Annus Fidei - Year of Faith

First flowers of our Colorado mountain springtime.

I became Catholic during a really cool time in the Church. Pope Benedict XVI announced a Year of Faith, saying, "reflection on the faith will have to be intensified, so as to help all believers in Christ to acquire a more conscious and vigorous adherence to the Gospel" (see the apostolic letter for the quote). I always thought that was really beautiful, so I spent the year meditating on that theme and specifically praying to God for more faith.

Easter is coming again (ooh, feel the electricity!), and I have been Catholic for nearly one year. I'd like to comment on that, and respond to some typical questions I've been hearing lately.

Like this one. "So, do you still hold on to some of your Protestant upbringing? Like, you haven't bought into everything, have you?"

Or simply, "how do you like it?"

Or even, "how do you feel about getting married in a Catholic Church?"

I looked back on what I said before I was Catholic, and I think I need to make a declaration now.  I had doubts and disagreements with the Church, but they relaxed with the grace I experienced in the Sacraments. The Catholic understanding of the Sacraments as effective instruments of grace is real. I prayed about lots of issues (prayers to Saints, relationship with Mary, indulgences, the priesthood, the hierarchy, sexuality, apostolic succession, whatever is typical). It doesn't matter what, specifically, because I received the faith I asked for on every count. I am a believer. I love the Church. I am completely and totally committed to her. I made my choice willingly and I have no disagreements with her. I am Catholic on purpose.

I read the Catechism and I believe and support everything in it. Its explanation of Scripture, faith, and morals, are as rich as you can get. I read the Bible and it sounds Catholic (or sounds neutral sometimes).

My fiancé and I are going through lots of good Catholic marriage preparation and we are totally in concordance with the Church. We agree with the Church's understanding of marriage, and we are delighted and enthusiastic that we get to administer the Sacrament of Marriage to each other within a full Mass. Our excitement probably borders on annoying (sorry, people).

Mary. Is a great confirmation saint to me. I feel squeamish about a lot of folk practice of Marian devotion, as present in certain Latin American syncretism, for example. But, whatever. Official Church teaching about Mary is helpful, beautiful, and full of deep wisdom, even if it is intensely mysterious to me. My favorite devotional pictures and paintings feature Mary. I do occasionally pray to Mary.

"Do you still think you can pray right to God or do you think you have to go through a priest at confession and things like that?" Um, yes, and yes, and yes, of course. Do you know what I mean?

I used to wonder if I would regret this commitment. What angst! I didn't know the peace that was in store for me. Well, it's been a year, and I love what I've chosen better than ever and more all the time. 

To Sanctify the Morning

Morning is like resurrection.

I love to wake up and say, I am alive! The silliness makes me smile. It's really fun. If you haven't before, you should try it. 

Here's a recipe to make the morning sacred:

-Invitatory Psalm and Morning Prayer
-Yoga! The Sun Salutation is my favorite.
-Sunshine. Not required, but very nice. An open window is ideal.

So guess what I realized! DivineOffice.org actually has the Liturgy of the Hours in podcast form. This means you can just go to the website and click on Invitatory Pslam, then press Play. Then they sing it to you! This enables you to begin your yoga for some awesome meditation.

Then also listen to the Morning Prayer for the day and continue saluting the sun, or whatever you like. The Child's Pose is also a great prayer posture. Yoga lends itself quite beautifully to Christian Prayer.

I like this tip from DivineOffice.org: "Sacred Silence (indicated by a bell) – a moment to reflect and receive in our hearts the full resonance of the voice of the Holy Spirit and to unite our personal prayer more closely with the word of God and public voice of the Church." Ahh, yes. Let's. 

So there you go. This is what I've been practicing lately, and it's a wonderful way to start the day. It's a short liturgy, but it makes me feel like I have plenty of time to breathe, and ample space in life to live with joy. So yeah, enjoy!

Islesboro sunrise from my bedroom window. A holy event.

Corpus Christi

Last week was the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (aka Corpus Christi). Mass was even more awesome than usual.

It was a lovely, sunny Sunday, so my man and I rode our bikes to church. It's actually not hard to carry on a conversation one the bike path. On the way home, it went something like this:
"Did you know that lots of Baptist churches only have communion like once a month?"
"Woah. Crazy. But what if you miss it?" Matt wondered. I shrugged dramatically.
"I dunno. I guess it doesn't mean too much."
"Then why do they do it?" Matt asked.
"Psh, Jesus said to do it. He just didn't say how frequently."
"But don't they want to be like the early Church? They had communion every day. And what about that verse in Acts about how the Christians devoted themselves to the breaking of bread?"
"Wow, a Catholic is quoting the Bible at me!" Pardon my sassiness throughout this exchange! But it got me thinking...

The Real Presence! Why didn't I believe in it before? I suppose I didn't think about it much because I wasn't taught about it in church. Now it's such an essential concept to me I don't remember why I didn't believe in it, and I don't quite see why it's offensive or objectionable. Actually, I'm wondering where Zwingli and Karlstadt got the idea to argue against it, and why Luther couldn't persuade them to keep their faith. But even if they were voicing valid concerns,  it seems to me like this argument is about 500 years out-of-date. Anyhow, I think the Catholic understanding of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is definitely the most compatible with scripture. 

I now read the Bible and see it as a Catholic book. It's amazing how frequently I see Eucharistic themes nowadays (and not just in the Bible... now singing hymns about the blood of Jesus really blows my mind. I can't help but think of drinking the wine). But anyhow, some of the most interesting Old Testament precursors are Melchizedek offering bread and wine in Genesis 14, God providing supernatural bread in the form of Mannah, the priests offering the Bread of the Presence on the golden table in the temple (sounds so much like Mass!), and of course the Passover tradition, which I think is what most people associate with communion. I've never realized the depth of the Old Testament precursors of the Eucharist, but they're surprisingly plentiful. A knowledgeable friend lent me a book called Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist by Brant Pitre. It's just fascinating, and I highly recommend it. One of the most exciting things is learning how closely the Mass follows the Jewish traditions surrounding the Bread of the Presence in the temple.

As for the New Testament... I love the Bread of Life sermon in John 6. I'm realizing that even Jesus feeding the five thousand in Luke 9 has deep Eucharistic themes (interestingly, this was the gospel reading in church for Corpus Christi. I learned a lot about the reason why from Father Peter's podcast). And of course, 1 Corinthians 11:24-ish is the most obvious statement of our beliefs. My point is that I think the New Testament passages make most sense taken at their word, so to speak.

But the most powerful influence on my thinking has simply been experiencing the Mass as a Catholic. I mean the sheer joy of it. Now that I get to participate in full communion, I completely understand why we call it Eucharist, or thanksgiving. Gone are the days of my trepidation, when I stared transfixed, overwhelmed with solemnity at "Behold, the Lamb of God." And I'm not intimidated any more by the immense gravity of walking forward towards the host. It does feel strange that I don't have a routine yet (I mess up! I forget what to do!), but the experience is mainly joyful. It fills my life with grace and I'm overwhelmed with gratitude to God.

It's an awesome thing. I actually mean that. I'm not using hyperbole. AWESOME.

Mary

Annunciation, Fra Angelico. Museo Diocesano, Cortona

I've never used a rosary. In my current passion for all things traditional, Catholic, methodical, affirming of our senses in worship, and foreign to Protestant-world, this seems like an anomaly to me. I actually refused to learn how to use the rosary in RCIA even though I love the prayer bead idea and I think rote prayers are supremely useful. It's just that I don't want to pray the Hail Mary.

Now don't get me wrong, here. Mary is the saint I admire most. Mary is my confirmation name. I take the Annunciation and Magnificat very personally, rather like life-callings.  In my room I have images of the Coronation of the Virgin, two cool rosaries, a hispanical Virgen de Guadalupe candle, and books of images of the Annunciation, with lots of my own doodles of them, too. A section of my thesis covered Spanish renditions of the Immaculate Conception, because I appreciate how awesome the paintings are.

The Coronation of the Virgin, Ambrogio Bergognone

Mary's the best, really. Who knows, maybe she never sinned. I don't really have a strongly entrenched opinion on that, or on any of the weird (i.e different from Protestant) Marian dogmas of the Church. I've abandoned the hostile skepticism of my younger days because I find it too acidic and ungodly.


Yet I don't pray to Mary. This is because I am having difficulty with the concept of the intercession of the saints.  The dead ones, I mean. I would totally ask Mary to pray for me if she were still alive and having a conversation with me. That's what praying to the saints means, by the way, for my non-Catholic friends. And I do rely on the intercession of my fellow Christians! The ones who haven't yet "fallen asleep," to use Jesus' phrase.

The Confiteor prayer contains the only place in the Mass where I don't participate. Can you guess where?

I confess to almighty God

and to you, my brothers and sisters,

that I have greatly sinned,

in my thoughts and in my words,

in what I have done and in what I have failed to do,

through my fault, through my fault,

through my most grievous fault;

therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin,

all the Angels and Saints,

and you, my brothers and sisters,

to pray for me to the Lord our God.

I say all the words in the prayer along with everyone else except for four words, "blessed Mary ever-Virgin." I do ask all the Angels and Saints to pray for me, because I think Angels hear our words, I know the Christians around me do, and I want all the prayer support I can get.

So, in summary... Mary is worthy of veneration and reverence, respect, meditation, and lots of awesome devotional art. I love that the best example in the Bible of godliness, belief, and purity is feminine. I love how her prominence in Christianity affirms the goodness and dignity of womanhood and motherhood. The Magnificat is glorious and we should all memorize it and use it in daily prayer. I love to hear my loved ones call me Mary, because I want to be like her. But I still can't pray to Mary because I don't think the deceased are conscious of our petitions or thoughts. This is a work in progress.

Love,
Mary

Easter Monday

"I regard it as absurd and unjustifiable that we should spend forty days keeping Lent, pondering what it means, preaching about self-denial... bringing it all to a peak with Holy Week, which in turn climaxes in Maundy Thursday and Good Friday . . . and then, after a rather odd Holy Saturday, we have a single day of celebration...

"Easter week itself ought to be an eight-day festival, with champagne served after morning prayer or even before, with lots of alleluias and extra hymns and spectacular anthems. Is it any wonder people find it hard to believe in the resurrection of Jesus if we don't throw our hats in the air?... It's long overdue that we took a hard look at how we keep Easter in church, at home, in our personal lives, right through the system. And if it means rethinking some cherished habits, well, maybe it's time to wake up...

"And while we're about it, we might write some more good Easter hymns and take care to choose the many good ones already written that celebrate what Easter really is rather than treating it as simply our ticket to a blissful life hereafter... We should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children's games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts, anything that comes to mind. This is our greatest festival.

"Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don't have a New Testament; you don't have a Christianity; as Paul says, you are still in your sins. We shouldn't allow the secular world, with its parareligious events and its cute Easter bunnies to blow us off course. This is our greatest day. We should put the flags out.

"If Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought to be a time to take things up. Champagne for breakfast again- well, of course. Christian holiness was never meant to be merely negative. Of course you have to weed the garden from time to time; sometimes the ground ivy may need serious digging before you can get it out. That's Lent for you. But you don't want simply to turn the garden back into a neat bed of blank earth. Easter is the time to sow new seeds and to plant out a few cuttings... Easter should mean planting, watering, and training up things in your life (personal and corporate) that ought to be blossoming, filling the garden with color and perfume, and in due course bearing fruit."

N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope. Chapter 15 Introduction: Celebrating Easter.



Some food for thought. Holy Week and the Triduum were really intense and serious for me. So I am delighted to say that my friends and I actually did spend Easter gardening in the warm sunshine, sipping wine, cooking lamb, singing songs, and going to big feasts. Friends and family, you are lovely.
I'm also delighted to say that my Confirmation and First Communion are on Easter Friday. I've been waiting a long time!

Spring is exciting. Easter is exciting. Life is exciting.

Thoughts on First Confession

Today I received the Sacrament of Reconciliation for the first time. I have to testify that it's a lovely experience.

First, I follow the Catechism's recommendation for a good examination of conscience. I love the emphasis on praying through certain passages of scripture to reflect on what you need to confess:

CCC 1454 "...prepared for by an examination of conscience made in the light of the Word of God. The passages best suited to this can be found in the Ten Commandments, the moral catechesis of the Gospels and the apostolic Letters, such as the Sermon on the Mount and the apostolic teachings.^{53"
53 Cf. Mt 5-7; Rom 12-15; 1 Cor 12-13; Gal 5; Eph 4-6; etc.}
 
The actual confession seems hard, but the priest is compassionate and quiet. He looks like Jesus, actually. He is not in a hurry (normally priests are so busy!). He knows me, my name and my long journey here. He listens, mostly, and then answers with wise words. He prays silently before he says a penance (mine involves meditation on some particular parts of Scripture). He says absolution, prays for me, and makes the sign of the cross with me. We smile: he with kindness and I with gratitude. I walk away light with joy.

You know, it always seemed suspicious to me to think that the Sacraments are so effective at dispensing grace. We can't put the Holy Spirit in a box, right? It's supposed to be spontaneous and experiential, right? We sense great movements of God with our emotions, right?
Yes, certainly. But I am learning that, somehow, the Sacraments really do have the effect of pouring out grace on us and renewing us in the Holy Spirit. Every time. Even if the people involved (congregation and priests) are distracted or in a bad mood or not pure in their intentions. It's amazing.

Just a musing. Confirmation is a beautiful process. I submit that it may be the most profound way to participate in the season of Lent. As a Candidate (an already-Baptized Christian), I will receive the other Sacraments of Initiation a few days after Easter (Confirmation! Eucharist!). So I don't get to participate at Easter, but I will just get to appreciate the Vigil from the audience. But I'm looking forward to the Triduum. I can hardly wait!

The Return of the Prodigal Son

Baptize the Babies!

This is the story of how I changed my ideas about Baptism, and it will probably be most interesting to Baptist readers. Sorry in advance to my parents for the contrary things I'm about to write. This issue really alarmed me when I first changed my mind, but in recent conversations with friends I've realized that the Catholic value of Baptism doesn't seem nearly so radical to a lot of Christians as it did to me. You see, I started reading the Catechism as a fresh graduate of a Southern Baptist university, having attended Southern Baptist churches for seven years.

So, I was baptized twice. So were all my siblings, though none of us as infants (sorry, Christina, you two weren't either, otherwise I suppose you could each count three baptisms). We each had a baby dedication, too. Now really, this doesn't make much sense. I don't regret this, but I think it actually belittles the meaning and the effect of the Sacrament of Baptism.

I've always heard that baptism doesn't actually "save" you (I recall my family leaving the church of my childhood and citing an "incorrect" teaching on this as one of the reasons) and that it's essential for a person to experience it when they're old enough to understand what's going on. And when we moved to the South, I often heard preached that it actually has to be baptism by immersion in a pool of water for it to count. So, none of that sprinkling crap. I obviously needed to be baptized again, this time the right way. So my brother and I got baptized together by immersion in Tennessee in 2007, and it was really cool and I liked it.

So it kinda blew my mind to realize that "real Christians" who were sincere about their faith (i.e. my new friends) could be content with baby baptism. My good man was very patient with my outbursts of skepticism and incredulity while I processed this. How could they treat their children's salvation so thoughtlessly? I wondered. The problems of nominalism arise when people claim to be Catholic because they were baptized as infants but they really aren't believers and aren't living holy lives at all. That's a valid concern.

However. I did change my mind on this, for several good reasons.
Firstly, the types of good Christian parents I know always agree that it's important to have some sort of rite of dedication of a new child to God. I think this is so important that I'd like it to be an official Sacrament. Regarding salvation... God saves people by grace. A Sacrament is an outward sign of an inward reality. Sacraments actually have an effect, and they're an important way that God gives grace to us. That's why 1 Peter 3:21 is true: "Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ" (ESV).

One nice thing is that the Catholic Church acknowledges the reality of my baptism (one or the other, I suppose). Which is interesting, since the Southern Baptist church that baptized me thought that it was "just a symbol" and wasn't doing a bit of good to "save" me.
Another thing that changed my mind is simply an analogy. Before Jesus established the New Covenant, God's people showed that they belonged to him by circumcising themselves and their children. Their babies. At eight days old, actually, so it sounds like most people didn't have much choice in the matter.  Then baptism replaced the circumcision of the Old Covenant. 1 Colossians 2:11-12 says, "In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead." 

Infant baptism makes a lot more sense to me in this light. If it was right and good for the Israelites to circumcise their infants, I can see how it would be right and good to baptize them now, even if they don't understand what's going on.

Actually, about that... I'd just like to say that I still don't understand the full significance of my baptism. I learn more about it all the time as the Holy Spirit awakens me to new meanings of it. So, I understand it a lot more now than I did when I was immersed at age eighteen, and exponentially more than when I got sprinkled at age nine. So, should I get baptized again because it is more meaningful now? Definitely not. Because baptism actually does something. It matters.

As a side note, I do think it's lovely to have a Sacrament that the Christian chooses only after the appropriate "age of reason," and Confirmation seems like an excellent venue for that all-important "public profession" that the Baptists celebrate with their immersions. It's important to acknowledge some sort of initiation to Christianity when people begin to understand their religion and take it to heart. And yes, believer's baptism is important and worthy of celebration.

Anyhow, the Church claims that infant baptism was the norm from the Acts of the Apostles up until the Reformation. There's good reason to believe that when "entire households" were baptized, that included children and infants (e.g. Acts 16:15, 1 Corinthians 1:16). Though I think historical evidence of this custom surfaces in the second century at the earliest. Still, that's pretty early, y'all. 
 The Catholic Rite of Baptism is very beautiful and full of scriptural analogies. It's even better than the best baby dedication. If you're curious, you can read it here.




I'll conclude with this neat image of Mary and Joseph presenting baby Jesus at the Temple (Luke 2:21)

Presentation of Christ at the Temple, Giotto di Bondone