Becoming present to God in the liturgical action, participating fully and willingly in God’s trinitarian act of salvation for us, is the ideal of liturgy. This willing participation, though, is a skill as well as a choice. Coping with distraction is one of the components of this skill.
Archive for category Devotions and Sacramentals
How American Catholics Pray
Jul 23
This is a review of James P. McCartin’s book Prayers of the Faithful: The Shifting Spiritual Life of American Catholics (Harvard University Press, 2010).
May we “taste and see!”
Jul 8
This photo of a homeless man with “invisiblemanitus” cleverly expresses the primary disease from which not the homeless, but the rest of us, suffer: defect of sight. Thomas Aquinas reminds us in Pange Lingua that in the eucharist, our ordinary senses fail us. (The wordplay of that verse is itself a theology: the Word of God efficit, makes; the senses deficit, fail; faith sufficit, suffices.)
I don’t think we’ve forgotten, in the present day, the failure [MORE...]
This post is in honor of Karl Rahner, whose reflections on the Sacred Heart of Jesus led to one of the most ground-breaking essays in 20th century sacramental theology, “The Theology of the Symbol” (Theological Investigations vol. 4, 221-52). Today, 19 days after Pentecost, is the Feast of the Sacred Heart.
In some sense, Rahner’s goal in this brief essay is to erase the mistaken dichotomy between “symbols” and “utilitarian” objects. We tend to have a [MORE...]
Notes from abroad
Jun 6
My wife and I are just recently back from two weeks in Poland and Ukraine. How recently? We are still encouraging each other each evening at 8:30 to stay awake for another hour, and our eyes still pop open at 4:30 in the morning (but with a little will power we roll over until 6:00).
I was giving lectures on liturgical theology at the Catholic University of Lublin at the invitation of a now dear friend [MORE...]
The Syro-Malabar Rite Catholics I met have a saying, adapted from Fr. Placid Podipara: they are “Indian in culture, Catholic in religion, and Syriac in worship.” Just this morning I discovered a new instance of the truth of this saying…
I am … asking that those few parish churches and chapels where the tabernacle is not in the direct center at the back of the sanctuary, that these spaces be redesigned in such a way that the Reserved Sacrament would be placed at the center.
Link to a version of the Stations of the Cross, arranged for public use, with optional meditations on the suffering of God’s people today.
Trinity Church, Wall Street, has long been a leader in pioneering new uses of the internet for evangelization and catechesis. Now they bring the Maundy Thursday adoration to the world with a “Virtual Vigil.”
Stations Online
Feb 23
From Saint Mary’s Basilica in Minneapolis, here are really beautiful Stations of the Cross.