RBWords - Volume 35 - Number 9: September 2022
Something to Think About
R. B. WORDS - VOL. 35 - NO. 9 - SEPT. 2023 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT - I have noticed recently among college students the adoption of some pious practices that I was well acquainted with prior to the Second Vatican Council. Perhaps the most visible example is the wearing, on the part of the young women, of a lace mantilla in church. Another practice is kneeling for communion and receiving communion only on the tongue. The latter can be awkward if done suddenly in a line and causing the one behind to stumble! In a couple of places that I have visited, the pastor simply puts a kneeler to facilitate this practice so both standing and kneeling can be accommodated. I remember well the “communion rail” at the church where I served many years as an altar boy. We servers had to get up and go drape a white cloth hanging on the back of the rail over the top of the rail for communicants to place their hands under. At a recent visit to a campus ministry parish I witnessed Mass said “ad orientem” i.e. with the priest’s back to the congregation. All of these things bring back memories. I later learned in my Dominican formation years the theology which prompted the practices which many Catholics never learned beyond, “This is the way we do it.” When I have asked students why they have adopted these older practices, most of them say it’s a way of experiencing or recovering a “sense of the sacred.” The liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council left many folks confused and befuddled. I doubt most have read the documents produced that explain some of the changes that were made, and the catechesis on the part of church leadership was inadequate. Most of the changes went BACK to earlier practices in an effort to recover ways that had fallen in disuse over the centuries. Perhaps the same process is at work now. Whatever one does, there should be some good theological reason (Tradition) for the practice (tradition). Taking on older practices simply because they’re “cool” or pretending to live in some “good old days,” will make all of this new phenomenon just a passing fad. IT’S SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
It Has Been Said
IT HAS BEEN SAID
Meditation is a word which covers a considerable range of devotional states. It is perhaps most simply defined as thinking in the Presence of God. And since our ordinary thoughts are scattered, seldom poised for long on one point, but evoked and influenced by a multitude of external things, real meditation requires as its preliminary what ascetic writers call recollection - a deliberate gathering of ourselves together, a retreat into our own souls. This is more easily done by a simple exercise of the imagination, a gentle turning to God, than by those ferocious efforts toward concentrating which some manuals advise, and which often end by concentrating attention on the concentration itself.
From THE DEGREES OF PRAYER by Evelyn Underhill
<< Previous Date [Back to List] Next Date >>