Catholic Carnival #125: Prayers, Priests, and Politics

Daughter of the King is hosting this weeks Carnival titled Prayers, Priests, and Politics… What a mix, eh? Get a cuppa something good and dive in!

Lembas… Food for the Journey

Reading The Lord of the Rings series as a Catholic is a totally different ballgame than when I was a Protestant.  While Tolkien didn’t care for allegory, his faith is readily apparent in the books.  Lembas, for example, as waybread… food for the journey….and its ‘relationship’ to the Eucharist, which is food for our journey as well. 

On this trip, it was my intent to visit the parish in each town to get a feel for the faith community we would be participating in should we accept a job in that area.   Each Mass was precious time of Worship and gave me an important feel for the community… and yet, that was not the most important thing I walked away from it with.  Truly, the concept of the Eucharist as food for the journey became incredibly real to me in a sort of ‘mini journey crash course’.  As our stress over the interview process grew in direct proportion to our exhaustion, I found the Eucharist providing rest and peace, a quiet center in the storm, and strength to face what lay ahead.  Mass became so much more than ‘what would our parish here be like’ (not that it was ever ‘just’ that), it became a necessary port in the storm.

 Regardless of where we go, I know where my Church will be… it wasn’t anything like ‘Church shopping’… rather it seemed foolish to check out homeschool groups, swim teams, etc et al and not check out the parish when our faith is so much more central to our lives than any of the normal things one checks out.  Yet in the process, I learned so much more… or perhaps learned a simple lesson I knew so well, even better yet.  Once again, that assurance, the blessed assurance, that regardless of where He may call us, I do not journey alone… and even when we arrive and all around me is unknown, He will be waiting there…

Blessed be God, Forever.

The Dinner Table…

We ended our interview odyssey at my husband’s parents for a few days visit.  It’d been a long time, over a year and a half since we’d seen them last during which the girls and I had reconciled to the Catholic Church.  Our visit coincided with Father’s Day and my father-in-law’s birthday always falls close to that, so we had a bit of  party Saturday evening. 

After the barbeque was eaten and all but my fil and I were in the kitchen cleaning up, my father-in-law turned to me and asked how long my husband and I had been married now.  I told him it would be 16 years this december.  I had no idea where he was going with this and then he said ‘and you were a die hard Baptist too’.  He went on to say how he never thought I would convert, he knew what I was like before, and it just wasn’t going to happen… that I was the last person he’d have ever expected to become Catholic.  He said, “It’s a miracle, that’s what it is… A miracle.”  As we got up to leave the table and rejoin the others, he said he owed me an apology, that he’d been pretty hard on me over the years.

It might seem a simple thing… and yet, aren’t simple things sometimes the most profound? I don’t mean the apology, the Lord knows I owed him one as well. Rather, his understanding of where I was and just how awesome was the work of God in my life these past 3(ish) years.  On the homeschool forums it is often insinuated, if not said outright, that I wasn’t REALLY a Baptist (and any number of other things) or I wouldn’t have converted…if I had REALLY been strong in my faith… that I didn’t REALLY believe such and such because a REAL Baptist/whatever would NEVER convert to Catholicism, despite having told them I was JUST LIKE THEM. I have been accused of dishonesty at best, idiocy and idolatry of demons at worst.  Yet despite the testimony of friends who knew me before, such accusers will not believe… and in a way I don’t blame them… after all, to believe that I was what I say I was would shake their foundations… their security.  If I was REALLY like them, then what happened to me could happen to them too… and that is unthinkable.

So for my father-in-law to say what he did touched me deeply.  To have someone (friends who walked my reconciliation with me excluded) who knew me before, knew me well, share that they remembered what I was, knew how solid I was in my faith then, and have them recognize and admit just how far God has moved me when so many have denied it meant more than I can say.  For it to be my father-in-law, who rarely speaks of such things and certainly not in such a personal way meant even more.

Rosary: Mysteries, Meditations, and the Telling of the Beads (Part 1)

This book by Kevin Orlin Johnson, Ph.D. was recommended to me by a friend who said “This is a MUST buy! RUN, don’t walk, RUN to Amazon…” and so I did. She is rarely wrong about such things.  I began it shortly before leaving on the two week interview odyssey with my family (husband is changing jobs) and continued to read it between my spousal obligations at each interview location. While far from finished, I must admit to being grateful the highlighter I’m using is a fresh one… certainly it is getting a LOT of use.

The book is divided into ‘chapters’ but they are not numbered, being differentiated instead by their title.   I begin here with the ‘chapter’ titled The Fertile Ground.  While it is all excellent, I’m just sharing some bits that really jumped out at me for one reason or another and read as a whole it flows much better than hacked into such ‘bits’.

The Fertile Ground

Conversion* is a turning of the heart toward God, which means that the heart has to turn away from the quick and the transient satisfactions of this world in favor of its birthright, which is everlasting reunion with God (Gn 25:29-34).

So from earliest times monks and nuns often sang psalms.  Sometimes they sang all hundred and fifty psalms, and sometimes they chose certain ones appropriate to the intentions of their prayers; but either way they all used psalms as a basis for meditative prayer – “I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the understanding also; I will sing with the spirit, but I will sing with the understanding also”, as St. Paul advised (1 Cr 14:15-16). And they added standard prayers like the Kyrie after each, no matter what arrangement of psalms they sang. Historians like Eusebius, John Cassian, and, long before them, St. Paul himself (Eph 5:19; Cl 3:16) testify that the laity, too, established the Psalter as the basis of their private devotions very early in the Church’s history.  Day and night, the people flocked to the oratories of the monasteries and convents to participate in those devotions, and they were certainly welcome; the communal prayers of monastic communities are above all the prayers of the whole Church for the whole Church, and for the salvation of the whole world. In fact, the monks didn’t just admit people who happened by; they invited the laity to join in.  By the turn of the fifth century St. Porphyrius of Gasa had already added an invitatorium to the psalmodic prayers of the monks in his diocese; he put Psalm 94 – Come, let us sing joyfully to the Lord – at the beginning of the devotions, and there it has stayed ever since across Christendom.  The Mozarabic Rite still calls this sonus, because it’s sung while the bells are being rung to summon people to prayer, and since at least the time of Charlemagne the rubrics in Europe have specified that it should be sung slowly, to give people enough time to get there.

Still, plenty of people could read, in the Middle Ages. In fact, the Book of Psalms was the basic textbook that the Church used to teach people to read.  And the practice is as old as Scripture itself – it’s why Psalms 110, 111, and 118 are arranged as little alphabet-books for Hebrew children.  The real problem was that before the invention of printing nobody could figure out how to make enough copies of the liturgical books so that everybody who could read could use one.  We sometimes forget that mediaeval Europe didn’t even have paper; a single sheet of parchment or vellum costs the life of a farm animal, not to mention weeks of preparation.  Even today good ink is costly, brewed by hand.  Manuscripts took years to copy, and they were unbelievably expensive.  A Psalter was worth a farm and a Bible a whole village.

To understand Mt 6:7 clearly, you have to go back to the Church’s Bible, which was the only Bible in existance when the King James commission started working on their own version.  The original Greek… In it’s classical sense… means “to stammer”, and it’s also used to mean to chatter any empty, meaningless sound.  Eustathius, the twelfth-century bishop of Thessalonika – who certainly knew his Gospel – used it in his commentary on Homer to refer to the twittering of birds.  Either way, the word doesn’t mean saying the same thing over and over; it means hemming and hawing, babbling meaninglessly instead of saying what you want to say, or just not getting to the point…. In the Latin Bible… nolite multum loqui just means “don’t talk a lot; don’t run off at the mouth; don’t rattle on like the pagans do: get to the point” – exactly what the Greek means…. So Mt 6:7 is a warning against confusing quantity witih quality; “first of all,” St. Augustine said, “Our Lord excluded loquaciousness” (Sermon 56:4).  Christ advised against twittering and talking too elaborately, which is a different thing entirely from repeating the same prayers over and over.  In fact – like pious people in the Old Testament (1 Kn 12) – he himself spent whole nights in prayer; he himself repeated what he said time and again (Mt 26:44), and he himself said that repeated prayers work even beyond the claims of justice (Lk 11:5-8, 18:1-8; cf. Jm 5:16-17; 3 Kn 17-18).

The simple answer to the objection, then, is that proper repetitions of vocal prayers aren’t vain, in either sense of the word. The words of vocal prayer are not meaningless – it’s a fault to babble them out without paying any attention to them (Mr 7:6), but words have meaning and, because the human mind operates in terms of language, words have power, the power to change the way you think.  If you repeat the words automatically, you’ve wasted this power, and you’e missed the point of vocal prayer, which is after all communication that asks for an answer.

If you’re saying it right, you can’t say it often enough; and if you’re saying it wrong, it doesn’t matter how often you say it.

But beyond that an objection to the repetition of vocal prayer in devotions like the Rosary misses the point, precisely because these vocal prayers are repeated as a way to achieve a state of clear meditation, a lively regard of God or of some aspect of God: he who only follows words has nothing, but he who possesses his own mind cares for his soul (Pr 19:7-8). Repetitions aimed at that goal can appear vain only to those who have not been taught the skill of meditative prayer.

If we’re working with our hands on earthly things, Richard Rolle asked in the fourteenth century, “what is to keep us from working with our hearts on heavenly things?”

… the laity across Europe had the habit of praying as they worked, too…. They counted their prayers by means of little stones, or they knitted those prayers together with a length of string, a circlet of cord knotted or strung with beads.

In fact, our English word “bead” really means “prayer”.

It’s also why the venerable St. Bede, the eighth-century English writer, was named that; his name means prayer.

For the word to enter our language as it did, the Angles must have used beads almost exclusively for counting prayers, and the Saxons must have worn their strings of prayer beads around the waist – the Saxon word for prayer is belt.

….the modern Rosary itself, lay far in the future in the year 800. But by then all the elements were there: the Faithful throughout Christendom, lay and clerical alike, were regularly practicing meditative prayer; they were structuring their meditations on the repetitions of vocal prayers anchored to the Lord’s own prayer, the Our Father; they added the Angelic Salutation after each Pater noster, and they counted these vocal prayers on beads, after the pattern of the psalms, grouping them in fifties for a total of a hundred and fifty.

 Some of these ‘bits’ were things that rang true from past experience… others were things that connected for the first time in a rapid fire chain and left me saying ‘duh, of course!’ such as the meaning of the word bead and how it translated to the name of the Venerable Bede (which I got before the book made the connection for me).  As much as I have appreciated the Rosary these past two years, this book (along with Hail Holy Queen by Scott Hahn) has helped me realize that I have only scratched the surface and that there is so much more to the beads I hold in my hand than I realize… and so much more that God can teach me through this devotional form of prayer.  Again the joy of new discovery breaks over me, the knowledge that no matter how long I live or how much I devote myself to the faith, the feast that God has brought me to in the Catholic Church is large enough to sustain me, fresh as though newly prepared and yet two thousand years old with wisdom that God has protected through the ages, simple enough to minister to my youngest child and yet rich and complex enough to satisfy the most discerning adult.  How thankful I am that God had not created within me a hunger for more of Himself that He did not intend to satisfy, and how I rejoice as He shares glimpses of what lies ‘further up and further in’.

*Many people use the word ‘convert’ when speaking in terms of a move from the Protestant arena to the Catholic Church.  This use does not accurately reflect what has happened however.  The proper term would be ‘reconciled’… so and so ‘reconciled’ to the Catholic Church.  This would be true regardless of whether or not they had ever been Catholic before.  The word ‘conversion’ in the Catholic faith refers to the ongoing process of the Christian walk, the Christian life. A cycle containing both  God’s saving grace (and other graces) and our loving response to Him through our prayers and Acts of Mercy, whether spiritual or corporeal, which changes or ‘converts’ us – our habits, desires, tendencies, thought processes, etc – into more Christ-like people.