The Obligatory Lent Post

Phillip and I started going to our church before we were dating. I'd heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that St. Upper Class Urban Neighborhood had an amazing priest. At the time I was tired of the "scene" at the Newman Center: all students reminiscent of what I imagined the Newman Center to be like when my mom had gone to college, hippie hymns and overly earnest guitar playing. I wanted families and old people and babies and feeling like you were at church. Phillip, my lone still-practicing Catholic friend was game to try it out, so he picked me up one morning and off we went to St. Upper Class Urban Neighborhood. It was a giant church with the slanted roof and the steeple and everything. It was huge in comparison to the Newman Center, which was still meeting in a house basement when I was in school. (Now it looks like this.) And the priest? He was amazing. Hundreds and hundreds of people attended Sunday morning Mass just to hear him talk. And he always said the same thing- love! your! neighbor!- but he always found a different way to say it each week.

We'd been attending a little over two years when the order he belonged to decided to send him to Africa to train seminarians. Phillip is still not quite over it.

We were not immediately enamored of the new priest. We could not adapt to his decidedly less charismatic demeanor, his solemnity, his reverence for the liturgy. We missed the energy and emotion of the old priest, we missed the way he made us feel. We grudgingly began to "church shop", going to nearly every Catholic church in a ten mile radius. I'm not sure what we were looking for, but we certainly didn't find anyone to match our old priest. For a while I entertained thoughts of attending non-denominational churches because, I reasoned, those churches had feeling. They had spirit and life. Besides, for two kids who had spent college entrenched in a "non-denominational" Christian student fellowship, those churches seemed a lot more familiar than Catholic liturgy.

Except not. I ignored everyone who kind of implied that I was in the wrong religion (of course, no one dared to say that outright!) I liked being Catholic. I liked how big it was and how universal. I liked that I could walk into any Catholic church in any country and know what was going on. I never understood the churches that collapsed after a pastor scandal or split up into two after a rift in the leadership. I liked the enormity, the vast, the sense of the magnificent. When I took him to Italy, Phillip loved the cathedrals. So grand and lavish and enormous- those were proper houses for God.

So we go to St. Fairly Wealthy Mostly White Folks because we've always gone there. We looked around for someone else, but we came back. It's familiar. It's where we got married and where we know a handful of people. We've stuck around long enough to learn that our priest is tremendously gifted in small groups, so talented at sharing his knowledge. Normally I'd gouge my eyes out with a spoon before joining a tour group, but I'm a little bummed I'm not going on the Holy Sites of Italy tour he's leading this spring. I can't imagine the things I would learn. We've stuck around long enough to participate in a small flicker of involved young people, one of whom is reluctant to miss a morning with his amazing pastor at the Presbyterian church and attend Mass with his wife. He told us this and another person said: What if the pastor leaves? Are you going to follow him? Who are you worshiping?

We've stuck around long enough that last night, after our first Lenten bible study, when we were sitting in the pews for Taize, I thought to myself: I feel very much at home.

This Lent I find myself in a very confused place. I am conflicted about how long I'm going to keep my job, what I'll do next, what I'd like to do next, what I should and shouldn't do, how long I'll do whatever I'm doing, can I hack what I really want to do?  I've been waking up early every morning with these thoughts circling around me. I'm restless and out of sorts. But I think God is calling me home, asking me to leave those things at the cross. I am not at church to hear a fantastic sermon or sing beautiful songs or to feel anything. I am there because that's where he is and that's where I should be.

For Lent I am going to a Wednesday evening Taize service, doing a bible study with the other young adults and attending the church retreat this weekend. I should probably give up my fake-sugar candies too, but instead I'm going to pray this prayer. It's actually a prayer for soldiers, but I think I can use it too:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. There will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Thomas Merton

Comments

[lee]

i love that prayer. thomas merton must have been a gen-xer.