Friday, September 27, 2013

Why There is Liturgical Worship


My adoption was brokered by the Catholic church and I grew up "believing" in God and that if my faith wavered, that I might be recalled to the orphanage by God. But I could not believe and I rejected everything and ever since I have missed having faith.

I don't like what man has done to the rituals of faith and when I discovered this quotation from
Andre Dubus’s short story, A Father’s Story (thanks to Andrew Sullivan) it resonated:
Each morning [at Mass] I try, each morning I fail, and know that always I will be a creature who, looking at Father Paul and the altar, and uttering prayers, will be distracted by scrambled eggs, horses, the weather, and memories and daydreams that have nothing to do with the sacrament I am about to receive. I can receive, though: the Eucharist, and also, at Mass and at other times, moments and even minutes of contemplation. But I cannot achieve contemplation, as some can; and so, having to face and forgive my own failures, I have learned from them both the necessity and wonder of ritual. For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.


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