Ask Not What You Can Get Out of Mass, But Whether Due Worship is Given to God

One of the problems with contemporary Christianity is that too often Christians focus on what they “get out of Church.” I am thinking specifically of the plight parents find themselves in when their sweet newborn grows out of sleeping at Mass and becomes the loud and active baby. Their experience of Mass changes from one of focused prayer with very involved participation to distracted prayer and focus on keeping a child quiet in church. And while negative comments to parents about their children are rare, those are the comments that stick in parents’ minds, much more so than positive comments and encouraging smiles.

One cranky fellow parishioner can take away a parent’s comfort with bringing their little baptized Christian to Sunday Mass. So the parents start going to separate Masses or take the baby to the back, fearing that their child is disrupting the personal prayer of those around them. It seems to the parent that as long as they bring little ones to church they will not be able to pray. This is not the case. They just need to learn to pray differently and realize that Mass is not about personal prayer but it is a place of public prayer.

Here is the thing: the liturgy is about the Body of Christ as a whole giving due worship to God. It is about the Sacrifice of the Mass being made, which requires only that the priest make the actions of the liturgy in a fitting manner and that the baptized members of the parish be present. It does not matter for the due worship of God whether that I am pacing in back with a child or parenting my 21 month old into quietness in the pew. My inability to focus and my not “getting anything out of Mass” is not taking away from the due worship of God. But my child not being there, my child being sent to children’s church or a nursery, takes away from the fullness of the Body of Christ being present at our obligatory Sunday liturgy. Children as baptized members of the community should be at the Mass, as Canon 1247 states, not excluding people by age, “On Sundays and other holy days of obligation, the faithful are obliged to participate in the Mass.”

Tuesday Night Mass by Ben SmidtPhoto by Ben Smidt. In the Creative Commons.

I discovered as a young parent that while personal private focus on the liturgy is important and good, it is not the purpose of the liturgy. The liturgy is the public worship of God, and while private consolations at Mass are a good thing, that is not the purpose of Mass. The Mass will go on. Personal, private worship of God is just that: something we can do personally and privately outside of the context of the liturgy. My husband and I have found that when we are able to set aside time for private prayer when our children are asleep and when we take time to go to a chapel alone, we have a deeper more personal relationship with God than when we worry about “getting something out of Mass” in addition to teaching them how to behave.

And as for everyone else, who is not the parent of the active and loud or fussy child, please be patient with families. For all Christians, the liturgy is not primarily meant for private prayer, but for all baptized Christians to pray together (even the non-baptized who are present worship God at the liturgy). It is an awful thing for Christians to criticize parents who have loud children. None of us know what it is like to parent each individual child; all people are different. We do not know if a child is teething and impossible to soothe or a child has allergies or any of those things, but we do know that children are meant to be in Church just as much as adults should be. Children are our hope for the future, and we should welcome them, with their non-adult behavior and all.  Since the liturgy is a place of public worship, all attending need to remember this and not be upset if they lose their personal focus on prayer. If we need quiet for prayer, then we should take time to pray in in addition to our attendance at Mass.

I am not advocating that children run wild in Church, I am trying to explain that the distractedness that even disciplined children cause it Church is okay, because they do not take away from the due worship given to God. I try my best to keep my children from distracting others, ask other parents to do the same, and ask the whole community to be welcoming of children and encouraging to parents. And cry rooms, nurseries, and children’s church (during the Liturgy) do not make children and parents feel welcome. When someone tells a parent pacing in back where the cry room is or to take their child behind the glass window in the back of Church, a parent feel ashamed to have children there and feels exiled from the body of the church.

If everyone were to realize that it is not about what one personally gets out of Mass, but giving due worship to God, then everyone would not feel like they need to create a space to for parents and children but would welcome them into the main body of the church. And parents can learn how to focus on the public worship in the liturgy, modeling it to their children, and stop fretting about what they “get out of Mass” and think more about what they bring to God.

How the Charismatic Renewal Led Me to a Traditional Life of Prayer

Praying by John Simoudis. In the Creative Commons.

Recently a friend from church asked me about why I started a new household when I was a student at Franciscan University of Steubenville. At Franciscan, households are groups of men or women who share a common spiritual devotion and way of praying. Usually students join an already existing one, but sometimes a group of three or more students will start a new one. My friend wanted to know if I found all of the other households to be too “charismatic,” but the thing is, my household was extremely charismatic. A lot of our prayer together came from what some of the other founders learned as they grew up in the Charismatic Renewal. During my time in college, I transitioned to a more traditional understanding of prayer and liturgy, but I never gave up entirely what I learned from a charismatic life of prayer.

My charismatic story begins with my parents meeting at a prayer gathering back in the late 70s in the basement of a church in St. Louis. Then there is the story of them getting married, having four children, and raising us all Catholic. They became less and less active in their charismatic community as my childhood advanced, but I still was prayed over every night, with my father laying hands on me. When I had nightmares about evil spirits, my parents taught me how to command them to leave me in Jesus’ name.

In high school I attended Life Teen Masses on Sunday evening, and started participating in praise and worshipstyle prayer. I went to the Steubenville Youth Conference in St. Louis and had powerful experiences in Eucharistic Adoration. At the youth conferences and Masses, I learned the emotional aspect of praising God in a setting of modern Christian music. It was not until college that I learned about the “charismatic gifts” of the Holy Spirit.

In my first month at Franciscan University of Steubenville for college, I met a group of kids, many of them raised in the charismatic communities in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We held prayer meetings outside all over campus, and when the weather turned cold we found off campus houses to pray in (we were very loud and did not want to disrupt the dorms). It was from them that I learned about the receptive yielding one must have to the Holy Spirit to receive what St. Paul calls the “spiritual gifts.” These are called by the Charismatic Renewal “charismatic gifts,” by St. Thomas Aquinas “graces,” and by those who commented on St. Thomas “graces freely given.” The gifts are identified in First Corinthians:

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord;and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one.
To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.
To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.
All these are inspired by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.
1 Corinthians 12:4-12

In the Charismatic Renewal there has been an emphasis on receiving these particular gifts for the good of the Church and the community. It seemed to be a renewal of the receiving of these gifts in the Church. When you read about the lives of the Saints, you can see how they received graces from the Holy Spirit, some of them being those specified in First Corinthians and others not specific to this list. But it does seem that St. Paul is saying that all Christians can be and are meant to be given these spiritual gifts: “to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” We are all called to holiness, and we should seek to receive graces from the Holy Spirit through the Sacraments and through other forms of prayer.

Back in college, while I spent a lot of time in praise and worship settings, it was really in my experiences of praying over and for others that I received some of the listed spiritual gifts. When my friends and I started our household, based out of our praying with each other, our main focus was healing prayer ministry. The Holy Spirit used our prayer ministry to bring healing to all of the ladies of the household, and to any person who asked us for prayer. It was all very beautiful and all very emotional. I believe that the spiritual gifts I received were authentic, as they expanded my life of prayer and increased my love of God.  But I could not have had this experience had I not had a habitual, disciplined life of prayer in which I sought spiritual union with God and submitted myself to the graces being offered to me by the Holy Spirit.

I have written before about how my study of theology and my habitual prayer life led me to desire more from the Church. Through prayer and reason, I became convinced that I should start covering my head in Church, and became drawn to attending the Extraordinary Form liturgy of the Latin Rite. I was led to these through the charismatic prayer that had formed the foundation for my relationship with God as an adult. From my youthful emotional relationship with God I was lead to a deeper, more rational relationship with God, which I was able to express in the solemnity of the Old Mass.
While I was starting to attend the EF Mass as much as possible, I was still active in my household prayer ministry. In my intercession for those whom I was praying over, I offered them words of wisdom or other prayers. When I would attend traditional liturgies, I would yield to the Holy Spirit during the times of beautiful chant or intense quiet, and I would find myself united to God in a prayerful praise. I found that my charismatic experiences were not specific to the prayer that takes place in the Charismatic Renewal, but I that by participating in charismatic prayer that I learned better how to pray in all circumstances.

I have been formed by the charismatic way of praying, and while I no longer attend prayer meetings, I do pray over my husband when he asks, and ask him to do so in return. I listen to and pray with contemporary Christian music as I cook my family dinner or run errands. I take the advice of St. Francis de Sales and remember the presence of God throughout my day. The more saints I read about and the more I seek to pray better, the more I realize that the fruits in my life of prayer from my involvement in the Charismatic Renewal are similar to, although much lesser than, the fruits of the lives of prayer of the most mystical of the Church’s saints. I know that my life of prayer will always be significantly less than that of the saints, but a greater prayer life is something for which I should continually strive.

So many of the saints had a rich prayer life, and yielded to the guidance and gifts of the Holy Spirit. Many of the Church Fathers, when giving guidance on how to pray, explain how to submit oneself to God in prayer, and to remember God at every moment. The phenomena of healings, prophecy, locutions, and consolations have long been a part of the life of the Church, and when one has a habitual and devoted life of prayer, they are a part of the individual’s prayer as well.

These spiritual gifts were present in the time of St. Paul, were present in the lives of saints throughout the Church, were possibly present in the life of the simplest devoted lay person, and are present now. They bring the individual closer to God, and they build up the whole of the Church. I am blessed to have experienced these spiritual gifts and am glad that I can seek them still for the building up of my domestic Church and the universal Church.

Originally published in full at Truth and Charity…

http://truthandcharity.net/how-the-charismatic-renewal-lead-me-to-a-traditional-life-of-prayer/

Join Me in a Novena for Marriages!

M and I praying for our marriage on our wedding day. There are five married couples beyond us!

I am so excited to share this with everyone. I have been planning this and bursting with the desire to share it with you all! I am going to pray a novena for the sanctification of marriages, and I would like to pray it for specific marriages and would love for you to join me!

I have been writing a lot recently about holy families and holy marriages, taking much of my inspiration from the example of Blessed Louis and Zélie Martin. You can read about their holy life together here. They lived out their marriage beautifully, centering the family around prayer, and both living lives of heroic virtue. As I wrote my articles, I realized that most marriages do not have an ideal situation for becoming holy. It takes the desire and devotion of both spouses to create a holy marriage, and a marriage that does not embrace all the graces of the Sacrament is missing out.

I am inviting you (and your spouse if he or she desires) to join me and my husband in a novena to Bl. Louis and Zélie Martin (from the site ““Blessed Louis and Zelie Martin: The Parents of St. Therese of Lisieux” run by a very nice lady Maureen O’Riordan) leading up to their Feast day on July 12. The novena will begin in one week on Thursday, July 3 and end on Friday, July 11. On the 12th itself, we will pray a litany to the holy couple. The novena itself has an imprimatur, so it is even Church approved!

If you would like to follow along with me in the novena, I will be posting reminders on this blog, Living With Lady Philosophy. You can sign up to receive emails with the reminders by following my blog by email in the left hand column, or follow the blog in a RSS feed. I will try to post the reminders to Facebook daily, but since we will be traveling, I cannot guarantee that.

Here you may also leave your intentions for your marriage or for someone else’s in the comments or you may email me your intention to livingwithladyphilosophy at gmail dot com (skip the spaces and use the actual punctuation), and I will add you to my list. If you wish to remain anonymous just give your first initials (ex. M&S) or your last initial (Mr. & Mrs. S) or even make up initials.

I am so excited to share this powerful novena with you my readers and to have this opportunity to pray for your marriages!

Our Hoped for Baby and My Trip to the ER

Last week I shared our very present grief over our unborn baby who had passed away inside me. Today I need to write about my experience of the baby passing on Tuesday.
_________
I think the story starts on the Tuesday of Holy Week. I had a pregnancy evaluation with my Creighton instructor. I have been charting with her for 7 years, so it feel funny to always call her that. She is an incredible lady, who always answers my questions and phone calls. In fact we might not have even known of this baby if it had not been for her recommending I get on progesterone post peak so a baby would have a chance to implant. Anyway, so when you do a Creighton eval, there are a whole bunch of questions that they ask and you have to give a multiple choice answer. It is for their data or something. One of the questions was, “Was this baby planned?” I have a strong aversion to the word “planned” when it comes to having children. I think it is the root of a lot of problems society has in its view of children. So, I told her so. I said that I didn’t really like that question, but I did not really want to say that the baby was “unplanned”. I talked it out, thinking that the baby had been hoped for and that we had wanted to have another baby and hopefully that cycle. So, sure, our hoped for baby was “planned”. We knew what we were doing when we hoped for another baby.

An early ultrasound of F.

Then three days later, we found out that this baby was not growing. This baby was gone. I looked back at the dates, and discovered that the baby probably stopped growing on the feast of St. Gemma Galgani, who is my Confirmation saint. And if you know about the immense amount of suffering she experienced in her life, I realized that praying to her about this baby, was really just asking her to help me suffer gracefully, to offer my sufferings. This quotation of hers helped me through my labor with L, and now with the loss of this baby:

–> “It is true Jesus, if I think of what I have gone through as a child, and now as a grown up girl, I see that I have always had crosses to bear; But oh! how wrong are those who say that suffering is a misfortune!” 

“It is true Jesus, if I think of what I have gone through as a child, and now as a grown up girl, I see that I have always had crosses to bear; But oh! how wrong are those who say that suffering is a misfortune!” – See more at: http://www.stgemmagalgani.com/#sthash.Yuc4M1L1.dpuf
“It is true Jesus, if I think of what I have gone through as a child, and now as a grown up girl, I see that I have always had crosses to bear; But oh! how wrong are those who say that suffering is a misfortune!” – See more at: http://www.stgemmagalgani.com/#sthash.Yuc4M1L1.dpuf

Further, we found out about our loss on Good Friday. We prayed the first day of the Divine Mercy Novena on our way to Good Friday liturgy, and my doctor called me just before 3pm to leave a message, just before she went into her liturgy. So, we contemplated Jesus’ death for us, and knew that our suffering at the loss of our baby was for something greater than ourselves.

Friday night we discussed whether or not our baby would have increased intellectual abilities after being separated from his or her tiny body. The body limits the intellect, but if our baby was even in a place of natural happiness, he would be able to know God, and if our baby was attaining the beatific vision, then maybe our baby would know about us and his family on earth. And that was something we could hope for as we entrusted our baby to the mercy of God.

Easter week we waited for the baby to pass, knowing that it might be awhile. I was on extra progesterone until Monday morning, and my levels would have to drop for the baby to come out. We prayed our novena, shared our distress with our friends, and felt the great grace of everyone’s prayers. The wonderful Moms group at St. Agnes offered meals, and we almost refused. I did not think I would need the help of meals, but I am glad we accepted knowing now the exhaustion of passing the baby. I sit here now, so thankful for the dinner a friend is bringing today. I also went to a lovely birthday party with some lady friends, and spent an evening laughing.

Easter Friday, I was really thinking and praying about a name for the baby. It was hard to decide or to even think of options. We have agreed on many names for our hoped for children, but I never considered what to call one who was miscarried. Then I thought about the canonizations to take place on Divine Mercy/Low Sunday. M and I both grew up with Pope Saint John Paul II as the only pope we knew. We were already in college when he passed away, and had loved him dearly during his life. While in Europe for a semester in college we saw his birth place, home parish, and went to the Divine Mercy Shrine in Poland. I realized that we should name the baby John Paul. I suggested it to M and he wanted to think about it.

Divine Mercy Sunday at Mass, I started to have symptoms of the baby passing: cramping and bleeding. We decided that the baby would be called John Paul in honor of the first pope that we knew. It took a few more days for things to progress.

Warning: Things are a little birth storyish from here on…blood and things…

We finally made it to a morning Mass on Tuesday for the Feast of St. Catherine of Sienna. We had been finding it difficult to get up early enough to go at 7:30am. I had stronger cramping during Mass and was pretty exhausted. M went to campus, and I tried to do housework. The girls were playing nicely, so I decided to not worry about home school. I cleaned the bathroom walls. I know, kind of a weird chore. I really wanted to deep clean; maybe it was some weird hormonal nesting thing. I finished cleaning the walls and realized that something was passing. I ran to the downstairs bathroom (to be away from the kids) and realized it was happening. It was physically easiest delivery experience of my life, but emotionally the hardest. I needed M home. He was not teaching his class yet, so I called him, told him I was pretty sure I had passed the baby and the placenta, started to cry, and asked him to come home. Then I found the baby, cleaned up, and tried to go back up to the girls.

F was screaming for me, so I gave her food I knew she would eat, safe in her high chair. I gave the big girls play dough, which always keeps them happy, and then realized there was more coming. The bleeding was not slowing, but rapidly increasing. I watched the clock for M to come home. I realized I probably would need to go to the hospital if things did not slow. I tried to go into denial, not wanting to make a big deal, but ended up calling my doctor. I told them how much I was bleeding and they were like, “Go to the ER, NOW!”

M arranged childcare at a nearby friends house. I called my sister who had gone through the whole bleeding way to much during miscarriage scenario to mentally prepare myself for the ER experience. (I am mostly melancholic; mental preparation is everything.) I tried to figure out what would hold all the blood on the way to the hospital, and went with a size 5 baby diaper.

We dropped off the kids, and our friends looked really worried. We had never gone to that hospital from this part of town, so we had a little trouble finding the right exit, but we got there. After signing in and talking to the triage nurse, we were sent to the waiting room. I wondered if they minded blood getting on their chairs, unsure of how long the diaper would hold up. We sat chatting for a few minutes, thankful that we had had a week and a half to emotionally accept the loss of our baby, and I suddenly felt light headed and nauseated. I told M and he ran to tell the desk. They brought out a wheelchair and told me it would be 10-15 minutes before my room would be ready. All I could think about was how awful I felt, how I really did not want to vomit, and did not think I could possibly last 10-15 minutes. Then I was dreaming. I did not feel sick at all. M saw me pass out and panicked, but the nurse was walking up behind me as it happened. The nurse convinced M that he needed to pull it together. M later told me that he thought that I might have died there sitting in the chair; the way my eyes rolled back into my head and I limped over really frightened him. I do not recollect it at all, but M was holding my face when I woke up. Upon waking up, I felt so much better than I had before passing out. The recollection of where I was and what was going on hit me pretty quickly as the nurse told me that I had passed out and to rest my head in his hand. I followed his instructions.

They wheeled me in a hurry to a room as I became more conscious. They told us that the best way to get to a room quickly is to pass out. I guess we got ahead of the sweet looking old couple who was sitting in the waiting room. So, I ended up in a hospital gown, on an IV, with a doctor giving me an exam. M was still really worried. They decided to call my doctor, to see what they would recommend. We had brought the iPad and M posted a status asking for prayers, which a friend said this about: “M[…] scared me with his cryptic FB post! I’ve been praying for you throughout the day.”

The OB on staff at our awesome, Catholic clinic, showed up pretty quickly. He said we could wait to see if the bleeding slowed or go ahead and do a surgical D&C. I asked to wait, and M agreed. So, they gave me something to help the uterus clamp down, and M went home to give the kids a nap.

I am a huge fan of emergency prayers from friends and family, and love that social networking is a way to pass on the need for prayer. I continued to check Facebook, called my mom and sister, and dozed for two hours. While dozing I tried to pray a Divine Mercy Chaplet for healing. The bleeding slowed, and by the time M came back, they said I could go home. I was so relieved, and so thankful for the prayers.

We got home, and I felt like I do after delivering a baby. I was exhausted and cramping, but had no baby to hold. I did have a very clingly toddler, who decided nursing was just what she needed. They had told me to take it easy and rest for a few days. I am still feeling the wear of losing the blood. It is pretty incredible to me that while I was only 8 weeks along, the passing of the the baby and the recovery feels so similar to a full term labor. Thank you for all of your prayers for my health and for little John Paul.

We are going to bury him in a local cemetery sometime in the next couple of weeks, and I am sure I will need to write about it again then.

In the Desert

Last night, on an impulse, opened a scrapbook I had made for my, then, fiance in the nine days between our engagement and Christmas. I made a beautiful record of our relationship starting with our first semester of college through when we became engaged a little over two years after we had met. What struck me about it was that on every page I had put a meaningful passage from scripture; back in college I spent time reading scripture everyday. After we had kids, and since I have been blogging, I have focused my reading on other things. In the short ten minutes of prayer time I set aside, I have been reading spiritual books or lives of the Saints. While, my husband and I have gotten back into praying our breviaries for morning and night prayer, my daily encounter with scripture only happens if we make it to Mass, and that only happens if we get out of bed in time for 7:30am Mass. For past week some child has been running a fever or had a nasty cough, so we have been trying to let the kids sleep. But it is not just the past week, the whole of the Winter, we were always making excuses of one or another not to go to Mass.

I am perfectly aware that daily Mass going is certainly not required of a family with three small children, but I know that when we go to daily Mass, we are a happier and better family.

We have a strong family prayer routine, with morning prayers, meal prayers, and bedtime prayers, but I feel that I have been missing something. I miss going to adoration, which I was able to do daily when I lived in Steubenville. But now we live two minutes from a perpetual adoration chapel, and with the kids going to bed at 7:45pm every night, there is no reason I can’t take time at least once a week to go and pray, to bring my Bible and sit and read and pray and journal.

I am realizing that I need a change, and trying not to be frustrated with myself for not realizing this sooner. I realize now, that the emptiness I have been feeling lately, my desire for more companionship, is a need for growing closer to God. That is what is missing now. I am highly dependent on a life of routine, and when I don’t have a routine, things tend to fall apart mentally. I can’t focus, I can’t plan, and I hang on to the semblance of routine that I do have, spending the rest of my day in aimless activity.

But the great thing about being human is that there is always room for improvement. Now is the time to improve, to pray, to trust, and to seek guidance. I am not sure that I have a conclusion here, and I am going to resist my need to wrap this up in a perfect ending, because I have no more to say. I guess I am in a good spot for the Triduum.