The Triduum/Easter: A Convert’s Impressions…

Erin has posted her thoughts on her entry into the Church and experience of the Triduum on her blog Kicking and Screaming.  Excellent reading.

Just a teaser quote… She said, “My reaction? I wanted to worship. Just worship. Give me a place to kneel and pray for a week or two, and let me worship. That was the reaction that the Triduum produced in me.”

Yeah. I remember that feeling. Nothing like it in the world.

Welcome home Erin!

Home Again…

As fabulous as it was to celebrate Easter Vigil with Shellie and her family, it was good to be back home and go to Mass with mine this evening. 

We are creatures of habit.  There are certain things that our minds and bodies recognize and react to because they are so incredibly familiar.  A good example of this in my life would be a trip to a friend’s house.  When I lived in Texas, my dear friend lived 2 hours away.  Her husband had a weekly night out of town due to business and the kids and I would often drive up to spend the night with her. It gave us a good 24 hour visit before we’d head home the next day. 

She’d make homemade hummus, tzatziki, and we’d roll out homemade dough into pitabread while visiting over a glass of wine while the children played together. We’d make a pot of good tea and watch movies while working on needlepoint. We’d laugh ourselves silly one moment and share our deepest struggles the next. That 24 hour visit would unwind all the stress and tangled skeins of care that life could throw at me. This was a frequent trip… every two weeks in the summer, every 3 to 4 in the school year (we both homeschool).  I was so conditioned that all it took for me to relax was to get in the car and begin the drive to her house. 

Walking into Mass in my home parish was similar.  Mass has come to mean a great deal to me.  It is communal, the coming together of the Body of Christ across time and space to worship,  to the Table for the Eucharist.  Friends, family, and complete strangers come together in an intimate union.  It is also personal in that I am nourished in a very personal and private way.  The graces I receive in the Mass feed my soul, mend my hurts, meet my current needs whether I accurately recognize them or not, and give me strength for the week ahead… and yet it isn’t about me. It is about God, giving to Him the worship that He has requested as fit unto Himself… and in joyfully, willingly, obediently giving what is His due I am greatly blessed.

The Job of the Laity…

It isn’t ALWAYS about the homeschool forums… really, it’s not… but many of the discussions there do spawn trains of thought or bring to the fore things I want to go into further or save for future reference.  This thread has been a hot topic the past few days…

 Thread Topic: Why are you dissatisfied with church as you have known it?

Kid Sister/Anne: Since you know I converted, first I should say that I was not unhappy with my church. I loved my church. The pastor was someone I admired and who was an excellent teacher. Oh sure, there were odds and ends of things that bugged me, but that happens for anyone when people get together for any purpose.

Am I satisfied now? Yes. On a much more deep and fundamental level. Does that mean that everything is perfect? No. Are there things that bother me? Yes… even at times something very important. Yet even in that, there is comfort.

All that said, whether or not I am satisfied is completely irrelevant. It isn’t about me. It’s about God and what He has said is right to offer to Himself.

Later in the thread came this post…

Originally Posted by Shorty

Well, I’m at a place where I want my church to be “holy”. As in, I am sick of bringing in garbage to the church because there is so much garbage in the world we must be ‘relateable’ to those who drift in the doors. Baloney! Church is for Christians, and I want to go to church and be reminded of the holiness of God, not the sinfullness of the world.

We are the Church, too. We are to be ‘in the world’ and to bring the Light of Christ TO the world. How can I do that without recharging myself with the Light of Christ?

I’m sick of leaving church feeling dirty, because my children discuss internet pornography or transsexualism in Sunday School. I don’t care that those things are ‘in the world’- they do not need to be in the church.

Sorry- but you asked. There it is.

To which I (Kid Sister/Anne) replied:
Completely understand. I’ve said for YEARS that Church is not the place for unbelievers… Church is for believers. You don’t bring unbelievers to church to hear the message. You LIVE the message. We come together to worship, we are sent OUT to reach others. 

In response to my comments here I received the following… 

Forgiven: Can you explain your thinking here to me? I don’t post in this forum much but I read it alot! I am really “bothered” by this statement. I was having trouble sleeping last night thinking about it.

<clip and paste>

I guess I don’t understand where the unbelievers belong if not in church? I mean where do they go to learn about Christ. I was not raised in church at all. When I starting seeking God I went to a few churches and a student Bible study. Thankfully, those churches were not exclusive to believers. I learned a lot, asked a lot of questions and gave my life to Christ at a church. I have been blessed to see 1000’s, yes 1000’s of people come to Christ in churches. I know God can speak to both believers and unbelievers through his teachers in a church.
Yes, it is uncomfortable to an unbeliever at first to see people worshipping God but soon when they know Him they join right in and laugh that they used to think it strange. They get how wonderful and awesome He is and that they should praise Him with their whole heart.
I have a great friend who lost his Mom to cancer on Christmas Eve. She was a believer, her son was not. He started coming to church and sitting in his car during praise and worship. He would listen to tapes of sermons until worship ended then come in for the bible study. He now writes new believer study Bible study guides and is on staff at the church. He said it took him a while to trust God and he is glad people gave him his space and didn’t criticize his decisions. We loved him through all of his wrestling, and now he is serving his Creator.
I think church is for everyone. Unbelievers need to see believers worshipping their God.
We may need to agree to disagree on this one. I just was flabberghasted when I read your statement and thought maybe I was misunderstanding what you meant by it.
Maybe you can explain your reasons for believing this and I will be able to see your side of things.

My response, interspersed with her comments, was as follows…

Originally Posted by Forgiven  I guess I don’t understand where the unbelievers belong if not in church? I mean where do they go to learn about Christ. I was not raised in church at all. When I starting seeking God I went to a few churches and a student Bible study. Thankfully, those churches were not exclusive to believers.

Kid Sister/Anne: You weren’t the type of person I meant. Certainly seekers should be brought to church, should be welcome to come any time to ask and to learn.

Originally Posted by Forgiven I know God can speak to both believers and unbelievers through his teachers in a church.

Kid Sister/Anne: Yes, He can… but the primary PURPOSE of Church is not for the unbeliever and it should NOT be geared to ‘reaching the lost’ or meeting the NEEDS of the unbeliever. That is what believers are for, as they live their lives out correctly in the world. Church is primarily for Worship, secondarily for education of the faithful, preparing, challenging, deepening them in their walk and their faith so the Body of Christ can go forth and be salt and light.

Many Christians today remain spiritual infants themselves because they are so geared to the lost that they are still covering children’s bible stories in adult education classes, superficial teaching at best. These Christians are not impacting their culture or their world for Christ because they look nothing like him. Rather, they look remarkably like everyone else. The unbeliever looks at them and says ‘I’m a good person too, I don’t see anything you’ve got that I need, you’re no different from me’. If such a Christian WANTS more, they must go outside the church to get it because frequently pablum is all that’s offered.

In our era, in an effort to ‘reach the lost’ the Church has brought the lost into the sanctuary and as a result been watered down and lost its savor. In order to reach the lost, the Church must become once again that place that it was intended to be, so that instead of bringing the lost to us and diminishing who and what we are to be as a result, we go out and take what we are, what Christ has given us, to them.

Originally Posted by Forgiven I think church is for everyone. Unbelievers need to see believers worshipping their God.

Kid Sister/Anne: With the exceptions I have mentioned already such as seekers and those who have needs met and know to go to a Church, I disagree with you. Church is primarily for believers. Unbelievers don’t need to see believers worshipping their God. Unbelievers need to see believers SERVING their God by living out the Christ-life. If believers are REALLY doing that, unbelievers won’t need to go to Church to hear the message… they will be going to church as seekers.

It’s so much easier to just ‘ask them to come to church with us’. Then we feel our duty has been done… it’s much harder to live in such a way that they ASK for what we have, that they ASK to come…

Originally Posted by Forgiven We may need to agree to disagree on this one.

Kid Sister/Anne: If we do, it will be with good will and love for you as my sister in Christ. 

Originally Posted by Forgiven I just was flabberghasted when I read your statement and thought maybe I was misunderstanding what you meant by it.

Kid Sister/Anne:Perhaps now you understand me better, and you may still be flabbergasted. Your situation, and the other you described, were not the sort of people I thought didn’t belong there. That said, church shouldn’t be about reaching the lost.

The exchanged continued a bit further…

Originally Posted by Forgiven  Maybe it is a doctrinal difference for us. It sounds like you are all Catholic (those who responded to me[who were agreeing with KidSister/Anne]), for me church is a bible study every time I go. I have gone to the Catholic masses a few times (dh grew up Catholic) and mass is very different than Sunday morning service for me. I appreciate chapter by chapter, verse by verse services. Thank you for explaining your statements to me, so I could understand your position.

Kid Sister/Anne: You are most welcome. Yes, I am Catholic, as is Shellie*… but this was my belief long before I became Catholic, and given her comments appears to be the same for Shellie as well since she is a VERY new convert. So I’m not sure it could be primarily chalked up to doctrinal difference. I certainly believe there is a place for chapter and verse teaching, but that is only part of what Church is… the learning part… but not worship.

I’m glad that we understand one another better.

The exchange did continue another post or two in which Forgiven explained a bit further her own position and though we still had substantial differences, in the end we were closer than either of us had thought at first.

Imagine then my astonishment at visiting the blog of a friend, Contemplating Christian, who used to frequent the forums but has not been a member in some time, only to find this excellent blog entry up. Being “Seeker Sensitive” is the job of the Laity, not the Church was posted after she read the reaction of Red Neck Woman to Pastor Stephen Furtick of Elevation Church’s rant over church shopping and the discussion that followed. It was incredible to read such an fabulous post on the VERY topic we had just been discussing on the forums but taken from this completely separate discussion begun from only a slightly similar topic. Interesting how God works. 

*Shellie was not the only person who agreed with me and posted to Forgiven. However, the other people who did so were protestant, though two are possibly on the road to Rome.

Church Shopping… A Rebuttal…

On the homeschooling forums recently, a poster submitted a blog entry from a pastor named Stephen Furtick and asked for our thoughts.  My reply was simple… “You do NOT want to know.”  That said, I had plenty to say… but my friend has said it first, and best. This is a MUST read blog entry by Red Neck Woman of Postscripts from the Catholic Spitfire Grill.

Adoration…

Worshipping God in the Blessed Sacrament… Adoration… one of the great treasures I’ve found in the Catholic Church.  Our parish has Adoration once per month for a 24 hour period.  I normally participate, waiting until the last minute to sign up for an hour so as to fill the empty spots… purely selfish, I assure you, as I’d like to see Adoration become more frequent. This month, the guy who coordinates all that in our parish was walking around so people could sign up at the Fish Fry one Friday and so I just asked him to sign me up for whatever hour he thought would need me. This time, it was 5-6 am… an unusual hour for me but I was looking forward to it as usual. What I didn’t bank on was getting sick the week before…

Climbing out of bed at 4:30 with some trepidation… still felt a bit queasy (not contagious… just not popping back as quickly as my 9 yr old did), I got ready to go and chatted with my husband who got up for an early morning breakfast. My bag loaded with materials… MP3 player filled with the rosary, Divine Mercy chaplet, Gregorian Chant, Abba Pater, among other options… my rosary, and rosary binder filled with Redneck Woman’s meditations using a rosary to pray for my children, for consecration, etc… I pulled on my coat and began the short drive across town to the Church.

It had dusted snow… the streets, sidewalks, and parking lots were silvered with it. Chilled air blanketed the empty byways and stores. Silence… even within the car, the only sounds my breathing and the rustling of my coat.  As I pulled up to the doors of the Church, I could see one other solitary soul slipping inside… and my feet duplicated his, marring the silvered dust before the doors.

With the open door, a burst of warmth, and light, and color… and the silence becomes not an absence but a Presence. Entering the sanctuary, I sign my name on the roster.  A nearby pew already has the kneeler down and I complete a double genuflection before taking my place upon it. Like the removal of my heavy winter coat in the vestibule, the mantle of care slips off my shoulders to the floor behind me as I begin this time of Adoration and prayer.

Shifting a bit, retrieving the readings and rosaries I wanted to use, I bid a whispered good-bye to a dear retiree in our parish who is leaving and we are left alone… my silver footed companion and I, before the Blessed Sacrament.  Over the past two years, I have spent many an hour here.  Some have been longer than others, at times tempted to join the apostles in sleep, at times ’schizophrenic’ prayer has been offered with mixed emotion… My companions have varied as surely as the intensity of my devotion, frequently a fellow parishioner, occasionally one of my children, my husband a time or two…

I began to read, to meditate, and to pray… setting to with a will, knowing the blessing and joy that will come, anticipating the treasured uninterrupted time with the Lord… despite the additional magic from the silvering snow, an ordinary Adoration… or so I thought.

It seemed but a moment before I had completed the initial readings and moved to the Children’s Rosary, and in doing so I mused a bit over the seeming increased intensity of the Presence… but didn’t pause over it, determined to pray for my children before time was up. Again, it seemed but a moment and I was more than half done with the Children’s Rosary… this caught my attention a bit as this usually takes me well over a half hour to pray, yet I didn’t hesitate but began to pray all the more as I knew I might be hard pressed to complete it and feeling that I wasn’t going to have enough time to pray for all that was upon me.

Next interruption, the door creaked behind me signaling a new adorer.  Surely it can’t have been an hour yet. A surreptitious peek showed it to be an older man I recognized who frequently comes and spends time before the Lord. Relieved that it was not yet the hour, I turned again to my prayer with joy.  One decade left and the door creaked again as the relief came for the next hour… and I could not believe it was up… I was nowhere near done praying.  There was so much left on my heart, the Presence of the Lord had grown so around me and it seemed that very little time had passed at all… only a few moments, surely no more than 15 at most… but the cell phone time does not lie, the fresh faces were present… and while I knew I could stay and pray as my heart longed to do… though I was certainly welcome, my husband slumbered at home – already concerned over his wife out at night alone. Should I stay and he awake to find much time passed and my absence continued, he would be quite concerned… and for that reason I could not remain.

Double genuflection. Crossed with holy water. Coat on again, lighter than the shoulders remember, mantle of care still pooled behind the kneeler in the pew.  The door opens upon the cold, silvered winter night, the silence once an absence hushes still… with Presence. He is yet with me… that intense sweetness, heightened awareness, living joy. 

Quiet breath, coat whispers, the car returns to its garage rest and I to my bed… Hidden there under blankets and the curve of her daddy’s arm, my youngest who bid me a groggy good-bye before I left from the door of her room. As I slide in beside her, my husband stirs and welcomes me home. I curl around my daughter, hold my husbands hand, and I turn to the Presence… again in Adoration.

Hear and Understand God’s Tradition…

Audite et intelligite traditiones quas Deus dedi vobis.

“Hear and understand the traditions which I, God, have given you.”

I’m currently reading Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master by Lawrence S. Cunningham and it is from this that I am quoting…

There are traditions which God has given us. They are so to speak a memory we are born with and into which we are born: a store of meanings, of symbols, of signs. What is born in us is the connatural ability to understand these great buried signs as soon as they are manifested to us.  What is given us in society is a more or less authentic manifestation of the signs. If society loses its “memory,” if it forgets its language of traditional symbol, then the individuals who make it up become neurotic, because their own memories are corrupted by uninterpreted, unused meanings. Then traditions themselves become mere dead conventions – worse than that, obsessions – collective neuroses.  To replace one set of conventions with another, however new, does nothing to revive a truly living sense of meaning and of life. This is our present condition.

This resonates strongly within me.  In my own experience, growing up as a Baptist (Southern of some flavor), I often felt drawn to certain things… liturgical tradition drew me, though I knew not what to call it. The austere nature of our faith and its tradition (or rather traditional lack of the same) left me feeling as though something were missing.  As a young child, striving to fill that unspoken void, I would contrive my own ‘traditions’ or forms of reverence. Having a lace trimmed hanky to lay my Bible is one good example, and yet this felt contrived even to my infant sensibilities and I soon gave it up in shame for having taken up such ‘pretensions’. 

Later, when I saw my first crucifix, I remember being struck by it – feeling a hushed awe and reverence within that was inexplicable… Later still in a similar setting, kneelers were intuitive in response as I felt immediately the desire to drop to my knees and pray. I worked hard (funny that since we were repeatedly taught that works were of little import) to be a workman approved before the Lord and stifled those childhood fancies, all the while feeling as though something important were missing… that such a holy God, such a magnificent Lord and Master deserved more than what was given… and that burning desire to give such to the Lord whom I loved was banked.

Even when I began to attend Church with my Catholic husband, the fear and misunderstanding taught me in my youth kept me from really seeing that what I witnessed there was the very fulfillment of what my young soul had yearned for.  When I finally was reconciled to the Church by God’s mercy and command, the protective walls bricked up over time to protect myself from that which I was forbidden to give as a protestant began to come down.  As I have lived a full year now as a Catholic with the blessings of the Sacraments, the joys of Eucharistic Adoration, the Liturgy and the Liturgical Calendar with all it entails, I have found at last that which my soul within naturally knew and longed to give as right to the Lord.  Truly, God has written His law upon our hearts… we ignore and deny this innate understanding to our peril.

We as a protestant society have lost our memory.  Our forefathers denied it; their descendents fought it, suppressing it more and more until it is so very lost that we of the common era in this protestant culture no longer recognize it within ourselves and rail against it embraced by others with vile blasphemies. We have reduced those beloved traditions given us by God to dead conventions so long that they have become  collective neuroses.  We have replaced God’s traditions, God’s ways with our own. New conventions, new traditions that reject all but that which seems comfortable, godly, and right in our own eyes.  In the process not only do we deify ourselves, but we forfeit life and all its meaning. We no longer show respect to any, much less the equal respect to all that we claim. We proclaim proudly that we bow our knee to NO man, and in the process, refuse to bow our knee to God. We have lost all sense of honor, of respect, and have no true understanding or experience of humility.  What else is dying to self but considering others better than we do ourselves?

Esteeming others, being willing to be humbled, being willing to abase ourselves, to be SERVANT to ALL men… this is the calling of the followers of Christ. If we are so unaware of the traditions of God that we no longer recognize true Worship, then we call things worship in error in order to have it at all. Such ignorance leads to not only great pride, but great sin. Let us not be so ignorant due to hard hearts and pride that we call speech, lectures, song-a-longs, and any humbling position of body worship. Let us not be so prideful in our ignorance that we can no longer bend our knee in respect to another lest it be construed as worship where none exists.  Let us again learn what we once knew and rejoiced to do, obey the traditions of our God and walk humbly before Him always.

Audite et intelligite traditiones quas Deus dedi vobis.

“Hear and understand the traditions which I, God, have given you.”

Let us hear, understand, and obey the traditions which He, our God, has given to us.  Blessed be God forever!

Who Ruined What…

There’s been some discussion today about a blog entry by someone called the Internet Monk. He was compared favorably (and presumably similarly) to the ‘emergent church’/Blue Velvet Elvis/Brian McClaren ’stuff’ by someone who’s read them all.  I read the blog entry, but haven’t read the ’stuff’ to which it was compared.

This man makes some astounding claims.

…God ruined church for me for the rest of my life.

I met people from every denomination you can think of who loved Jesus, believed the Gospel and wanted others to do the same: Episcopalians, Disciples, Methodists, Catholics, Presbyterians, United Church of Christ, Crazy Church of Christ, Pentecostals, Charismatics, mongrels, mutts, whatevers. I prayed, worshiped and witnessed with these folks.

It ruined me, and it was God’s fault.

This just boggles the mind. GOD ruined church for this guy. My eyeballs may need to be surgically rescued they’ve rolled so far back.  Given the second quote, you’d think he’d come to a different conclusion, after all, God didn’t make all these denominations! But no, he says it again, that fellowshiping with all these people and seeing that they all love God, believe the Gospel, and want others to as well RUINED him… and it was God’s fault!!

No. This is not God’s fault that church is ruined for the Internet Monk. It is man’s fault.

• Man rebelled against God.
• Man decided that he didn’t want to obey those God had placed in authority over them.
• Man decided that regardless of what Christ said about obeying those in the seat of authority despite the inhabitants personal wickedness, he didn’t want to wait for God to deal with the person Himself.
• So man broke away from God’s Church and set up altars for himself.
• He began to make his own buffet line of beliefs, deciding he knew better than the Church what was right in God’s eyes.
• In a stunningly brief amount of time, men continued that rebellion exponentially… splintering further and further.
• Now many of the beliefs held by the many thousands of denominations around the world are heretical, agreeing only in small and rapidly diminishing bits with the Church God created and placed apostolic authority in.

It truly has become the ’shopping mall’ the Internet Monk describes… but it was man who did it, not God, and in doing so it was man who damaged the Church, not God.

In addition, the Internet Monk has ruined the Church for himself. He is doing the same thing all those other people throughout history have done.  What we (protestants, former in my case) all have done. We’ve gone through and cherry picked what we like from the buffet. I’ll have a little OSAS, because I like security.  Oh, and I don’t want baptism to wash away sin, nope… I like that whole prayer thing… but no way am I going to admit to any authority over me but the Holy Spirit and He speaks to me direct so you people are all wrong if you don’t believe what I do. The Internet Monk is doing what is right in his own eyes, and calling it godly. Sacred scripture disagrees.

So here the Internet Monk sits, proudly claiming how God ruined church for him. Talk about taking the easy way out.  Easy to blame God and pretend you are holier because of it (though that is frankly a new level of delusion to me, he seems to have pulled it off). In doing so, he totally bypasses the difficult position of ACTUALLY aligning himself with what God has said about His Church because I can tell you RIGHT now that is NOT a popular place to be. With this position, no one fusses because you don’t compromise over how they do things… because in the Internet Monk’s position you get to ‘like’ things about them all, and don’t have to hold to the standards God has set to the exclusion of all others. Instead, he sits back in self-righteousness claiming he is above it all, and claims it’s all God’s fault that he can’t fit into any of those churches… and he lumps the Catholic Church into that mess. Am I the only one pulling out hair in fistfulls?

He goes on to say…

I doubt if God cares how many different ways we gather, worship, work or do mission.

Really. I’m wondering if this guy reads his Bible at ALL?  God VERY much cares how we gather, worship, work and do missions, especially the worship part! I know I said this recently, but do Nadab and Abihu ring any bells? What about all those details about the temple, about who could enter the Holy of Holies, about what they were to wear, how they were to make offerings? God is pretty. darn. picky. if you ask me… as is His RIGHT! How on EARTH does one read the Old Testament and keep thinking that God doesn’t care how we worship!??!?!

The blog entry goes on, but it just leaves me depressed and in mourning. This is not what drawing closer to God looks like. This is not what unity looks like. We do not become more godly by drawing further out into an ever more self-righteous and individualistic Christianity or by painting God as a loving eunuch who is groveling and grateful for whatever offering feels good to us in the moment!

It isn’t that I don’t understand what the Monk sees. I too see things of God in each denomination… strengths that they contribute to the Body of Christ, the bits of truth they have left.  However there is a place where the Body of Christ is unified and all those strengths are present, and were we to reconcile ourselves to the Church as God saw fit to create it we’d have all their strengths more fully present. Yet it wasn’t the strengths that I saw predominating in the protestant churches of my experience.

It wasn’t God who ruined the church for me. It was the Christians. Over and over, it was the Christians who let me down and threatened to ruin the church for me.  I kept telling myself, you can’t count on men (as in mankind). Men will fail you every time. You can’t blame God for their failures. That was what enabled me to not see the church as ruined… and in the end, it was God who saved the church for me.  When I finally stopped fighting to have it my way, and really let go and let Him show me the Truth… He showed me His Church. Coming into His Church, I still found similar problems to the ones elsewhere… but I found so many things that all those other churches didn’t have.  They didn’t have the Real Presence. They didn’t have unity. They didn’t have grace. They didn’t have the Sacraments through which God braces broken men. They didn’t have the wealth and depth of faith and practice.  They weren’t worshipping under the Authority God left for us, submitting to the shepherds He has given.  They weren’t really worshipping at all. They were having lectures, singing and social hour. The strengths and support found in His Church have made battling the problems possible because we are family. We are one holy Catholic and apostolic Church. Obedient to what God has said is worship.  We don’t limit God. God has limited us, and in doing so, set us free.

The Sacrifice of Praise…

The well people in my family went to Epiphany Mass this evening.  Meaning Precious (dd 11) and myself.  It was nice to go with her by ourselves.  She is very devout and we both are able to focus completely on the Mass.  For some reason with the other girls there, and dh, it is a bit more distracting at times.

The choir was there, the organ playing, all the Christmas decorations still up and the Wise Men had completed their journey across the miles (and the dais) to worship the Baby Jesus in the manger in our creche. I was not scheduled to serve as Eucharistic Minister, but ended up serving anyway which is always a great privilege.

Lately I’ve been engaged in some discussion on a home schooling forum with protestants over the Eucharist.  Someone stated that college students praying over and calling some Ritz and Pepsi communion was perfectly ok.  Believing in the Real Presence and having a particular passion for the Eucharist due to the manner of my marriage and reconciliation, I had to disagree.  This led to the usual, ‘we can worship any way we please’ type argument on the protestant side and the ‘no, God never left how we worship up to us, remember Nadab and Abihu’ from me. It’s a common exchange with only minor variation as the protestant in question changes over time.

This has been on my mind a great deal of late, the differences in how we approach worship and praise and sacrifice.  Most protestants view worship as what ‘feels good’ or is ‘comfortable’ or what seems right in their own eyes.  A sin of which I am guilty above all, God forgive me.  I do not speak about that which I am not also convicted! However, God did not leave the details of proper worship up to us. He didn’t in the early days of the covenants with Israel, and He didn’t in the completed Covenant with Christ either. 

Then tonight in Mass in the prayers and Consecration of the Eucharist, a phrase caught my attention and I found myself struggling not to give in to meditation on it. 

We offer you the Sacrifice of Praise.

The Sacrifice of Praise… I had always thought of that as several things… a gift, as something we owe God, as an offering… but the sacrificial element of giving God praise hit me today. It is a sacrifice because we can’t just give whatever we think is best.  It is a sacrifice because we must give to God the type of praise GOD has said is appropriate. It is a sacrifice because we die to ourselves, give up our own desires in form of worship, give up our preferences in forms of worship, give up our own comfort with what constitutes worship and praise and instead give to God what is RIGHT to give Him. The praise we offer truly IS a sacrifice… and our humbling ourselves, worshipping Him as HE has said is right and good is part of that sacrifice.   It is a sacrifice because it is not we who limit God by worshipping as we please, but God who limits US to worship that accurately reflects who He is and what He has done. Yet it is a sacrifice of praise because in humbling ourselves we truly see in ever new and deep ways how majestic and holy He is and respond with praise. The more fully we humble and reconcile ourselves to true worship, the more aware we become of all the grace and blessing and glory that God has revealed of Himself in that worship, and our willingness to praise is magnified, and our sacrifice more willing and more perfect.

I too had to sacrifice my personal comfort level and preferences in worship when God called me home to Rome… I am so grateful for all the sacrifices God asks of me because they always make me more like Himself… and hope that I am always willing to see what new sacrifice He requires. In the end, I have found that the Liturgy is so precious to me… I can’t imagine anything else as worship now that I’ve truly experienced it. Reconciliation to the Church has helped immeasurably in that way… and yet I must keep being willing to be shown where I yet fail to die to self… I’m a poor and unwilling sacrifice despite my desire to be a better one.