More Nice

Between Sports and the Party: When Teaching the Faith Feels Like Babysitting

A fired-up catechist shares successful lessons with a frustrated volunteer.

Nice

The next few posts link to RAnn's Sunday Snippets


I like this.

This too:

DIY card via Vistaprint. It was too easy. 

Thumb on Ya Forehead

My take on Ash Wednesday: people like the intimate, blunt touch of the priest's thumb against their foreheads, and being marked by the touch. It gets right to the fundamental wisdom of sacraments.

Of course it's not a sacrament. And as a symbol of repentance you could could mark your own forehead with a cross of ashes. But that would be skipping the bit where someone with Jesus' authority reminds you of your sinfulness and mortality; and you meekly accept that gentle chastisement. Without necessarily understanding the fullness of the ritual, I think that's the main reason so many non-Cats want to receive ashes.

Not Like Magua

For what ails ya

I heard this story at Mass this week:

The serpent said to the woman, "Did God say, 'You shall not eat of any tree of the garden'?" 2 And the woman said, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; 3 but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden..." 4* But the serpent said to the woman, "God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." 6 So..the woman...took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate...The LORD God said, "Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" 12 The man said, "The woman...gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate." 13* Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this that you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent beguiled me, and I ate." (That's 10 eats.)

A Whole Lotta Eating going on. And I was thinking how Adam & Eve weren't forbidden from looking at something, or holding something, or wearing something, or using something; but eating something. Which makes sense because what you eat becomes part of you, whether it's nutritious or poisonous. And sin is as much a part of me as say, the DNA I also inherited from my parents.

But here's another Whole Lotta Eating episode:

"Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever... The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" 53 So Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; 54 he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. 56* He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me. 58* This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live for ever." (That's also 10 eats. More than coincidence?)

Another nice OT-NT couplet. Humans freely ingest the poison of sin; but they can also freely ingest the antidote. This is a concept the kids will grasp immediately. But John 6 doesn't show how. The how comes at the Last Supper. This year we've already covered Genesis and John 6.  So during tomorrow night's Last Supper class, I'll start with a quick backtrack to the eating in Genesis. Then when we get to "this is my body, this is my blood" we'll recall John 6 and eating the fruit, the kids will figure out how they combine to say something significant about Mass. Then in our Mass classes at the end of April, I expect I will be able to ask, "What does eating the fruit in Genesis have to do with Communion," and hear back something like, "Adam and Eve ate the bad food but now we eat the good food." In 6th grade that's an A.

Next year this idea will run from the first class to the last class: Genesis/ Passover/ John 6/ Last Supper/ Mass.

Audio based on the above content here.

Enchanted Sirach

This post links to RAnn's Sunday Snippets

Viva la Caccia

My wife personifies the Ideal Wife in Proverbs 31, which is not the subject of this post. This post is about our courtship some 26 years ago. Briefly, this was our courtship:

Some enchanted evening

When you find your true love,

When you feel her call you

Across a crowded room,

Then fly to her side,

And make her your own

Or all through your life you

May dream all alone.

Once you have found her,

Never let her go.

Once you have found her,

Never let her go.

That's right, a couple of verses from South Pacific's Some Enchanted Evening. I first heard Ezio Pinza sing it when I was a kid, and it has defined romance for me ever since.

So tonight I was browsing the Bible before Mass started. Let's try...Sirach. I get to Chapter 6:

"My son, from your youth up choose instruction, and until you are old you will keep finding wisdom. Come to her like one who plows and sows, and wait for her good harvest... Come to her with all your soul, and keep her ways with all your might." It's about Wisdom, but it made me think about my wife. And "Make her thy whole heart’s quest, follow, as best thou canst, the path she makes known to thee," which reminded me of our courtship, and Some Enchanted Evening. Then "search, and thou wilt find her, hold fast, and never let her go."

If Oscar Hammerstein wasn't riffing on Sirach when he wrote that lyric then this is a bigger vale of tears than I thought.


P.S. Sirach is a deuterocanonical book. I do wonder how Hammerstein might have encountered it.

Cri de Coeur 2

This post links to RAnn's Sunday Snippets

Sunflowers maybe

In the past week I engaged in some online discussion about the Church and the Laity. At one blog I was asked to answer the following question: "If you were able to make a request of your pastor regarding what you would like to see happening at Church, what would you ask for?"

I responded:

"The Institutional Church might enable the laity to use its structure to do things that the Institutional Church doesn't initiate, or direct, or manage, or oversee. Take my Diocese of Charleston SC. About 200k Catholics. Let's assume at a 1% rate, there are 2,000 Intentional Disciples in the state. I know maybe 100 of them. Suppose there were a clearinghouse for all self-identified IDs? It'd be useful for the motivated layman to know who all the others are, and coordinate, and support each other in ways we can only guess at. There are great things only the laity can do. But until we know who is ready to act we can only act individually, and in isolation. We can coalesce imperfectly around existing structures such as prolife and RE, but I believe we'll thrive if the Church simply calls the scattered mustard seeds to know each other at the diocesan level on down. And leaves the rest to Holy Spirit.

Speaking on the lay side, the fact that I'm socially connected to like-minded, New E Catholics in my parish/ deanery/ diocese/ Anglosphere is a huge encouragement in what I do as an individual. And it also means we give and receive lots of feedback, coordinate and put people in touch with each other, have lunch, etc. It may sound facile, but that sense of family matters a lot. And it all happens without being the clergy's problem."

Also in the last week I proposed to a pastor this approach to jumpstarting the New Evangelization in his parish. Something like it would be read from the pulpit and included in the weekly bulletin:

"Brothers & Sisters in Christ,

You are probably familiar with the term New Evangelization, which was first used by Pope JP2 more than 30 years ago. I’ve spoken about it both from the pulpit and in my other communications to the parish. Pope Francis regularly encourages all Catholics to help with "the church's primary mission of evangelization in the modern world." So evangelizing is something that the Church has been emphasizing for a long time, although I expect we can all agree that there’s not yet much evangelizing going on.

So what can we do? I hesitate to create a new parish-wide initiative or program, because I don’t think that's what we need. Instead I’d like all of you to reflect for the next month on whether you as an individual Catholic are called by Jesus to participate in building up the Church, whether by evangelizing or something else. You may feel a bit isolated or frustrated that God wants you to do something, but you may not know what it is. Or maybe you do know, and don’t see a way to make it happen. Maybe some of you already evangelize in your daily lives, and no-one else in the parish knows. Whoever you are, I know you’re out there, because the God gave each of us something to do, and the Holy Spirit gave us the gifts to do it. But I don’t know who you all are, and you may not know each other, either. So here’s what I propose:

On xx/xx/xx at xx p.m the parish will host a one hour social with light hors d’oeuvres. If the Holy Spirit moves you to come, come. If the Spirit doesn’t move you, but you’re curious, you come too. If this isn't your regular parish, come anyway. There won’t be a program for the evening beyond me saying a few words of greeting. Most of the time would be spent meeting each other, and finding out how we all help, or would like to help, make the Church all Jesus wants her to be.

As I said, there’s no plan, no program, and no obligation; just conversation and nibbles. It’s ok to just show up, but it’d help to figure food and drinks if you email xxxx if you do plan to come. See the bulletin for the email address.

It's a great time to be Catholic."

Here's my point: there are too many lay Catholics with too many unique gifts waiting to be used in ways that only the Holy Spirit may be aware of, for the Church to motivate and direct them all from the top down. So the alternative is to let the purposeful faithful find their own ways forward. That's how things have developed in my part of Upstate S.C.: a self-maintained, growing informal network of Intentional Disciples. But it took 15 years to develop all by itself. What I'd like to see is that same lay network extended throughout the diocese in much less time. How? By having the Diocese use its statewide structure and authority to generate an ekklesia, a calling-out of the motivated faithful from random obscurity into the light, so they can all see each other, both physically and via the net. The shepherd would still care for the flock, and watch for wayward sheep; but wouldn't organize, direct, or program this informal association. That'd be left to the people and the Holy Spirit.

Like Mao said, "Let Flowers of Many Kinds Blossom."

Book Review 7: Not the Fist, the Fingers

This post links to Convert Journal

I was given a review copy of Catholic Laity in the Mission of the Church: Living Out Your Lay Vocation by Russell Shaw. I looked at the cover: a blob of faceless people dressed the same, doing no-skill-no-brains heavy lifting, participating serf-like in yet another Hidebound Church Ritual. As my mother-in-law says: Oh Dear. I anticipated the usual disembodied dull platitudes and tiresome restatements of the obvious. Fortunately I read the book anyway, and was pleasantly surprised. I thought it was the opposite of the cover. It's about each lay person as a uniquely-gifted individual, not all of us en masse. 

The book kicks off with a history of the laity, the clergy, and their relationship, from Acts of the Apostles to the end of the 19th century. Huh- I didn't even know the laity had a history. Turns out we do, and it bears directly on what our roles may be today. Moving on to the 20th century, you'll be familiar with Catholic Action, the Catholic Worker movement, and Opus Dei. They're included not so much to explain what they are, but to show how they fit into a 2000-year-old stream of non-clergy doing their own thing. I like that.

Vatican 2 is treated at length, both in its specific attention to encouraging the laity to Get Out There Without Waitin' for Faddah an' Sistah t'Tell Ya What t'Do; and the difference between what V2 asked the laity to do, and what the laity's actually done so far. Apparently lay Catholics are still too much beholden to the clergy, which I understand completely, having been born in 1957. It wasn't that the Church didn't say, "Y'all lay folks got your own charisms, go use 'em." She did. But the people were thinking in terms of doing stuff within the established system, and following the initiatives of that system; and Mama Church didn't argue. Even today the typical Catholic has yet to jump on the chance to figure out his or her unique gifts, and then act on them without necessarily seeking the Church's approval, guidance, or control. But that was still V2's message.

So what's the problem? We could rattle off a few, but I would not have included clericalism among them. You know, what Pope Francis talks about every Tuesday. Shaw writes: "Clericalism....assumes that clerics not only are, but are meant to be the active, dominant elite in the Church, and lay people the passive, subservient mass." Careful attention is given to clericalism; how it curbs the laity's initiative and sense of responsibility; and how to minimize its effects. (Shaw wrote this book in 2005. Francis must have read it.)

That's the first half of the book, thematically if not physically. The second half discusses how the laity can get on with it:

1. Taking the idea of lay vocation seriously. That is, every lay person is called by God to Do Something, no less than Faddah or Sistah. God called you. Yes, you. Get on with it.

2. Figuring out your vocation and the charisms you received at Confirmation. So you can get on with it.

3. Taking responsibility for the Church.

4. Evangelizing the World wherever you find yourself. Get on with it. You could die tomorrow. OK, that's me talking, not the book, but a sense of urgency is a good thing.

If you're already on the New Evangelization Express, doing the Intentional Disciple Thing, you probably don't need to read this book. But you'll profit from its broad and deep scope if you do read it. If you're on the fence, or behind the fence, then yes, you need to read this book.

Get fired up about Jesus and His Church.