You Never Know Who Might Be Listening

The St. Vincent de Paul Society was founded by college students who were praying like crazy over their Bible study. Their goal was to figure out if Catholics made the world a better place or not.
        After noticing that Jesus seemed to spend inordinate amounts of time with people in misery, it occurred to them that He might have been dropping a clue. They walked out onto the streets of Paris and started fighting poverty in order to glorify God. The Society has been going strong ever since.
        Last year, at our annual retreat, we decided to re-apply ourselves to prayer.
        Some of us began to pray together every morning before we opened the store. Others stopped at noon, took the phone off the hook, invited all the customers to gather round, and sent petitions heavenward. And the most disorganized among us clasped hands before leaving at the end of the day. Better late than never.
        We were talking to God, but it turned out He wasn’t the only one listening.
        One day a customer was browsing for a long time among the knick-knacks when she stopped, and asked our cashier, “Aren’t you people going to pray today?”
        The volunteer gathered the rest of the crew and they prayed with the customer. The lady’s cat had died that day, and feeling upset, she came to St. Vincent de Paul because she knew that we would pray with her.
        Another day, a regular customer came into the store, and announced that she had the day off of work.
        “You’re spending your free day at St. Vinnies?” I asked in surprise.
        She said, “This is the anniversary of my son’s death so my boss gave me the day off. I don’t belong to a church, but this seemed like the next best place to come.” We prayed with her, too.
        Another customer told us that she comes every week because the store is a place where she feels peace and kindness. She is struggling with health problems and she takes comfort in praying with us. When we prayed with her that day, she never mentioned her own needs during the petitions. She prayed for us and our work, instead.
        Do Catholics make the world a better place? Not necessarily. But praying Catholics—that’s a real opportunity.

Living the Liturgy
By Fr. Robert Johansen
Pastor, St. Stanislaus Parish, Dorr

“Lent and the Contemplation of the Lord”
        We were made for contemplation. That may sound somewhat ethereal and other-worldly, but it is nonetheless true. The pagan philosophers knew this centuries before Christ: Aristotle wrote in the 4th century B.C. that one of the purposes of man’s existence is contemplaion. The great Church fathers and theologians advanced upon this understanding by recognizing that the proper object of contemplation is God. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that our complete happiness can only be found in the contemplation of God.
        Now, contemplation isn’t just for saints, philosophers and theologians. We are all, according to our different gifts and circumstances, capable of contemplation. If you have ever looked up into the starry sky at night and tried to fathom the mystery of the heavens, you have engaged in contemplation. If you have ever held a newborn child and wondered at the mystery and gift of life, you have engaged in contemplation. Contemplation will lead our minds and souls to the things of heaven, but it is meant for all us here on earth.
        The liturgy is meant to be an opportunity for contemplation. The great convert and theologian Fr. Max Thurian wrote that “the Eucharistic liturgy is an act of thanksgiving; consecration, a memorial and an offering... which invite the celebrants and faithful to turn towards the altar of the Lord in an attitude of adoration and contemplation.” Pope John Paul II wrote, “Jesus awaits us” in the Eucharist, “the sacrament of love”, and urged us not to “refuse the time to go to meet him in adoration [and] in contemplation full of faith.”
        The age in which we live is not friendly to contemplation. We tend to value action, progress, “getting things done”. We often value enthusiasm over wisdom. We are practical, and contemplation seems very un-practical. To many of us, contemplation seems a little too close to doing nothing. But contemplation isn’t “doing nothing”. It is allowing God to do something to us. And in order for God to reach us, to penetrate our minds and souls, we need to make some space, some room, a quiet place in our lives and hearts, so we can hear and see Him.
        It seems to me that we sometimes allow this preoccupation with action and enthusiasm to obscure or even drive out altogether the contemplative aspect of the liturgy. In our concern for “active participation” (in itself a good thing), we sometimes let a spirit of busyness invade our celebrations. We evaluate the quality of the liturgy by how many people have how many things to “do” in the liturgy. We are tempted to judge how “good” a liturgy is by the decibel level. But active participation must begin in our hearts and souls — without the interior dimension all of the activity in the world will be for naught.
        And so, in this season of Lent, we are given an opportunity to make a quiet place for God by stripping away some things. We are urged to do penance, to fast, to give things up, so as to allow the space those things take up in our minds and hearts to be filled by Christ. The Church’s ancient custom is to make our liturgical celebrations more simple and austere: simpler, quieter music; less decoration in our churches. The object is to make our liturgies more contemplative, to give us more room and quiet in which to see and hear the Lord.
        Pope Benedict XVI, in a message he gave before becoming Pope, wrote that by contemplating beauty we come to contemplate Christ. He quoted the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky, who had written, “The Beautiful will save us”. But, Pope Benedict explained, “people usually forget that Dostoyevsky is referring here to the redeeming beauty of Christ.” To see and know this beauty we must have quiet and peace in our souls. We must, the pope explained, “learn to see Him.” The school for learning to see Christ is the liturgy: so in this season of Lent, let us make time for peace and quiet. Let us make our celebration of the liturgy more austere: let us put aside busyness and be still with God. Let us turn our hearts and minds wholeheartedly to “adoration and contemplation full of faith” of Jesus Christ who awaits us.