I confess... I miss anxiety

It’s just one word. 

But I still notice it, almost every time. 

I miss “anxiety.”

It's been eight years now since the new English translation of the Roman Missal was implemented in Catholic parishes across the country on the first Sunday of Advent--back in 2011.

At our own parish, we were well prepared for the changes by our pastor, who arranged very helpful homilies, over several weeks, and even started using the new language two months early! It was his way of helping us to focus on Advent-- and not on whether we were getting the words “right.”

At the time, as we worked on the transition as a community, I found it very helpful to keep in mind the responses we say at Mass in Spanish.  The 2011 English translation parallels those Spanish responses much better than the previous one ever did.

Yet there is one point at Mass that still stalls me.

Right after we say the Our Father, the celebrant’s prayer that leads to the Sign of Peace, currently says:

Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil, graciously grant peace in our days, that, by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

But prior to Advent 2011, the prayer was:

Deliver us, Lord, from every evil,
and grant us peace in our day.
In your mercy keep us free from sin
and protect us from all anxiety
as we wait in joyful hope
for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ. 

Protect us from ALL ANXIETY.

There is nothing wrong with distress. But I genuinely miss begging God, as a community, to protect us from anxiety, all anxiety.

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NOTE:

I have two free Advent Apps from MAGNIFICAT to give away!! 

Please leave a blog message or private message me if you’d like one!! 

First come first serve.

Happy first day of Advent! 

learning to hunger for Christ

It is only the first week of Lent and it is already clear to me that this year’s 40-day pilgrimage is going to be different. 

Some things, of course, are not. I am already procrastinating about making any real changes –and I admit that I am all too willing to find just the perfect explanation (aka. excuse) to break my resolutions.

Yes, already, after only six days of Lent!

All that aside, it does feel different. 

Perhaps it’s the convergence of Lent and the Year of Mercy? Or maybe it is celebrating this Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy within the context of publicity for my new book and my efforts to make known Father Stanley Rother’s inspiring life?  Or all of the above?

Something is helping me take notice… and hear… what I often and normally miss.

“…we pray, O Lord,

that we may learn to hunger for Christ,

the true and living Bread,

and strive to live by every word

which proceeds from your mouth.”

~ prayer after communion, 1^st Sunday of Lent

My God, I am yours for time and eternity. Teach me to cast myself entirely into the arms of your loving Providence with a lively, unlimited confidence in your compassionate, tender pity. Grant, O most merciful Redeemer, that whatever you ordain or permit may be acceptable to me. Take from my heart all painful anxiety; let nothing sadden me but sin, nothing delight me but the hope of coming to the possession of You my God and my all, in your everlasting kingdom. Amen.

~CatherineMcAuley

“But maybe a ‘leap’ isn’t the most appropriate metaphor for this spiritual journey… we are called to ‘continuing conversion.’ We do not simply just fall deeper and deeper into our faith after our baptism or initial conversion. We are called to keep jumping. We talk of that ‘leap of faith,’ but our reality is one of multiple leaps, every day. Tiny jumps, or steps, even, sometimes just the distance it takes for our feet to go from the bed to the floor. It is that forward motion that keeps us going, that keeps saying that today will be better. Today I will try harder. Today I might fail. But I am still loved.”

~Kerry Weber, reflecting on RCIA

“Rite of Calling the Candidates to Continuing Conversion,” 

from her gem of a book,

“Mercy in the City: How to feed the hunger,

give drink to the thirsty,

visit the imprisoned,

and keep your day job.”  

 [ all photos © Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda, 2016 ]

#SmallMerciesMiércoles: I'm grateful for... our Catholic liturgies

I've had a busy, non-stop kind of day, which means I'm writing this #SmallMerciesMiércoles post in the evening--as I wait for dinner. I'm not sure what my daughter Michelle is cooking for us tonight, but I can tell you that the smells making their way to my office are pretty spectacular... but I digress!

At our parish tonight we celebrated and prayed together a modified Tenebrae service, also known as "a service of shadows."  To read more about this monastic tradition go here.

I was very moved by this response, which we chanted throughout the readings, psalms, and prayers:

This is the holiest of weeks of the year, with liturgies that are rich in meaning and abounding in beauty, and tonight's service was no exception. It was lovely, reflective, and challenging, a perfect entrance to the Triduum we begin tomorrow. To read more on the Triduum go here.

As I reflect on the richness of our Catholic faith and traditions, what I'm grateful for today becomes quite obvious. 

I'm grateful for... our Catholic liturgies, and how they connect me across time, history, and space with the whole community of believers!

This will be my last blog post until Easter week, so I'll leave you with two thoughts. First, from my dear friend Father Thomas Boyer, a brilliant homilist, now retired:

"The Passion of Christ is not about how Christ suffered, what happened to him, and how awful we might think it was. The Passion of Christ is about his response, not his persecution...  

Watch and learn from the master. Despite his fear and his agony, he is focused on God and on others. He meets women who are weeping for him, and he tells them to weep for themselves. He hangs there with a criminal, and he comforts him with a promise of Paradise. No matter what happens in this Passion, it is never about him. He remains attentive and focused on God and the needs of others…   This is what we can learn from the Passion; not how Christ died, but what he still teaches us through his death about hope, about sacrifice, and about love for others."

And finally, something I wrote last year, published on Good Friday in the New York Times section “Room for Debate.”  The question was,  “What is the purpose of Lent.”  Here's my response:

Ten years after my friend Pat and I walked 350 miles of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, we laugh about the vigorous women we were then. Pat is battling life-threatening brain cancer, and I’m learning to function with a diminishing chronic autoimmune condition.

It would be too simple to say our physical circumstances are a metaphor for the struggles and challenges of the Camino. In so many ways, the Camino is a metaphor for our whole lives: I can’t anticipate what struggles today will bring, but anything is doable one step at a time. Every uphill has a downhill. Hardship becomes manageable with a friend. Every single thing that I carry weighs me down, so I must choose wisely. 

In our culture, pain, suffering, worries, difficulties and grieving are all things to conquer — and to anesthetize as quickly as possible. Each of us is an addict looking for a quick fix. Drugs. Food. Exercise. Sex. Shopping. Disposable relationships. Whatever it takes to not feel bad, sad, hurt. 

Thus the question for me is not whether there’s a point to giving things up during Lent, but whether I should ever stop fasting from all that numbs, dulls and deadens me to life, all of life, as it is today — the good and the bad. Fasting makes me willing to try. 

For Christians, Good Friday stands alone in holiness and singularity. The day defines who and what we believe — and what makes us different. Christianity scandalously proposes a God who becomes human out of love for humanity. The scandal deepens when this God-made-man willingly accepts suffering and death out of complete trust. 

The Passion of Christ is not ultimately about how Christ suffered; it’s not a documentary on the History Channel. The Passion is about Jesus’ response. 

In the midst of intense pain, in spite of undeserved persecution and profound discrimination, Jesus keeps his eyes on God, commending his heart and entire being to the one he trusted completely and without reservation. Each Lent, I fast to remember.

Go here if you'd like to read all of the other entries.

wood carving by a Costa Rican artisan, on our home's entryway

God of mercy, make these holy days

a time of hope and promise for your people!

Year of Faith: faith celebrated

Our Lady of Lourdes grotto, University of Notre Dame

Although I hesitate to use the word organize, this past week I sorted through and cleared the cobwebs off my desk, which has not see much actual work for many weeks now. 

The few work projects that I’ve managed to complete, however, have been different and quite interesting.

I wrote the August column in the current issue of St.Anthony Messenger, for example, part of their special monthly feature for this Year of Faith.

In this world of 140 characters, the challenge as a writer was to say something personal and meaningful—in no more than 400 words! Our assignment called for each writer to take on a theme inspired by the Holy Father’s letter Porta Fidei, “Doors of Faith.”

My particular topic from the document is this: how the celebration of faith fuels our faith. The idea is inspired by a passage found in paragraph 9 of Porta Fidei that states:  

“To rediscover the content of the faith that is professed, celebrated, lived and prayed,[15]and to reflect on the act of faith, is a task that every believer must make his own, especially in the course of this Year.” 

Here’s the complete paragraph: 

“We want this Year to arouse in every believer the aspiration to profess the faith in fullness and with renewed conviction, with confidence and hope. It will also be a good opportunity to intensify the celebration of the faith in the liturgy, especially in the Eucharist, which is “the summit towards which the activity of the Church is directed; ... and also the source from which all its power flows.”[14] At the same time, we make it our prayer that believers’ witness of life may grow in credibility. To rediscover the content of the faith that is professed, celebrated, lived and prayed,[15]and to reflect on the act of faith, is a task that every believer must make his own, especially in the course of this Year.”

And here’s the short reflection that I wrote, titled “Faith Celebrated”:

As a young Cuban refugee growing up in the neighboring island of Puerto Rico, I was keenly aware of all that made me different. In spite of speaking the same language, my schoolmates teased me for my differences in speech. Like refugee families from other cultures, ours was a multi-generational home shared with three grandparents. Our family spent a considerable amount of our time and energy taking classes and attending events meant to remind us of our native culture, lest we ever forget what made us Cuban—and why we were refugees.   

 It was an unsettling time for all the adults in my life. This meant that I attended five different grade schools and lived in five different homes—one not corresponding with the other.  

 I was a perceptive child, more aware than most of the inner struggles of those suffering around me. In a very real way, I felt my parents’ anguish over the family and friends left in Cuba. I ingested my grandmother’s nighttime tears and loneliness. I experienced my grandparents’ uprootedness and displacement.  

 In the midst of all this inner suffering and external displacement—and perhaps directly because of it—my sense of place, belonging, and peace became deeply rooted in the Catholic Church.  

 Unlike most people’s experience, however, this sense of being claimed and chosen was not attached to one parish—but in a very real way, to the Church universal. Walking into a church. Celebrating the liturgy in unison. Receiving the Eucharist with mis hermanos, my brothers and sisters in the faith. This was, and is, home to me. 

 Paraphrasing Pope Benedict XVI’s declaration, I want this Year of Faith to arouse the desire to profess the faith in fullness and with renewed conviction, with confidence and hope.
  

In truth, there’s no substitute for the basics. Honest, daily prayer. Reclaiming the graces of the Sacraments. Approaching faith and tradition with a willing heart. Reclaiming the liturgy, and especially the Eucharist, as our home—the source from which “all its power flows.” 

 Only if we put the events of our lives—past, present, future—in contact with the Word of God and the Sacraments will those events become signs of God’s presence in and for our lives. 

 Only if we recommit to daily private and public prayer can we “rediscover the content of the faith that is professed, celebrated, lived and prayed.” 

Do we dare live our lives with such certainty?

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Be sure to check out the printed August issue of St. AnthonyMessenger Magazine, where this reflection was first published [www.StAnthonyMessenger.org].