The Knitting Theologian

Today is the memorial of St. Catherine of Siena, who is my confirmation saint. She wasn’t my first choice. I wanted St. Sebastian, who was my grandmother’s confirmation saint. I loved my grandmother and I wanted to be like her. Unfortunately, the woman who was preparing us for Confirmation informed me that, because I was a girl, I couldn’t have a male confirmation saint. I was infuriated. This seemed to me to be a ridiculous limitation. Why could my grandmother have a male saint when I couldn’t?

My mother came to the rescue, proposing St. Catherine of Siena. "She’s the first female Doctor of the Church," my mother said. "And she’s no dummy. Besides, she was a writer." So I took her as my confirmation saint and went on with my life without even reading a biography of her. Well, no, I think I did look her up and found a biography like that in the Liturgy of the Hours, which seems to specialize in uninteresting biographies for saints:

Saint Catherine was born at Siena in 1347. While still a young girl, she sought the way of perfection and entered the Third Order of Saint Dominic. On fire with the love of God and neighbor, she established peace and concord between cities, vigorously fought for the rights and freedom of the Roman Pontiff, and promoted the renewal of religious life. She also composed works of doctrine and spiritual inspiration. She died in 1380.

Fast forward several decades to now, when one of my encompassing interests is prayer and how it works. As my own prayer life deepens, I find reading about prayer becomes even more interesting. Right now I’m reading a book by Thomas Dubay called Saints: A Closer Look. This book is not a collection of biographies but rather an analysis of the qualities that make saints different from everyone else. In the chapter on heroic virtue, he quotes St. Catherine of Siena on her deep love for God:

You are a mystery as deep as the sea; the more I search, the more I find, and the more I find the more I search for you. But I can never be satisfied; what I receive will ever leave me desiring more. When you fill my soul I have an even greater hunger, and I grow more famished for your light. I desire above all to see you, the true light, as you really are.

I have tasted and seen the depth of your mystery and the beauty of your creating with the light of my understanding. I have clothed myself with your likeness and have seen what I shall be.

That prayer is also in the Liturgy of the Hours Office of Readings for today. It is an amazing statement of love and thanksgiving. Thank you, St. Catherine of Siena.

Talk about an Old School Catholic experience. All I can say is “Look at what I missed.”

Blessed Sacrament is an old church. It’s celebrating its centennial this year (big Mass on August 8th–I’m going to try to be there) and it looks like a Real Church. You know. Built of brick, with a big bell tower. Embellishments on the brick outside. Stained glass windows. Hard surfaces inside–concrete floors, wooden pews. Giant pipe organ up in the front to the left. It reminds me of St. Charles Borromeo, in North Hollywood, where I used to sing–same general layout. (Sorry about the Wikipedia link–I know. But it has a good picture of the outside of St. Charles. And, hey, if you care, here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Paul Salamunovich, who I used to sing for in the 80s and early 90s.)

When I got there the parking lot was full. Blessed Sacrament might have the latest Last Chance Mass in Seattle, starting at 5:45 PM. Compline follows more or less immediately. The posted starting time is 7:00 for Compline, but Blessed Sacrament started a novena to St. Peregrine Saturday so they had a lot of people lined up for anointing after the 5:45 Mass. Hence, Compline started late. But it was nice to have time to sit and look around the church, and smell old incense, to look at the corpus and to pray.

Compline and Benediction is not a long service. It started with a procession to the tabernacle to retrieve the Blessed Sacrament. We sang two verses of Pange Lingua. There was a cantor. We chanted Psalm 91 antiphonally. We sang two verses of Tantum Ergo. The service concluded with a procession to the Shrine of the Blessed Mother, accompanied by the Dominican Salve Regina, an amazingly complex and beautiful chant. Then we processed to the altar of Sts. Dominic and Catherine singing another chant hymn, O Lumen, which was also complicated and beautiful.

I went for both the chant and the experience, and I want to go again. It was wonderfully reverent. Driving back over the bridge, I felt peaceful and ready for whatever the week ahead might hold. To me, that’s a benefit of ending the weekend with prayer.

Compline at Blessed Sacrament is the last Sunday of every month. I recommend it.

Lord, I am not worthy to receive You,
but only say the word and I shall be healed.

Oh, Lord Jesus, You are present among us
in this bread,
in this wine,
in this assembly.

I pray for all those coming to receive You.
Heal those who are broken.
Strengthen those who are weak.
Console those who suffer.
Nourish those who long for You.
Rejoice with those who are rejoicing.

Though I cannot receive You sacramentally,
touch my heart,
live in me,
stay with me:
A glowing ember in the depths of my heart.

He himself bore our sins in his body upon the cross, so that, free from sin, we might live for righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. (1 Peter 2:24)

I always used to skip over passages like this because they made me so uncomfortable. Yeah, right, Jesus died for my sins, I know that…next! And the reason statements like this made me so uncomfortable was that deep down I really wasn’t convinced that Jesus loved me. My retreat experience last December changed all that.

In that experience, Jesus revealed to me the depths of his infinite love and compassion for me. Finally I was convinced. That conviction gave me the courage to look at my sins fully and honestly. After doing that, I find that statements like the one from 1 Peter I quoted above stop me short every time.

My awareness of what Jesus suffered because of my stubbornness, arrogance, pride, self-centeredness, uncharitable speech, wayward thoughts, and all the rest brings tears to my eyes and a sense of what I sincerely hope is real repentance to my heart.

Maybe this is why I can abstain from Communion and Reconciliation, even though I long to partake of those sacraments (Reconciliation in particular–imagine that). But I can wait. I made Jesus wait for oh, 16 years. Even longer than that, really. God can take as long as He wants.

Could you use Twitter for religious or inspirational purposes? Suppose you set up a community where people would follow each other to post and respond to requests for prayer. Imagine if you could post a prayer intention, even something as minor as “I’m really having trouble avoiding this temptation,” and have your followers post back “I’m praying for you,” “Jesus, help Julie avoid this temptation,” etc. How would that feel?

I know that when I pray the prayer relationship is not only about me and God. Thousands of others across the world are also actively praying at any given moment. I find it comforting at 5:00 AM, when I’m saying Morning Prayer, to know that others in the world, my country, my state, my city, even perhaps my neighborhood, are doing the same thing.

You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MacAller.

Sometimes God tells me things in prayer that I just don’t get at the time, and then does me the favor of whacking me upside the head with a blindingly clear example of just what He meant a few days later.

Let me explain. Last Thursday and Friday, in my twenty minutes of mental prayer, I heard God tell me "don’t be afraid." And both mornings I was a little puzzled, because I couldn’t think of anything in my life that was frightening me. "OK, God," I said. "But what exactly are You talking about?" I’m sure you won’t be surprised that I didn’t get a direct answer at the time.

This past weekend I had the first meetings of this quarter’s class, Fostering Communities of Faith. Isn’t that a nice, safe-sounding title? Well, by lunch of the first day, I was ready to quit the class. I was scared, big-time, by what the class would demand of me. And as I grappled with the reality of the depth of my fear of conflict and my fear of intimacy, I realized just exactly what God had been telling me a day or two earlier.

I could see that God was offering me a big invitation. The problem was, the invitation was blank, except for two words: Yes or No. No details! No further information! And, given that I’ve been praying for awhile now for the grace to do God’s will, I knew that I really only had one answer to give: Yes.

God help me.

I’m doing the reading for my next class, Fostering Communities of Faith, and two of the books suggest that what we need to do as churches in this time is to make it possible for people to belong to the church before we ask them to believe.

I suspect my husband would agree with this idea. He thinks that the Catholic Church is like a club and finds it somewhat exclusionary. And I think, well, you could join the club if you were willing to make a leap of faith that you don’t seem willing to make. That kind of thinking, according to the books I’m reading, reflects a model of evangelism that doesn’t work in today’s world. And my own experience shows the truth of that.

So then I thought, maybe it hinges on how you define what it means to belong. Because, after all, anyone is welcome to come to Mass at our church. We don’t check for Catholic credentials at the door. For my husband, belonging seems to mean being able to do what everyone else does. So at the Easter Vigil he went to the font to bless himself with the new water because everyone else was doing it, not because he believes in the symbolism of new water or baptism or water made holy or anything like that. Similarly, he told me that he would go to Communion if he didn’t know it was against the rules, even though he doesn’t believe anything about the Eucharist.

I have a lot of trouble with that statement, and I’ve been thinking about it, over and over. What I finally came up with is this.

Actions are important. Even my husband could agree that actions sometimes speak louder than words. So I think that the action of going to Communion in a Catholic church attests to  believing very specific things about the Eucharist. If you don’t believe those things, then you are lying. And lying is hurtful to the Body of Christ. Remember the parable of the dishonest steward. Those who cannot be trusted with small things cannot be trusted with great.

For my part, I do believe all those very specific things about Eucharist. And I believe that it is necessary to be free from mortal sin in order to receive Eucharist. I’m not. So if I were to go to Communion, knowing that I am not free from mortal sin, I would, by my actions, be attesting that I was free from mortal sin. And then I would be lying. So that’s why I don’t go anymore.

Now. It took me years and years to be fully honest with Jesus about my sins, to sit with Him and say, “yes, I did that, I really did.” And when I did that He showed me how my sins were truly wrong and hurtful. And it wasn’t until after I was fully honest with Jesus about my sins that I was able to fully believe in God’s absolute and infinite love. And *that’s* when I was truly converted.