God alone is my Savior, and God alone is the Savior of the hurting person next to me. If I am to give anything at all to the hurting person next to me, it must come from God. Or perhaps better yet, if that hurting person next to me is to receive something that will heal her, it must come from God. I could heap all sorts of things on all sorts of people, and it might only clog them off or confuse them from receiving from God. It's not that I need fear about giving from out of my heart, but I do need love to motivate me in all things, never a twisted sense that I have to pay for this.

Here's Why I Love the Feast of All Saints

This morning when I woke up, it struck me clearly why I love the feast of All Saints so much. In days gone by, it seems I could never look at a human being, myself or anyone else, without getting depressed. I am by nature the type of person who sees flaws, failings and weaknesses. I see the problems in a picture. Add to this tendency having been taught the theological notions of the total depravity of man and justification as a legal fiction, and you have a recipe for a mess. I don't know how many times I heard the idea that being justified means that God looks at us with some holy sense of amnesia, "just as if" I'd never sinned. The idea was that, for Jesus' sake, He plays along with the charade and calls us holy, imputing Jesus' righteousness to us legally. Grace meant we were "covered," not changed. We stay rotten, abominable sinners, unable to do anything good. Then we die and get to heaven and finally we are really holy because we've left this world and sin behind.

It could be worse. The basic things are there: Salvation comes through Jesus, heaven is the goal, we sin. But there's this huge, gaping span called the course of human existence that gets left on the dung heap, to use the metaphor Luther was fond of. It occurred to me at one point in my life that if we were doomed to live this sort of dungy type of existence, and bliss and Jesus awaited us in heaven, why not just check out ASAP to get there? Why bother living? Why was suicide not a great option? There was a logical inconsistency here, and my life depended on it.

So, I will say that it was when I became a Catholic that things changed, although in this instance I use the phrase "becoming Catholic" in its ongoing sense of constant conversion. There wasn't one date where I suddenly believed a different doctrine and everything changed. Transformation doesn't work that way.

I learned the theology. I learned that grace as a legal fiction is inadequate, and unbiblical. I learned that grace is about sonship and entering God's covenantal family and being transformed from glory to glory. This not only was Scripturally consistent, it resonated with the deepest needs my soul had always felt: If God cannot transform me, I thought, who needs Him?

All that learning helped me understand, and my constitution requires understanding things. But where my heart is really torn open is in interaction with other people. In some ways, I only became a Catholic a couple of years ago. (In other ways, I suppose I'll only become a Catholic this afternoon or tomorrow or next month!)

How's that, you say? Well, I realized about two years ago that I had always kept a certain reservation in my heart. I think perhaps it comes from having always seen everyone primarily as a package of flaws. Oh, of course as I matured I was well aware of my own flaws and did learn to have mercy on myself, and therefore I would not go around having a cow over everyone's flaws. However, the yearning in me to behold, well, God in all His glory, just always turned me off from getting too familiar with regular ol' people. The contrast was too jarring, too sad. I couldn't stand the constant disappointment.

Then the Lord surprised me and brought me amongst a group of people whom I could trust enough, and be focused elsewhere enough (not on myself -- very important), to completely forget about my reservation. What was this reservation? I think it can be summarized thus: If all this God stuff is real, then He transforms regular Catholics. That is the proof. And I'm afraid I'll never see it. This was no conscious realization. But it seems many people I've talked with, converts at least, have a certain litmus test in their heart that either keeps them cautious or flings wide open the floodgates of their hearts. This was mine. God, if what you say is true, show me in plain ol' garden variety Catholics.

Part of how this litmus test thingy works is, of course, we fear. We hold on to the test, in the package, so to speak, unopened. We fear that we really have been deceived all along, that it is too good to be true. We know it can't be, but dang, that litmus test -- if we actually do it -- is going to show it one way or another. It's going to change things. So for many of us, it takes several years and circumstances out of our own control before heaven is able to slip in and settle (or perhaps stir up!) those fears, and let us actually run the test.

And then one day, when I wasn't concerned about being guarded, without making a big deal out of it, God seemed to pick up my litmus test, rip it open, and dip it into... my parish choir. I remember telling a group of friends at School of Community, in tears, shortly after I joined my parish choir that I knew then that it was all true. All true. All the good things I'd learned in my head over the last 15 years were all true. It was a deep, intuitive ... floodgate opening in my heart. And then I realized there was a weight of glory that had a claim on my life, and that was real, too. This was to change quite a bit.

Why? Because God allowed me to see Him in the faces of plain people who had flaws, failings and weaknesses. He was there. Just like I could perceive Him the in the Eucharist that night of my conversion on Christmas Eve (but that's another story entirely. One story at a time!)



I love the Feast of All Saints, because it gives me a completely new way of looking into the face of every person.

Why I Go to Daily Mass

Going to Mass this morning put me in memory of those early days of my sojourn into Catholicism when I first started attending daily Mass. Very early on in my process of conversion, after I had experienced Christ's call and tremulously responded, I was complaining to the Lord one day abut how scared I was and how hard this would be for me. The Lord responded by telling me "Be going to Mass." I knew that He meant daily Mass, and on an on-going basis. This felt like tough love to me, and like He was completely not indulging me in my nervous complaint. In hindsight I can see the Lord was holding out a precious gift to me, one I'm sure I'll never value highly enough this side of heaven.

But one thing that always struck me when I was new to daily Mass going was how miraculous the whole thing was. And not just in the "technical" sense in which the miracle of transubstantiation takes place so that Jesus is really present with us in the Eucharist (as if that isn't super-abundantly more than enough right there!). But personally, for me, the Mass often felt like an intimate communication, a lesson, a teaching, advice, even, for me in the particular need I had at that particular time, on that particular day. It felt like the Lord was personally weaving together, stitching up, the loose and flailing bits of my life, my thoughts, my prayers, and making something reasonable from them. It was in this way that I fell in love with the liturgy and absolutely could not wait for Mass each day. It helped that I was learning so much at the time. Everything seemed new. And I was so thankful for Fr. John who offered the Mass I attended most of the time. He was one who had a cadence to his prayer that was absolutely predictable and yet never sounded like he was "just saying" prayers. And I loved him so much to boot. His presence subtly taught me so many things, but I think most important among these was that these profound experiences with Christ happened for me within the context of the church community. I loved Christ, I loved Fr. John, and those loves washed over and gathered up all the rest of the community gathered there. It reminds me of CL parties at my friend Suzanne's house. I'd just love anyone who came in those doors, because they were part of who gathered. At the time, I struggled with this at Sunday Mass because it felt so anonymous, and truth be told I struggled at daily Mass as well. But it was in the daily Mass context that I apprenticed in this love.

Today at my parish I was put in memory of all these things. My head was the typical jumble of half-awake thoughts and concerns as I entered Mass (a few seconds late), but from the opening prayer, I heard words designed to perfectly heal my soul. To do that stitching. The Scriptures spoke their living word to me. The love I have known in that community beamed its memories and reality brightly into my soul. And Jesus, my Lord, came again, just for me. Oh Lord, I am not worthy, but only speak the word and I shall be healed! This is good, rich soil, and the Lord gives me all I need -- for me, and for those He gives me.

How shall I make a return/ for all the good He has done for me?/ The cup of salvation I will take up/ I will call on the name of the Lord/

Serving In Many Ways

This article from the Direction for our Times newsletter represents another facet of Anne's talk that really struck me on Monday. I'm hoping to get access to the MP3 of the talk to link on this blog.

Serving in Many Ways
by Anne, a lay apostle


In the past few years we at the core of this apostolate have been blessed to meet many Catholics from many parts of the world. To see the living Church in action has been truly inspiring because we have this tendency to think that we are the only ones working. Isn't it true? We see how hard we're working and we forget that we're part of a big family. We are all working very hard for Christ.

What is the same about everybody that we meet is their love for Jesus and their commitment to the Gospel message. What is very different is the way each person and organization lives out this commitment.

Cardinal Avery Dulles was an American Catholic Theologian. He was a very clear thinker and writer. One of this writings described five different models of the Church.

• The Church as an institution, meaning the hierarchy.
• The Church as a mystical communion, meaning a communion of people.
• The Church as a sacrament, meaning a transmitter of God's graces.
• The Church as a herald, meaning a proclaimer of God's Good News.
• And finally the Church as servant, meaning sharing the concerns of mankind and assisting those in need.

Each model offers beautiful, necessary contributions and comes with both benefits and risks. Any one model, though, as far as I can see, serving to the exclusion of others, would be incomplete. All models bring something.

I see today that people tend to become really excited about specific areas of service in the Church. I'll give you an example. I was listening to three young Catholics one day and they were talking about a current event in the Church. One of the persons said, "Well, if I was there I'd be out there protesting. I'd be holding a sign, that's what I'd be doing and I think that's the right thing to do. If we don't stand up for our faith, nobody will." Another one said, "Not me. It's a circus. My job, I think, would be to stay home, see to my duties and pray for all these people involved." A third one said "You're both wrong. We should be there dialoguing with these people trying to create bridges, not walls. You guys aren't getting this right."

Now of the three, who got it right? I think they were all getting it right. Each one was inspired by the Holy Spirit to respond to the situation. Who got it wrong? They all got it wrong because each one was convinced that their way was the right way and that the others were wrong. Nobody was really ready to admit that there was a place for all three types of service.

Let's consider another example. Take a humanitarian service crisis today. If we have a room full of Catholics sitting at a table, we're going to have differences of opinion on how we should respond. Some might think practically, some might think mystically and some might think metaphysically. What will each bring?

Well, the practical ones might bring food. The mystical ones might bring the sacraments. The metaphysical ones might study the causality of the crisis.

On a good day all of these people will work together as a team and there will be peace in their service. On a bad day the practical ones will accuse the mystical ones of bring out of touch. The mystical ones will accuse the practical ones of being too earth bound and they'll both turn on the metaphysical people for thinking too much and complicating matters.

I'm sure that God delights in all of us and I know He needs all of us. He has commissioned all of us to do His work where He has placed us. I think He's so pleased when we support each other and I think He's very disappointed when we tear each other down. We should each thank God, of course, for the opportunity to serve Him where we are and we should thank God for all of our brothers and sisters serving in different ways throughout the body of Christ.

My friends, if we have disunity we lose our effectiveness. If we have disunity we lose our peace. And, if we have disunity Jesus loses the opportunities that He hopes to use in our vocations.

We as lay apostles of Jesus Christ the Returning King, and, as a spiritual movement in the Church, are called to participate in a great renewal. Everyone is welcome in this movement. Everyone is needed.

I look at the uniqueness of the individuals who work along side us and I'm so happy. It makes me rejoice. No one personality or experience will characterize us because we are all unique and because we're all needed.

We're obedient to the Magisterium of the Church because we understand the Church as protective. We are obedient because we love. Our obedience is rooted in love. We do not hold up obedience like a false god and use it to whip other people. We don't hold up our obedience as proof that we are any better than anybody else. Our obedience is deeply personal and should be viewed, at least in part, as a blessing from God, a gift.

We have to accept, my friends, that if we were in different circumstances we might find it very difficult to be obedient. We can't judge. This should make us humble. This fact should create in us a reverence for Catholics who are living away from the Church.

We should be reverent about our brothers and sisters who are out of the Church at this time. We may be getting it right in some areas, and I feel sure that is true. But we also may be getting it wrong in other areas. And maybe when we can't seem to get it right in one area, we're doing better in another area. The people away from the Church aren't any different in many areas of their life.

Many people who are living away from the Church are drawn to this apostolate. They say that they don't feel welcome in some of our churches. Now this hurts us. We want people welcome. We want to be loving and welcoming because Jesus is so loving and welcoming to each one of us. But we have to face this truth. Many don't feel welcome.

Why? That's the question that we each have to answer. As I have said before, I think many people want to come back to our faith but I think they feel as if there's a 'STOP' sign outside the door. We want to make sure that we're not holding any of those 'STOP' signs. We want people to come back to the Church and work out their transformation from inside our Catholic family.

Jesus wants to bring in His people. I think He wants to use us to do it.

You might say, "These people are defiant. They don't like us. They get mad if we ask them to come back to the faith." It was never an easy job to evangelize but in this lay apostolate the Lord has given to us beautiful tools and these include the little "Heaven Speaks" booklets.

You might be looking through these booklets and you might say, "Well, I'm not depressed, so I'll save this one for Susie who is depressed. And I didn't have an abortion so I don't need that booklet." However, I think we need to familiarize ourselves with all of these booklets. Learn what heaven would say to someone who suffers in that way and then we will have really good help for God's children around us. I think it would be a good way for us to reach people. The Lord will use them.

Jesus encourages us so much. And in the September 1, 2009 Monthly Message He says this, "I want you to increase both your dependence on heaven and your awareness of your dependence on heaven. Each day, everyday, ask heaven for help throughout the day."

Lay apostles, if we do this we will truly become the humble servants that God needs. We will not be delivering our version of heaven, we will be delivering Christ's version.

We are Saved in Community

I had great intentions of writing lots regarding the octave of Christian Unity, but a computer failure on Tuesday changed those plans. So it goes! Here are some posts I wrote last year.

Today I was musing over some memories I thought I'd like to share. Tonight's homily by Deacon Mike focused on how God's plan of salvation entails us being saved in community, not as solitary individuals. These memories have something to do with that.

The first is actually a dream I had many years ago that stayed with me for years as a sort of formative paradigm at the time I was coming into the Catholic Church. In this dream I was being asked by someone what I would like to eat. After a bit of thought, I requested a piece of pizza. "Really? Just a piece of pizza?" the voice inquired. Ok, I said, how about a whole pizza. A whole, large Domino's pizza, with lots of toppings. It was like the wildest possible thing I could imagine to satisfy me. Surely a whole pizza would leave me stuffed. The voice asked me "Does it have to be that?" No, I answered, somewhat puzzled. You did, after all, ask what I wanted... At this response, my grandfather entered the room carrying a very large container, something like a long feeding trough, full of beef stew. Suddenly I found myself at a long table set for many people, full of steaming homemade food.
Whether I realized it mid-dream or not, clearly the shift in my thinking was from self-satisfaction to being part of something wonderful and big that was meant for lots of people beyond myself. I once had a concept that salvation was about me squeaking out of this life, safe with Jesus. At best, other people were supposed to see me with Jesus and want to get their own pizza, too. I was being introduced to a whole new reality where salvation meant belonging to a people.

Which reminds me of another memory. Roughly one year after I became Catholic my friend Ann and I went to a Pentecostal camp meeting that we had frequented in the years before. I remember wanting to go just to verify whether or not I was missing anything. Would I feel I was suddenly coming in out of the cold? Like I was eating delectable food I'd longed for? I remember the registration area. The woman who helped me was impeccably dressed, extremely gracious, "God blessing" me and as smooth as silk. She was like the image of holiness, in the sense that I had come to know it in the pentecostal/holiness movement. She, and everyone else, had their parts down well. The conference was nice, but I felt rather disconnected from it.

On the way back home, Ann and I stopped off at a Catholic charismatic conference, as I wanted to make this process comparative. We came in at an odd time for only part of the weekend, so again I remember the registration process vividly. The woman helping us there was an older nun in full habit. She didn't really greet us, but was crabbing and complaining to the man with her that nothing was in the right place, and how was she supposed to do this job without the things she needed, how could she find keys for our rooms, etc. etc. Perhaps it sounds ironic, but my heart welled up warm with the thought "I'm home!" It was clear this nun was not exuding any plasticine sense of holiness. She was a grump, but she was showing her real self. Faking me out wasn't even occurring to her. Moreover, I knew I was a lot more like her than the other woman I'd encountered. This was my home; a place where I could be myself, warts and all. Ahhh....

When I first started attending Mass I was firmly in the plasticine camp. Outer religious looks were very important, and I honestly thought they meant something. Something good, that is -- like other than a mask to conceal all sorts of rot. I had a very hard time looking at regular ol' Catholics and realizing they apparently had absolutely no concern or desire for the plasticine holiness that had been my pursuit. Between hardships like being alone in Japan and the pain of infertility, over the course of years I slowly forgot about the value I had put on trying to have the right religious looks. Accepting people as they were no longer came painfully to me.

However, I realized about a year ago that I had held a residual fear about having become a Catholic. Issues of truth never gave me the slightest doubt or worry since my initial conversion. But I had held a residual worry that I would never witness bona fide holiness, real transformative love for Jesus, among rank and file Catholics. I could accept Sister Grump, but I longed to meet St. Bernard of Clairvaux. No, I longed to meet Christ. I knew that Christ was present in His Church and had been through the ages, as witnessed to by the fiery love of God expressed in people like St. Bernard. Subconsciously I had always sheltered myself among "certain groups," whether converts or charismatics or intellectuals or religious orders or movements, where I felt Jesus was more certainly found. But when I had initially encountered Christ in the Catholic Church it wasn't in the midst of any of these. It was in an everyday parish. Looking for him again there was something I'd taken only baby steps toward in the 15 years I'd been a Catholic.

And then, when I first was experiencing the shock of joining my parish choir, what struck me was that this was the verification that the full deal promise of Catholicism was actually true: Jesus was really present among regular folk who had absolutely no interest in "appearing holy" in the way I'd once learned to. Certain of our good choir folk don't always have the most pious mouths. There's no faking anyone out evident at all even though we are all so different. And yet (I keep trying to stop myself from thinking that this is a contrast instead of a direct corollary) grace flows through these good folk. This grace has blessed my life tremendously, and indeed has worked healing in me.

I am so, so grateful for my family in the Church. That includes Sister Grump and yes, even the plasticine brethren. We are not perfect, let's face it (even when we think we are). But we are loved (even when we think we are not). If we are faithful to His love, we will love each other in return. Just the way we are.

You Are Witnesses of These Things: Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Once again it is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.




Here's an appropriate prayer for the beginning of this week. (lyrics)

Of Needing and Being Needed

Last night I sang with the "City Choir" for our diocesan Mass to celebrate the Year of the Priest. "City Choir" is the default name of my parish choir plus a few other people who turn out to sing for these special diocesan events. For this liturgy we were joined by several Franciscan University students, as it was held at the University's fieldhouse; the only place big enough to fit everyone for an event of this size.

It was a very rich experience. In particular, I'm contemplating the experience of needing and being needed...

We sang quite a bit of course, but one of the two pieces we sang as a choir (there's a better adjective for that, but what?) was Palestrina's Sicut Cervus, which I've mentioned on this blog several times over the last few months. This is by far the most difficult piece we've attempted, and it has been the focus of our efforts for some time. Almost as soon as choir ended for the summer I found a CD with the Sicut on it that I have endlessly renewed from the library since then. (I love libraries!) It would not be an exaggeration to say I've listened to this piece over a thousand times since then. Some days, I would simply plug this song into my CD player, hit repeat, and listen to it waft through the house all day long. (In an effort to bolster my sense of personal normality I must state that I am not the only choir member to have done this!) As a result I've developed a pretty good sense of the timing of the piece and where each voice comes in, etc.

It didn't soak in just how my minor obsession with this piece affected my fellow altos until last night. When we practiced in the past, people would say to me "Ok, Marie, just sing in my ear; I need to hear you" and the like, but I really didn't know how to take this. When we practiced just before the Mass, I realized that people were making serious comments to each other -- women with far more experience and stronger voices than myself -- about how they needed to see my mouth or hear me. I realized that listening to a polyphonic piece a thousand times leaves a mark. Also, when we began to practice, the tenors were ten feet away from the altos, and the whole thing completely fell apart. We absolutely needed to be next to each other as we were used to in order to get it right.

When we sang the piece the altos did in fact split into two camps towards the end, and I knew it. I didn't think to turn my body to try to signal in those behind me that we'd gotten off (now I realize it -- that would have been a good idea!). But fortunately it was a short time and there was a section at the ending where I heard the basses cue the altos and I cut in with it and we ended correctly. So, it was all fine.

I guess usually when I hear someone talking about needing someone, I think the person is speaking out of some weird sense of self-deprecation or something else embarrassing from which is it better to avert one's gaze. In this choral context I really understood that an admission of need is not an admission of weakness or abnormality, but it is an expression of a desire to be one's best. It is really a strong form of self-love in the best sense of the word. This is just yet another example of how participating in a choir is such a humanizing experience for me.

The shoe was on the other foot when we sang a communion hymn in parts that I don't ever recall even looking at in the past. I would have floundered a good long time had not the same women behind me come in strong with the alto line. I was able to hear it, and follow. The closing hymn was to a tune for which I have known the alto part from the womb (it feels like), so with no music for it, I belted it out. And I heard the same voices behind me doing the same. It was so much fun -- like finding someone from your hometown in a crowd.

I'm contemplating this and other moments of the evening that brought me this same message, this same window into my humanity and that of others. God blesses me so and I do not wish to drop a crumb of what He gives me (even though I know I've already dropped bushel baskets). I'm also heeding what I can only call the Lord's call to me this Advent: to come to Him in a more focused way. To soak in His Word, especially in its organic context of the liturgy. To listen not for echos, but for His original voice. To allow that voice to reach down into my soul, where only He can touch. To hear Him say again that He is with me, and so to experience Him.

Sanctuary

Today I was an assistant in my son's Catechesis of the Good Shepherd atrium. In the course of the opening time of singing, we happened to sing the song "Lord, prepare me to be a sanctuary/pure and holy/tried and true/with thanksgiving/I want to be a living/sanctuary for you." My friend Jeff, who was also assisting today, happened to ask the children what a sanctuary was. In less than a second, my brain checked out from this vocabulary review as the image and words sprang to my mind: sanctuary = holy place; ok... next? But there was my son with his hand up, and he responded "A sanctuary is a place where you go to be safe."

Screech.

It was one of those ripping the needle off the record album moments for me. Sanctuary. A place of safety. Hmmm. Holiness. Safety. Hmmm.

In the God-vocabulary recesses of my mind, the word holiness/sanctuary and the song itself (which I learned many years ago) conjured up images of being clean, scrubbed, no junk, "picture perfect," flawless, immaculate. These certainly are not evil associations, but I realized that these also suggest to me the idea of effort, striving, and -- especially -- great potential for loss. When my son mentioned this concept of sanctuary as a place of safety, entirely different images come to mind: love, comfort, peace, acceptance, freedom, relaxation, fullness, joy. These associations suggest to me that this is a gift, not something I have to struggle to maintain or earn. And there might even be a scrap or two of junk lying about.

Somehow the idea of safety brought my mind to my friend Joe. He has been, in ways simultaneously great and small, a catalyst in my life this year both just as himself and as our parish choir director. But there is an interesting twist for me with this concept of safety as I think about this friend. Now, I think of my husband as one who gives my life its solid foundation. He is a steady-Eddy, and the face of loyalty and security themselves. I am blessed to have a husband with whom I don't have any concerns of volatility or that leaves-you-guessing sort of sense. He is the face of Christ giving me certainty, constancy, hope. But when I think of Joe I think of a dynamic that is understandably very different. Actually, the image that came to mind right away was of the taxi ride to the top of the Mount of Transfiguration. If you have ever taken that trip, you cannot forget it. The roads are far too narrow for tour buses to climb, so they all park at the bottom of Mt. Tabor, and tiny little taxis pack in the pilgrims while grinning cabbies take hairpin turns at what seem like horrendous speeds, and deposit the pilgrims at the top of the mountain, where I'm sure many stumble out with racing hearts and prayers of thanks on their lips. They are safe. The drivers know it all along, but the passengers aren't always so sure. Joe is like this face of Christ, grinning at me reassuringly while I soar with exhilaration (but not without questioning whether I'm actually about to die).

Singing in and of itself is not really something that I feel takes a great deal of courage, but singing either with a choir or cantoring with an organ requires a certain kind of unity, a tiny kind of death to oneself. I have always been used to singing any which way I feel like in church; inventing harmonies, switching octaves, etc. But the kind of singing I do now calls for the sort of courage that is not about standing in front of others and being heard (yawn), but the courage to contribute what is mine in coordination with someone else, and not as a freestylist. Maybe you can grasp how this is requires an act of courage for me. The other people involved become important to me, and I to them. I, who have had such a habit of living in a solitary way, even among people. It just brings me a sense of wonder again and again. And I've found many implications for my broader life, well beyond music, but born within this meaning: politics, interior life, relationships. Singing doesn't generally make me question if I'm so close to the edge that I'm about to plummet to my death, but these other things sure do!

So, I look at Joe, and I see Christ telling me I am safe. I am in a sanctuary, a safe place. It is a gift to me, this love, comfort, peace, acceptance, freedom, relaxation, fullness, joy. It is given to me not as an end in itself, but so that I face the challenges of life with courage and thereby make it possible for others to find a sanctuary as well.

And I wonder... maybe this is what holiness is actually all about after all.

Contemplating the Straw in Bethlehem

Today at Mass I couldn't help but think of the straw in the cave where Jesus was born. Here is the immaculate Son of God, the One desired by all ages. There, animals. St. Joseph did his best, I am sure, to make sure the animal droppings were cleared out for Mary, but the scent of that stuff has a way of hanging on. The animals themselves have a certain scent, and it wasn't the scent of wood shavings from the carpenter's shop.

But as I contemplated that scene, two concepts welled up in me. First, Reality. The amazing Incarnation, the Son of God truly present in the world. Along with the smelly animals. Second, affection. When I truly behold what has happened, I do not, I cannot, think less of Jesus because of the animals, I have to think more of the smell because of Jesus. I know that I do not like the smell of cow dung. But it is here, with Christ, and so somehow, it also is taken up in my adoration of Him. That smell of cow dung might put me off from kneeling before Christ (what if I kneel in it?), but I have to go back to the heart of Reality. It is Christ.

I looked out over the congregation as I cantored today, and I remembered the times before I entered the Church when I cringed at the thought of being identified with those people, those Catholics. Today I looked with a sense of affection. I realize I still might be put off by the way Christ chooses to be present with us, but I am encouraged to see others kneeling in my straw and not worrying about getting their knees dirty. God grant me the courage to always do the same.

Anguish: Wilkerson, Giussani and the New Evangelization

This evening one of my Facebook friends posted this video (really it's an audio with subtitles) by David Wilkerson.


David Wilkerson used to be one of the preachers I followed, regularly reading his messages and newsletters. His book The Cross and the Switchblade was one that impacted me as a young charismatic, and I have respect for this man.

For the most part, I can echo just about everything he says in this message entitled A Call to Anguish, perhaps all but the last few sentences where he speaks of the need to build walls and hunker down inside. This isn't what Jesus' ministry was about. Yes, he did avoid people who were trying to kill him when it wasn't time, but we can have the assurance that this was about obedience to the Father rather than a fortress mentality. I'm not going to make too much of that, though, because it was almost an aside after the rest of his address.

I can hear in this, though, God's mercy to me in calling me to become a Catholic. While what Wilkerson says is, I believe, very true: life-giving ministry, life-giving ... life is given birth to through an anguish, a deep, burning desire that consumes us, literally purifying us as it consumes our dross. But Wilkerson's address is deeply intense with no real joy to be found in it. This was my experience as a Protestant charismatic. Ready to be spent for God, ready to "give it all," but without the joy of the Incarnation to really, deeply know Jesus right next to me, loving me in my humanity, in my life. I'm not saying this lack of knowledge is Wilkerson's problem, because if you read The Cross and the Switchblade, you can read of his experiences. But this was my problem. I believe that the charism expressed in Fr. Giussani, Communion and Liberation, gives me the balance. He expresses this deep passion, this deep desire, yes, a deep anguish and longing, and yet I can't help but think at the same time about the joy that characterized him as well. Perhaps we in CL could stand a bit more of the purifying anguish, rather than seeking after "the joy," or what we find pleasing. And I say that not so much as a judgment against anyone in CL I've actually met but more as a reflection based on what I've heard Fr. Carron try to emphasize to us in the Spiritual Exercises.

I hear in this message not only God's mercy to me, but I hear again a call that has been gently rapping on my heart for several weeks now: I hear a thirsting, desiring and longing among our separated brethren for the fullness of Christ's Church. We ALL need to share what God has done in our lives and the treasures He has given us, but we Catholics have an obligation, a serious obligation, to get proactive in our bearing witness to Christ's Church. We need to be aware, first, of the treasure we have been given. Then our love must compel us. I believe people are getting very ready to hear that God does indeed have more for them in mind than they know. We need to know how to explicitly call people to faith in Christ Whom we have met in His Church.