Sophie's First Communion

As I promised, here are a few pictures. Except for some group photographs with the other first timers, nearly all the pictures we took today are in the slideshow in the sidebar. The yellow-haired child demanded some equal time.

A Good Morning

My oldest daughter, Sophie, is receiving her first Holy Communion tomorrow. Her grandmother made her dress; she's going to look beautiful. Her last practice is tonight, and then in the morning she's going further into the life of the Church. We're excited for her, as you can imagine. It's going to be quite a liturgy. Pray for us.

In the afternoon, I will try to post some pictures of her in her dress.

Funny story: Monday night, at her last practice, the first-time communicants practiced going forward, and they received unconsecrated bread and wine. When Sophie got back to the pew she sat down next to me and shuddered. She looked at me, grimaced and said, "That wine don't taste very good."

With Tears

There is probably no blog that so regularly edifies me as Fr Stephen Freeman's, Glory to God for All Things. I "share" his posts so often that I sometimes feel like a groupie; I'm certainly a junkie. Fr Stephen is an Orthodox priest. What does that mean? Well, whatever else it means, it means this much: If I were to meet him, we could not receive Holy Communion together.

I had a dream the other night that my family went to a Baptist church and the people of the church tried to force me to take communion with them, which I refused. It was one of those dreams; it bothered me throughout the day.

Sometimes the oddest things will get me thinking about the oddest things.

There are many of you, many whom I dearly love, with whom I cannot receive Holy Communion. We are separated, here, at the Lord's Table.

And I'm struck by how casually we discuss our separation - should I even be able to speak of it, let alone argue about it, without tears?

I cannot receive Holy Communion with friends.

I cannot receive Holy Communion with family.

And the reason we cannot share in Holy Communion is because our separation, this wound, is the reality in which we live. (And I know my part in it. But there are some places one must go regardless of the cost. Aren't there?)

I'm not sure I intend anything by writing these words. I was simply reading Fr Stephen's blog when I saw his picture and imagined meeting him.

You and I, we are brothers and sisters, separated. It is not as though there is no unity, of course, but we are not one as we ought to be. And how can we speak of our disunity, our brokenness, with anything but tears?

The Food of Strong Men

Dreams are strange. It goes without saying, I realize, but nevertheless it seems the thing to say here before I share this dream with you. There's something captivating about dreams - all this forceful emotion and clear thought injected into sorting, nonsensical images that flicker arbitrarily in our brains.
     And so I dreamed all last night of receiving the Eucharist - the Mystery that is our very Lord. But I dreamed of potato chips with ridges instead of communion wafers. And as we sat in our pews, the bowl of chips was passed around the pews as if I were an Evangelical. The bowl was passed to me and somehow, terribly, the bowl spilled all over the floor at my feet. I was horrified. Here at my feet was our Lord. I waited until the liturgy was over and approached a woman who knows how such matters are handled and she said they had a special vacuum cleaner to handle such mishaps. But then, five minutes later, she returned and said it was unavailable, that it would have to wait until after the following liturgy. And so I crawled onto the floor and shielded my fragile Lord with my body, wrapping myself around Him as the pews filled with worshippers. One man began to stamp the chips with perverse delight. So I began to eat the body of our Lord off the floor. I filled myself with Him.

     “I am the food of strong men; grow and you shall feed on me; but you shall not change me, like the food of your flesh, into yourself, but you shall be changed into my likeness” (St Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, on Christ and Eucharist).

     I know it sounds ridiculous, but of course it didn't feel so - the stuff of dreams. My only desire was to bow before our Lord and to worship Him. It seems, perhaps, like some gross idolatry to see a man pressing his forehead onto the floor before Bread. But I worship there nonetheless. Before this Mystery, I must.
     And in this Mystery, this incarnation of Kingdom, in this taste, this mouthful of what is and what will be, Now, I am changed. The bad made good. I pray that it might be so.
     Save us, O Good One.

Sacrament of Love

Published today is a wonderful exhortation concerning the Eucharist from Papa Benedict. It is titled Sacramentum Caritatis, the Sacrament of Love. I would encourage especially my Catholic brothers and sisters to read it.

It is instructional and devotional - here is a taste:

True joy is found in recognizing that the Lord is still with us, our faithful companion along the way. The Eucharist makes us discover that Christ, risen from the dead, is our contemporary in the mystery of the Church, his body. Of this mystery of love we have become witnesses. Let us encourage one another to walk joyfully, our hearts filled with wonder, towards our encounter with the Holy Eucharist, so that we may experience and proclaim to others the truth of the words with which Jesus took leave of his disciples: "Lo, I am with you always, until the end of the world" (Mt 28:20).

Amen and amen.

This is why I am Catholic.

Why I Am Catholic, XI

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat - the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

- C.S. Lewis, the final sentences of "The Weight of Glory"

Why I Am Catholic, X

I am compelled to be Catholic, or at least not Protestant, because the Eucharist is no mere symbol, though it is symbolic. It is a true symbol, just as C.S. Lewis called the incarnation a true myth. It is, churching up my speech, a sacrament - indeed, it is the Most Blessed Sacrament for it is Christ's Body, Christ's Blood.

Why I Am Catholic, IX

"The Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, 'This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me'" (1 Cor 11.23-25).

The Didache - one of the earliest Church documents (A.D. 70, written while John was still living) - identifies the Eucharist as the sacrifice of Malachi 1.11.

"Take note of those who hold heterodox opinions on the grace of Jesus Christ which has come to us, and see how contrary their opinions are to the mind of God. ... They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins and which that Father, in his goodness, raised up again. They who deny the gift of God are perishing in their disputes" (Ignatius of Antioch, "Letter to the Smyrnaeans" 6:2-7:1 [A.D. 110]).

St. Vincent of Lerins, a fifth-century French bishop writes, "[I]n the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and in the strictest sense 'Catholic,' which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing declare, comprehends all universally. This rule we shall observe if we follow universality, antiquity, consent. We shall follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true, which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were notoriously held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if in antiquity itself we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors" (Common, 2 [italics added]).

Why I Am Catholic, VIII

I truly worship in the Mass, because the Mass is worship - a higher form of worship than that formerly available to me:

"Protestants, in their worship services, offer songs and praise and prayer to God; this is their highest form of worship. Since they don't have a priesthood, they have nothing else they can offer. Catholics on the other hand, offer the Sacrifice of the Mass to God. Our offering of sacrifice is made only to God and is our form of worship. This allows us to give lesser things such as songs and praise and prayer to those who can pray in our behalf before God: the saints and especially the Blessed Virgin Mary. When the Protestants see us offering what is their highest form of worship to someone other than God, it appears to them that we are worshiping someone other than God."

St Charles Borromeo Catholic Church

This quotation does not necessarily address a Catholic's nearness to God - there are countless Protestants who are nearer to God than I am - but it addresses, rather, the offering itself. And Protestants are unable to offer the true and proper sacrifice of the Mass, the Eucharist (Malachi 1.11). This reality left me questioning myself as an evangelical - If Christ is here, why am I not?

(And through the transition this quotation provides, I will next enter into the following reasons why I am Catholic: the Eucharist, which is the primary reason for my catholicity, and the communion of saints.)

Flannery: On the Eucharist

I saw the following Flannery O'Connor quote on "Martha, Martha" - and straightaway had to steal it.

"Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the 'most portable' person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, 'Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.' That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable."

The Riches of Emmanuel

I know that most Protestants who have thought about and determined to be Protestants have manifold problems with the Roman Catholic Church - many of the problems arise out of competing worldviews (sometimes differing eschatologies) while most of them, in my opinion, bubble up out of simple misunderstandings of or misinformation about what Catholics actually believe. Though only a novice, I have begun studying the Roman Catholic Church, and I have found richness there. And, possibly, exceedingly great richness.

Let me share with you the true riches of the Catholic Church. It is not found in her history, and it is not in her unity or charity (or even her hats). I do not find it in her strong moral stand within our culture or in her unrelenting grasp of right. It is not that she has given us the Scriptures or that she is, after two millennia, thoroughly orthodox. Don't misread me - there are riches here. But her true riches are, unquestioningly for me, in her Mass.

Many of the riches in the Catholic Church I can explore as a Protestant. In many cases, I can even make them my own. But the Mass is wholly different, wholly other. It has its liturgies (the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist) that must be performed. And though the priest plays an essential role in the Mass, it is not about the priest. Or the music. Or the homily (sermonette). The Mass is a celebration of the Eucharist. And the Eucharist - and here lies the scandalon, the stumbling stone - is Christ.

The dogma of the Real Presence (the transubstantiation) is a difficult one. The Church claims that the wafer and the wine truly, really, and substantially transform into the body and the blood, the soul and the divinity of Christ - though completely indiscernible by the senses. The Eucharist, therefore, celebrated as such, is either the greatest good or it is foul evil. I don't know that there is a middle way.

And therein is my great struggle with Catholicism. It is the most profound and life-changing news I have ever received as a believer - that I can touch and experience and feast upon our Lord. And it is the most terrifying.

What am I to do with this Sacrament?

For the first millennium of the Church's existence, the Real Presence was never questioned. And it was not rejected until the Reformation (even Luther and Calvin believed in the Real Presence, though they rejected the Catholic Church's teaching about its transformation - some of our "higher" Protestant traditions still believe in the Real Presence as the real spiritual presence of Christ). The Early Church Fathers write about the Real Presence and believe it. The Scriptures certainly allow and even suggest such an interpretation (This is my body, whoever does not discern the body, etc.). Is the Reformation more weighty than the first 1500 years of Church tradition? Wouldn't the Early Fathers have better known what our Lord intended than Luther or Calvin?

If the Real Presence is true, then I cannot keep myself from the Catholic Church.

What am I to do with this Sacrament?