Limping into Easter

This is the high season for Catholics, especially those church going rosary saying apologetics reading catholic blog groupies like me.  

Except I am completely spent.  Emotionally, spiritually, personally, I am tired.

I have had a crummy Lent.  The irony stings. I wrote a column on Lent. I've tried adding things and taking away and I’ve forgotten and started again and forgotten and started again and deliberately ignored my resolutions and confessed and confessed and failed yet again. .

Trying to right the ship, I tried to lead a family rosary and we did it, if you don’t count the silent cold war between one child who refused to come in, and another who refused to come up from the basement after they’d screamed at each other.   I felt defeated.  How can I raise these people to be holy when I am not?  How can I be responsible for these souls when I am flunking with my own?

It occurred to me that I don’t envy the Pope trying to be responsible for the souls of the whole Church, trying to lead all of us to the heart of Christ.   We are an unruly lot of surliness...like my children on occasion.
Yet all of it can turn in an instant, from the clamor of a fight to the grace of unexpected extraordinary generosity.  We keep trying and sometimes, we can approximate the love we are called to give.

We have to lay hold of, the heart of Christ, and it is freely offered at every mass in the Eucharist.  That is the great miracle of His love, that is Heart is ours for the taking, it is offered like a lover, for He is love.   Take and eat.  Be at peace. Be not afraid.  Christ will fix everything we’ve broken if we let him.

We needed the Crucifixion, each of us needed Our God to suffer that that much …just for us because we are so messed up.  We are so angry. We are so injured, we hold onto our wounds fearful of the Divine Physician’s healing touch.  We want to hold onto our pain in our pride, and let it define us.  We cannot give a perfect Lent, we cannot save ourselves.  It is only in surrendering to God’s grace that we allow his Heart which as always beat for us, to enter.  

Easter happened.  Easter is happening.  This is the great reality, that a great or crummy Lent, Christ accepts all our offerings, the crumpled resolutions that got forgotten and abandoned and the ones well kept, it is the hearts He desires.   So to all who come to crowd the Easter mass, offer your heart, He will give you His, and all the weariness and wounds of this world will be washed away.  He will heal all of our lameness, world and self inflicted.

Have a blessed Easter.

Spambot Saturday

http://sherryantonettiwrites.blogspot.com/2011/11/of-all-holidays-im-missing-ill-rue.html

Why I am Catholic

Bloggers over at Patheos have been answering the question and I thought it a worthy one to ponder this Holy Week.   Why be Catholic?  Why bind myself to a life I didn't plan?  Why invite upon myself this world of pain? 

Because it is a true world.  Because the only way this world of pain is made any better, is by God's mercy.  The world absent God, is one of teeth and power and pain, sickness and death. Just look at the Crucifixion, this is what we make when we reject God. With God, there is love, kindness, healing, forgiveness, beauty, truth, light, salt, peace, mercy and life. Again, look at the Crucifixion.  God makes that symbol of torture and cruelty and death, one of redemption.

I am Catholic because I believe the Eucharist is the Heart and Soul, Body and Blood of our Lord, always, every time, and that we consume Him so as to be transformed, to have that in us which is not love, burned away.  But we have to willingly allow ourselves to be consumed in the process, and that's hard.  

I am Catholic not because of feeling or sensation or miracles though I've experienced all three but
because I cannot escape the knowledge that God loves me and has a profound plan which He is working on to redeem me even though I screw up daily and often.  It is a comfort to know to my bones, God has a plan even if I cannot see it, and to trust in that plan even if I haven't been briefed. 

I am Catholic because of the Eucharist and the luminous joyful sorrowful glorious mystery that is life.  I've never been in a moment when I could not find something within the word or the rosary or the sacraments that pulled me through or out of times that were hard.   Prayers are always answered.  God is always there, He is always whispering, "I love you." 

So I am Catholic because the church has within it, all of the tools to help us find the capacity to surrender to love, to surrender to God, to accept God's grace on God's terms, not ours. The Sacraments, the seasons of the Church, the liturgy of the word, the scripture, the lives of the saints, the sacramental, the sacred music and art, the Holidays, the feasts, the obligations and the optionals like the Liturgy of the Hour, the Rosary, the Divine Mercy Chaplet, all work in beautiful concert together to straighten what is crooked and bend what is inflexible in my soul.