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This morning, I took my wife to our second Mass of this vacation week; and afterwards, we spent nearly an hour in a deep and emotional conversation about some of her struggles with Catholicism.
From what I gathered, there were two main issues at play. One was that she was brought up in a more charismatic megachurch-style setting that had some explicitly anti-Catholic leanings, and she's having a hard time shedding some of those pre-judgments.
She observed that she was raised with a more "fluid" understanding of worship, and so the Mass often seems "dry" and "rigid." And she feels a sense of guilt through our time there because, inwardly, she's judgmental toward what's going on, and knows she ought not to be.
The other issue is a sense of guilt over not knowing what's going on - even though, as I pointed out to her several times, she knows more than she thinks and seems to be following along quite well.
As a result of these two things, she says she finds it very difficult to "connect" with God through and in the Mass.
For my part in the conversation, I pointed out some of the ways in which our shared background talks a good game about leaps of faith, being still and knowing that God is God, etc.; and yet, when we're asked to apply that to what actually happens in church, we balk....
We're resistant of worship that involves real engagement in mystery; we're intolerant of times when something bigger than ourselves is really happening. And some of that resistance is born from prideful demands to stay in control.
I noted also that, whereas our backgrounds tend to privilege a character she termed "the loudmouth" (i.e., the very vocal and exuberant Christian), a healthy life of faith may very well not look like that: it may be more the widow with her two tiny coins and no fanfare.
After all, who's to say that a little old lady praying the rosary doesn't have more spiritual vibrancy than any dude leaping and jumping with joy (or whatever else) on a stage?
I also pointed out that our old stereotype of Catholics as passionless goers-through-the-motions gets blown up in many ways, one of which is the lives of the saints, who through two thousand years showed what serious and vibrant Catholic Christian devotion can be.
As far as the 'rigidity' of the Mass, I told her how freeing I find it, when my mind's spinning and it's hard to nail down words to say, to have such beautifully structured litanies - with my mouth I reply, "Lord, hear our prayer"; with my mind, "Yes, Lord, *that's* what I mean!"
And furthermore, when it's hard to 'connect,' what a beautiful thing it is to think that, in these prayers, a billion Catholics are praying for me - each doing some little part to hold me up and lend me strength, as I in my prayers pray also for them.
I talked a little also about how, in our day, it's easy to get bogged down by the paradox of choice, and to try to hunt for an 'ideal' church and our 'ideal' worship; but what liberty it is to just take the Church for what it is, where I find it.
After all, the first-century Ephesians (for instance) couldn't 'church shop': worship was just worship, church was just church, and they were 'stuck' with their real neighbors, with no self-segregation or (hopefully) factionalism.
And so there's something to be said for just taking the church as it is, not worrying about judging the spiritual quality of those around me, and doing my part to, hopefully, inspire the greater passion I'd like to see, starting with scrutinizing myself.
I pointed out, too, that if we could be dropped among those in the second century who were the grandchildren of the apostles' own converts, their worship would have looked a lot more like what we see at the Mass today than to a megachurch, however 'lively' it might be.
