The Kid Sister of Blessed Imelda

Audite et intelligite traditiones quas Deus dedi vobis.

“Hear and understand the traditions which I, God, have given you.”

I’m currently reading Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master by Lawrence S. Cunningham and it is from this that I am quoting…

There are traditions which God has given us. They are so to speak a memory we are born with and into which we are born: a store of meanings, of symbols, of signs. What is born in us is the connatural ability to understand these great buried signs as soon as they are manifested to us.  What is given us in society is a more or less authentic manifestation of the signs. If society loses its “memory,” if it forgets its language of traditional symbol, then the individuals who make it up become neurotic, because their own memories are corrupted by uninterpreted, unused meanings. Then traditions themselves become mere dead conventions - worse than that, obsessions - collective neuroses.  To replace one set of conventions with another, however new, does nothing to revive a truly living sense of meaning and of life. This is our present condition.

This resonates strongly within me.  In my own experience, growing up as a Baptist (Southern of some flavor), I often felt drawn to certain things… liturgical tradition drew me, though I knew not what to call it. The austere nature of our faith and its tradition (or rather traditional lack of the same) left me feeling as though something were missing.  As a young child, striving to fill that unspoken void, I would contrive my own ‘traditions’ or forms of reverence. Having a lace trimmed hanky to lay my Bible is one good example, and yet this felt contrived even to my infant sensibilities and I soon gave it up in shame for having taken up such ‘pretensions’. 

Later, when I saw my first crucifix, I remember being struck by it - feeling a hushed awe and reverence within that was inexplicable… Later still in a similar setting, kneelers were intuitive in response as I felt immediately the desire to drop to my knees and pray. I worked hard (funny that since we were repeatedly taught that works were of little import) to be a workman approved before the Lord and stifled those childhood fancies, all the while feeling as though something important were missing… that such a holy God, such a magnificent Lord and Master deserved more than what was given… and that burning desire to give such to the Lord whom I loved was banked.

Even when I began to attend Church with my Catholic husband, the fear and misunderstanding taught me in my youth kept me from really seeing that what I witnessed there was the very fulfillment of what my young soul had yearned for.  When I finally was reconciled to the Church by God’s mercy and command, the protective walls bricked up over time to protect myself from that which I was forbidden to give as a protestant began to come down.  As I have lived a full year now as a Catholic with the blessings of the Sacraments, the joys of Eucharistic Adoration, the Liturgy and the Liturgical Calendar with all it entails, I have found at last that which my soul within naturally knew and longed to give as right to the Lord.  Truly, God has written His law upon our hearts… we ignore and deny this innate understanding to our peril.

We as a protestant society have lost our memory.  Our forefathers denied it; their descendents fought it, suppressing it more and more until it is so very lost that we of the common era in this protestant culture no longer recognize it within ourselves and rail against it embraced by others with vile blasphemies. We have reduced those beloved traditions given us by God to dead conventions so long that they have become  collective neuroses.  We have replaced God’s traditions, God’s ways with our own. New conventions, new traditions that reject all but that which seems comfortable, godly, and right in our own eyes.  In the process not only do we deify ourselves, but we forfeit life and all its meaning. We no longer show respect to any, much less the equal respect to all that we claim. We proclaim proudly that we bow our knee to NO man, and in the process, refuse to bow our knee to God. We have lost all sense of honor, of respect, and have no true understanding or experience of humility.  What else is dying to self but considering others better than we do ourselves?

Esteeming others, being willing to be humbled, being willing to abase ourselves, to be SERVANT to ALL men… this is the calling of the followers of Christ. If we are so unaware of the traditions of God that we no longer recognize true Worship, then we call things worship in error in order to have it at all. Such ignorance leads to not only great pride, but great sin. Let us not be so ignorant due to hard hearts and pride that we call speech, lectures, song-a-longs, and any humbling position of body worship. Let us not be so prideful in our ignorance that we can no longer bend our knee in respect to another lest it be construed as worship where none exists.  Let us again learn what we once knew and rejoiced to do, obey the traditions of our God and walk humbly before Him always.

Audite et intelligite traditiones quas Deus dedi vobis.

“Hear and understand the traditions which I, God, have given you.”

Let us hear, understand, and obey the traditions which He, our God, has given to us.  Blessed be God forever!

There’s been some discussion today about a blog entry by someone called the Internet Monk. He was compared favorably (and presumably similarly) to the ‘emergent church’/Blue Velvet Elvis/Brian McClaren ’stuff’ by someone who’s read them all.  I read the blog entry, but haven’t read the ’stuff’ to which it was compared.

This man makes some astounding claims.

…God ruined church for me for the rest of my life.

I met people from every denomination you can think of who loved Jesus, believed the Gospel and wanted others to do the same: Episcopalians, Disciples, Methodists, Catholics, Presbyterians, United Church of Christ, Crazy Church of Christ, Pentecostals, Charismatics, mongrels, mutts, whatevers. I prayed, worshiped and witnessed with these folks.

It ruined me, and it was God’s fault.

This just boggles the mind. GOD ruined church for this guy. My eyeballs may need to be surgically rescued they’ve rolled so far back.  Given the second quote, you’d think he’d come to a different conclusion, after all, God didn’t make all these denominations! But no, he says it again, that fellowshiping with all these people and seeing that they all love God, believe the Gospel, and want others to as well RUINED him… and it was God’s fault!!

No. This is not God’s fault that church is ruined for the Internet Monk. It is man’s fault.

• Man rebelled against God.
• Man decided that he didn’t want to obey those God had placed in authority over them.
• Man decided that regardless of what Christ said about obeying those in the seat of authority despite the inhabitants personal wickedness, he didn’t want to wait for God to deal with the person Himself.
• So man broke away from God’s Church and set up altars for himself.
• He began to make his own buffet line of beliefs, deciding he knew better than the Church what was right in God’s eyes.
• In a stunningly brief amount of time, men continued that rebellion exponentially… splintering further and further.
• Now many of the beliefs held by the many thousands of denominations around the world are heretical, agreeing only in small and rapidly diminishing bits with the Church God created and placed apostolic authority in.

It truly has become the ’shopping mall’ the Internet Monk describes… but it was man who did it, not God, and in doing so it was man who damaged the Church, not God.

In addition, the Internet Monk has ruined the Church for himself. He is doing the same thing all those other people throughout history have done.  What we (protestants, former in my case) all have done. We’ve gone through and cherry picked what we like from the buffet. I’ll have a little OSAS, because I like security.  Oh, and I don’t want baptism to wash away sin, nope… I like that whole prayer thing… but no way am I going to admit to any authority over me but the Holy Spirit and He speaks to me direct so you people are all wrong if you don’t believe what I do. The Internet Monk is doing what is right in his own eyes, and calling it godly. Sacred scripture disagrees.

So here the Internet Monk sits, proudly claiming how God ruined church for him. Talk about taking the easy way out.  Easy to blame God and pretend you are holier because of it (though that is frankly a new level of delusion to me, he seems to have pulled it off). In doing so, he totally bypasses the difficult position of ACTUALLY aligning himself with what God has said about His Church because I can tell you RIGHT now that is NOT a popular place to be. With this position, no one fusses because you don’t compromise over how they do things… because in the Internet Monk’s position you get to ‘like’ things about them all, and don’t have to hold to the standards God has set to the exclusion of all others. Instead, he sits back in self-righteousness claiming he is above it all, and claims it’s all God’s fault that he can’t fit into any of those churches… and he lumps the Catholic Church into that mess. Am I the only one pulling out hair in fistfulls?

He goes on to say…

I doubt if God cares how many different ways we gather, worship, work or do mission.

Really. I’m wondering if this guy reads his Bible at ALL?  God VERY much cares how we gather, worship, work and do missions, especially the worship part! I know I said this recently, but do Nadab and Abihu ring any bells? What about all those details about the temple, about who could enter the Holy of Holies, about what they were to wear, how they were to make offerings? God is pretty. darn. picky. if you ask me… as is His RIGHT! How on EARTH does one read the Old Testament and keep thinking that God doesn’t care how we worship!??!?!

The blog entry goes on, but it just leaves me depressed and in mourning. This is not what drawing closer to God looks like. This is not what unity looks like. We do not become more godly by drawing further out into an ever more self-righteous and individualistic Christianity or by painting God as a loving eunuch who is groveling and grateful for whatever offering feels good to us in the moment!

It isn’t that I don’t understand what the Monk sees. I too see things of God in each denomination… strengths that they contribute to the Body of Christ, the bits of truth they have left.  However there is a place where the Body of Christ is unified and all those strengths are present, and were we to reconcile ourselves to the Church as God saw fit to create it we’d have all their strengths more fully present. Yet it wasn’t the strengths that I saw predominating in the protestant churches of my experience.

It wasn’t God who ruined the church for me. It was the Christians. Over and over, it was the Christians who let me down and threatened to ruin the church for me.  I kept telling myself, you can’t count on men (as in mankind). Men will fail you every time. You can’t blame God for their failures. That was what enabled me to not see the church as ruined… and in the end, it was God who saved the church for me.  When I finally stopped fighting to have it my way, and really let go and let Him show me the Truth… He showed me His Church. Coming into His Church, I still found similar problems to the ones elsewhere… but I found so many things that all those other churches didn’t have.  They didn’t have the Real Presence. They didn’t have unity. They didn’t have grace. They didn’t have the Sacraments through which God braces broken men. They didn’t have the wealth and depth of faith and practice.  They weren’t worshipping under the Authority God left for us, submitting to the shepherds He has given.  They weren’t really worshipping at all. They were having lectures, singing and social hour. The strengths and support found in His Church have made battling the problems possible because we are family. We are one holy Catholic and apostolic Church. Obedient to what God has said is worship.  We don’t limit God. God has limited us, and in doing so, set us free.

The well people in my family went to Epiphany Mass this evening.  Meaning Precious (dd 11) and myself.  It was nice to go with her by ourselves.  She is very devout and we both are able to focus completely on the Mass.  For some reason with the other girls there, and dh, it is a bit more distracting at times.

The choir was there, the organ playing, all the Christmas decorations still up and the Wise Men had completed their journey across the miles (and the dais) to worship the Baby Jesus in the manger in our creche. I was not scheduled to serve as Eucharistic Minister, but ended up serving anyway which is always a great privilege.

Lately I’ve been engaged in some discussion on a home schooling forum with protestants over the Eucharist.  Someone stated that college students praying over and calling some Ritz and Pepsi communion was perfectly ok.  Believing in the Real Presence and having a particular passion for the Eucharist due to the manner of my marriage and reconciliation, I had to disagree.  This led to the usual, ‘we can worship any way we please’ type argument on the protestant side and the ‘no, God never left how we worship up to us, remember Nadab and Abihu’ from me. It’s a common exchange with only minor variation as the protestant in question changes over time.

This has been on my mind a great deal of late, the differences in how we approach worship and praise and sacrifice.  Most protestants view worship as what ‘feels good’ or is ‘comfortable’ or what seems right in their own eyes.  A sin of which I am guilty above all, God forgive me.  I do not speak about that which I am not also convicted! However, God did not leave the details of proper worship up to us. He didn’t in the early days of the covenants with Israel, and He didn’t in the completed Covenant with Christ either. 

Then tonight in Mass in the prayers and Consecration of the Eucharist, a phrase caught my attention and I found myself struggling not to give in to meditation on it. 

We offer you the Sacrifice of Praise.

The Sacrifice of Praise… I had always thought of that as several things… a gift, as something we owe God, as an offering… but the sacrificial element of giving God praise hit me today. It is a sacrifice because we can’t just give whatever we think is best.  It is a sacrifice because we must give to God the type of praise GOD has said is appropriate. It is a sacrifice because we die to ourselves, give up our own desires in form of worship, give up our preferences in forms of worship, give up our own comfort with what constitutes worship and praise and instead give to God what is RIGHT to give Him. The praise we offer truly IS a sacrifice… and our humbling ourselves, worshipping Him as HE has said is right and good is part of that sacrifice.   It is a sacrifice because it is not we who limit God by worshipping as we please, but God who limits US to worship that accurately reflects who He is and what He has done. Yet it is a sacrifice of praise because in humbling ourselves we truly see in ever new and deep ways how majestic and holy He is and respond with praise. The more fully we humble and reconcile ourselves to true worship, the more aware we become of all the grace and blessing and glory that God has revealed of Himself in that worship, and our willingness to praise is magnified, and our sacrifice more willing and more perfect.

I too had to sacrifice my personal comfort level and preferences in worship when God called me home to Rome… I am so grateful for all the sacrifices God asks of me because they always make me more like Himself… and hope that I am always willing to see what new sacrifice He requires. In the end, I have found that the Liturgy is so precious to me… I can’t imagine anything else as worship now that I’ve truly experienced it. Reconciliation to the Church has helped immeasurably in that way… and yet I must keep being willing to be shown where I yet fail to die to self… I’m a poor and unwilling sacrifice despite my desire to be a better one.