Do I have to go to Church? Nope. And yep.

Today I was working on a project while listening to Catholic Answers Live on their podcast.  They were asked if it was true that if a Catholic skipped Sunday Mass, would they go to Hell?  And Tim Staples the host, dutifully answered "yes,"  with a lenghty explanation.  

The trouble was, I think that explanation would be mostly OK if you were a Catholic already, but the broadcast was overheard by a good friend(and non-Catholic) who commented out loud, "... and THAT is why I will never be a Catholic."

Seems pretty unreasonable, to condemn someone to hell just for sleeping in on a cold Sunday morning, doesn't it?  Especially if you are a 'model Catholic' in every other way in living out the gospel.  One misdeed cancels everything out?  How capricious of God is that?  

The problem with asking the question 'Why' is that the answer is usually much much longer than anyone has patience for.  Especially for something that seems pretty unreasonable right from the get-go.  While I could probably drone on for a very long time about this topic, I thought that an analogy might work better.

Imagine that today is your Wedding Anniversary, and you have made plans to go out to dinner with your wife.  But instead of celebrating your anniversary, you choose to hang out with your friends.  So on the day of the celebration of the most important event in your life together, you choose to ignore your most important relationship and do something else.  You are probably pretty darn cognizant you will be sleeping on the couch that night.  Or with the fishes if there is any justice in the world. 

Now if you are sick, or your job forces you to be out of town -- you likely get a pass on that Anniversary dinner until another time -- just like with Mass.

That is sort-of what happens if you deliberately choose not to go to church.  Just like it doesn't much matter if you won't be in the right frame of mind at that anniversary dinner -- the choice of NOT going to Mass says to God -- "you aren't that important to me."  But it isn't God that condemns us to Hell.  It is our free choice.  When we do things like this we freely decide something is better than God.  If you died just then, God would respect your choice to have something other than Him.  Which begs the question, what is Hell?  I'll save that for another day.

But, as with your marriage, you do have a chance to fix this screw up.  If you are genuinely repentant, and try to not repeat such an act of selfishness again, you can make up with God through the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Personally, I do not want a faith that only affirms me when I'm right.  I want a faith that tells me when I'm in the wrong too.

Tempus Fugit

As the title implies,  Time is a-waisting.  I made a New Year's resolution to post more often, and yet here we are, February 15th and no new posts yet this year.  I'm going to try and keep this more active by focusing on the areas where I see God at work in my life or in the lives of those around me as I continue to discern a vocation to the Permanent Diaconate.  

Incidentally, I found out that the new class will not start until as early as Spring of 2016.  This in particular I found a little hard to take, as I had my hopes built up that I might be able to apply this winter.  As in now.  Sigh.  God's time is not my time.

Around the parish, I am still in my role of Pastoral Council President, and I had been looking forward to rolling back my involvement in the Parish as the potential of involvement in the Diaconate proceeds.  I have recently concluded an introduction to the Neocatechumenal Way,  become involved in Deliverance Ministry, as well as helping out our First Annual Diocesan Men's Conference in a very limited way.  And since the Diaconate progaram has been pushed off for another year, a good friend invited me to a Weekend silent Retreat at the Opus Dei headquarters in New York.  I'm particularly looking forward to that.

I'll have updates on all this and more in the upcoming posts.  I want to try and keep it light so I stay motivated to carve out some of my very busy time to blog about my progress down this very bumpy road.

Whassup?

Well, I have been on a long blogging hiatus.  Partly was because I was having a really difficult time discerning the diaconate and then likewise thinking that I should perhaps blog under a different banner.  I never could figure out what that alternative banner was to be named though.  While I dallied, life continued and I neither journaled nor blogged my 'progress'.

So rather than go into a summary of the intervening few years,  I think I'll just pick up where we are at.  By way of summary,  I had some rather technical issues regarding my first application to the diaconate a couple years ago, and they couldn't be resolved in time to join an aspirant class.  By complete surprise I learned in March of this year that a new class was forming, but I only had a few days to get in the application, and through frustration I hadn't resolved this issue from a few years ago.  So, here I sit, perhaps to follow through with this program again in two years.  In the meantime it has been recommended that I get a Spiritual Advisor, and I intend to make a few phone calls about that after Pentecost when Confirmations are over and prospective priests will have a moment to catch a breath.

On Church-Shopping

In his rule, St. Benedict describes one of the decrees of monastic life. The monk "is to promise, before God and his saints to be stable" -- that is, to settle in a place, one place, for life. It is not an assumption we share. The notion of a grown man still living in the house where he was born conjures images of instability, mental and emotional. We imagine Boo Radley, afraid of the world beyond his porch.

Our culture is formed and defined, not by stability of place, but by mobility and choice.  The modern American family is often spread over the country.  My own relatives live in PA, VA, IL, IN, IO.

Although more powerful in protestant churches, I think the phenomenon of church shopping is a growing experience locally in the Catholic Church.  There is a tremendous sense of place and rooted identity in most of our parishes, as well as the idea that 'Priests come, priests go, the community stays put.  But I think that younger churchgoers no longer prize stability of place in worship any more than we prize stability of place in the rest of our lives.  There is a lot written about leaving one church and finding another, but comparatively little on choosing to stay put, as sticking with an uncomfortable fit is never valued in a consumer culture.

When some parishioners get upset with a certain turn of events in their parish there is a sense of taking our business elsewhere in voting with their feet and checkbooks.  But what if, there is no 'perfect fit' in finding a parish?

We learn in our marriages that neither spouse is perfect, and so perfection ceases to be a factor.  We set about building households in which people can grow and learn and forgive and be forgiven -- a place where we are known to one another.  The only way we can do that in our families is to stay together through the tough times - in one place, in and out of season, weathering the flowering and falling and flowering again of affection.  Stability makes community possible.

Likewise, our parishes are communities made of the ecclesiae - the little churches - that are our homes.  Stability in the parish is as necessary as stability in the home.  Like the home, the parish needs to be a place where brothers and sisters can be formed together, under one roof, sitting at one table, hearing family stories told again and again.  But like in the married life, stability in the parish means giving up the hope of perfection. 

We all have some grim tales to tell about our parish experiences.  Some of them involve over or under or self involved clergy.    Some are stories of parishioners who have transformed the act of leaving in a snit into an art form.  But there are lot happier tales to tell too.  Pastors come and go, the parishioners remain.  Sunday after Sunday, when it is only the visible sign of others; faithfulness keeping me holding fast.

Stability allows parish memory.  And that is antidote to nostalgia.  There was never a golden age when we prayed without ceasing, cared for the poor without complaining and shunned gossip.  There was never a time when our priests were all attentive and wise in the confessional, eloquent yet brief at the ambo and saints on the streets.  Lay and clergy, they were like us, humans who try -- and fail -- to love God and their neighbors.  Parish memory is the antidote to the 'mall syndrome'.  The idea that just around the food court and past J.C. Penney's lays the secret of our happiness.  Parishioners who leave one failing church to join a parish that appears to be ascending will discover the lead beneath the gold soon enough.

Though I'm sure they're out there, I've never met a long married couple who wished they had divorced.  Maybe when John lost his job they say, or during the years when Mary was drinking, because those were bad days.  But they knew on some level perhaps too deep for words, that neither they nor their marriage were consumer items to be returned for imperfections.  Having come through the fire together -- in part because they came through the fire and the did it together -- they found it wasn't they who made the marriage; it was faithfulness to the marriage that made them; a couple, a household, a family.  And in the hard work of fidelity, they too have found something better than customer satisfaction.  They have found joy.

The Feast of Stephen

Yesterday Dec 26th my little group of friends was scheduled to bring the Eucharist to those Catholics with the misfortune of being in the hospital on Christmas.  As we rode the elevators, I thought about some comments of a few mentors who introduced me to this ministry.  While much focus was given to bringing the physical presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, my Deacon and Priest friend also focused on the importance of bringing Jesus in companionship and brotherly love. In other words we are all called to be His hands and His feet.  The deacon said that often times, no one comes to visit these people and they are starved for some simple conversation and attention.   As I rode the elevator up I wondered where it was that he got the impression that so many were looking for that.  It was a rare experience for me.  I kid you not, the following then happened...

For it being the day after Christmas, a surprising number of people did not want to receive, but this was tempered by the genuine enthusiasm and gratitude of those who did receive.  At my very last stop though, I experienced something new.  I had one last woman to visit in room 448.  It was a two bed room, but there was no one in the first bed.  The lights were off, though there was that grey illumination that comes from the overcast sky.  Behind the divider curtain slouched an elderly woman who watched me approach.  I asked her name, and it turned out that she was not the person I was looking for.  On a whim, I asked if she was Catholic and explained why I was there.  She was not Catholic.  She then engaged me in a conversation that  was filled with the fear of a person confused as to where they were and what was happening.  In the beginning, I was seeking a break in the conversation, or an opportunity to extricate myself (I had to serve at Mass within the hour).  But  when she denied me every opportunity I thought "so what if I am late, they'll get along fine without me."  And so I started to speak with her and tell her a few stories about my Christmas, and the cruise I just returned from.  She lit right up, had long moments of lucidity and laughed at my stories.  She complained of being hungry but couldn't sit up to eat or peel the banana that was on her breakfast tray.  So, I helped her rearrange her pillows and sit up, peeled her bananas and told her another story while I helped her to eat.  In the end as I left she thanked me for 'being the only Human contact' she has had.

On the elevator down I realized that today was the feast of St. Stephen -- the first Deacon and martyr in the Church.  The Diaconate was created to serve because of inequities and human failings  in the early church; 'the Hellenists murmured against the Hebrews because their widows were neglected in the daily distribution'.  And now, on the cusp of my 40th birthday I ask for clarification on this aspect of the diaconate, and the Holy Spirit provides.  How remarkably easy it would have been for me to turn around and leave this woman the second I learned she wasn't who I was looking for.  And yet... she was who I was looking for after all.

Ephesians 5 set to music -- Sanctus Real, 'Lead Me'

Food. Incorporated

I think every adult should watch this movie.



"A Culture that views this pig as a pile of protoplasmic inanimate structure to be manipulated by whatever creative design the human mind can foist on that critter will probably view individuals within its community and other cultures in the community of nations with the same type of disdain and disrespect and controlling type mentality."  -- An organic farmer interviewed in the movie.

Amen brother. Aldous Huxley, how prescient you were.