Category: Beauty

In Defense of Liturgy (With a Little Help from the Irish)

I read an essay a while back in which the author said that he never understood liturgy before he went to Notre Dame.1 It was the stadium, though, and not the Basilica that taught him about the importance of ritual. As he wandered the campus, he saw that there were certain things that must be done on a football Saturday: playing corn hole at a tailgate with a red solo cup full of cheap beer in one hand; eating a charred burger cooked by some student organization at a concession stand on God Quad; watching the band step off from the steps of Bond; lighting a candle at the Grotto.2 There was a certain dress code: jeans and an ND t-shirt (polos acceptable on men of a certain age). The game itself was filled with ritual, from the holler heralding kickoff to the keys jingling on third and long, from “we are ND” shouted like they meant it to the “pushups” on top of the crowd every time the Irish found the end zone. This completely unreligious experience was as liturgical as any the writer (an Evangelical, I think) had ever had.

In this supremely ritualized celebration, we begin to see that there is something liturgical about the human person, something that demands ritual and repeated actions. Just as game days and Christmas dinner and road trips take on the same shape each time, so must our worship. It’s unnatural to try to make worship “spontaneous,” as though resisting the urge to revel in what is familiar somehow makes the familiar less sacred, as though spontaneity is the ultimate value in worship, rather than faithfulness and truth.

There is, of course, an Evangelical Protestant inclination to reject “liturgy” because the “liturgical” becomes scripted, rote, stilted. To that I can only reply that all that is holy is liturgical, if by liturgical you mean ritualized and repeated. Every new mother  gazes at her baby with tears in her eyes and murmurs, “He’s beautiful.” Every groom looks on his bride with something like wonder as she walks down the aisle. And everyone watching at a deathbed holds his breath as the dying man takes his last. That our rituals become empty is our fault, not theirs. We coast through the Mass not because it is insufficiently passionate but because we are. If we could see it with new eyes, looking on the football festivities with the eyes of a freshman, not of a professor who’s had season tickets since Ara, we might begin to appreciate the liturgy that combines the passion of a thousand Saints into the unimpassioned droning of a twenty-first century congregation.

But the worse rejection of liturgy, I think, comes from within our own ranks, from those who want to cut some parts, embellish others, and add commentary throughout. Rather than lamenting the “vain repetition” of the Catholic Mass and moving on to their own (often more passionate but rarely less “liturgical”) services, as do our Protestant detractors, they try to change the liturgy that is cherished by so many. They sit during the fight song or drink milk at the tailgate or wear sundresses and pearls. There’s nothing wrong with those things–and yet, there really is.

One consequence of my new itinerant lifestyle is that I find myself at parishes as varied as American Catholics are, often with little advance warning of what I’m about to experience. In the past 6 weeks, I’ve been to Mass in 12 different states at about 35 difference churches, and let me tell you, there are as many ways of being Catholic as there are Catholics. And despite the joys of seeing Catholics of all shapes and sizes coming together for Mass, what’s struck me most has been the liturgical abuses: the Gospel proclaimed to a seated congregation, the Eucharist distributed to EMs before the priest has received, the hand-washing omitted, the precious blood consecrated in a pitcher and then poured into wooden chalices. And I just have to wonder: why?

I know that some of these priests or liturgy committees or parishes really feel that there’s a good reason to change the way Mass is celebrated. But I just go back to football Saturdays. If the band decided that they were going to skip the fight song and play instead a recently-deceased student’s favorite U2 song after every touchdown, that would be kind, but it wouldn’t be appropriate. The stadium would erupt in boos, letters would be written to the school newspaper, and sizable donations would be withdrawn. The fight song is sacred–you don’t mess with that, no matter how compelling the cause.

How much the worse if such a dramatic change was made arbitrarily–let’s say they decided to change from the traditional student-painted golden helmets to some half-black, leprechaun-emblazoned monstrosity for no apparent reason. The outrage would flood facebook like a clever new meme. Whether you loved football or not, you’d be shocked. When I asked my friend Steve if he’d seen the new uniforms, he shrugged: “You know I don’t care much about football.” Then I showed him the new helmet. “That’s not okay!” Because while the uniform itself may change, the helmets shouldn’t. Maybe the color of the helmets doesn’t matter, but the tradition does.

What makes the fight song or the helmet or “May I have your attention please” or pushups sacred isn’t their inherent value; the Irish are no less likely to win a championship with ugly helmets as they are with the lovely gold ones. What gives every moment of every fall Saturday meaning isn’t why we do it but that we do it. That 80,000 people put their arms around each other and sway to the Alma Mater, that we pump our fists like fighting Irishmen when a certain song is played (or keep our arms crossed in an X if we have the misfortune to live in Zahm), that we risk salmonella to eat an undercooked brat–we do that, together. We join as one body and in doing so give meaning to meaningless ritual.

Now, there’s nothing meaningless about the Mass. But there are steps and words and rites whose meaning we might not grasp–or whose meaning we think we understand to be patriarchal or misogynistic or whatnot. Yet there is a sanctity even to these, not because of what they mean, in this instance, but because seeming to mean nothing they mean obedience and unity and faithfulness. They mean that the Mass is home whether I’m in Jerusalem or Jersey. They mean that we have chosen our God and our Church over our own sensibilities. They mean, in an era of jumbotrons and snazzy uniforms, a tradition that goes back generations and honors those who’ve gone before, uniting us with our ancestors in a way that the latest trends in football or worship never could.

Of course, I’m not rejecting top-down innovations like the forward pass or Vatican II. I’m just begging stylists to leave the uniforms alone, players to stay classy, and fans to keep waving the coach’s initials during the 1812 Overture, whatever you think of his coaching abilities. And I’m not condemning anybody; I try really hard not to judge anybody, especially priests, for whom I have a particular love. I’m just begging priests to say what’s in black and do what’s in red, musicians to remember that this isn’t their show, and people in the pews to rejoice in your Church, even if you think you could do it better.

What makes the liturgy magical isn’t just the consecration or the proclamation of the Gospel; it’s the whole glorious game-day package. Chipping away at the parts we don’t like doesn’t do anything but cheapen it. So here’s to glorious football traditions and deep liturgies–may our rituals ever be mystery and our hearts ever rejoice to seek understanding.

  1. I have googled and googled to no avail. Anybody know where I read this? My apologies to the author for this attempt at paraphrase, but my memory of the essay is essential to the point I’m trying to make. [↩]
  2. If you haven’t been to a home game at ND, you’re missing out. [↩]

How to Pay Attention at Mass

I didn’t really grow up praying. I mean, my parents prayed. And I’m sure I joined in. But all prayer was to me was reciting the words I’d memorized. There was no relationship there.

Really–what’s not to love?

Mass was worse. I hardly even tried there, stand/sit/kneeling along with the congregation with my mind on My Little Ponies instead of my Lord.

I remember, on the day I made my first communion, whispering to my mother during the Eucharistic prayer, “What do you do after you have communion?”

My poor mother had no idea that the answer was “pray,” that I could possibly not realize that the silent kneeling was supposed to give me the opportunity to speak with the God I’d just received. She thought I was asking for things to say in prayer, so she answered, “Sometimes I thank God for the stained glass windows.”1

From there on out, when I was at my most “pious,” I spent my meditation time repeating, “Thank you for the stained glass windows thank you for the stained glass windows thank you for the stained glass windows thank you for the stained glass windows” ad infinitum until I’m sure God himself was annoyed.

“Child dies in tragic ugly shoe incident. Story at 10.”

When I wasn’t feeling pious (the better part of 1991-1997), I spent communion evaluating the shoes of the people walking by.  When I saw shoes I liked, I’d hold my breath until I saw another pair I liked. It was the 90s–I almost passed out a few times.

So believe me when I say that I don’t go to Mass because it’s fun.  I didn’t have some incredible conversion that inspired in me a love of silence or liturgy or contemplation or–God help us–sitting still and being quiet.  Nope–3000+ daily Masses later, I’m still bored.

When I make this confession, people are often shocked that I’m a real person, not some plaster Saint. I think “normal” people assume that those of us who are trying to be holy really enjoy prayer. And while there are some who do, many of us struggle just as much with paying attention in prayer as your average Catholic.

The difference, for those who take this God thing seriously, is that we actually struggle with it. We don’t just succumb to boredom and take the Mass as an opportunity to check out the latest fashion trends in our corner of suburbia. We pull our attention back every time it drifts, we prepare for Mass, we fight to treat the Mass as though it were the most important thing on the planet. Which, of course, it is.

So I thought I’d give some pointers to those of you who (like me) are struggling to pay attention. Not every suggestion will work for everyone, so look through the list and see if there isn’t something that might help you. Ignore the rest.2

  • Choose wisely. We don’t all have the luxury of choosing which Mass we’re going to attend, but if you do, be intentional. Figure out which music draws you deeper into prayer, which preaching inspires you, and which congregation is focused (or energetic or traditional or family-oriented) enough to strengthen your prayer. There’s something to be said for persevering through distractions, but no sense borrowing trouble.3
    .
  • Although this window mostly got me wondering if the shepherd in green thought he was on Arsenio Hall….

    Pick your poison. If you’re anything like me, you’re going to be distracted no matter how hard you try. There’s a big difference, though, between being distracted by counting cinder blocks or trying to figure out where that stain in the carpet came from and being distracted by sacred art. So I tend to go to churches with lots of representational art. If my mind’s going to wander, better it wander to the Nativity than to the Colbert Report.

  • Seat yourself. Once you’ve chosen a Mass, don’t just slide into the most convenient pew to exit from. Pray over where in the sanctuary you focus best. I need to sit in the front or I’ll spend the whole Mass looking at the people around me and trying to figure out their ages and marital statuses and relationship to the kids sitting with them and on and on. If I sit in front, I only do this after communion, which is a much shorter time to try to discipline myself. Other people need to be in the back where it’s quieter or in a darker spot or whatever. As they say in real estate, location, location, location! It can really make a difference.
    .
  • Be prepared. Take some time with Sunday’s readings (or the daily readings) before you go to Mass. Maybe read the upcoming Sunday’s Gospel every day or just spend Sunday morning looking over the readings. You’ll be surprised at how much more you get out of Mass.4
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  • Dress the part. There are some obvious rules about what clothing is appropriate to wear to church; clean, modest, and in good repair come to mind. What I’m saying is, leave the torn jeggings at home. But stepping up your game a little for Sunday Mass might make it easier for you to focus (and those around you as well). Wearing a tie or a skirt might feel so foreign to you that you automatically sit up straighter and focus more. If nothing else, it’s a nice gesture when you man up and wear pants instead of shorts, not because shorts are bad but because it shows that you find the Mass important.
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  • Offer it up. Not to be a cliché, but prayer is powerful. Not only do the graces of your Mass get poured out on the person you pray for, but it also helps you to focus when you’re doing it for someone. If your Mass is for your sick granny, you’re less likely to space out.
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  • Tweet it. Let me be very clear: I am NOT suggesting that you live tweet the Mass. Put your stupid phone away for an hour a week! But if you challenge yourself to come up with a 140-character summary of the Mass’s theme and tweet it,5 you’ll have to pay attention to the readings, the prayers, and the homily. Did you know that Sunday’s prayers actually connect to Sunday’s readings? And that the first reading is chosen specifically to connect to the Gospel? Commit to tweeting about the Mass every week and you’ll have to start paying attention just to have something to say.

    See?? This lady’s already doing it! Now I’m following her, although most of her texts are in what looks to me like Tagalog.
  • Play guessing games. Let’s say you don’t read up ahead of time–see if you can guess the theme of the readings just by listening to the opening prayer. Then listen to the first reading and see if you can predict the Gospel. During the Gospel, try to guess what point the priest will make in his homily. If you’re as competitive as I am, this’ll keep you on the edge of your pew.
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  • Get real. I think what makes Mass hardest is that it doesn’t feel relevant to our lives. But it is! You just have to open your eyes to realize that every moment of the Mass is just begging you to give yourself to God. I find this most powerful during the offertory. When the bread and wine are brought forward, I (try to) do a little examen. I pray about what I’m most grateful for at the moment and offer that as a sacrifice of thanksgiving to God when the bread is offered. When the wine is offered, I consider what “cup of suffering” I’m being asked to drink and I offer that to God as well. In doing this, I surrender my tight grip on my blessings and thank him for my suffering. Then I go deeper and recognize the crushed wheat that’s gone into the bread–what past suffering has made this current joy possible? I meditate on the fact that this wine of suffering will become the blood of Christ–how can my suffering be transformed for the good of the kingdom? Most days, I space out, but when I’m focused enough to pull this off, it can be really incredible.
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  • It’s the little things. A priest once recommended to me that rather than getting frustrated when I realized I’ve been tuning out at Mass, I should pay attention to what I tuned back in for. “Maybe,” he suggested, “that’s the Holy Spirit trying to get your attention.” So instead of giving up because it’s the Creed and you haven’t noticed a word since the Confiteor, see if there’s something in that line of the Creed that speaks to your heart. The thing is that the Mass is so replete with meaning that whatever six words you manage to focus on are more meaningful than everything else you’ll say all week.

Odds are good you’ll fail again and again and again. One of the consequences of the Fall is that worship no longer comes naturally to us and spending a solid hour not obsessing over yourself can be a little bit like hell. Don’t get discouraged that the Mass is still boring after you’ve been trying so hard for six weeks–it takes a lifetime. Besides, sometimes boring prayer is just what we need. So try to pray and focus at Mass but recognize that whether or not your prayer is good is ultimately up to God, not you. All you can do is the best you can. He’ll do the rest.

 

All right, peanut gallery. I’d love to hear any tips or tricks you’ve got to offer–Lord knows I need them. What works for you?

  1. Small, awful, abstract things so high up as to be barely visible. Definitely not something I’d normally thank God for. [↩]
  2. Or, you know, spend 5 years wrangling babies at every single Mass, then go by yourself and have a blissful hour of peace. From what I’ve heard, it’s practically the beatific vision. [↩]
  3. Note: there are some exceptions, but in general, you are canonically obligated to attend the parish in whose boundaries you reside. I’m not so much advocating that you enroll at a different parish as that you move to the parish you want to enroll at. [↩]
  4. As an aside, the more you love Scripture, the more the Mass means to you. Get on that. [↩]
  5. Can we get #todaysMass trending on twitter? That would pretty much make my life. [↩]

My Favorite Thing About NYC

There are churches everywhere!  And whether they look like this:

Granted, the lighting wasn’t great, but there’s not much you can do with seafoam carpeting and cinder block walls.
My friend Amanda likes this window. But what about those metallic squares to the right? Can you see those?  Nobody could like those.

or like this:

I love the altarpiece.

Check out the Joyful Mysteries in this window!

what matters is this:

15 years after my conversion, seeing this candle lit somewhere I wasn’t expecting it still gives me a thrill.

Because he was present among stalls and he’s present among cinder blocks.  What a blessing to step from the empty noise of the street into the eloquent silence of his presence.

 

1st church: Nativity in Manhattan; 2nd church: St. Thomas Aquinas in Brooklyn–just your generic NYC neighborhood church.  I swear, sometimes it’s like being in Rome!

An Ignatian Meditation on Surrender

Have you ever been in prayer and had a really powerful image and a sense that you were entering into really deep prayer–maybe even contemplative prayer–and then you realized that you were thinking about mashed potato shampoo and you weren’t actually having a vision, you were actually half asleep and dreaming?

Yeah, that happens to me at least once a week.

It’s not that images don’t have a place in prayer, it’s that coffee does.  And when I’m good and jacked up on caffeine, I can use my imagination to pray and get some images that make a lot more sense than mashed potato shampoo.  Prayer isn’t just a left-brained experience of memory and recitation, nor is it an introvert’s Mecca of silence and solitude.  Prayer is about relationship and God wants to encounter you in so many different ways.

So sometimes I put away my rosary and close my breviary and even try to turn off my interior monologue.  I turn to the Gospels and try to meet Christ there.  When the Spirit’s moving, I can open the Scriptures and insert myself into a scene, imagining that I’m encountering Christ just as the characters of the Gospel do.

This style of prayer is often called Ignatian, after St. Ignatius of Loyola whose Spiritual Exercises use this technique.  The idea is that you enter into the story and allow the Holy Spirit to speak to you through, essentially, daydreaming.

What’s most important here is to be open to the promptings of the Spirit.  Don’t try to dictate who you are in the scene or what you experience.  Instead, try to let go and see what happens–do you find yourself cast as a Pharisee?  Are you too distracted to listen to Jesus?  Are you afraid to approach him?

One of my students, after a meditation on Jesus calling Peter to walk on water, told me that he knew Jesus was calling him out of the boat but he couldn’t hear what he was saying because he refused to listen.  “Were you afraid of sinking?” I asked him.  “Oh, no,” he said.  “I knew I’d be safe.  I was just afraid that I wouldn’t be happy, so I turned my back on him.”  Very telling.

A seventh-grade boy explained after a meditation on the woman caught in adultery that he was a Pharisee.  When I pushed him, he got very quiet and then said, “I think I have the same struggles that the Pharisees did.”  Twelve years old.

An Ignatian meditation can definitely be done with just you and a Bible, but a guided one can be a good way to start.  So I’ve got a meditation for you on the woman who anointed Jesus.  Throughout the meditation (about 20 minutes), I ask a lot of questions.  Ignore them if they don’t help.  Definitely don’t feel the need to figure out your answer to every question.  The idea here is to immerse yourself so completely in the scene that you let go of yourself and allow the Spirit to speak to you. (You’re going to need speakers.)  So set aside some time, get comfortable, silence your cell phone, and see what the Lord has to say.

Anointing at Bethany Meditation

After your meditation, take some time to process.  Who were you in the scene?  What emotions were you feeling?  What did Jesus say to you?  What look did you see in his eyes?  Where did you go at the end?  What does all this mean?

This kind of meditation doesn’t work for everyone, but I thought I’d throw it out there for those of you who were interested.  I do a lot of these (on retreats especially) and I’m trying to get into the habit of recording them for y’all.  You can find others on this page.

Getting a Beat-Up Bible

Six years later, it may be time to rebind again. When the binding breaks apart completely, it’s the beginning of the end.

When I was a first year teacher, years of use (and abuse at the bottom of my backpack) caught up with my Bible.  The first part to fall out was James.1  Over the next few months, it reached the point where I was keeping my Bible in a Ziploc bag.  So I bit the bullet and sent it away to be rebound. I was seriously lost without it.

When it came back, I was so excited, I ran into class and shouted, “Guys!  Guess what!!!”

“You got engaged!” one of them guessed.  Yup, I was so excited to have my Bible back, I looked like a radiant bride.  That might be nerdier than it is holy….

But I think it says something that literally the only thing I’d be devastated to lose in a fire would be my Bible.

This page in Luke was only mostly detached before I went to take the picture. The things I do for you people!

I mean, not to be weird or anything, but I love my Bible.  Okay, yeah, I love the Bible, but I really particularly love my Bible.  It has all my highlighting and notes (even the really embarrassing stuff like, “Worms, I hate worms” and highlighting 3 straight pages in puke green from when I was 13).  I might not remember exactly what a verse says, but I know it’s highlighted on the right-hand page in the left column towards the top in an epistle that has a lot of footnotes on the page.  Give me 5 minutes and I can find it–usually faster than I can google it because I often can’t remember more than the feeling it gives me.

I started reading the Bible when I was 13.  The weekend I was converted (praise God!), I decided that if I was going to do this Jesus thing, I was really going to do it.  I was going to read the whole Bible.

There’s my tally down at the bottom. Do you love my second grade magic marker handwriting on the dedication page?

It took me five and a half years.

It was tough going, largely because I read straight through and got stuck in Leviticus for maybe a year and a half.  But during that time I developed a relationship with my Bible.  I began to find meaning in what had seemed irrelevant or dull.  I “discovered” connections between the Old and New Testaments that seemed to make sense of everything.  I started taking my Bible with me everywhere–just in case.  I bought (okay, fine, buy) purses only if they’re big enough to fit my Bible.  Eventually, I started reading it through once a year.

I’m a 28-year-old Catholic and I’ve read the Bible ten times.

Maybe I don’t love books as much as John Paul does. Nobody loves books as much as this kid.

Now, this is not due to some great virtue of mine.  I just really love books.  So much so that it’s currently past midnight and I have to be up at 8, but I know I’ll still read for at least an hour after I put the computer away.  So I realize that I’ve definitely got an advantage when it comes to loving the Bible.  But I think Catholics especially forget how important this book is.  Because we’ve got so much richness to our faith outside the Bible, we often (as individuals, not as a Church) ignore the Word of God.

We can’t do this!  Forget the fact that you’ll never get anywhere with a Protestant if you don’t know the Bible, this is the WORD of GOD!!  It’s meant to be studied and memorized and loved and lived.  After the Sacraments, there is nothing more important to the life of a Christian.  So here are some tips for those of you whose Bibles are in mint condition:

  1. Read the whole thing–eventually.  I think every Christian should read the Bible at least once. I really recommend the one year option above if you’ve got the dedication and the time (almost always less than 20 minutes a day).  It breaks up the boring parts (and there are a lot of boring parts, especially when you’re a Bible beginner) with Psalms and Gospel passages.  Plus, I’ve known very few people who manage to push through if they’re just going Genesis to Revelation.
  2. Start with the fun stuff.  Most people really aren’t up for 2 Chronicles or Ezekiel when they’re newbies.  So ease into it.  Try reading a chapter a day from the Gospels.  Or get a broader view by reading in this order: Luke, 1 John, John, Philippians, Matthew, Isaiah (maybe starting at chapter 40–that’s where it gets good), Mark, Genesis, 1 Corinthians, 1+2 Samuel, Romans, Deuteronomy, and go from there.  It’s not a logical order by any means, but I think those books are interesting enough to get you acclimated before you dive into Ezekiel and the like.
  3. Study the liturgical readings.  Take some time with the readings before Mass every day or spend the whole week looking at Sunday’s.  Try to figure out how they connect or imagine what you’d preach on.  It’ll transform the liturgy for you, too.
  4. Memorize.  My life has been absolutely transformed by the memorization of Scripture.  When I find a passage that speaks to me, I generally make up a tune for it and sing it over and over until it sticks.  Then when I need it, the song pops into my head.  This has the further benefits of making the Mass come alive when I hear a passage I’ve memorized and really impressing people when I can quote a whole chapter from memory.
  5. Mark it up.  Don’t be afraid to write in a holy book!  I spent a few years reading but not highlighting or taking notes, and while that means I have fewer embarrassing things in there, I also have less to show how God has blessed me through his Word.  Marking up your Bible doesn’t just help you find stuff later, it also reminds you how you’ve grown and draws you deeper.  I add quotations from Saints, point to other passages, or pencil in my own observations–in a lot of ways, my Bible is almost a journal for me.  I’ve read the Gospels more than 20 times, but I still read with a pen in hand.  As St. Gregory the Great said, “Scripture is like a river . . . broad and deep, shallow enough here for the lamb to go wading, but deep enough there for the elephant to swim.”  I will never exhaust the depths of Scripture and marking it keeps me mindful of that.
  6. Just read it!!  Play Bible Roulette (flip and point), read a Psalm every day, find a Scriptural devotional, follow a daily verse on Twitter, pick a verse to meditate on throughout the day, check out Pinterest Bible boards, or walk down the beach reading people’s tattoos.2  But do something to make sure you’re in Scripture every day and let it transform you.  As St. Jerome said, “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”

At the end of my life, I want to take a lot of laugh lines, a heart broken and remade over and over again, and a beat up Bible before the throne of God.  Join me?

PS Anybody know a good book rebinder?  I’m not sure how many times you can rebind a book, but I think I need it to last longer than 6 years if I’m going to hang on to this Bible for a lifetime.

  1. I actually discerned whether I ought to be Protestant, James being a book Luther particularly disliked. I tend to read too much into things. [↩]
  2. I once had a student who was a Chinese national who had a Bible verse (part of 1 Pt 4:8) tattooed on his back. I commented on how much I liked it and he told me–in very broken English–that he didn’t know what it said and didn’t realize it was form the Bible. I guess it’s like when Americans think they’re getting “loyalty” or “family” tattooed on their shoulders when really it says “pork fried rice.” [↩]

Did You Know I Have Kids?

I’ve been stumbling on this blog over a habit I have of referring to “my kids.” I’m sure that’s confusing to those of you who don’t know me. “Wait, didn’t I see something about consecrated virginity? But she has kids? Hang on, now….”1 So rather than footnote it every time, I thought I’d write you a good long explanation.2

My newest godson, Hugo. He’s inspecting my crucifix. My work here is done.

I have hundreds of children. A few godchildren, but mostly spiritual children, students I’ve taught and teens I’ve spoken with at retreats or camps or talks and sometimes ladies twice my age who needed God to love on them through me. The relationship I have with these kids of mine is sometimes just a few hours long and sometimes lasts for years and changes us both. I call them my kids because I am their mother–one of many mothers they have, God willing. I call them my kids even when they’re 25, because when I say that I don’t mean that they’re children. I mean that they’re mine.

When I was first discerning a vocation to consecrated life, I went to see my spiritual director. I was feeling led to enter a convent that summer but my relationship with my students was holding me back.

“I just love these kids so much, Father. Maybe that’s God’s way of telling me not to leave them.”

“Oh, that doesn’t mean you’re supposed to stay. That just means you already have a consecrated heart–you already love them with a mother’s love.”

I burst into tears at that: “You mean, I do get to be a mom?”

I had been wrestling with my vocation, convinced that Christ was calling me to be his bride but still longing for marriage and motherhood. I had offered my barrenness as a sacrifice to God but I remember sitting in a movie theater watching a movie featuring a pregnant woman. I sobbed into my sweatshirt (have I mentioned that I’m super-emotional?) and prayed, “Lord, I will give that up. But I will never stop wanting it.”

Like many women, I ached to be a mother. I wanted so badly to give myself in love to people–and, to be quite honest, to be loved and needed in return. I think it’s a universal longing–the desire to love and be loved–and for many women, this manifests itself as a maternal instinct, even for those who aren’t physical mothers. I’d read about women feeling like mothers to their students or their friends and it just struck me as counterfeit–some sham replacement for real motherhood that was supplied us to keep us from being bitter when we were old maids (and yes, at 24 I did kind of consider myself an old maid.  Catholic college will sometimes do that to a person).

But then I began to experience this phenomenon of spiritual motherhood. When I first started teaching, I loved my kids so fiercely that I honestly felt creepy. I remember almost crying from pride while watching a pep rally, of all things, and thinking that there must be something wrong with me if I loved these random kids so much. It wasn’t until I began to discern my vocation that I realized that my love for these kids was maternal.

These three lived with me for three summers in a row. Diapers and nightmares and tantrums and all.

There is something very real about spiritual motherhood. I have never borne physical children, so comparisons I make will have to be viewed in that light; I have, however, been a foster mother to young children, so I can relate to the all-consuming task (and love) that is physical motherhood, both biological and adoptive.

No, it’s not the same, but neither is the way you are a mother and the way my sister is a mother. Because two types of motherhood are different doesn’t make one any less real. They aren’t the same—and yet, somehow, they are.

As a teacher and minister, I love His children as my own. Certainly, I don’t have the same motherly love for every one of the hundreds of children who have belonged to me—my heart couldn’t take it—but I offer myself completely to each one and some few dozen have become as dear to me as I can imagine any physical child of mine being. I pray for them desperately, I ache with love for them, I miss them terribly when they go off to college.

There’s a reason people don’t have 20 kids at a time–it takes a lot out of you.

Just as a physical mother does, I suffer for my children. No, I’m not theirs 24 hours a day, but I feel the weight of their souls as strongly as many physical mothers. My knees are bruised for praying for them, my face lined with the joy of watching them repent and the agony of knowing I can’t make them saints. Daily I pour myself out for them and daily they roll their eyes and ignore me, sometimes embracing sin just to spite me. Yes, I am a mother—and a mother almost exclusively of teenagers, God help me.

My children are so often broken before they even get to me. I love them with everything I have, but I am not the most important force in their lives. I spend my life working damage control, trying to love their broken hearts back together, knowing that I will often fail. I plant the seeds and I hope, but most of the fruit is borne years later, after they’ve moved away and fallen out of touch. I watch my children leave the fold and I never know if they’ve come back.

Unlike physical mothers, I usually have these children for only a few years after high school before they move on and mostly forget me; unlike physical mothers, I often have absolutely no impact on them after they leave my care. I can’t call them every Sunday if they don’t want to hear from me; I can’t always step back into their lives to invite them lovingly to conversion. At a certain point, I have to let them go.

The love of a mother is the love of the Cross. We pour out our lives for our children and they spit in our faces. Some few stand by and love us in return. The rest may, by God’s grace, be converted by the empty tomb, by the hole in His side, by the tongues of flame. We love and we pray and we hope—and we leave them in God’s hands. This is motherhood—spiritual and physical.

I feel for those of you without physical children who view spiritual motherhood as a consolation prize, a phrase coined to silence those women who suffer for not being physical mothers. I felt this way for years, and perhaps I accept it more joyfully now because, in a sense, it’s something I’ve chosen. But real holiness is rejoicing in the suffering we’ve chosen and in the suffering that’s been forced upon us.

I’m not exactly sure of my point in writing this post–maybe just to give you a glimpse into my heart?

Maybe encouragement for those who long to be mothers that you are mothers. All women are called to spiritual motherhood (with friends or siblings or children in the church nursery) and you are able to love the souls around you with a mother’s love and to transform them through that. It’s not the same, but it’s not less, either. Motherhood is a gift offered to all women–see 1 Tim 2:15; if it’s not open to everyone, those of us who can’t bear children are in serious trouble.

Maybe I just want to ask you all to take a moment to thank your spiritual mothers. Godmothers, teachers, friends–there are women in your life who’ve held you before the throne of God or wrapped you in arms of love or taught you to be honorable and virtuous. Many of them don’t get phone calls on Mother’s Day or presents at Christmas. They love you because they choose to, not because you were handed to them. Spiritual motherhood is often a thankless job; let’s change that today.

Then again, maybe I just want something to link to when I say something about “one of my kids.”

  1. I had a kid once, a secular atheist who had been in Catholic school for four years. One day I mentioned something about the Virgin Mary. “Mary wasn’t a virgin,” he laughed. When everyone looked confused, he continued, “Mary is Jesus’ mom, right? She can’t have been a virgin. That’s not how that works!” He wasn’t objecting to the theology–he’d honestly never noticed it before. Way to go, Catholic schools. [↩]
  2. Many of these thoughts show up in a comment I posted a while back on Simcha Fisher’s post on spiritual motherhood. [↩]

You Are Good Enough

Princess NatalieI had a fight with a five-year-old today. She was wearing a Cinderella dress and two tutus and told me she was pretending to be a princess.

“Oh, Natalie!” I said, in that voice I use when I’m trying to get little ones excited about something. “You don’t have to pretend. You are a princess!”

Natalie was not amused.

“Yes, because a princess is a daughter of the king and your Father is the king!”

“My daddy is not a king,” she stubbornly replied. I tried to convince her. I laid out the argument. She agreed with all my premises, that God is her Father, that he’s king of heaven, that the daughters of kings are princesses. But she would not accept my conclusion.

The exchange felt a lot like conversations I’ve had with older girls—and adult women. They know intellectually that they’re loved by God, but they’ve bought into the lie that they’re not good enough. And so they pay lip service to God’s unending love and go happily back to hating themselves.

Being a Christian is so often about choosing God’s truth over the world’s lies, and I think we get that. We choose chastity and sobriety, we choose confession and fasting, we choose life and we march to support it. We’re glad to be radically different on all those surface issues, but we ignore the central truth of Christianity, that truth without which none of the rest of it makes sense:

God loves you.

Deeply, desperately loves you. He made you exactly as you are—on purpose—because he wanted you that way. From before the creation of the universe, God was planning your too-frizzy hair or too-loud laugh or too-big butt and loving it.

The world tells us the lie that we’re not smart enough or pretty enough or thin enough or athletic enough or popular enough or whatever. Popular Christianity counters with: yes, but God loves me anyway.

LIE!!

God doesn’t love you anyway—he loves you exactly this way! Sure, there are parts of you that are sinful or unhealthy and he wants to walk you through those. But he even loves you in your sin and your addiction. He loves every little bit of you. He’s captivated by you. Why?

Because you’re a princess, a daughter of the King.

The princesses in our stories are beautiful, yes, but they are also brave and clever—in the good stories anyway. More importantly, though, princesses are wonderful simply because of who they are. They don’t have to earn our love. We even love the awkward and plain ones in the stories we read as tweens. We love them because they are daughters of the King. He loves them, and that makes them good enough.

My friends, you are beautiful—so beautiful. You are brave and clever and strong. You are funny and sweet and loving. Maybe you’re a little short or sweaty or slow, but can’t you see that God is entranced by just that? Your cynicism is endearing, your chub lovely. The God of the universe made you just that way. He doesn’t make mistakes.

I need you to be strong on this one. I need you to decide today to serve God. You’ve done it in so many other ways. Today I’m asking you to believe that God is who he says he is. God is love. There is nothing about you that can change that. God is crazy in love with you—read Isaiah 62:3-5, if you don’t believe me. Or Hosea 2. Heck, read the whole book of Songs and tell me again that you’re not good enough.

You are so good. So beautiful. So loved. Don’t let the lies of this world ever convince you otherwise.

Letting Him Lead

He taught me to dance in my tiny grad school living room.  We had to push the futon out of the way to have room.  Sure, I’d “danced” before, but I never could get my feet to do the right things, and I was nervous.  I’m not generally clumsy,1 but there’s something about someone being that close and paying that much attention to the movement of my body that just makes me nervous.

This is not a picture of that dance lesson (although it would have been nice if he had been wearing a tux). But it is a picture of me dancing. So that’s relevant. Right?

But he was nice, and not my type, so I let him teach me.

“What do I do?” I asked, as he put his hand on the small of my back.

“Just lean back,” he smiled.

“But what are the steps?  How do I count?”  I’m sure a look of panic crept into my eyes, despite my desperate desire to maintain my composure.

“Just lean back and let me dance you.  Relax and look into my eyes.  In this style, the guy does the work.”

So I put my arm around his shoulders and my hand in his.  Then I took a deep breath and let go of myself.  I had to be loose for this.  I had to surrender, to let him hold me and look at me and move me.  A few times I tried to pay attention and catch up and do the “right thing” and it just got me all twisted.  For this dance to work at all, I really had to let him lead.

I could have fallen in love with him right there. I don’t know why more men don’t learn to dance.

I was wearing ripped jeans and flip flops, but I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so elegant or so graceful or so captivating.  There was nothing between us but the dance, but oh, what a dance.

It was one of the most intimate moments of my life, looking into his eyes, being held so close, almost letting him carry me.  It was pure and innocent and intense and I’m so grateful for that dance.

It’s a moment that comes back to me in prayer often, that ethereal half hour in the living room.  There’s something so beautiful about that image,about  the surrender involved in that dance.

I picture myself in the arms of Christ, just being held and adored.  I spend my life doing and thinking and achieving, but here it’s enough just to be.  There’s so much of me that wants to know what to do next, how to act, what steps to take, but that just makes me stumble.  The beauty of dancing with a man who knows how to lead is that all I have to do is look into his eyes and trust.

And so in prayer and in life, I’m trying to lean back.  I’m trying to let go of my plans and intentions and desires and to be caught up in his embrace.  There, in his arms, I don’t have to do anything but let myself be loved.  Dancing through life with him, I don’t have to know the song or the steps.  I just have to let go of my obsession with being in control and let him lead.

For years, my relationship with Christ has been a romantic one.  It’s the only way I can understand how consumed he is with love for me, the only way I can learn to live and move and have my being in him.  Maybe this image of being held and loved and danced won’t work for those of you who see him differently–men especially–but, oh, what a gift it is to find him in prayer and to feel the beauty and the power and the intimacy of that living room dance session in his Eucharistic embrace.

More often than not, the song I hear is a setting of St. Ignatius’ Prayer for Surrender:

Take, oh Lord, and receive
All my liberty, my memory,
My understanding, and my will.
All that I am and all that I possess
You have given to me.
And I surrender it all to you.
Form it to your will.
Give me only your love and your grace!
For with these I am rich enough
And desire nothing more

How perfect.

Irregular

  1. That scar on my arm? I ran into the door. At the library. Just call me Evel Knievel. [↩]

Why I Am (Still) a Christian

I’ve always been fascinated by conversion stories, the moments of grace and truth that pull people out of themselves and into the romance of faith.  Lauren Winner points out in an essay on staying Christian that learning about the great cannonball moments of people’s lives isn’t enough.  Faith isn’t about watershed moments and voices from heaven—it’s a long, slow, subtle series of whispers and inklings and dried tears and rest.

I’ve mentioned briefly that my conversion happened in an awkward confession in middle school.  But Lauren’s right: I’m not a Christian because I felt good about Jesus fifteen years ago.  My life with Christ is constantly being nourished—and challenged—by the people and the worship and the beauty and the books and the music and the hardships of every day.

I am a Christian because this world shows me evidence of design and its beauty strikes me as gift.

I am a Christian because I’ve never yet found a better explanation for the empty tomb.

I am a Christian because every little thing I encounter tells me that this is true.  I’ve read and researched and argued and I’m just convinced.  As with most things, Chesterton said it best:

The difficulty of explaining “why I am a Catholic” is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. I could fill all my space with separate sentences each beginning with the words, “It is the only thing that . . .” As, for instance, (1) It is the only thing that really prevents a sin from being a secret. (2) It is the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior; in the sense of supercilious. (3) It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. (4) It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message. (5) It is the only type of Christianity that really contains every type of man; even the respectable man. (6) It is the only large attempt to change the world from the inside; working through wills and not laws; and so on.

I am a Christian because I believe in goodness and I can’t for the life of me find any source of objective morality outside of God.

I am a Christian because there is nothing more still than the silence of the sanctuary.  There’s a peace that’s almost tangible when Christ is present in a room.  I’m too melancholic not to be convinced by the way his Real Presence calms my heart.

I am a Christian because by nature I am sullen and self-pitying but by grace I am filled with joy.  Only God could break my shriveled heart and make it new in such a spectacular way.

I am a Christian because the embrace of Christ is the only place where I am completely known and even more completely loved.  I fought for so long to be good enough and pretty enough and smart enough and then one day realized that I had been enough all along.  When I see myself through his eyes, life is worth living.  Otherwise, God help me.

I am a Christian because I know that I’m not good enough—he builds me up, strengthens and forgives me, and sends me into the world to do the impossible.  And somehow I do.

By God’s grace, I love him more today than I did in the passionate throes of my adolescent conversion.  Because love at first sight ain’t got nothing on decades of passionate faithfulness.  Back then, he was exciting and intriguing; today, he’s everything.

 

What about you?  Are you still coasting off a moment at God camp 30 years ago?  Or does he strengthen your faith daily, as he does mine?  I’d love to hear why you’re a Christian today.

Why I Go to Mass Every Day

Sometimes I have to drive 40 minutes each way.  Sometimes I have to walk in 100 degree weather.  Sometimes I have to skip a meal.  Sometimes I have to get up at 5:30.  Sometimes I have to take two cranky children.  Sometimes I have to go in Arabic or Polish or Korean.  Sometimes I have to drive through the snow.  Sometimes the homily is terrible.  Sometimes the priest is so sketchy that it barely counts as Mass.  Sometimes I’m sick or tired or just cranky.  Sometimes I don’t pay attention at all.

So worth it.  Every time.