Praise post! I just had to come on here and say what a beautiful Mass I was blessed to attend this morning. Granted, we still can't sing (because COVID-19), and I cannot wait until we can sing again. But everything about today's liturgy was so profoundly connected to my own walk with the Lord. I was literally bouncing with joy at the end of Mass as I shared with others how loved I felt by the Lord in this Mass.
The opening hymn was Be Thou My Vision (which is the same tune as Lord of All Hopefulness, so I'm not sure which it was actually; but I love them both). Be Thou My Vision was one of my household's two main household songs during my time at Franciscan University of Steubenville. I was a member of Warriors of the Word women's household starting in the fall of 2013. Our spirituality was rooted in Scripture and oriented to the study of and prayer with Scripture. To this day, I still have a deep, deep love of the Word of God, and I am so thankful for the community I experienced among my household sisters during those formative years at Franciscan University. Our two household songs that we sang at almost every single Lord's Day celebration were Be Thou My Vision and At the Name of Jesus. Every time I hear these songs, I think of, pray for, and experience communion with my household sisters (past, present, and future), and I am reminded of the great gift of God that those years at a passionately Catholic university meant to me.
The readings today were excellent (of course) as well. What was awesome, though, was that I could tell (based on a conversation that I had with my pastor earlier in the week) where the homily was about to go before it even got there. My pastor pronounced the last word of today's Gospel, "chosen", with such emphasis that I had a premonition of what he was about to say. Sure enough, his homily was focused primarily on the new series The Chosen, and he even announced that the parish is going to host a watch party outside on the corner of the street where the parish is located this Tuesday. So, you'll know where to find me. Haha!
Feel free to listen to the homily here. It's great, and will hopefully get you interested in The Chosen, if you haven't seen it yet.
The Offertory hymn was also beautiful, though I did not recognize it.
I had the other great blessing of being able to attend Confession on Wednesday. It was a little overdue, and so very good to receive the grace of God in the sacrament. So, so good, my friends. So then, at the Consecration, I remembered to offer the plenary indulgence (which you can obtain at every Mass you attend if you, when the Host is raised and the bells rung at the Consecration, say "My Lord, and my God", and meet the other conditions for a plenary indulgence) for a soul in purgatory who had no one to pray for them. I prayed that this person's soul would enter into the fullness of joy, and for a moment I felt I had a little glimpse of that soul's joy. What a gift!
Then, for Communion, I was overjoyed to hear the song We Come to Your Feast played. I was first introduced to this song when I volunteered for a summer at the Apostolate for Family Consecration. During one of our retreat weeks, the college-age volunteer staff were asked to play the music for the liturgies since we had not had any families sign up for it. It was probably my favorite week of music! But this song was the offertory hymn on a few days that week, and I fell in love with it. To give you a glimpse at the lyrics, I will share them here:
We place upon your table
a gleaming cloth of white:
the weaving of our stories,
the fabric of our lives;
the dreams of those before us,
the ancient hopeful cries,
the promise of our future:
our needing and our nurture
lie here before our eyes.
We come to your feast,
we come to your feast:
the young and the old,
the frightened, the bold,
the greatest and the least.
We come to your feast,
we come to your feast
with the fruit of our lands
and the work of our hands,
we come to your feast.
I love this hymn. So again, my heart was filled with great joy at Communion today.
Then, to complete the whole circle, I smiled as I heard the closing hymn: O God Beyond All Praising, yet another hymn that has been a part of my journey with the Lord. It stands out to me in memory as the closing hymn for the graduation Mass for myself and my classmates in the Masters program that I participated in after graduating from Franciscan: the Echo program through the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. This song always brings me back in memory to being in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, surrounded by other amazing young men and women with whom I had lived in community, prayed, and studied for two years who were all about to go out into the world and tell the Good News. My mom was in tears, and I was, too, once I saw her. But this song just brings me back to that moment.
This is the providence and goodness of God, my friends. I can't help but think of the words of the song Reckless Love, "You have been so so good to me." It's true! God has been so good to me! So very good. And I am just so incredibly thankful.
But I also want to take a moment to appreciate and point out how key hymns were in this moment of encounter with God that I experienced today. Two of them were very traditional hymns, one was slightly more contemporary. (Which also leads me to give "props" to my parish because they strike that balance between traditional hymns and some praise and worship hymns really well. Like, really well. It's better than anywhere else I've experienced so far in how these two come together in a single liturgy.) But what they all have in common is that they are rooted in my memory to a particular celebration of a sacrament and a moment in my life. The Liturgy, when we make it a habit, has power to influence and transform us, even through the simple function of memory. May this inform the way that we plan our liturgies and lead our families and communities in prayer.
Finally, I would like to give a shoutout to the amazing spiritual fathers that I have seen among the priests of my diocese. I've met some amazing priests, but I have been amazed at how truly these men fulfill their role as spiritual fathers. I've experienced that really powerfully in just the past year. This is also an occasion of praise to God for me, since I have suffered some wounds in this area recently. Today, as I prayed after receiving Communion, Jesus showed me how healing the witness of men who embrace the call to spiritual fatherhood can be - men who don't just say what spiritual fathers are supposed to say, but who actually show up and carry out their role as spiritual fathers with their spiritual children. It's such a huge difference. And, I'll warrant, I would not have noticed that without experiencing the wounds that I have. How good is the Lord that He uses even our woundedness to show forth His goodness and glory?
Praise the Lord for His goodness, His mercy, His sacraments. Praise Him all ye angels, saints, and creatures. Amen.
the Itinerant Catechist
