Does this sort of religion "work" today? |
“American spirituality has shifted since the '60s toward a much more engaged, responsive, intimately experienced sense of the spiritual. Every church is different. Every person within a church has a somewhat different experience of God. But I thought this represented something really important about American spirituality." I think this insight has a lot to say about the changed Catholicism of the last fifty years.
Now I grew up, or at least got a good head start on growing up, in the pre-Vatican II Church. I was in High School when the Council met. I had at that point been through eight years of Catholic grade school and was safely ensconced in a private Catholic Boys High School where we were expected to be in Sodality and where the entire student body went to Mass in the gym every Friday morning. I grew up with family rosary, Mass on Sunday, Wednesday night Holy Hour, and Friday Stations during lent. We had no meat on Friday, fasted in Lent and the Vigil of Christmas (and several other days), and had a crucifix in every room in the house (except the guest bathroom), and assorted statues and holy pictures not only in the bedrooms but the living room, family room, foyer, and dining room. We weren’t fanatics—though it sure sounds like it now—it was what everybody we knew (‘cause everybody we knew was Catholic) did. We didn’t have Mass in English, communion in both kinds, charismatic prayer meetings, centering prayer, bible study, Lectio Divina, or guided meditation. Thomas Merton was Seven Story Mountain, Joan Chittester was still wearing a wimple (and not yet writing books), and Richard Rohr and Ronald Rohlheiser were both in Little League. It seems strange in retrospect, but this sort of religion worked.
Mass was something Father did for us. He said Mass. We went to Mass and, if we were in the “State of Grace” and hadn’t eaten, we went to Holy Communion. God to us was “mediated” by the priest. Those gates in the communion rail were a powerful symbol—they kept us at our respectful distance but they swung open and closed to admit the priest who went from us to God and from God to us. In the same way, the priest standing at the altar with his back towards us and “facing God” was a clear sign of his role as our designated mediator.
And if there was anything that the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council did, it was to give us direct access to God in which the priest may have remained a facilitator but no longer was the mediator. The gates were gone—the rail was gone—the barrier stood no longer and we could enter the sanctuary without obstacle. Prayer was in our own language and we could speak with God directly without Father having to take our prayers to God in Latin, God’s language of choice. The Mass and rites of the Church shaped our prayer, but didn’t exhaust it. Now people would gather for prayer meetings. Now there were bible studies. Now people began reading books about meditation and growing in the spiritual life. Lay people began having spiritual directors and spirituality shifted from staying out of sin and saying prayers to serious paths of spiritual journeying. It wasn’t only evangelicals who wanted an experiential prayer life—it was Catholics.
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