Apparently midterms eat up all my knowledge of the flow of time. This is a short entry to just say “I’m still here”. I know I promised an entry a day for Lent, and I feel like an ass for not doing it. But I also am not entirely surprised. I’m not the best at routines. I think I’ve got enough routines to keep track of right now that I’m still trying to master that adding a daily entry to the list was not my brightest idea ever.
But aside from my inability to blog daily, I have had a lot of interesting thoughts (interesting to me, that is) about God and church lately. A lot of it has been in trying to figure out how to explain to others the appeal I find in the Catholic church. And some of it has been coping with my lackluster feelings these last couple of weeks about God and religion. I’m feeling burnt out, but it turns out the answer to how to discuss both of those topics with people are precisely the same.
When I walked into the church Monday night for RCIA, I had just skipped class. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to RCIA either. I was tired (still am), and stressed out about these midterm projects I’m working on (still am). I got to a point in my evening when I just didn’t have it in me anymore to study for longer, and so I went to RCIA even though I’d skipped class. It turned out to be the right choice.
We toured the sanctuary of the church, as well as the various rooms and pathways behind the alter area. It was interesting to learn where they keep everything, and what they do behind the scenes to make a mass happen. But what I found most interesting was the instant calm and awareness I felt when we entered the sanctuary. Everything that exisists in a Roman Catholic church pulls together so nicely (in most cases) to create a space which makes it easy for me to focus on God. Even if my mind wanders, my eyes always wander to some other reminder of God and his influence in our lives. If I look one direction I see banners of the color of the season, in another direction, there’s stained glass with scenes from the Bible. I can even turn all the way around if I want and see something to remind me of God–in the case of this church, it’s these beautiful relief sculptures of the Stations of the Cross.
Now, I can’t say I totally understand all of what I see, but whatever it is, I know it’s there as a visual reminder of God. And so it goes with the other senses as well. I can’t pin it down exactly, but our church smells like what church ought to smell like, at least as far as my own imagination is concerned. And it sounds like a sacred place too–even with people in it, it sounds like a sacred space where the people are focusing on their time with God inside the sanctuary. Even when people talk (and it does happen, often, actually), it’s usually hushed. It’s with a sense of reverence. Because in the Catholic Church, if that little red light is lit over in the corner, then we are most certainly directly in the presence of God, and reverence is called for.
When I’m tired, and stressed out, and have lost my (already limited) ability to focus on what I’m doing, walking into a Catholic church helps me focus. All of the reminders, via all of my senses, pull together to make my time focusing on God as easy as any entity outside of my own self can. And I can’t help but think that this came together because God knows us, knows how we work, and wants to make it easy for us to enter into a relationship with him.
While we were touring the church, we also went into the confessional to see what it looks like. It’s very different than what I always imagined it to be, and certainly it’s different than in the movies. But walking in, seeing it for the first time, was an illuminating experience altogether. Intellectually I thought that confession was a good idea, because what better way to work on your relationship with God than on human terms, terms we can comprehend, if God offers such an opportunity? (And he does, via confession.) But today it was more important than that–although there was no priest there and we did not actually have confession, seeing it up close helped me incorporate that into my understanding of the Church and how God uses it to help us. It’s hard to confess to a person–I certainly can’t imagine doing it, though I know I will eventually. But it is necessary, because it’s bringing that process of confession down to a human level that lets us really deal with whatever we’re confessing.
We need God, and God has been so gracious and kind and loving as to make himself available to us in human terms. He is accessible through human experiences. How could I, someone who has been trying to develop a relationship with God for awhile now on my own–how could I turn away from such divine help?
(I’m still not sure this explaination will suffice, but it’s all I’ve got in me today.)
