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Young Adult Ministry

February 9, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

This week’s edition of the National Conference for Catechetical Leadership’s newsletter included our reflections on young adult ministry. Check it out below and let us know what you think!

Several years ago, we listened to a group of Vatican II Catholics wonder where young adults go after college–why aren’t they in the pews on Sundays?  We were in our late 20s and didn’t quite know how to explain that Catholic parish pews are not always quite as welcoming as they could be; that young women in their 20s and 30s need special care in being welcomed into Catholic life.  Since then, we have worked with a group of young women to create From the Pews in the Back: Young Women & Catholicism (Liturgical Press, 2009).  This collection of essays sheds light on how young women are negotiating Catholic identity and offers insights to Catholic ministers interested in reaching out to this population.

Hoping to inspire Catholic ministry that meets young women where we are, we offer this brief, top five list of tips for ministers.

(5)  Do service & justice work.  One of the hallmarks of our generation is passion for service and justice–many have spent years in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps or Americorps or other volunteer programs.  Create opportunities that continue this kind of work, in Catholic communities.

(4)  Be open-minded.  Welcome alternative lifestyles and women from all sorts of different backgrounds.  Many young women feel alienated by the Church’s conversation about homosexuality and sexuality–simply say, “Welcome!” and show that you mean it.

(3)  Be interfaith. Young women have grown up in an interfaith world–their daily lives intersect with Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims.  Encourage interfaith conversation and incorporate it into your ministry.

(2)  Encourage small communities.  Many young women in our collection write about the value of connecting with other young women.  Providing that forum extends the invitation.

(1)  Involve young women in leadership.  Let these young adults self-define.  Many young women have a sense of the kind of spiritual engagement and religious practices they are searching for–give them the space to find it.

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Here I Am! Send Me!

February 7, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

by Jessica Coblentz

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God… -Marianne Williamson

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Throughout my younger years I responded to questions about my ambitions for the future with career titles like, “doctor,” “teacher,” or “lawyer.” Good careers that would make any parent or teacher proud. But for as long as I can remember I have wanted to be a writer. For many, many years, however, I simply suppressed every urge to admit it aloud.

My silence was not a consequence of uncertainty. On the contrary, the more I hushed my true desire, the more loudly the vocation rang in my heart. And my silence was in no way related to any pressures I felt from my family; they always told me to dream big. I simply could not say the words, “I want to be a writer,” because of the tremendous burden of greatness accompanied even the thought of it. I was keenly aware that book after book had altered my life; writers were these truth-bearers with such immense possibility to connect with others! Writers were this little girl’s heroines, and thus, writing seemed too precious a vocation for me. If I tried to become a writer, how would I possibly emulate the profundity, creativity, and all-around greatness that I attributed to the worthy writers who had touched my life with their work? Writing was too sacred a vocation to claim for myself.

Stunned by a great vision of God’s glory, the Isaiah of this week’s Sunday Readings found himself humbly questioning his own vocation. “Woe is me, I am doomed!” he exclaimed, “For I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” In light of God’s greatness, what could he possibly say? How would he ever be suited to bear God’s Word—the Word beyond all words? We know Isaiah did speak, for we would not have the words before us if he had not. “Here I am! Send me!” he eventually proclaimed—but only after an angel touched his lips with an ember from God’s altar. Continue Reading »

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For J.D. – With Love and Squalor

February 4, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

by Rebecca Curtin

My ten year high school reunion is coming up. That means it was ten years ago that I had my first spiritual encounter with J.D. Salinger. At the time I had already read The Catcher in the Rye and had not been very moved. But, my senior year in high school we were asked to read Franny and Zooey. I used my mother’s precious and battered copy from 1971, in which she had scribbled her maiden name, so familiar to her and strange to me because it was a name I had never heard her use.

Salinger never says much about Catholicism besides, in Catcher, “Catholics are always trying to find out if you’re Catholic” – a line that still makes me smile. His favorite family, the Glass family, who are the center of Franny and Zooey, is half-Irish and therefore, we assume, half-Catholic, for we learn one of the Glass children has become a Roman Catholic priest. Much has been said in the literary world about the influence of Eastern religions on Salinger’s writing, but in Franny and Zooey, despite the narrator’s own insistence that it is not a work of mysticism, I recognized a spiritual philosophy that helped me understand the depth of my Catholicness.

Franny and Zooey, in many ways, exposed me to religious ideas in a broader sense. Quotes from the Stoic, Hindu, and Christian traditions are in one scene shown carefully listed, together, on the back of a bedroom door. This juxtaposition was itself unique to a high school student accustomed mostly to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, and Romeo and Juliet. It was exciting. But, what really moved me in Franny and Zooey was what seemed to be a family-centered theology, a theology of the everyday. Religious language invades Salinger’s prose, and the banal aspects of everyday life become are here as sacred as prayer. Members of the Glass family inspire enlightenment in each other and perhaps even, as was recently suggested by one commentator on NPR, sacrifice themselves for one another’s spiritual well being. Mrs. Glass’s homemade chicken soup is called “consecrated”; it is sacramental, Eucharistic, and accordingly, Franny, feeling depressed and flawed, must refuse it.

And, in the end, the escape route from the malaise, from the frustration of life as it must be lived in the twentieth century, is unconditional love. And, various characters lecture and insist, this love must be shared with everyone, especially with the unlikeable, marginalized person in society, the person who you can’t imagine loving. For, Zooey counsels Franny at the end of the text, that dislikeable person is “Christ himself.”

J.D. Salinger is a controversial figure, and sometimes I feel a little guilty for liking him so much. He had, as many tormented geniuses do, a sordid past and troubled existence. His reported treatment of women has been, above all, a particularly difficult thing to stomach. It is sometimes difficult to reconcile the personal life of a writer with the beauty of the art they create.

One Salinger line, though not from Franny and Zooey, that has really stuck with me over the years is a description of another of the Glass children, Boo Boo Glass, in one of Salinger’s short stories, “Down at the Dingy.” Salinger writes: “Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was – in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces – a stunning and final girl.”

And Salinger, all his unprettiness – and sometimes pettiness – aside he remains that stunning and final writer who can still move a twenty-eight year old woman to tears, just as he did her teenage self, all those years ago.

Rebecca Curtin lives in Cambridge, MA and hopes that she will always recognize a consecrated bowl of chicken soup when it is offered to her.

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American Prayer Hour

February 3, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

Check out this way that you can stand in solidarity with the LGBTQ community the world over this Thursday morning. Whether you’re in one of the cities where folks are gathering or not, all you have to do is pray.

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Sarah Gottfried @ Patheos

February 2, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

Check out Sarah’s piece, “A Midwife for Ascension” at patheos.com:

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The Greatest of These Is Love

January 31, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

by Jen Owens

In this week’s readings, I hear a call to love. At the outset, Jeremiah tells us of a theophany he experienced, one that wraps him in a love that is bigger than words can express. God said to him, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born, I dedicated you, a prophet to the nations I appointed you.” One of the gifts I find in the opening words of the reading is the idea that God loves us first, that God’s love is not anything that we can work for or earn. It’s freely given, shared with us by no doing of our own. This love is how God knows us; it becomes the marker of our identity.

And we respond to God’s love with love. Because the Second Reading is so often used at weddings, we often think of it in terms of romantic love. However, the letter was addressed to the whole Christian community at Corinth; it encourages us to treat one another with a kind of love that is active, even prophetic. This community is the one we enter into at Baptism, when we make a commitment to be radical, responsible, and regal, as a friend of mine likes to say, drawing on the imagery of prophet, priest, and king that the Catechism uses in its description of this Sacrament of Initiation. Bearing this in mind, remembering the Catholic community to which we belong, the words of the letter to the Corinthians sound a little different.

Finally, in the example of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, we learn that prophetic action is bound up in the same spirit of love that provokes it. Just in last week’s Gospel, we heard Jesus proclaim to those in his hometown that the Spirit of God was upon him, sending him forth to share good news with the poor, liberty with captives, sight to the blind, liberation for the oppressed, and a year of jubilee for all. Love abounds in this passage–the love of a parent for her child, of a prophet who will become a savior for his people. And this week, we hear that that love disrupts the way things are done, to the point that the community threatens him with violence. Some see this passage as a foreshadowing of the events of the latter parts of Jesus‘ ministry, which ultimately lead to his death.

However, in today’s readings, I hear not an affirmation of violence, as some feminist theologians have characterized interpretations of the crucifixion, but rather, an affirmation of love. In these readings, I hear a call to love in the way that Jesus did because the words of the letter to the Corinthians are true: the greatest of these is love. Love is what brings us into being, what calls us each by name. Love is what leads us to prophetic action, to name the sins of the church and the world for what they are. Love is what will convert the church and the world from those sins. And love is what will aid the work of reconciliation and of healing, for which our church and our world are in such desperate need.

Jen Owens is a co-editor of From the Pews in the Back and a first-year doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA.

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Jen @ Patheos

January 29, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

Check out our latest installment of “In All Things” over at patheos.

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Community

January 27, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

By Kate Dugan

Next month marks three years since Jen and I moved From the Pews in the Back from an idea we bounced around in any spare moment we had together to a public project.  We put out the call for submissions by young women about being Catholic at the end of next month.  I remember really clearly those first few moments.  We were in the basement computer lab of Harvard Divinity School; we had our own gmail address and a blogspot blog and a flyer.  When we pushed send on the first couple emails, we took deep breaths and sort of looked at each other: here we go!

We had no idea if we’d get enough essays to make a whole book.  To our amazement, we received just over 100 essays by the middle of April.

What has also been amazing, in these years since those first days, has been realizing that this book has created a loosely-knit community of women talking about being Catholic.  This week, I gave a presentation about the book at Loyola University Chicago with two other contributors and co-facilitated a conversation about young women’s Catholic identity with Beth Knobbe at Northwestern University’s Sheil Catholic Center.

Both events really reminded me that there is still an eagerness to talk about how young women are able to function in the contemporary US and be Catholic.

Kate Dugan is a co-editor of From the Pews in the Back and a PhD student at Northwestern University.

Posted in From the Pews in the Back, Kate Dugan | 4 Comments »

The Thought that Counts

January 26, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

by Angela Batie

I’ve been undertaking Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises this year. This endeavor, which Karen Armstrong recently called a “crash course in mysticism” has been one of great expectation for me. I’ve been told that I would be transformed, would be seduced by prayer, and would emerge a different person than I set out.

As with so many other journeys in my life, it seems that God has something different in mind for me than what I anticipated. (You’d think I’d have figured this out by now.) Instead of regular mystical experiences, awaking each day with a great eagerness to jump into prayer, and an all-around sense of being a dramatically new, spiritually aware (really, almost saintly) person, I have found this to be more of an exercise in fidelity, commitment, and openness. In my efforts to do things “right,” I’ve struggled with sensations of dryness or hollowness in my prayer. Thank goodness for weekly spiritual direction, where my wise and wonderful guide has helped me identify how those feelings are not of God. Instead, God honors my intentions and deep desire to know God more intimately, even when I don’t feel like I’m succeeding.

For God, the thought counts. God looks beyond my failings and honors the truest desires of my heart. Thank God!

In prayer, it occurred to me that maybe this applies to this Church of ours. So many of us in From the Pews in the Back seemed to be asking the question, “Why do I stay?” as we grapple with the things about our tradition that don’t seem to make sense or are hard to swallow. I’ve been wondering what it would mean for me to look beyond the ways I see the failings of our Church and instead try to honor the deeper desire of the Church: to follow God, to preach the Good News, to serve the poor. If God can give me the benefit of a doubt, perhaps I can try to see our Church as what is aspires to be rather than how it falls short. Maybe I can try to see the Church for its deepest desires and truest intentions, see it for how it longs to be instead of how it is.

Angela Batie is a campus minister and adjunct theology instructor at Saint Louis University. She found a cobweb on her nearly-new elliptical machine a few weeks ago. The cobweb is still there, but she remains cautiously optimistic that she can maintain this spiritual fitness regimen.

Image is from http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2679046027/in/photostream/

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The Parts of a Family

January 24, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

by Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello

For more than a year-and-a-half I have been able to spend only limited time with my son and husband as jobs and the economy keep us in different time zones. Sustaining family life has been a challenge. But for three blissful weeks around Christmas we were all together. Like all family gatherings ours was bound to have some tension. We expected it. We planned for it. But we did not anticipate how much our most recent separation (4 months) would impact this readjustment. In the midst of the holiday busy-ness we realized that we had a lot of work to do to reestablish patterns, rituals, and rhythms which had been altered by time and space. Each of us had to recalibrate; we had to reorganize our sense of who “fit” where and who had what role to play in a given situation/moment/scenario. It was hard. My husband and I struggled at times to cede space to the other in family decision and we struggled at times to let go of roles that we had taken on out of necessity.

Anyone who has experienced some sort of separation or loss might appreciate what I describe here. I am not alone. So many people I know have had to revisit roles and rules and identities in the face of life’s twists and turns and challenges. When someone moves out of your life you work to fill the void or question the new order. My friends who have lost spouses or parents to divorce or war understand this. My friends who right now are suffering with the knowledge that their child has a terminal illness know this. My friends who embark on a new career or have a new baby know this – even in adding to a family, some aspects of one’s former life is lost. In all of these cases people work to plug the holes and remake their families because loss or gain changes so much.

This week’s readings speak loudly to people like me and so many others: people separated or recombined by need, desire or circumstance. In the first reading and the Gospel we have one of the most perfect bookended pairings in the liturgical year. From a prophetic pronouncement of the Lord’s day to Jesus’ pronouncement of his fulfillment of the prophets we are witness in these readings to the idea that God is among us. That Christ lives with and in and through us. And in witnessing this presence we are reminded of the humanity of Jesus and of the fact that it is in and through each of us that God’s love and gifts are shared.

In this light we turn to the second reading—one of the most powerful in the gospels—in which we are reminded forcefully of the ways in which each of us—as that which is “the church”—is a needed, necessary and critical part of the body of Christ. This imagery never fails to move me. I imagine a lost finger, a missing arm. I recall the absences felt deeply in my childhood – of the loss of a parent, grandparents and friends. And…this week I think of the loss of “how it was” and I question my place in my own small family given my distance in recent months. Am I needed? Do I matter? Separation often highlights this: an empty chair, an empty room, a silence, a missing partner.

The reading from I Corinthians reminds me of what I know deep down (and why loss is so hard). It reminds me of the synergy and symbiosis of the thing I call “family”. It reminds me that each of us is a critical, needed and necessary part of not only the church, but of our families as well. While I have been lamenting the challenge of reestablishing roles and refilling those silences in my own life this reading reminds me that I might be better served noticing the unique roles that I, my husband and my son play in making our family “our family”. With this frame our challenges might be rewritten as reminders of the gifts we each bring, gifts that cannot be replicated or replaced no matter what happens.

I pray this week for those who have suffered loss and who know full well how important each individual is in a family or a life and I pray fervently that those of us lucky enough to reconnect with loved ones will heed the reminder of this first reading. 


Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello is seeking inner peace and strength as she embarks on yet another move – this time to the University of Luxembourg where she will be teaching as a Fulbright fellow this spring. Luckily the Grand Dutchy of Luxembourg is only 3 hours from her husband and son.

Image “Handprint” from: http://www.nonameartgroup.com/exhibitions.htmlhttp://www.nonameartgroup.com/exhibitions.htmlhttp://www.nonameartgroup.com/exhibitions.html

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An “Intergalactic” Tribute to Mary Daly

January 22, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

By Pearl Maria Barros

I first came across the writings of Mary Daly when I was a senior in college. Interested in finding out more about this radical feminist, I did a quick “Google” image search of her name. Suffice it to say I was a bit shocked when the photo of Daly wielding an axe-like weapon popped onto the screen. “Great,” I thought to myself, “and they wonder why people are afraid of feminists.” No castration anxieties here. Anyway, I read some excerpts from The Church and the Second Sex, quoted Daly in my senior thesis, and filed her away in my mind alongside the pre-calculus I’ve never used since high school.

A year or so later, I found myself in a graduate class on feminist theologies in which Daly was definitely featured on the syllabus. We read Beyond God the Father and Gyn/Ecology. I can still remember giggling as I read her “New Intergalactic Introduction” over the phone to my husband. “Only Daly can get away with this,” I said to him. Indeed, at that moment it seemed to me that Daly’s writings were far too flamboyant for a feminist scholar who wanted to be taken seriously. I had no desire to imitate her.

Imagine, then, my own amazement when I found myself defending Daly during an in-class discussion in which several female students critiqued her for being “too angry.” They claimed that she was abrasive, out-of-line, and even crazy. And the more I heard them, the more I wondered if this great axe-wielding Hag was really crazy or whether we were actually the crazy ones for not realizing that she was fighting for us. Suddenly, I found myself speaking in class – something I hadn’t yet done all semester and it was already November. I began by reminding my colleagues that Daly had in fact studied Patristics and that she would probably be familiar with Augustine’s notion that “anger is the daughter of hope.” I invited them to ponder how this connection between anger and hope might change our image of Daly from an angry, man-hating feminist to a woman whose hope for a world without patriarchy enabled her to rage against the confines it placed upon her body, spirit, and mind. What could we learn from her example? Most of my colleagues remained quiet, some looked at me with suspicion, some smiled, and I think the professor eventually said something along the generic lines of, “you make a good point.” Then, we talked about something else and the clock ticked away.

Ever since that class I have had much respect for Daly. Of course, I do not agree with everything she wrote, but I do admire her willingness to confront patriarchy with a terrifying strength and even a bit of humor. I love the way she took patriarchal slurs against women – “hag,” “witch,” etc. – and turned them into something powerful, something capable of grace. I’m not sure that I would have followed Daly out of the Church that memorable day when she invited all women who were tired of patriarchal religion to leave its cement walls (literally and figuratively). No, I probably would have stayed in the pew. Indeed, I have done so. But I have done so out of choice and out of hope and even with a bit of that anger that arises from experiencing injustice. And I continue to do so, smiling and giggling at times as I picture myself wielding an axe and chopping through all of the false boundaries that Catholicism has placed around women, sexuality, and even God. May you rest in peace, Mary Daly. Amen.

Pearl Maria Barros received her BA in English and Religious Studies from Santa Clara University and her MTS from Harvard Divinity School where she continues to pursue her doctorate in Theology. When not studying, she enjoys spending time with friends and family who remind her what theology and life are ultimately all about.

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Eileen Markey at Busted Halo

January 21, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

Check out From the Pews in the Back contributor Eileen Markey’s most recent piece for Busted Halo, “Living in Limbo.”

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Mind the Gap

January 20, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

by Rebecca Lynne Fullan

I ride the subway so often that I’ve started to have a very strong psychological response to it. I stand, often in a place that is cold, dark, and damp with a sort of generic, don’t-forget-you’re-underground dampness, and I peer and hope into a tunnel, deep and long to the point where my vision is swallowed up, and then suddenly, in a rush of noise and motion, rattling and shining, this beautiful silver train comes, and it will take me from where I am to where I need to go.

And once I’m safely, warmly cocooned inside, there are all these people. Wrapped in their different clothes, and the public-private faces of the subway commute. There’s something about the particular blank expression that people wear on the subway that, paradoxically, feels very intimate. Here, with these strangers, I don’t necessarily smile, or animate my thoughts in my eyes and cheeks and mouth. I let my face be still, and so do they.

They are many, my fellow travelers. I see all shades of skin, all lengths of limb, all variations of shape and dress. Once, a woman with a body in a large male shape, or perhaps a man wearing womanhood for the time. Not drag though, what was worn was easy, comfortable, an everyday identity whether or not for every day. Soft brown skin. When there was a train wreck in my mind (they happen more frequently here than in life, let us be grateful), I imagined this person carrying me free of the wreckage, and setting me back down on the street. There was, I guess, instinctive safety in the motherly form and the masculine strength. Continue Reading »

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“What If?” at Busted Halo

January 19, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

Check out this reflection on the Haiti earthquake at Busted Halo.

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Review by Lauren Murphy

January 18, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

Check out this review of From the Pews in the Back in the Winter edition of St. John’s Abbey’s The Abbey Banner.

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No Ordinary Time

January 17, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

By Kate Henley Averett

Today is the second Sunday in Ordinary Time, but if you’ve been paying attention to the news this week, you know that it is no ordinary time.

Nothing about this week has felt ordinary. When I open my laptop and pull up the New York Times or the Huffington Post, I am assaulted by photos of collapsed buildings with limbs sticking out from under the rubble, bodies being removed from the streets by bulldozers, and the dead – the many, many pictures of the dead. I want to make it stop but I allow the assault to continue because I know that it is infinitely more painful for those who are there, who don’t have the luxury of closing their computer to make the image go away. And so it is that I allow my heart to be broken, and my mind to be haunted by these images.

I wasn’t planning on writing about Haiti when I sat down to compose this post. I closed the news sites on my browser and pulled up this week’s readings and tried to read them with no agenda, no preconceived ideas about what I should be writing about. But I didn’t get very far before the images of the earthquake that ravaged Port-au-Prince slid back into the forefront of my consciousness. “No more shall people call you ‘Forsaken,’ or your land ‘Desolate,’” the first reading, from the book of Isaiah, sang to me, and I could not help but to associate these words with Haiti, and with President Obama’s assurance to the people of Haiti that they “will not be forsaken.”

And then there was the second reading, ordinarily one of my favorites: I Corinthians, the gifts of the Holy Spirit. We each have different gifts, different callings, the letter states, all stemming from the same God but manifesting in a variety of ways. And yet upon reading it this time, my mind balked at the idea. In this far-from-ordinary time, I am seized by the conviction that we are all, each and every one of us, called to do the same thing – to give what we can, whatever we can, to aid the people of Haiti. Because sometimes the situation requires that we abandon our ordinary routine, our plans, our default mode, and step up to do what we are able. This is what the Gospel reading – the story of the wedding at Cana – said to me as I read it, no longer trying to push Haiti out of my mind. Coming to the aid of the servers was not on Jesus’ agenda the night of the wedding, but his mother called him out when he resisted her request to help them. You must help them, I heard Mary telling her son, because you can. You are in a position to help someone in need, and therefore it is your duty to do so.

And it is with this idea in mind – that if you are in a position to help someone in need, you are called to help them – that I propose the following: if you are reading this post right now, you are in a position – you are called – to help the relief efforts in Haiti. Please take a moment to think about what you can afford to give – no donation amount is too small. If you have already donated, think again, as I am going to do, about whether you can manage to make one more donation, as the need for medical supplies, food, clean water, and equipment continues to rise.

There are many organizations that need your help. Partners in Health has a clinic not far from Port au Prince that has injured people pouring in to be treated and is in urgent need of replenishing supplies – you can donate to their efforts here. You can donate to Oxfam America here, to Catholic Relief Services here, or to the Jesuit Refugee Service here. Additionally, the Huffington Post has compiled a list of text-to-give options that allow you to make a donation to one of several organizations via text message.

This is not an ordinary time. The situation in Haiti demands of us an extraordinary response. I hope that you will join me in answering the call to help.

Photo: A mountain outside of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, taken in 2003 by Kate Henley Averett

Kate Henley Averett travelled to Haiti in June of 2003 to volunteer with The Haitian Project. Her heart is broken by the unimaginable tragedy of this earthquake.

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Going Home

January 13, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

By Jessica Coblentz

My parents continue to reside and worship in the Seattle suburb where I grew up, so the holidays are a time when I return home to the Catholic parish of my youth. I often find myself feeling sentimental as I recognize the things about our community that have not changed. The sanctuary maintains the same woodsy, Pacific Northwest aesthetic, distinct from every other church I have visited around the country. Many of the parish’s liturgical quirks persist. I often find myself singing to the same songs that I memorized during Mass there when I was twelve.

It is not all similarities, though. There is something about experiencing the same-ness of my childhood church that brings out the difference in me. It is as if this community is the control variable in an experiment tracking my spiritual fluctuations. Participating in the Eucharist in the sanctuary of my First Communion confronts me with how the significance of this sacrament has shifted so much for me since that first engagement. Recognizing familiar faces in the pews reminds me of how my understandings about being Catholic have shifted since our last meeting. Going home reminds of me of how I used to take for granted my local parish’s comforting characteristics, thinking that their liturgies and community were definitive of Catholicism everywhere.

Many people have told me that the consistency of the Catholic Church makes it feel like a home for them, no matter where they go. It is like every week’s Eucharist has the potential to serve as a coming home, a stable marker in our fluctuating world no matter which city one finds herself in. I haven’t always thought about it like that myself, but this year’s coming home is reminding me that perhaps my journey to Mass each week can be an occasion for this sort of reflection. Perhaps, this year, the Eucharist will be my control variable as I try to reflect, week-to-week, on the ebb and flow of my spiritual life.

Image from http://www.stjude-redmond.org/images/Church/Stjudeoutside1.jpg.

Jessica Coblentz is a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School and the Pastoral Associate for Young Adult Ministry at the Paulist Catholic Center in Boston. Follow her writing on the Web at www.jessicacoblentz.com.

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Food, Flesh & God’s Grace

January 12, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

Rebecca Fullan’s article is live over at patheos.com.  Check it out & join the conversation on faith and the body on that site.

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This Sunday’s Readings

January 10, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

St. John the Forerunner by William Hart McNichols

By Eileen Markey

This week’s readings present a dicotomy between anger and mercy. Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11 is interpreted in Catholic tradition as foreshadowing John, who came before and “prepared the way” for Christ. In Luke’s Lk 3:15-16, 21-22 Gospel we read the scene of Jesus’ baptism, where John says he is not the messiah, only the opening act and the voice of God claims Christ saying, “this is my beloved son, in whom I am well proud.”

John the Baptist was always my favorite New Testament character. “Make straight the way of the lord” he exhorted from his desert hermitage. He was so hard core: living on locust and honey, wearing nothing but an itchy camel-hair smock. The family bible in my childhood home had a dramatic full-page picture of John the Baptist. It showed a matted-haired man, nostrils flared, pointing one finger to the heavens with teeth clinched and arm muscles flexed. He was filthy and intense and angry and on a mission. I loved him.

I saw him as a sort of punk holy man, unhinged, but definitely in tune. You can easily imagine John the Baptist letting lose on some venial Judean. If there were a quote bubble in that childhood bible it would have read, “Are you kidding me? The lord is coming, you schmuck.” My John the Baptist exhorted. He cried out.

I so often want to exhort. To cry out. To stop traffic. John the Baptist was PISSED at the injustice in society, at the prisons and the people left hungry and the idolatry. So am I. It feels powerful to be angry. It feels wild.

But the other readings for this week’s liturgy don’t exhort. They are gentle. They remind us the the most powerful element in the universe is not rage, but mercy. Continue Reading »

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Snowing

January 7, 2010 by Kate Dugan & Jen Owens

From: http://www.shepherdpics.com/Blog/uploaded_images/snow-795901.jpg

By Kate Dugan

It’s snowing today in Chicago. The weather forecasters were warning about the morning commute and the National Weather Service people told us to make sure we had flashlights ready. On my morning run, there were several do-good shovelers out there shoveling, even as the snow continued.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved the snow. But my parents remember a different version; when I was a toddler and walked on snow for the first time, I was freaked out by it. I imagine the texture and the uneavenness of it made my newly walking legs unstable. Apparently, not the fan I would become by the time I hit gradeschool.

Last weekend, my husband and I drove up to the parking lot of Washington’s Mt. Rainier National Park to do some New Year’s splitboarding. The snow had fallen over the night and, as we climbed into the snowline, he said something about how much he likes the quiet and the freshness of new snow.

There is something almost mystical about a new snow. It mutes parts of the world and blankets it in quietness.

And so it is, perhaps, with the new year. We usher in a new chapter of our lives, we mark new commitments or re-commitments with resolutions and we dream about the possibilities for the new year. It is a refreshing, potentially-filled time of year. And to do so amid the snow and the quiet seems to offer an element of reflection to this change of calendars. The snow invites us–me–to take a deep breath and think calmly about the new year.

What are some of your resolutions or goals or commitments for 2010? How is the change in calendar influencing you?

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