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 Liturgical Spirituality
Father Anthony’s post on the elusive presence of God provokes the following rejoinder. I have often said that the real question in sacramental theology is not about the real presence of Christ but about the real presence of us. Everything we do at liturgy enables us to become really present to God the Trinity.
I am led to this thought by my reading of C. S. Lewis’s fourth Letter to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (Harcourt, 1964), [MORE...]
In the “Amen Corner,” Nathan Mitchell takes up the issue of “a God who is elusive yet explosive, hidden yet revealed, absent yet accessible.”
Camino to Compostela
Jul 28
La Cigüeña de la Torre reports that 2,200 young people from Madrid have set out by foot on the pilgrimage path to the shrine of St. James in Compostela.
Vatican Dress Code
Jul 28
The officers of the Swiss Guard are now pulling aside tourists who show too much skin.
When was the last time you encountered complete silence? This question came to me this past Sunday as I sat in church waiting for the Eucharistic celebration to begin. As I sat there wanting to pray, I couldn’t. I couldn’t seem to find a moment of silence to help me focus and prepare for Mass. All around me was chatter. Don’t get me wrong, I too am a culprit in all this. I am notorious [MORE...]
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...]
Total Bull
Jun 16
In the ring, bulls are regularly sacrificed “in honour of the Virgin Mary, as part of the celebration of a religious festival.”
Finger and a face
Jun 15
By coincidence, I once made Galileo’s fingers the topic of a Gilbert article and the last posting reminded me of it:
A Finger and a Face
Gilbert!, Volume 2, Number 7, June 1999, 31.
Two years ago I committed one of the more heroic acts in my life. I drove in Italy. To locate my valor more precisely, I drove through Pisa to take my family to see “The Leaning Tower Of.” Until that trip, my wife and [MORE...]
Galileo’s relics are to be housed, not in a cathedral, but in a public museum. That is why I am not sure whether this is a story about religion, or about science, or about art. Perhaps it is a story about something else entirely, a curious and half-hidden alternation between the sacred and profane.