The 7 Pillars of Catholic Spirituality by Matthew Kelly: The Mass

No.3: The Mass – I agree with Mr. West that the liturgy is the primary Catholic experience of God & of the Body of Christ. I agree that the vast number of Catholics do not get much out of the liturgy (i.e., “it’s boring”), because they come ignorant, ill-prepared, & with the wrong expectations of what’s wrong with the liturgy is in our heads & hearts. However, it is not true that every expression of the liturgy we encounter is a true one. The Church is not silent on the matter. While she permits a great many options, she has pastorally taught for decades what is the proper way to celebrate Mass in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Why? Because when properly celebrated, the dignity, beauty, & solemnity of the Roman Rite is compelling to people & facilitates the necessary spiritual dispositions for an encounter with the mystery of God.

Fathers, if you are in the habit of opening Mass with, “Hi! How is everybody doing today?” or even “Good Morning” instead of, “In nomine Patris...”, er, “In the name of…” then you are not fulfilling your responsibility to lead your people in worship of God, to raise their hearts & minds up to the heavenly. In mixing the sacred with the profane, you are sending mixed signals to your flock & sowing confusion. I can’t imagine a pastor that is worried that his parishioners show up for Mass too early, that church decorum is observed too well, that people are too attentive to the readings, that their devotion to Christ in the Eucharist is too great. Isn’t it rather the casualness & profane-ity of the masses at Mass & the resulting lack of receptivity that grieves our pastors? The “world” doesn’t take God, his Christ, or the Mass seriously at all. Don’t let it have a voice in the sacred liturgy by lending it yours. Do the Red, Say the Black, & everything will be fine.

As for the people, this is simple: dress appropriately, observe the fast, arrive on time, pay attention, follow along with what’s being said, read, sung, chanted, & prayed, give your share to the collection basket, & receive the Eucharist reverently if you possess the necessary dispositions to do so. You are in the presence of God: you are in the Upper Room, you are in the garden, you are at the trial, you are at the foot of the cross, you are at the empty tomb. You should take this seriously, because the liturgy speaks of the ultimate things of what it means to be a human being. Beware of shallow notions of “full, conscience, & active participation.” Your actuosa participatio should be primarily interior. To paraphrase St. Pope Pius X, when you carefully follow the actions on the altar & join your prayers to those of the priest, then you have prayed holy Mass.

Mr. West’s idea of being open to the one thing God is trying to say to you is a good one, whether you write it down or not. Even when it’s obscured by clumsy human action, the presence of Christ Jesus subsists in every part & action of the Mass. It is he as the Head joined to his Body that offers worship to God the Father. This is why you have to actually come to Mass & not just stay home & say prayers by yourself. We are called to physical unity as the assembled Body of Christ, just as we are called to physical union with Christ individually in the Eucharist (which you have to be present at Mass to receive). Of course, Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is quite special, but he is also really present in the proclaiming of the Scriptures, especially the Gospel, where Jesus addresses us anew in his own words, calling us to further conversion & showing us the way to Kingdom of God.

If you don’t get much out of Mass, maybe that’s because we’re not primarily there to receive anything. We are there first because God is God, & thus worthy of worship. Everything else flows from the sheer magnanimous generosity of God. If you leave Mass & go back to your normal life without a shadow of change, the problem isn’t with God or religion or the Mass, it’s with you. You have put an obstacle in the path of the Holy Spirit, which is how God works in your world, both exterior & interior. Examine your conscience & motivations, then go back to the top of the paragraph & start again. We all have a fearsome power over God – we can either welcome him, usually involving a measure of humility & suffering, or we can turn him away. He cannot compel your heart. Hopefully, we all have another whole week to work on it.

The 7 Pillars of Catholic Spirituality by Matthew Kelly: Contemplation

2. Contemplation – It is true that human thought is creative, though Mr. Kelly's examples might be a little flawed; but it is definitely true that what we think, we become.  If the goal of human existence is to become partakers in the divine nature, seems we should spend more than a little time contemplating the divine.  Maybe there exist those who can ponder their innermost thoughts & attain to the divine essence whilst working at their desk with the phone ringing, or in line at the grocery store or in traffic, but the rest of us need silence. 

The enemy hates silence, so he fills our lives with as much noise & distraction & activity as possible.  Therefore, unless you decide to change the pattern of your life & say, “I will spend W hours in prayer every Xday & Yday at Z 0’clock, & I will cull these things out of my life, because they're really just noisy & empty distractions," I doubt you will ever really find that time; there’s always something to crowd it out.  We are habitual creatures.  Our habits – the actions that reflect our priorities & our world view – are the activiites for which we regularly give our time.  It is largely through our habits that we create ourselves.  If our habits are for good, we grow in virtue; if for bad, we grow in vice.  There is no neutral ground here; we are either climbing the mountain of God or falling back down. 

Another consideration is receptivity.  Even if we could dwell in the most remote desert cave, the silence would do little good if we make it only a monologue about ourselves - it must be a dialogue.  Christians call this loving exchange prayer.  God converses with us in the silence, but he is the only one who really has anything interesting to say, so we must be prepared to listen.  But don’t be fooled.  This is no ordinary, empty silence; it is a very active waiting, full of the power of God &, therefore, full of every possibility.  It was in this silence that Mary received the angel & gave her fiat.  Make it a habit to spend time with God in silence.

In the Beginning by J. Ratzinger - Homily 4, Part 1

Point of Order - in an all-too-common moment of confusion, I managed to post the 2nd part of Ratzinger's homily first.  So perhaps you should read this, then skip back to the other part.  Cheers.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger begins his 4^th & last homily on the biblical accounts of Genesis by recalling a comment made by a fellow bishop: today we have cut the Gospel in half!  Many people speak about the Good News of Christianity in attractive & palatable ways, but no one dares today to speak the first part of Jesus’ prophetic message: Repent!  That is, to acknowledge the reality of sin.  Ratzinger says that to repent is “to acknowledge our sinfulness, to do penance, & to become other than what we are (p.61).” 

But sin is a very old-fashioned notion these days when many people reject moral norms as the residue of a backward & less-enlightened era.  Of this Ratzinger says, “…the whole idea of the moral has… been generally been abandoned.  This is a logical development if there is no standard for human beings to use as a model – something not discovered by us but coming from the inner goodness of creation.  With this we have arrived at the real heart of the matter.  People today know of no standard; to be sure, they do not want to know of any because they see standards as threats to their freedom (p.62).”  Here we see that sin & freedom are intrinsically connected together.  Man, however, was not given an absolute & boundless freedom; it is subject to the limitations of the one who grants it him.

Ratzinger then considers the two great images of the biblical account: the Garden & the Snake.  In the Garden, God establishes man as co-owner & co-creator; together as creature & creator in harmony, man’s life finds fulfillment.  The Garden is a place of peace, beauty, & plenty; the very image of God’s plan for man.  Indeed, God created man to be one with Himself.  Creation, then, is “a gift & a sign of the saving & unifying goodness of God (p.65).”  The snake, on the other hand, was a prominent figure in Eastern fertility cults & a great temptation for Israel to abandon its covenant with God & join the milieu of its time.  For the Israelites during the dark time of captivity in Babylon, & for us today, the snake sows doubt in God’s power & goodness, even his very existence.  Here we must ask, why did God create man in such a way so he would fall?  Love must be perfectly free or it is not love.  God gave man the power to choose Him or something else.  While the choice is free, the consequences are not.  Ratzinger notes, “man decides to not accept the limitations of his existence (p.67).”

Today, we clearly see that technology has advanced rapidly & has made life quite luxurious for those that can afford it, but it changes so rapidly as to be disorienting.  Art, too, no longer seeks to image the heavenly, but often becomes a putrid image of the fallen instead.  In the uniquely human fields of art & science, the only guiding principle is that whatever can be done must be done; but when separated from the beautiful, the good, & the moral, they quickly become monsters.  Ratzinger says, “the measure of human beings is what they can do & not what they are, not what is good or bad.  What they can do they may do… (p.68).” 

Much like the Israelites in captivity who began to forget God & turned toward their captor’s idolatrous ways, it is a trick of Satan today that “we look on [technology] nowadays with incomprehension & ultimately with helplessness…  [Men] do not free themselves, but place themselves in opposition to the truth. And that means that they are destroying themselves & the world (p.69).”  We think of ourselves as quite advanced today, but only a miniscule few of us actually know how all the electronic devices upon which we rely actually work.  Likewise, art has degraded into entertainment, whose goal seems increasingly to be the peddling of smut.  In his slavery to technology, Ratzinger notes that men “do not make themselves gods… but rather caricatures, pseudo-gods, slaves of their own abilities… (p.70).”

We end with man enslaved to the idols of his own creation; but next time we will see the response of the New Testament.

The 7 Pillars of Catholic Spirituality by Matthew Kelly: Confession

Everybody loves a list, so the CD “The Seven Pillars of Catholic Spirituality” has been making the rounds & getting some attention in my parish. It’s pretty good; he gets straight to the heart of the modern Catholic malaise & responds with sound advice, amusing stories, & orthodox teaching. Plus, anyone with a foreign accent seems to have immediate credibility with Americans, so hopefully people will tune in long enough to actually consider his propositions & make some God-oriented changes in their lives.

I do think it is funny/sad that people will pay a speaker to come tell them what anyone who takes the holy Faith seriously could tell them if asked. Admitting my daily failure to live according to the teachings of Christ, I must say that I have tried to press the importance of a few of these items in my catechism & Scripture classes, & in reply usually I just get blank stares with crickets chirping in the background.

With that intro, here’s my point-by-point take on the Seven Pillars of Catholic Spirituality, 1 or 2 points at a time…

Pillar No. 1: Confession – It is true that the world has lost its sense of sin in general, but among Christians who still have a sense of right & wrong many will say they just “take it Jesus.” Apart from setting aside Scripture on the matter of confession, being such masters of self-deception as we humans are, our desire to “just take it Jesus” quickly devolves into, “I’ll take it to Jesus as soon as I have something serious to confess, which, I mean, really isn’t that often is it? I mean, virtually never; because when I said those things to that person, they really deserved it; & when I took that stuff, I really needed it; & when I slept with so-n-so, I was just loving my neighbor like we’re supposed to; & when I did this or that, it’s because I can justify anything whatsoever to myself. Nope, I don’t really ever have anything to take to Jesus. He loves me just as I am & he forgives everything I do.”

Sure he loves you, but he is also calling you to something far greater, & refusal to seriously acknowledge one's wrong-doings is refusal to enter into the heavenly banquet (Mt 22). Did you notice that the king's open invitation to his son's wedding banquet came down rather suddenly? Remember the poor sap that was thrown out because he didn’t have his clean, white wedding garment ready? Don’t be that guy!

This is pretty easy: just on the human level we need to spend time examining our thoughts, words, & deeds, & then we have to own our sins before someone else so as to get the poison out of our system by actually saying them aloud to a confident. Think of all the money paid to psyhiatrists who ask us, "And how does that make you feel?"  What people really want to hear is, "My child, your sins are forgiven. Now go & sin no more."  So, on the supernatural level, the sacrament brings grace that helps us to overcome those things that plague us & restores the joy & peace proper to children of God & restores harmony with others. I assure you, Satan hates Confession.  So get in the box. You’ll be glad you did.