bearing blog

"What is the Eucharist?"

I figured I might as well share some of what I have been writing over at Electingthepope.net, Dorian Speed's big conclave-Q-and-A project.  

Last week I managed to snag the question "What is the Eucharist?"  I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer the question, but I had a definite idea how I wanted to go about answering it for Dorian's audience.

Come to think of it, Dorian hasn't actually told me who the audience is, except that it has to include non-Catholics, sixth-graders, and journalists. 

Here's what I wrote.  

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In Catholic practice and belief, the Eucharist — also called “Holy Communion” — is the highest form of worship, and has been from the earliest time of the Church to today.   Lumen Gentium, a document of Vatican II, calls it the “fount and apex of the Christian life.”  The “Liturgy of the Eucharist” takes up the latter half of every Catholic Mass throughout the world.

So what is it?  Why is it so important?

Let’s begin with Scripture, with one of the best-attested  and earliest-written passages in the New Testament.

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St. Paul, leader of the first generation of Christians, says in the First Letter to the Corinthians:

…I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, 

that the Lord Jesus,

on the night he was handed over,
took bread,

and, after he had given thanks,

broke it and said,

“This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

In the same way also the cup, after supper,

saying,

“This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.

The story is also told in three of the four Gospels.  Likely the earliest is St. Mark’s account:

While they were eating,

he took bread,

said the blessing,

broke it, and gave it to them, and said,

“Take it; this is my body.”  

Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them,

and they all drank from it.  

He said to them,

“This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many…”

The “direct quotes” of Jesus Christ in these Bible passages are taken literally by Catholics, though we do not claim to understand exactly how it all works.

Here is what we do understand.  At the Last Supper (“on the night he was handed over,”) Jesus took the unleavened Passover bread and told his friends “This is my body.”   He took the Passover wine, in a chalice, and said to them “This is my blood,” and/or “This is the new covenant in my blood,” before giving it to them to share.

We take this man, who healed the sick and raised the dead with a word, at his word:

• When he gave to them to eat that stuff that looked and tasted like bread, it was — really was — his Body.
• When he handed them the chalice, redolent with wine’s fragrance, the contents of that cup were — really were — his Blood.

We hear this man, who made Peter to walk to him on the water with a command, and trust that we can obey his command:

• If he tells the Church, “Do this in remembrance of me,” then the Church can and must “do this.”  

And so the Church has, and does.  In the Liturgy of the Eucharist, a priest (acting in the place of Christ, as we understand Christ was asking his apostles to do) takes bread, blesses it, and quotes Jesus’s words “This is My Body.” He takes wine, blesses it, and quotes Jesus’s words that declare it is His Blood.  We believe that by commanding this, Jesus has made it — somehow — so it can be so, and is.

We believe that in every Eucharist the Church does what Jesus was doing — or rather, that Jesus does it, through the actions of the priest who does as Jesus commands.  From the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraph 1410):

It is Christ himself, the eternal high priest of the New Covenant who, acting through the ministry of the priests, offers the Eucharistic sacrifice. And it is the same Christ, really present under the species of bread and wine, who is the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice. 

Each Eucharist isn’t a repeating of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, nor is it a new sacrifice every time.  Rather, it’s one and the same “Holy Sacrifice,” because (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1330)

it makes present the one sacrifice of Christ the Savior and includes the Church’s offering.

Our “offering” is ourselves, as well as the material gifts we’ve brought with us to help support the Church, and the bread and wine that our support helps provide; we offer all that as part of the Eucharistic liturgy at Mass.

Jesus was anticipating the cross when he instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper; we are memorializing it when we participate in the Eucharist at Mass.  From the Catechism, paragraph 1323:

This he did in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages until he should come again, and so to entrust to his beloved Spouse, the Church, a memorial of his death and resurrection: a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, a Paschal banquet ‘in which Christ is consumed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.’”

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“The Eucharist,” also called “The Blessed Sacrament,” is that blessed stuff.  It appears to the senses exactly like simple unleavened bread and like wine in a cup, not very different from its appearance before the Eucharistic blessing.  But we don’t call it “bread” and “wine” anymore, unless we’re careless with our language, because we believe that on a level that’s more real than things we can touch and see, it’s not bread and wine any longer.

(If in writing and speaking we want to refer to the stuff-that-looks-like-bread-but-isn’t, you may hear us call it the “Host.”  If we have to refer to the stuff-that-looks-like-wine-but-isn’t, we call it the “Precious Blood” or else we may say “the chalice” or “the cup.”)

When we receive Communion, we receive the Eucharist:  we are given some of the Host or some of the Precious Blood or both (depending on local practice and circumstances), and we consume it, believing that in doing so we are — really — eating and drinking the Body and Blood of the Lord, for the simple reason that He commanded us to.

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The Eucharist is usually reserved after Mass, in the form of leftover blessed Hosts, in a special closed container in the Church called a tabernacle.  Between Masses, it is fitting to pray and reflect before the tabernacle, and to direct our prayers to the Lord, because we believe He is really there.   At some times, a blessed Host is placed in a special display stand, called a “monstrance” (from a Latin word meaning “to show”) which allows it to be seen and adored by the faithful:  this practice is called Eucharistic Adoration.

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To read more about the Eucharist, see the article “The Sacrament of the Eucharist,” part of a section in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that explains the celebration of the seven sacraments.

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Would you have added anything?

More crosses for the comfortable.

A couple of days ago I quoted some material from The Imitation of Christ, Bk. 2, Ch. 12, "On the Royal Road of the Cross," and used it to consider what "taking up one's cross" might mean when one is healthy, happy, relatively wealthy, and secure.

Whatever suffering must be borne is the cross.

Even if it's very small.

The small crosses can be the hardest to bear correctly, because we can brush them off so easily without thinking... and when we do, they -- since they must be borne -- land on someone else....

If we imagine that we don't have any "real" crosses, and wonder why we've been so lucky as to do without them -- disabilities, bereavements, chronic pains -- we can fail to take up the cross we've been sent.

• Does your body feel bad or painful in any way, or are you sick or injured? If you can't make the suffering go away entirely, that can be the cross -- whether you know why you're sick, or whether you don't.
• Is there any kind of "tribulation of spirit in your soul" -- any sort of interior turbulence, depression, grouchiness, fear, or any other discomfort, whether from an identifiable cause or whether it seems to come from nowhere? If you can't quite shake it even after reasonable effort -- trying to gain perspective, count your blessings, cheer yourself up, take your meds -- that can be the cross.
• Do you lack spiritual consolation? Does your prayer seem to do nothing? Does your meditation yield no fruits? That, too, can be the cross.
• Do your kids drive you crazy? Do your parents bug you? Does your spouse annoy you? Is your co-worker chewing his gum too loudly in the next cubicle? Is anybody anywhere getting on your nerves? That, too, can be the cross.
• Finally, don't you get on your own nerves sometimes? Don't you ever say to yourself, "Self, you're an idiot?"

...If it must be borne by somebody, it's the Cross.

Because I was interrupted, I ended that meditation abruptly, and I am kind of unsatisfied with it -- especially with the bit about shrugging off your cross and making someone else bear it. I am worried that I implied that you cannot simultaneously bear your cross and allow someone else to help you bear it.

Also, I want to highlight a couple of other crosses that commonly afflict the comfortable.

To do this, I want to turn away from the Imitation's chapter and look at, instead, another via crucis: the fourteen Stations. As a refresher, here is the traditional set, likely to be the one depicted in your parish church:

1. Jesus is condemned to death
2. Jesus carries His cross
3. Jesus falls the first time
4. Jesus meets His mother
5. Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus to carry the cross
6. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus
7. Jesus falls the second time
8. Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem
9. Jesus falls the third time
10. Jesus is stripped of his garments
11. Crucifixion: Jesus is nailed to the cross
12. Jesus dies on the cross
13. Jesus is taken down from the cross (Deposition or Lamentation)
14. Jesus is laid in the tomb.

Only a handful of these refer to Jesus actually bearing the cross alone -- number 2, when He's "made to carry" it, and then the three falls at stations 3, 7, and 9. Let's take a look at some of the other stations.

In the first station, "Jesus is condemned to death." This station could be taken as the anticipation of a coming cross -- and fearful anticipation itself is a significant cross. I remember a bit from The Screwtape Letters about this, about failing to recognize that fear of the possibilities, and not the possibilities themselves, are the cross:

We want [your patient] to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory images of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy...

Your patient will, of course, have picked up the notion that he must submit with patience to the Enemy's will.... It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross, but only of the things he is afraid of. Let him regard them as his crosses; let him forget that, since they are incompatible, they cannot all happen to him...

The fourth station is a mysterious encounter: "Jesus meets his mother." Our theology teaches us that Mary is permitted, through the merits of her Son, to participate somehow in the Redemption; at the very least, by her initial fiat, but also that the fiat is bigger than just that moment. So this moment is her cross too, and it is a kind of cross that we can also share: accompanying a loved one on their way of the cross. It is surely a cross to watch someone we love struggle with a burden that we cannot take away, or may even have helped to bring about.

The fifth station is strange, too: it is a bearing-of-the-cross that is not fully bearing it, because Simon the Cyrenian is helping. Jesus said, "Take up your cross" -- but here he allows another man to take up Jesus's own cross. I love this station because through it, Jesus gives us permission, so to speak, to allow others to help us bear our crosses, and in fact this allowing is a way to bear a cross -- the cross of relinquishing a cross to someone else -- and that can be hard, a different kind of suffering, because so many of us hate to admit that we cannot bear it alone, or are unwilling to "be a burden" to someone else. But if we are not to regard the people around us only as potential burdens, we also must not regard ourselves as only potential burdens -- even when we are at our most burdensome.

(You know the notion that we should unite our burdens to the cross of Christ? Simon went about his days doing his duties and suffering whatever troubles came to him, all the days before and all the days after -- but on Good Friday Simon's duty and burden became, for a time, literally united to the cross of Christ -- they were one and the same. Something to meditate on.)

The traditional sixth station may be apocryphal, and is certainly not explicit in the Gospels, but I am comfortable with the notion that the Church has given it to us for a reason. Veronica snatches her veil from her hair, and wipes Jesus's face. She would have been left bareheaded, and indeed a true icon of Christ would have been left on her veil, written in sweat, tears, vomit, drool, snot, blood. This is a human connection, and a humiliating one -- the cross of accepting intimate bodily care. In Veronica I see the sickbed nurse, the midwife or doula, the elder-care provider -- the mother, the spouse, the grown daughter or son -- I think of people who held my hair while I vomited, who've cleaned up the bathroom after I was violently ill. It is hard not to be able to take care of yourself and have to entrust your personal care to others. You may wish they will forget that they have seen that side of you -- but you will leave your mark on them.

I am going to stop here and leave the remainder of the stations as an exercise for the reader. Leave your ideas in the combox.

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Vacation fast.

An odd thing happened to us this year: we accidentally scheduled our roughly-yearly family winter vacation to coincide with the start of Lent.

Technically, there's nothing wrong with this, but it does feel a little bit weird. I am blogging this on Fat Tuesday evening from a charming but wobbly little breakfast table in the kitchen of a ski-vacation condominium that is literally larger than my house, with more yard.

(This is one of the side benefits of deliberately living in a smaller-footprint home: camper cabins, vacation condos, even hotel rooms sometimes feel decadently luxurious.)

On the other side of the great room my three oldest children are playing cards with my husband's parents, who joined us in Montana for a week in the mountains. Mark booked the condo "the same week as last year," remembering the perfect snow conditions and empty trails, and forgetting that Easter is a moveable feast and consequently that Ash Wednesday is a moveable fast. I don't know that we would have done it differently anyway; we have little flexibility in travel plans sometimes, now that business travel has stepped up so much for him, and since we planned to coordinate with the grandparents' schedule too.

I think it worked out, though. Mark and I are the only ones of an age that binds us to the fasting obligation, so nobody else is affected. I can't possibly do any vigorous skiing and touring -- neither of which are necessary duties -- and still keep a meaningful fast. Therefore I must fast from those activities, too, but I don't want to put a damper on the rest of the family. I volunteered to stay in the condo and take care of our 3-year-old, freeing everybody else to do something less toddler-friendly.

Unlike me, Mark can manage outdoor activities and fasting -- his body appears to be perfectly happy to switch over to burning itself for fuel any time he feels like going on a climbing tour, living on the occasional bolus of chocolate-espresso flavored energy gel. So tomorrow, the rest of the family will all drive down to Yellowstone for a snow-coach tour, and I will cocoon with my littlest guy.

I am a little bummed that we won't manage to get to a service with the distribution of ashes, but I have my breviary; I will deal.

I learned over the past few Lents, after my weight loss and after reconfiguring my eating habits, that the "one full meal and two smaller meals that don't add up to a full meal" formula messes with my head too much. (And it's kind of a made-up guideline anyway; that formula doesn't appear in canon law.) It messes with my head because I usually eat that way: my breakfast, lunch and snacks generally add up to less than my dinner. So I switched to having just the one meal in late afternoon, and the rest of the day I sip vegetable broth and hot, milky coffee as needed. As far as I can tell, the law of fasting allows for one meal, and it allows for liquids of any kind, and that is enough to keep my blood sugar to a level where I can, at least, care for my children.

(But not where I can go on a snow-coach tour with my children in Yellowstone National Park.)

So I am going to stay back with one child, and make a pot of soup to feed the family when they return tomorrow evening, but I will probably have mine in the afternoon. And I am going to start a pot of vegetable stock in the morning, to simmer reassuringly all day. And I am going to set an alarm, and pray the Hours, and read stories to the little one who stays with me, and ponder the welcome absurdity of ski-in/ski-out penitence with a hot tub and concierge service, and enjoy some solitude. The boom of the avalanche control teams setting off explosions on the ridge will have to stand in for bells, but I see no reason why I cannot make a sort of retreat anyway.

And if it's possible here, it's possible anywhere.

My sacrifice, O God, is a contrite spirit. A humble and contrite heart you will not spurn.

Rend your hearts, not your garments.

Wherever we are -- even in the lap of luxury, in the midst of riches beyond the reach of most human beings, in the comfortable stability of good health and good friendships and good marriage and good family -- wherever we are, we can still crave change within, and we can begin it from the very center. Sometimes it makes sense to transform from the outside in: to wear the ashes, and hope that they soak into the soul. Other times, we have to transform from the inside out: to look like nothing has changed, smooth and clear and implacable as ever, accepting a burden that no one else can see; but still to be changed interiorly, a scrap of flesh born, liberated, from the heart of the stone.

 

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Candlemas Saturday.

Leila reminds us that Saturday is Candlemas.  If you want your candles blessed, you have a couple of days to get your ducks in a row (i.e. find candles, plan to get to Saturday's Mass).

It so happens that Saturday is a First Saturday, and I usually hit those, so I'll be there without any extra work.  We don't use candles a lot in our house, but it occurred to me that I could

(a) dig out my Advent candles and bring them!

(b) buy a few packs of birthday candles.  Why not?  

 

Vocations and altar servers.

One somewhat-controversial topic in liturgical circles is whether altar servers ought to be all boys, or boys and girls.

Serving at the altar used to be a no-girls-allowed thing until fairly recently. (Girls still can't serve at Masses in the extraordinary form.) Even now, bishops are permitted to restrict altar-serving to males in their own dioceses, and where bishops have permitted girls to serve in this way, pastors are permitted to restrict it to males in their own parishes.

Unsurprisingly, some folks would rather live in a parish with children of both genders serving at the altar, and some folks would rather it be only boys. I suppose the arguments on the side of girl altar servers are pretty obvious: Rome permits it, so there is nothing inherently wrong about it; men and women are equal before the Lord, and even if men and women properly play different roles it is rather complicated to explain that to children; girls who want to serve should be able to, etc. Arguments against it have to do with the reality that the priesthood is open only to men, that vocations to the priesthood are nurtured in altar service, and that more boys serve when altar serving is restricted to boys.

I attend a parish in which only boys are altar servers (though adult men and women both assist as extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, and sometimes assist with serving). Anecdotally, the notion that more boys serve when girls are excluded is supported here: We have upwards of a dozen servers at each ordinary Mass, and 75 is not unheard of.

I think I prefer the boys-only tradition, as long as it is accompanied by careful catechesis, because it is more supportive of our male-only priesthood -- it echoes the reasoning, and it brings more boys into close contact with the Eucharist, and it is a seed for vocations. I think the dearth of altar servers today (typically only one to three at many parishes) is an unintended consequence of opening the role to girls. (Who would have expected that fewer children would serve if twice as many became eligible?) But I don't fault pastors and bishops for choosing to permit girls to serve, now that permission is available. Rome permits it, and that means the decision is theirs to make.

I wonder if perhaps a more fruitful attitude would help both boys and girls who serve at the altar. Pope Benedict recently gave remarks to a pilgrimage audience of French altar servers, both boys and girls:

Pope Benedict told the young people they were blessed to be "particularly close to Christ Jesus in the Eucharist. You have the enormous privilege of being close to the altar, close to the Lord."

The pope prayed that being an altar server would help the young people deepen their friendship with Christ and enthusiastically share God's love with their friends and families.

"And, if one day you feel called to follow the path to the priesthood or religious life, respond generously," he told the youngsters.

 

Luckily for you, I can read French, so I can give you the whole quote from the Vatican website. Here is my translation:

It is with affection that I greet the dear altar servers, come from France for their national pilgrimage to Rome, as well as Monsignor Breton, the other bishops who are here and the chaperones of this important group.

Dear young people, the service that you faithfully carry out permits you to be particularly close to Christ Jesus in the Eucharist. You have the enormous privilege to be near the altar, near the Lord. Be conscious of the importance of this service for the Church and for yourselves. Let it be for you the opportunity to grow a friendship, a personal relationship with Jesus. Don't be afraid to transmit with enthusiasm to those around you the joy that you receive from his presence! Let your entire life be resplendent with the happiness that comes from this nearness to the Lord Jesus! And if one day you hear the call to follow him on the way of priesthood or the religious life, respond to him with generosity!

To all of you I wish a good pilgrimage to the tombs of the Apostles Peter and Paul!

I generally accept that one of the purposes of having young boys serve at the altar was to nurture vocations to the priesthood, and that's why I generally support the decisions of pastors to restrict altar service to males (though, as I tried to express, I am not hostile to the pastoral decision to permit girls to serve at the altar). I know there are plenty of traditionally-minded Catholics who feel similarly to me, that boys-only altar service will better serve the Church's need for priesthood vocations.

But Pope Benedict's remarks make me wonder if we who feel this way haven't perhaps lost some of our focus on vocations in general. After all, vocations to the priesthood are not more noble than other vocations to religious life (or than marriage, for that matter). Perhaps part of the lack of reverence and lack of appreciation of the importance of altar service is not really caused by the admission of girls, though perhaps that change might have triggered events that revealed more symptoms of the problem. Maybe the problem is that we aren't looking on altar service as a place where religious vocations of all types are planted and grow.

At least in our parish, where the connection between vocation to the priesthood and service at the altar is preached explicitly, and where the pastor has made it clear that he is deliberately reinforcing the connection by restricting altar service to boys, families willingly and joyfully encourage (or require) their sons to serve at the altar and hope that from among these boys new priests will step forward.

But why not, in a parish where girls are permitted to serve, still try to make a connection between service at the altar and vocations to the priesthood, or to consecrated virginity, or to contemplative religious life, or to active religious life as a sister or brother? Why couldn't it be, in such a parish, that families willingly encourage sons and daughters to serve, and express hope that from among these boys and girls that new priests, brothers, sisters, vowed lives of service to the Lord, will emerge?

I admit that I have never really seen such a connection made explicitly, except in the parish I attend now. I have always attributed it to the boys-only policy. But maybe the real reason is something deeper than which of two permitted pastoral choices the pastor has made.

 

Past, present, future in the Canticle of Zechariah.

I try, imperfectly, to pray at least some of the Divine Office every week. It suits me, and it doesn't, and that is probably good for me. I like the parts that change from day to day; I get tired of the parts that are the same day after day. I usually speed through the Invitatory at a quick mumble, unless it has been a few days since I have managed to pick up the breviary, and then it is like a cool drink of water. I don't mind the Canticle of Mary, because I don't get to Evening Prayer as often as I would like. I get very tired of the Canticle of Zechariah.

Jen Fulwiler at Conversion Diary once assembled a stable of bloggers to post about the Our Father, one word at a time, a series which turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself (I hammered out a meditation on "Earth" in about twenty minutes, and I rather like it). More recently another blogger, Sarah Reinhard, did the same thing for the Hail Mary.

These meditations are useful because they breathe a little new life into a prayer that we have all said so many times that it risks becoming empty, wasted, like exhausted soil. I am not the one to do this, at least not right now, but maybe those of us who pray the Divine Office could use a little of that for the 95th Psalm and the Canticle of Zechariah. Every day is just a little too often for me to keep getting something new out of these (and YES I have already noted the irony implicit in the 95th Psalm being about the stubborn Israelites complaining about the same old same old every day for forty years and their hearts going astray and all that).

Anyway, the last time I opened the breviary to the Canticle of Zechariah I did notice something somewhat new to me, so I thought I would share. Here is the text as it appears in the LOTH:

Blessed be the Lord,The God of Israel; He has come to His people and set them free.

He has raised up for us a mighty Saviour, born of the house of His servant David.

Through His holy prophets He promised of old that He would save us from our enemies, from the hands of all who hate us.

He promised to show mercy to our fathers and to remember His holy Covenant.

This was the oath He swore to our father Abraham:

To set us free from the hands of our enemies, free to worship Him without fear, holy and righteous in His sight all the days of our life.

You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare His way, to give his people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins.

In the tender compassion of our Lord the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Glory to the Father,and to the Son,and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever, Amen.

 

This time, the structure of the canticle stood out to me, the way it speaks of past, present, and future. Check it out:

Present: this has to do with the stuff that is happening in the moment that Zechariah speaks.

He has come to His people and set them free.

He has raised up for us a mighty Saviour, born of the house of His servant David.

The Savior is still in utero at the moment, but the setting free has already begun.

Past: This has to do with the whole history of Israel, which is characterized here entirely as a promise by God to Israel (although you will note that the Covenant, which took two to tango, is mentioned, it is entirely in the context of mercy):

Through His holy prophets He promised of old that He would save us from our enemies, from the hands of all who hate us.

He promised to show mercy to our fathers and to remember His holy Covenant.

This was the oath He swore to our father Abraham:

To set us free from the hands of our enemies, free to worship Him without fear, holy and righteous in His sight all the days of our life.

Look at those promises: to save Israel from its enemies, from all who hate it; to show mercy -- at the same time as He remembers the covenant in which they made promises that they would keep only imperfectly. Also to set Israel free "to worship Him without fear," which could be characterized a couple of ways: it could mean that they are free from persecution from those enemies, so that it isn't dangerous to openly worship the God of Israel; or it could mean that even if there is persecution, that they can worship without "fear" of the persecution, perhaps firm in the knowledge that those enemies can destroy body but not soul, can strike at the nation but will not exterminate it; or it could mean that somehow they can worship God without fearing God. One or all of those is linked with a promise that the people will be "holy and righteous in his sight."

Future: This is the part that has not yet come to pass, and remains indefinite, as Zechariah moves from revelation of the present and rumination about the past to prophesying of the future. It is in two pieces.

You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare His way, to give his people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins.

In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Here we have the very specific prophecy aimed at the infant John the Baptist, followed by something further on. Note that "the dawn from on high shall break upon us" is presented as a future event, while the raising up of the Savior is presented as something that has just happened now -- so I am inclined to think that the breaking of the dawn does not represent the birth of Christ, but something else. The proclamation of the kingdom of God -- the central of the five Mysteries of Light -- seems to fit.

These three parts of the prayer -- past, present, future -- are bracketed by, shall we say, two timeless bits. The introduction is eternal:

Blessed be the Lord,The God of Israel;

...and the conclusion, which isn't part of what Zechariah said, of course, but we add it to the end of all the canticles, is, er, also concerned with past, present, and future, reminding us that the whole shebang is eternally the doing of the Three-in-One:

Glory to the Father,and to the Son,and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever, Amen.

I am not sure why the overall structure jumped out at me just then, but it did, and I rather appreciate the canticle a bit more now. It seems a coherent whole: less a prayer to be mumbled through, and more a piece of poetry. Something composed.

"Daily Mass as the original 'small group.'"

Thoughtful reflection from Amy Welborn on the utility of "small groups" in Catholic parishes.

When I go to daily Mass in this town, whereever  go, there are at least fifty people there.  During Advent and Lent, far more.

Think about it – in your parish, during Lent, probably 200 people gather daily in a “small group.”

They enjoy catechesis through the language of the liturgy itself, the Scripture readings and the homily.  They enjoy the deepest fellowship of all through the Eucharist – being joined not only to the others present but to ever Catholic throughout the world, in heaven, and to Christ himself.

That catechesis, grace and fellowship are real. 

.....when considering “small groups” in a Catholic parish…start with daily Mass. Thank God for what happens there…build on it…stop trying to invent, invent and invent some more.

…and maybe follow the old guys for their after-Mass coffee at McDonald’s and then their morning at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store.  Fellowship? Check. Works of Mercy? Check.

Amy writes in the comments:

When we start from “Wow..there’s no community in this humongous parish..how do we create and build it?” we are rather subtley declaring our dis-believe in the sacramental life of the Body of Christ.

It should be more “We are in communion with each other and with the whole Body of Christ. That is so amazing and fantastic! How can we live this out and be Christ to each other and the world? How are we called to be like Christ crucified and poured out in love?”

Yes.

Handwritten thanksgiving.

I approach my prayer life rather in the same way I approach housecleaning.  Which is to say:

Clearly, I like to think about ways of doing it, systems, etc. much more than I like to do it.  So a lot of times, when I decide "It's time to clean house!" what I really do is sit down and make a list of what needs to be done and a schedule by which I should do it, and before long the time is up and I have to do something different.

Also, my living space looks pretty tidy enough most of the time, except dead in the middle of the school day or when we're having a party.  It's 7 am and the kids aren't up yet, so my evening routine still hasn't been disturbed.  The floor is more or less clear of clutter, the kitchen counters are mostly empty except for a tray of chocolate-filled breakfast buns and a coffeemaker, the children's books aren't all in the shelves but they are at least in a neat pile on the floor by the couch.  I'm pretty sure there isn't a bunch of junk on the bathroom counters, and the schoolroom is fairly orderly.  

But if you looked closely at the kitchen counters you'd find some sticky stuff and crumbs, if you looked closely at the floor you'd find more sticky stuff, if you looked around the couch you'd find it had been a long time since the last vacuuming, and please don't open any cabinets or closet doors, nor look too closely at the rim of my toilet.

Somewhere in one of those drawers there's an old schedule reminding me that I was going to swipe the toilet with a brush every Wednesday morning.  Or maybe it was "make a kid swipe the toilet."  I don't remember.  It felt good to write it down.  Much better than actually doing it.

So.  My prayer life is like that too.

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A humorous analogy suddenly comes to me:  The Liturgy of the Hours is like Flylady for slobby prayer.

Do with that what you will.

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Oh, and one more thing:  I like blogging about cleaning more than I like cleaning.  And I like blogging about praying more than praying.  And apparently, blogging about cleaning and blogging about praying makes me feel a sense of satisfaction similar to what I imagine I might feel had I actually cleaned, or prayed.  Remember that next time you get impressed at my organizational skills.  They are really just a finely tuned means of procrastination.

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But I never will be cured, I think, of the attempt to fix my sloth/acedia through better planning.  Since I did the Marian consecration last month, I have been trying a number of new things.  Or maybe it's more accurate to say that I have been trying to look at the old things through a new lens.

I hit upon this idea to make myself a handwritten prayer-book.  

Last year, when I read through Introduction to the Devout Life (lots of posts on that here), I wound up carrying a well-dog-eared copy around everywhere and using it as a prayer manual for a while.  The many sections are not organized as a prayer book, but they give a method of morning prayer, a method of evening prayer, recommendations for confession, recommendations for preparing to attend Mass, etc., and I found it useful to refer back to the book often.   Note that the book didn't actually provide "prayers" as much as it did a "method of prayer."  But I like to have "prayers," so eventually, I sat down with de Sales's method of morning prayer and  I wrote out a formula that followed the method but was in my own words.  Well, some of St. Francis deS.'s words and some of my own.  I kept that sheet of paper next to my bed, which freed me up to keep the book in my handbag.  

I used that morning prayer for quite a long time.   I still use a memorized short excerpt from it many days.  ("Behold, O Lord, my poor heart which has conceived many good desires yet is too weak and wretched to put them into practice unless you grant Your heavenly grace.  This I beg, O Merciful God, through the passion and resurrection of Your Son, in whose honor I consecrate this and all my days.")

St. Louis de Montfort's book True Devotion to Mary contains a method called "This Devotion at Holy Communion" which suggests some ways to pray before, during, and after Communion.  I tried to follow along in the book a couple of times while I was in Mass but found it too cumbersome.  Because it doesn't exactly contain prayers but more an instruction on how to pray, and it's wordier than it has to be.  So finally I sat down and wrote out some pithy prayers that, if I prayed them, would be in accord with de Montfort's method.  (It was a little better, but I still need to tweak it.  The Mass follows a different rhythm now than it did in the saint's time, and it's harder to slip long personal prayer into it.   The intent of the vernacular Mass is, after all, for us to pray along with the Mass.)

I looked around at Mass and of course I always see many people thumbing well-worn prayer books and Magnificat issues and breviaries and things during the wait to go up for Communion or after communion or just before or just after Mass.  (I wonder how long before people will dare to use their Kindles and iPhones to access prayerbook apps in Mass?  I've seen people do it in the adoration chapel.)   But I know from experience that I get distracted by a thick book of prayers.  What I need is a book of just exactly the prayers I am working on using.  A morning prayer, an evening prayer, a short method of meditation before the Blessed Sacrament, a thanksgiving after Mass.  

So I got me a little Moleskine, the cheaper, thinner, brown-paper-covered kind, and began writing prayers down in it.  

I like it.  There are dozens of "morning prayers" to choose from; I can put in just the one or two I really am likely to use, plus I can write out my "own" one that I developed from St. Francis's method.  I can copy out prayers in Latin that I would like to learn.   (Working on the Anima Christi right now.)  I can write out an examination of conscience that leaves out the sins I am not likely ever to commit, and thus saves time.  

I think once I have it filled up I will want to do another draft.  Already I have crossed out and rewritten a few sections that turned out not to sound right, that I kept wanting to say differently.  But in the meantime I am finding it fruitful to have my own words, or at least words chosen by me, at my fingertips.

Let me give you one example.  So, one thing I've never been in the habit of doing is kneeling to make a prayer of thanksgiving after Mass.  (I was never catechized to do it, and although there are always some people that I see praying after Mass in the pews, of course most people are up and socializing, even at my solidly orthodox parish.)  I went looking for something, and OH MY they are loooong.  There is no way I could realistically do any of that with the four kids all wanting to get downstairs before the best doughnuts are gone.  So just as a practical matter I needed a short one.  

For the time being I used the "Hail Holy Queen" as a placeholder while I tried excerpting some of the longer ones, and I tried composing my own.  But what kept popping into my head was a musical antiphon from one of the psalms:  "How can I make a return to the Lord for what he has done to me?"  I didn't know which psalm, so I googled it, and found that it comes from Psalm 116.  

The whole psalm isn't really what I was looking for, but the second half is.  So I used just a few verses from that Psalm as my Thanksgiving After Mass:

How can I repay the LORD for all the great good done for me?

I will raise the cup of salvation and call on the name of the LORD.

I will pay my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people.

Dear in the eyes of the LORD is the death of his devoted.

LORD, I am your servant, your servant, the child of your maidservant; you have loosed my bonds.

I will offer a sacrifice of praise and call on the name of the LORD.

I figure it works as well as anything else.  Having looked for a prayer with a Marian flavor, I liked the "child of your maidservant" bit. 

Anyway, I have a number of more prayers to add to the little book before it has everything I need on a daily basis, but it does seem like a good start, and I'm already using it regularly.  I'm totally going to recopy it more neatly, though, when I've got it all together.  Because that will be something I can do one of these days to put off actually praying.   Naturally.

More on Benedict for families: Prayer, work, and study.

I'm totally buried in school planning this week, so blogging has gone to the back burner.

 Scratch that:  I'm immersed in school planning.  Planning is absolutely my favorite part of homeschooling.  It's summer, I only have to teach a little bit of "remedial" stuff (or let them teach themselves; for example, my 10-y-o's special summer subject is intensive typing practice with Mavis Beacon), and to top it all off, two of my kids are visiting Grandma and Grandpa for two or three weeks right now, so I have tons of time.  And I'm pouring most of it into lesson planning NOW so I won't wake up some morning in February 2012 and say "I don't know what I'm going to do today so I guess we'll just watch movies."

So speaking of being immersed in work, did any of you go and read Fr. Longenecker's Saint Benedict for Busy Parents that I recommended a few posts ago?*

I found myself unable to stop myself from creating a three-by-three matrix:

	Prayer	Work	Study
Obedience
Stability
Conversion of Life

...and trying to fill in all the cells, or at least some of them.  Do I practice obedience with regard to prayer, etc.

Because that's the kind of response a girl like me has to a piece of spiritual reading.  (You should have seen my notebook after I finished The Interior Castle.)

Of course, I immediately ran into another question, because while some of the stuff I do every day is undoubtedly prayer, and some of it is surely work, and some of it is arguably study, there's a lot of other stuff that isn't clearly any of them.   It's not hard to classify, for example, driving to the grocery store as "work."  What about going for a swim?  What about eating dinner?  And for that matter:  what about hanging out with friends or just sitting down with a cup of coffee in the morning getting ready to face the day?  I noticed a distinct lack of "just chillin'" in St. Benedict's trinity of how you spend your time.  And yet the monks were expected to have recreation time.   So do you suppose St. Benedict thought of the free time the monks had as part of prayer, part of work, part of study?  Or is free time some kind of fourth thing outside of prayer, work, and study?  Or is free time spent doing things that all can get classified as either prayer or work or study?  (If scrubbing the floor can be a form of prayer if it is done with love, I suppose finally getting that cup of coffee can be prayer if it is done with gratitude.  "If?"  Who isn't grateful for that cup of coffee?)    

Or maybe there really is no such thing as free time and the reality is that whatever we're doing, we are working, or studying, or praying, whether we realize it or not, and maybe we should sit up and pay attention to what it is we're making, or learning, or saying to God.

But anyway, I made a stab at classifying all the things I do as either "prayer," "work," or "study."  

Prayer wasn't too hard.  Attending Mass is prayer (even if I'm too busy attending to children to pay much attention to it, I decided).  Prayer is prayer.  Going to Confession or Adoration is prayer.  No problem.  

So you could say it was pretty easy to classify everything I do into "prayer" and "not-prayer."  (Subject to the caveat about all activities being a form of prayer if you do it in love, à la St. Thérèse.)  It was trickier to decide what to do with all the "not-prayer."   

In other forms of "what do you call what you do" classification, "work" is divided from other things, like "leisure," by monetary considerations.  Does it create wealth?  Can you get paid for it?  This won't work here.  It's more essential than that; it has to make sense whatever the context of economy.  And anyway, we're not distinguishing it from "leisure," but from "study."

So, in this system, "work" is something you do (I decided) that participates in creation:  remakes the physical world somehow.  It "co-operates with God in the redemption of the world," to quote Fr. Longenecker.  "Study" is something primarily interior that involves taking in the world as it is, and shaping it in the mind.   

With that in mind, I decided that teaching children is work; that preparing lessons is work.  That all the aspects of life that I could call "homemaking" is work.  For the purpose of dividing life up into this trinity, writing is work, even though I do it almost entirely for fun.  Traveling of all kinds is work, even driving to the grocery store.  Physically caring for other people, like nursing this child on my lap right now as I type, is work.  Physically caring for myself is work, too, and that includes getting the exercise I need and want.  And so having dinner with my family or friends is work.  Indeed, interacting with other people is almost always work, even just hanging out, because through our interactions with each other don't we remake the world in a small way?  Don't we have an opportunity to co-operate (if we are kind and prudent and open to the spirit) in redemption?

That leaves a number of things that can be called "study."  Scripture study and spiritual reading seem like they could be either "study" or "prayer," but fortunately, St. Benedict himself called them "study," and that is a bit of a guide to help us define the category.  All kinds of scholarship and research are "study."

Now, if you work as an academic, or a scientist, or a teacher in or out of the home, the distinction between "work" and "study" may be a little difficult to pinpoint; I, personally, make the classification based on whether I am remaking my own mind or something outside my own mind at the time.  When I skim through a stack of history books to decide what I will teach the children, I am studying.  When I put pen to paper to make a list of points I plan to teach, I am working.  

I have worked in laboratories, and I think I can figure out how I would classify as work or as study the various tasks: planning experiments, building apparatus, running experiments, collecting and analyzing data, writing up results and presenting them.  There is some prayer, of course, too:  I suspect that even if you include all the atheists, it's a rare researcher who hasn't uttered "OH PLEASE LET THIS THING WORK" at least once.  

Much leisure is study.  All reading for pleasure, and by extension all media consumption of any kind (this includes reading Facebook -- but not updating your status, which would be work, since you are creating content for others).   Developing skills of your own through reading or watching others  is study (although practicing them may be work).  Self-examination is study, even when prompted by prayer.

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Speaking of self-examination:  here is where I explain something about myself, because I can hear a voice asking "What's the point?"  The point is, I find a peculiar entertainment in continually examining my life, interior and exterior.  I find a meditative peace in the act of simplifying and filtering it.  Creating a blank table in a spreadsheet, all crisscross black lines, and empty  -- like the one above, before I started filling in the cells -- rakes the sand in my little mental Zen garden.

And I like the exercise of "What if I thought of --say-- getting to the gym as part of my work?  How would that change my attitude toward it?  Would it affect how I see it interrelating with the other things that are part of my work?"

Actually, the bit that felt most satisfying when it clicked into place was the concept that for me, hanging out with my friends, insofar as I am capable of "hanging out"  -- being with other people in general -- what I called "Fellowship" in my spreadsheet -- was to classify that as "work."  Because really, I am a classic introvert, and even though I enjoy other people, it wears me out.  Calling "fellowship" "work" lifted a bit of weight from my shoulders. 

The most useful insight for me, though, is that when you classify everything as either prayer, work, or study, no time is wasted.  It's either spent for good, or spent for ill.  

When I attend Mass, or pick up the breviary, or stand in line for confession, or even utter a voiceless "please!", I'm praying.  Am I referring to God or to myself?  Am I aligning my will with God's or against it?  Am I a channel for grace or an obstruction?  Am I opening my heart or trying to conceal it?

When I watch a video, or check comments on a news story, or listen to music, or read a book, I'm learning something.  Did I learn something true or something false?

When I write a blog post, or clean up a mess, or assign work to the children, or go for a run, or go to sleep, or spend time chatting with my friends, I'm participating in the creation and redemption of the world.  Did I help it or hinder it?

 

 

________________

* I forgot to mention on that post that I owe a hat-tip to Rich Leonardi for linking to it.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

The clock is ticking down to Ash Wednesday and I'm still wondering what I'm going to "do" for Lent.  I am a little bit jealous of my husband, who never worries about it, but cheerfully gives up chocolate every single year and calls it good.   As I have written in previous years, I have sworn off all non-obligatory food-related sacrifices because they mess with my head.  I think maybe I was on to something when I wrote this post before Lent another year:

Do you think maybe it's backwards to try to think "hmm, what can I give up for Lent?  Something that I like, something that's a sacrifice, hmm..."

Do you think maybe it might be better to think first "What particular virtue do I want to develop, or what bad habit or vice do I want to eliminate?  How could I fulfill my vocation better?" ... 

... and then, having answered that question, to consider what sacrifice would actually serve that goal?  I mean, maybe chocolate is really hard to give up, but maybe it's not a chocolate-free Lent that would best help you grow in holiness.  Unless you have a disordered attachment to sweets in particular, and you think chocolate is actually getting between you and God, and that's what you're hoping to work on.

Or is that just me being overly analytical?

I think I will go back to St. Francis de Sales today and consider his idea of discerning which one virtue (or a very few virtues) to focus on.  Maybe that will help me think of something.  I already have a couple of good ideas for small things I plan to do, but unfortunately none of them are things I can do daily.  On the other hand, if you put it all together, it might work out to almost daily.  

I need something to read, for one thing.  One of the most rewarding things I ever did during Lent was read the Diary of Sister (now Saint) Faustina -- the one who saw the Divine Mercy apparitions.   I came out of it with a much better understanding of what the Church means when it calls an apparition "worthy of belief," which isn't the same as coming right out and saying "This really really happened exactly the way the visionary said it did and you have to believe it really happened."  Because even if you were to assume that St. Faustina was delusional or mistaken about what happened to her (I guess it doesn't work if you assume she was a liar), you would find that her writings about her experience, the thoughts she took away from them and transcribed, are true to the Gospel and inspire love of Christ.  Probably more than anything you're likely to read here.  

I was thinking about paying $3 for a pdf of Amy Welborn's newly refurbished, Lenten-devotional form of her late husband Michael Dubrueil's work The Power of the Cross.    (She has it in forms that should work on your Kindle, Nook, iPad, or iPhone; not having any of these I was going to go for the pdf.)  Or I might pull Fulton Sheen's Life of Christ off my bookshelf -- it's just about the right length for Lent.  Or I might start re-reading Volume 1 of Jesus of Nazareth, since Volume 2 will be released next week, and I could take them as a whole.

Last year I didn't give up computer time, facebook, email, or blogging, on the theory that to do so would be the equivalent of giving up answering the phone or opening the mail.  And I probably won't do so this year either.  But one thing I did do was set time limits around my internet usage, and that turned out to be pretty valuable.  So I may do that again this year.   I also thought that I might consider which of the political blogs I follow tend to be the most destructive to my internal peace, and temporarily delete them from my reader.  

My schedule is such that I get about two opportunities a week to visit the Adoration chapel all by myself for more than an hour.  Only I rarely, or never, actually use the time for this.  I always have something else to do (and in fact I do not think of these time blocks as "opportunities to visit the chapel" but rather as "planning time" or "me time.")  I think I may try using these time blocks for Adoration instead.  It would probably be good for me to give up planning time to God.  Theoretically his plans work out better than mine anyway.

Well, that's enough of that:  it's almost time to start school.   So, comments topic of the day:  Not "what are you thinking about doing this year," but let's look for evidence of good ideas from the past.  In your most fruitful Lents, what were the sacrifices or devotions that enriched you the most?