How faith dies…

I stood very still when I hung up the phone, confused, disturbed…feeling the small surge of energy that I had felt before the conversation drain away.  I went to the computer and tried to find the reference that had been cited to me.  I usually have no problem finding stuff, I’m part bloodhound…couldn’t find it.  Went out to the dining room table and very methodically put my study materials away, placed them in my bag, and placed that bag in a closet.  Closed all my bibles and carefully arranged them on the bookshelf, taking a long time to line up all the edges.  Reeling, I was reeling and I didn’t fully understand why.

I have waited seventeen months to write about this death of another sort, I waited and reflected until I felt certain I was no longer writing on emotion, but almost detached from myself, a critical evaluation. Only recently did the tumbler click and I gained enough insight to coherently tell my tale of once having faith, to having nothing but emptiness.

I won’t wrap it in a white hankie, but say straight up what I was told. I was told that I was dissing Jesus if I read my Magnificat during Mass, you know, following along with the first and second readings. I never followed along with the Gospel, but found it incredibly helpful to read and hear at the same time the other readings.  Evidently the American bishops have a large bug up their rump about people reading the readings during Mass when we should be listening. Oh the scandal of it all. Right? Faithful found reading scripture during Mass, headline material if I ever saw any. I found the quote that was tossed up to justify this admonition. It was an obscure line in a bulletin handout on the USCCB site about the new Mass translations.  It is as follows:

The key word in all of this is listening. We are called to listen attentively as the reader, deacon or priest proclaims God’s Word. Unless one is unable to hear, one should not be reading along with a text from a missal or missalette. Rather, taking our cue from the General Instruction itself, we should listen as we would if Christ himself were standing at the ambo, for in fact it is God who speaks when the Scriptures are proclaimed. Carefully following along with the printed word can cause us to miss the gentle voice of the Holy Spirit, the message that the Spirit may have for us in one of the passages because we are anxious to ‘keep up,’ to move along with the reader.

Reading along does not exclude listening. Who writes this stuff anyway and where have they been sitting? I read this and thought to myself that my bishops are clueless of their flock. They didn’t know me, didn’t care about me, and were so out of touch with reality that I questioned if the church was even relevant to me anymore.  Yeah, I did.  I thought, let me tell you about the real world, let me tell you about why sometimes we hold onto that Magnificat with all our strength, as we would hold the hand of a good friend. For you see, it was  holding someone’s hand, a gentle hand, a much loved hand of such strength, and personality. A hand that we would never touch again, never see stroke a spoiled feline, never hear coax such magic out of a trumpet, or liquid notes from a silver flute.

As I was unpacking Justin’s belongings, barely two weeks after his sudden death, I came across a box of Magnificats.  Many of them had little stickers and post-it-notes to mark certain scripture passages, or  meditations.  They were so carefully kept. As I went through his desk and books, I found more. It was like finding little stars, little crumbs from him. When you no longer can hear your child’s voice, speak with them about God and life, you cling to whatever you can find, whatever scraps of insight and relationship that can be salvaged.  They were a tangible link to Justin and to the faith we shared.

It was our Magnificats that we clung to the day Justin died for the scripture reading that day came from the book of Job:

“The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!”

We held to that, repeated over and over in our brains, blessed be the name of the Lord, and we put our hand to the plough and did what no parent should ever have to do. We buried the light of our lives. We did our jobs, we did the next thing, and we never questioned, we were grateful that this rare soul had graced our lives for twenty five years.

 Our reality is that every Sunday we sat only feet away from where Justin’s casket rested in the nave of the church,  you sit in Mass struggling to focus, to keep your eyes from straying to that place, so you follow along in the Magnificat because it is a lifeline, a focus. You grasp it in your hand when the sun hits the same spot as it did during the funeral and you are transported back to that day. You hold your breath and bite your lip till it bleeds because the hymn being sung is the entrance song from your son’s funeral Mass.  Are you with me?  Can you put us on as you would a coat and wear us for a moment?  Who wants that coat, right? Could I look into my husband’s eyes that are so full of pain and tell him that he can’t read his Magnificat anymore, that it sets a bad example? Tell the gentlest, kindest man I have ever known, devout and faithful, that he is dissing Jesus? Is that what my church asks of me?

I remember looking at the Tabernacle the very next Mass we attended and asking God why He never said anything to me. “Why did You not tell me that I was offending You”?  All these years we have been together, all I poured into Your hands including my son, and You didn’t say anything?”  And so began the great silence.  It is funny how the exterior manifested the interior quiet. We kept moving further and further to the back of the church, my Magnificats went unread, I only carried it to slip my phone in it unnoticed.  I could barely sit through a Mass any more, when I felt like I was literally going to jump out of my skin, I would use the Rosary app on my phone to focus on something, anything.

Our Magnifcats go unread these days. I should just cancel our subscriptions. I met some of my very best friends through the Magnificat, Dom Eugene Boylan, O.C.S.O., Father J. P. DeCaussade, and Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard just to name a few.  Which led me to their books that opened such windows of light and reflection. I have put all those away also. I feel like a child who has nothing left of the home they once knew, a home that was their life, now the rooms are all different and empty.

Do not be tempted to say “oh don’t take it that way, don’t let that bother you.”  That is the entire point of why I am writing is to say that it does matter, it matters what we teach, it does matter what we say. The soul is so fragile, people are so wounded. So often we never know why people leave the church, why one day they simply walk away, well I am telling you why so that you don’t have to wonder.  It is always good to hear those conversion stories so that backs can be patted and a surge of righteous glee can be felt, but what about the other side?  What about when the church forgets that she is a hospital for the bleeding and sore, not this facade of ideals and perfection? What happens when we focus on tiny little splinters and ignore the blade lodged in our brother’s heart?  Death happens.  A different story of a soul.

If every soul we encounter is an encounter with Christ and Him crucified, then every soul needs to be seen in need of tender care, a recognition of the stripes it bears, a gracious hesitation should be acknowledged before adding weight to an already bleeding back.