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Posted by on May 14, 2018

Mystagogy: A Journey with the Holy Spirit into Deeper Faith

Mystagogy: A Journey with the Holy Spirit into Deeper Faith

Mystagogy is the fourth and last stage in RCIA (the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults). The term comes from the Greek for “secret.”  The reason this term is appropriate for Christianity is that the tradition understands much of its focus as being on the supernatural. By definition the supernatural is often not known nor experienced through ordinary reasoning or empirical interaction. During the time of Mystagogy, RCIA neophytes are called to deepen their experience of the Sacraments (or Mysteries) received at Easter and to understand them. The sacraments are a primary encounter of Christians with God and thus events with an ineffable dimension.

This time after the Easter Sacraments therefore includes opportunities for experience, reflection and learning.  The most important goal is that neophytes grow in closeness to God. The second goal is that they know the joy of sharing their faith in the community of the Church. Neophytes are then encouraged to reach out eventually to those not part of the church community.

For new Catholics, the Eucharist, a mystery itself, is the model and the means of why and how one can live the life of a new creation. In the Eucharist, Jesus gives himself to believers in a humble and personal way and models the self-giving and purest kind of love that happened at the Crucifixion. The Eucharist transforms and empowers recipients to live a life that is full of the kind of love we see in Jesus. As they are fed, they can go out and feed others.

This new life is not something one can read about and just do. It is not a skill. It is a relationship. As a living relationship with God, it takes time. This relationship grows through the reception of the sacraments, prayer, and doing service. The period of Mystagogy is the beginning of what St. Paul calls “putting on Christ.”  (Romans 13:14)

After the intense months of RCIA, it can be a shock for new Catholics suddenly not to be a part of a group attending the liturgy and practicing prayer, learning, and reflection. Many people involved in RCIA teams, as well as new Catholics, feel that Mystagogy, which usually lasts a month to six weeks, is not nearly long enough. Some parishes have RCIA programs that run one and one half years to two years. Other parishes encourage RCIA graduates to join Bible studies, prayer groups, adult religious education, parish retreats, and ministries within the parish community.

In the end, Mystagogy and the ensuing Christian life are a matter of trust. God lives in our depths and graces us in unseen ways. We often do not know exactly where we are going in life, but we know that Jesus is with us. During Mystagogy, the New Christian is led by the Holy Spirit deeper into God and the life of faith, both a matter of intellectual knowledge and unfathomable mystery. It is the beginning of a great adventure.

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Posted by on Dec 8, 2017

Mystagogy: A Journey with the Holy Spirit into Deeper Faith

Liturgy – A Flunk Proof Quiz – well almost ;-)

Most of us think of liturgy as something that happens inside the Church building.  Here’s a short quiz. Don’t worry because we will tell you the answers. It’s easier than making rock sculptures at the beach and there are no smashed thumbs. (Really.)

Question 1: Liturgy is the “work of the people.”

  • True
  • False
  • Maybe both
  • Don’t know

Generally, we look at the Greek word “leitourgia” which referred to a public event or ceremony put on by the local population. People would worship various gods, offer sacrifices, or worship the emperor with parades, games, and feasting. ACTUALLY, our worship happens to us as Christians when we allow ourselves to get caught up in the life of the Trinity.

Question 2: The liturgy is the Mass.

  • True
  • False
  • I wonder
  • I think that there is something else

Well… Liturgy usually refers to the official worship of the Church. This includes the Mass and the Sacraments, as well as the Liturgy of the Hours, also known as the breviary or the office.

Question 3: Everything else is private prayer and is not “officially” Liturgy.

  • True
  • False
  • Used to be true
  • The times they are a’changing

This diagram shows how we generally think of the liturgy and other prayers or ways that we connect with God.

Taking a closer look at Vatican II’s teaching on the liturgy in Sacrosanctum Concilium, we find a broader understanding of Liturgy as something more than the Mass and the Sacraments. Liturgy is more than focusing on all of the little red marking in the margins of the book that tell you how to perform the ceremony.  Liturgy is the encounter with God who is the source and summit of our life. This obviously happens in the Mass and the Sacraments. But we also encounter God in our lives and the prayers and devotions we say in church, at home, or in public – like saying the rosary, lighting a candle, or saying grace before meals. We also encounter God in nature and exploring the stars. Since our life in the Trinity is one continuous whole we experience a liturgy of life.

Question 4: Liturgy pervades my life since I am part of the Body of Christ and caught up in the Spirit.

 

  • All of the time.
  • Some of the time.
  • Not if I am clueless.
  • Only if I let it.

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God. (Romans 8:26-27)

 

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Posted by on Sep 19, 2012

Mystagogy: A Journey with the Holy Spirit into Deeper Faith

The First Fruit of the Spirit is Love

Driftwood Flowers

Writing about LOVE is daunting. What can one say about it that has not already been said? How many songs and poems, plays and stories have been written about it?

But the hesitation about this is based on a false premise. The false premise is that our lives and thoughts are set and not constantly changing. Change scares us but change also frees us and gives us hope.  So, LOVE is always new in us. Everyday we grow and greet life with new thoughts and feelings. These may be negative, but even if they are, we are exploring new ways to reach for love, to know love, to experience love, to be angry at love.

Recently I was wrestling with the tremendous variety in love. From the Greeks forward we know the ancient spectrum of types of love: from pleasure to sacrificial spiritual love — pure altruism.  I have always considered the “ideal love” — the purely altruistic love — the standard against which I judge my feelings and actions. I put myself down for having “Mixed Motives.” I see that I often pursue people for double motives. I may want to help that person or validate that person, but he or she also makes me feel good or important or useful. Does that nullify my help to them? From the point of view of suffering, especially suffering from things such as depression or trauma, the love of things we enjoy, including relationships and sexuality, is rare and to be sought. Many people enjoy very little. If they could get pleasure out of a painting or a meal, it would be a good thing, possibly a very holy thing. So, love should not be interpreted as something free of my concerns or enjoyment. It is possible both to please God and others and also please myself.

Teilhard de Chardin, in The Divine Milieu, speaks of being both attached and detached at the same time. We should love what we do or enjoy but we at the same time must surrender control over the processes or outcomes. Love involves the risk of caring, of getting involved. But if an affinity or pursuit is taking us away from God, we have to detach ourselves from it. So, love includes the maturity of wisdom, of surrendering to what is best, not just to what I want.

Love is said to be generous. Paul in I Corinthians 13 presents a description of extraordinary generosity and lack of ego, patience and kindness. How can love be so generous and still please me? There is a double answer to this. First, we believe that everything is grace. The very ability to love without counting the cost to us, is a sign of God’s work in us. So, being able to do loving actions is a sign that God is close. Secondly, it is a very good thing to see ourselves as loving. We don’t need to feel like failures at life. It is not a prideful thing to know ourselves as happy, as someone who is doing well, or as someone who enjoys giving in appropriate ways.

Love requires discernment. When love is expressed as giving, it can be beneficial but it can also be harmful. Actions that seem to help people may actually be robbing people of their independence or need to do things on their own. Loving actions may be good in themselves, such as cooking a meal for the homeless, but not actually be loving because I may really need to use that time to do something else, such as study for an exam.  As we all know, sometimes the most loving thing is not to do something or not to say something. I cringe at the thought of letting my children make mistakes; but, not trying to control them or lecture them, now that they are grown, is a very loving thing.

Love is often a decision, not a feeling. Putting my mother in a skilled nursing facility was a very painful thing for me. It was the very best thing to do given her level of medical difficulty and my need to work full time. It was a loving thing to do especially since I had visited and researched all the possible facilities and knew my mother’s likes and dislikes. Every step of the way I had to be supportive and creative with my mother’s reactions to her new home, which turned out to be multiple. As she aged and grew more ill, I tried to find the best fit for her in residences. I met a number of people in the same situation who also were making hard decisions that nevertheless were out of love. For the last nine months of her life I drove 40 miles from work to where my mother lived just about every day. She was in pain and often unhappy. I could not fix her or her situation with my love for her. I decided to be there, listen to her and solve whatever problems I could. I wanted to take her off her cross. Oddly enough, that would not have been loving.

Real love always involves some suffering. By its very nature it involves attachment to who or what is loved and when that person or thing leaves, dies or deteriorates we suffer. That is not wrong, but it does hurt.

Love also involves longing. Built into our spirit is the desire to be united to what we love. We feel separation all the time. In developing our own identities we do so in relation to others who are separate from us. It is necessary and good to be our unique selves, but it is also taxing. We sometimes feel that we want to fall back into union with our mothers, or mother images of infancy so that we can get out from under all the responsibilities and worries of life. We also long to be truly known as we really are. We want unconditional love.  These feelings are in all of us and good in themselves. In this life our task is to become our true selves. We travel through a series of experiences which challenge and teach us. One of the things that draws us forward is the desire to be known and loved. God is in the midst of all these experiences — knowing and loving us. The more we see how God loves us into growth, the more we can love this way in our lives. This love can be both sensitive and harsh. If we mediate on the Gospels we can see these two expressions of love in the way that Jesus lived and how he related to people. We can see how he relates to us, to me.

This sense of God’s personal love for me is sustaining. Its gentle and challenging aspects make sense to me. In The Living Flame of  Love, John of the Cross, speaks of God wounding us to get our attention in order to purify and heal us. Love is not always pretty but it is the most important thing in life.

Public Domain image by Christina Spiegeland

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Posted by on Mar 25, 2012

The Church: LA Religious Education Congress

Hello from Los Angeles!

The Religious Education Congress has been excellent — energizing and enlightening.  There has been a decided focus on some basic topics and themes that have been unpopular with most Catholic progressives — things like sin and the Sacrament of Reconciliation.  It’s all been integrated in a very interesting way.  I believe it may be in reaction to the accusations of the Catholic Right that everyone else in the Church has fallen off the deep end into perdition.  It is also probably in response to the reality of the need for evangelization regarding the need for God in the first place.

Religion is very un-PC at the moment.  “Sin” as a topic is a “no-no.”  Taking responsibility for hurtful acts is very difficult for most people.  The connection between sin and evangelization is that one cannot be a credible witness to the need for faith if one is living a chaotic or destructive life.  Many of the speakers pointed to the need for good decisions, being able to hear God’s voice in the midst of all the competing voices in our culture — security, money, appearances, status etc. —  and having a spiritual director or a personal spiritual coach in the person to whom one goes for the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Matthew Kelly noted, “Holiness is attractive.”  We have so many Catholics outside the Church who have been hurt by someone in the Church that we have to look at how committed we are to our own faith — does it really matter?  We are attracted to a Mother Teresa.  She was only one person — a small one at that.  So, Kelly rightly asked — “What’s with the rest of us?”

It’s a good question — one that we would all do well to take as our focus during these final days of Lent and as we go into Easter.

 

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Posted by on Jul 26, 2011

Mystagogy: A Journey with the Holy Spirit into Deeper Faith

Novena to St. Ignatius Loyola – Reconciliation – Fifth Day – July 27 –

Testimony:

Thank God for His mercy and grace. If not for His grace and mercy, I would have been so lost in drugs and alcohol and misery. He sent His son to die for each of us. What I have now is peace that passes all understanding, and His Spirit that lives in me to give me actual joy in life. finally joy and peace that I thought was in pain killers and booze. That wasn’t joy, that was being numb. Not now! Not anymore! Thank God for His grace. – blog comment on “Your Grace Is Enough for Me” by stormyweather

Reflection:

This testimony is a beautiful example of true reconciliation. It involves a transformative healing and could have come right out of the pages of the Gospel – The Good News.

Confession, or the Sacrament of Reconciliation, is high on St. Ignatius’ list of priorities for the First Week of the Exercises. The challenge for most cradle Catholics is focusing on a long Church approved check list of sins, as opposed to focusing on the person of Christ. The things that bother us the most are obvious if we are honest with ourselves. Often we can become neurotically obsessed with our own behavior in terms of small things, without facing major issues like alcoholic parents; sexual, physical, or psychological abuse; refusing to forgive. People in lifestyles or marriages that don’t meet Church standards can feel that somehow God is not interested in them; somehow He died only for the good people.

Most of the detailed lists cover symptoms of some type of break-down in our relationship with God as codified in the Ten Commandments or the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth. However, this can lead to a denial of our own feelings and cause damage in other areas of our lives. If my anger is always close to the surface, it is not really helpful to keep confessing it and beating myself up over it without looking more deeply at what its cause is. My marriage can be problematic and my sex life unsatisfying. However, if I just keep focusing on the symptoms instead of these deeper issues, I am wasting time and energy and building up to something that will be very bad for everyone concerned.

Sin, guilt, and remorse can be very complicated. Returning veterans from the Middle East have not sinned when they killed people if you believe in the just war theory of morality. That doesn’t mean that they don’t carry a great burden. When they lash out in destructive ways as part of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, marriages are lost, children are harmed, suicide can follow. Going down a checklist doesn’t even begin to offer the healing we all need in these and most situations. Let us look at ourselves, our loved ones, and all others with honesty and compassion as we embrace the forgiving Christ. We are worth everything to God. Perhaps the greatest sin when we don’t see ourselves as worth saving. God does not make junk.

people-walking-on-street

Examination of Conscience

Place yourself in God’s presence and know that you are with a trusted friend. Put out of your mind all thoughts of an avenging father figure or some tyrannical authority figure. You are with the God who came to dwell among us and shared all things we endure except sin. Jesus was open and frank with people who came and spoke with him. He expects no less from you. If you are upset or confused, listen for the healing voice of your Friend. Open your heart and listen.

Start with a thank you for being redeemed and saved and for protection. Ask the tough questions. Why did my child die? What do I do with my alcoholic husband? My heart is broken. Can you mend it? I tampered with evidence to get innocent people convicted. I fought for tax laws that would protect me and take food, healthcare, housing, and education from the poor. I did my best to be careful, but I killed women and children in that village. I think the Church is wrong when it says we should get rid of the death penalty.

Be open to finding out the facts. Have I brought these issues to a counselor? How do I start to change things and to make amends. What is the deeper issue here?

Talk with Jesus. Accept His forgiveness. When he says “Go in peace and sin no more,” what will I do to make that a reality? If you are glum or downcast, something is wrong. You have been pardoned. Stretch, breathe, cry for happiness. Break out in song. Jump for joy. This day salvation has come to your house.

Concluding Prayer

St. Ignatius, you signed your letters “pobre de bondad,” poor in goodness, and called yourself a pilgrim. Please pray for me to be open to what God is calling me to do to announce and build up the kingdom. Transform my petitions into questions of discernment and pray for us to remember that all of our true needs and desires are already known to God. Pray that I be taken beyond my wants, beyond my fears, from death into life.

In your writings and by your example we are reminded to pray for the Church and the Holy Father, for all who dwell in darkness and for the millions lacking food, water, and other necessities. We join our prayer with yours for true openness so that we can contemplate the Divine presence in all things and praise, reverence, and serve God Our Lord in action.Pray for us to have the courage to meet and to serve the Lord Jesus in the poor and the suffering.

Praise be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
Now and Forever. Amen.

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Posted by on Aug 5, 2008

Mystagogy: A Journey with the Holy Spirit into Deeper Faith

Saint of the Day – St. John Vianney: August 4


St. Jean Baptiste Marie Vianney (1786-1859) was the parish priest of the village of Ars and is known primarily by that title even in English, “The Cure d’Ars”. Canonized in 1925 St. John Vianney is the patron of parish priests. In many respects he is a thoroughly modern saint.

He was born into the midst of the French Revolution and into a devout rural family who worshiped in secret with outlaw priests who refused to become state functionaries. The upheaval of the revolution closed schools, hospitals, and other institutions. For the first time in human history, the state asserted itself without religion as it destroyed the old Catholic order – the Ancien Regime. The “Goddess of Reason” was enthroned in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Priests, nuns, and the Catholic nobility were killed, forced into hiding or exiled.

After the revolution subsided, Napoleon attempted to gain complete control of the Church in France and even took control of the Papal States, removing the Pope from Rome and bringing most of the Cardinals to Paris. In 1812 Napoleon’s fall began with the disastrous retreat from Russia in winter. The Industrial Revolution would follow, ending forever the cultural matrix of European Christianity.

St. John Vianney’s 73 years of life would span the trauma of the ending of the Divine Right of Kings to the rise of the rights of the common man. He would become emblematic of a Catholicism redefining itself, as it was torn from the 1,500 years of prerogatives and burdens of its affiliation with the state dating from the reign of the Emperor Constantine.

St. John Vianney began by re-asserting the centrality of God in his own life and supporting those in the parish who still practiced the faith. It is important to note that his vocation was in itself something of a miracle. Due to the upheaval of the times, he had no formal education until he was 20 and had great difficulty with Latin. To make matters worse, he got drafted by Napoleon and ended up as a deserter in hiding. An unlikely amnesty made it possible for him to return to his studies. If there hadn’t been such a severe shortage of priests, it is possible that he would never have been ordained.

His personal example of holiness in terms of his prayer and his charity to all made a deep impression. Sunday had become just another workday. Taverns were places of dissolution and much of the social order had broken down. “Dances” were part of a wild party scene involving promiscuity and adultery. Orphans and the disabled were exploited and left to fend for themselves. Over several decades, he led a movement to remedy these problems and to encourage religious devotion, while promoting service to others.

When the bishop attempted to assign St. John Vianney to other parishes, the community protested until the bishop relented. By our standards, his personal acts of penance and mortification, his meager diet, and short hours of sleep, appear to be excessive and even harsh. Reports that he was assaulted by the Devil at night strike us as bizarre, maybe even pathological. Yet they were witnessed by men in the parish who came when they heard the commotion.

Interestingly, he was not severe with his parishoners or penitents in the confessional. In fact, he was known for having won over a prominent woman who was a Jansenist and led her from a severe and demanding conception of God.

Not all of his fellow priests agreed with his approach or pastoral style. In fact, we might say that his special gifts in his historical circumstances may have created the ideal of the parish priest as a solitary super hero, like the desert fathers or the anchorites of the early Church. This calling is something one can respond to, but it cannot be fabricated and put on like a suit. Fr. John Cihak, in “St. John Vianney’s Pastoral Plan”, helps us understand how his example can guide parish priests today.

There is one major factor that is alluded to in the wonder of St. John Vianney’s life and ministry, but it is especially important for all of us who are parishioners today. God worked extensively in the life and ministry of St. John Vianney through his family, those who sheltered him as a deserter, and the people of Ars. Whether the pastor is single or married, the position is one of the most exposed and the most lonely. In denominations with a married clergy, and in the case of Eastern Rite Catholic priests and Latin Rite Catholic deacons, the spouses and children of clergy have a special opportunity and burden that only we can support by our prayers, understanding, and kindness toward them.

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Posted by on Aug 23, 2007

Harden Not Your Heart

Many years ago I was teaching a 5th and 6th grade religious education class (otherwise known as CCD in Catholic circles). It was a lively group of children, many of whom were quite outspoken. We gathered weekly in a church hall after their regular school day. I always let them move around a bit, talk with each other and work on a cross stitch project while I was getting the space ready for our class. It helped them transition into the time we would spend together. It also helped them get to know each other, because they came from four or five different schools.

One particular day, a very lively, expressive girl, I’ll call her Marcie, decided that she didn’t like something I had said in greeting or in calling the group together. I don’t remember now what it was, but none of the other children thought anything of it.

When I called the children to gather in a circle for our opening prayer verse and song, Marcie joined the circle but faced away from the rest of us, towards the outside, saying she wasn’t going to be part of the group because she didn’t like what I had said.

It’s not often that a teacher gets such a perfect example handed her on a platter, so I shamelessly moved ahead and used it! We were, after all, studying the sacraments, including Reconciliation, that year. I asked the other children to look at Marcie and notice what she was doing. She had chosen not to be part of the group and had turned away from us. We had not turned from her. None of us had rejected her in any way. It was her choice to turn away and would be her choice to turn back to join the group. That is the way it is between us and God. God never turns away from us. We may choose to turn from God — and we are the ones who can choose to turn back at any time. God will never force us to act in either direction. It’s entirely up to each of us.

And what did Marcie do while I was speaking? Before I finished the first sentence, she had turned back to the group and was apologizing to all of them for giving me the chance to make a “religion” lesson out of what she had done. They were quick to make her feel at ease again.

I remembered Marcie and that day today as we prayed the Psalm at Mass. “If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your heart.” (Ps 95:7-8) God’s voice calls us. I hope we can respond as quickly as Marcie and the other children did to join the circle listening to His voice.

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