Best Thing I Ever Ate -- Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives -- and Receiving Holy Communion

Last night, my husband and I were watching Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives on the Food Network Channel.

It got us talking about our favorite meal in a restaurant. We couldn't come up with one contender - and we eat out a lot - too much.

That's when I realized something. My favorite meals have always been the ones I eat when I am incredibly hungry.

John agreed.

When we come to the table hungry, we experience the best meal.

The same is true with receiving Our Lord in the Eucharist. We come hungry for Jesus. Having set every other substitute aside, we come to receive the Meal we most desire.

Some may leave feeling ho-hum about Mass, but those who put aside all other contenders, those who have set their hearts and minds and bodies on Christ, are always filled. Always satisfied. Always renewed and strengthened.

The International House of Pancakes has a slogan. Come Hungry, Leave Happy.

Spiritually, that could be our slogan.

Come to Mass hungry to receive. Leave fulfilled and happy. Ready for almost anything.

Best Thing I Ever Ate -- Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives -- and Receiving Holy Communion

Alleluia one more Sunday

This weekend, we will hear the words of Isaiah:

See, I am doing a new deed,
even now it comes to light; can you not see it?

I read these words this morning during my Adoration time. (Yes, I peeked ahead to Sunday's OT reading.) And I thought about the entire passage and Isaiah's prophecy.

It seems that God works this way a lot. He says what He is going to do. And often, we don't believe because it doesn't happen in the way we expect or in the instant we had hoped it would occur.

For example:

He speaks to Joseph of old, in a dream. Your brothers will bow down to you. But it doesn't happen immediately. His brothers sell him into slavery. He is mistreated and misused by Potiphar's wife. He rises in the ranks. And when he least expects it, his brothers come to Egypt to ask for pharoah's help - and they bow down to the one who speaks for pharoah. . . not realizing that this is their brother.

He speaks to Moses, I am going to free my people. But it doesn't happen immediately. They go through plagues and Pharoah saying no again and again. Then they have to pass through the Sea. And then they wander forty years. Then they have to cross Jordan. And then they have to "take the land".

Again and again, God says what He will do.

You will have a child. You will be set free. You will inherit a land. You will be my people. You will know the truth. You will have peace.

And because He is God (and we are not), He does it in a way that we cannot envision and in a moment we don't expect.

I sat there at about a quarter to four this morning and I read these words. See, I am doing a new deed, even now it comes to light; can you not see it? Isaiah spoke hundreds - thousands - of years ago. But He spoke of a New Covenant. A Messiah. The Hope of Israel. He spoke of one who would take our sins, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. And we would be able to come to Him. Sit with Him. Enter the holy of holies.

And in that moment, I raised my eyes to the Eucharist and I knew that I was seeing the fulfillment of Isaiah's words.

This new thing that God has done. . . can you not see it?

Alleluia one more Sunday

A Common Dictionary

Even when we speak the same language, we sometimes have difficultly communicating with one another. You don’t have to travel to England to experience this. There are regional anomalies right here in the United States.

It happened to me while walking out of a grocery store in Atlanta a number of years ago. A lady entered Winn Dixie and asked me, “Are you finished with that buggy?” I stared blankly for a moment and realized she was referring to my grocery cart.

“Oh, yes. Sorry. It’s all yours,” I mumbled, as I quickly added another definition to the word buggy. From henceforth, it could refer to a piece of baby equipment, a prop for an old west movie, or (in Atlanta) a grocery cart.

Likewise, one of the more frustrating aspects of sharing the Gospel with others is that we do not always share the same dictionary. In 2007, a woman on the reality show Survivor proved the point. The host asked her about being religious. She bristled and explained that she is not religious but has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Catholic viewers scratch their heads and think, she sure sounds religious to us. The problem is that Evangelicals and Catholics mean different things when they use certain words or phrases.
Take the word religious. To the Catholic, it means to be counted among the faithful. One who is devout. Baptismal vows shape how they live, and they are fully engaged in this journey to God.
To Evangelicals, the word religious means almost the opposite. They believe a religious person concentrates on rituals and formulas at the expense of a meaningful relationship with Jesus Christ.

That is why Evangelicals will not ask a stranger if he is religious. Rather, they will ask him if he has a personal relationship with the Lord. And it’s a valid question. To answer it appropriately, though, we need to consider what the person really wants to know. Like the woman who asked if I was finished with the buggy, you may not be able to answer the question if you do not know what the question is really asking.

In short, how real is Jesus to you? To what extent has He impacted your life? Do you invite Him to go with you into your week? Do you talk to Him before you fall asleep? Is He the first one you speak to when you wake in the morning? Do you see Him in the face of the homeless? The poor? Your aging parents?

When things go really well, is He the first one you tell? When things are spinning out of control, do you reach out for His hand, like Peter walking on the water to Jesus?

Being religious does not mean (or should not mean) that we cling to external rituals that are void of meaning. On the contrary, it should mean that our faith impacts everything that we do. It redefines our calendar, it gives framework to the way we worship God, it instills reverence and a proper fear of the Lord, and it brings order, balance, depth, fullness and unwavering faithfulness to our walk with God. This kind of faith is very personal.

Moreover, every Catholic who receives the Most Blessed Sacrament receives Jesus Christ in the most intimate way possible. You can’t get more personal than having Jesus Christ on your tongue. His Real Presence meeting you at the cellular level. Overwhelming you. Changing you. Think about it, when you went forward to receive Our Eucharistic Lord at Mass last time, you experienced the most personal touch we can experience on this earth. The One who created you, the One who flung the stars into space and formed every valley and mountain, the One who holds all things in His Hands – He became so small and humble that you have been given the opportunity to rise from your knees, walk the aisle, bow, and put out your hands and take Jesus into your own body!

It is too miraculous, too mysterious to comprehend. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. And it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to contemplate such profound love. Spend the distance from your seat at Mass to the raised Eucharist contemplating with awe and wonder who it is that comes to you – so intimately, so personally.

How is it possible that He should come inside me, and I not cease to breathe, to think, to exist? Such love, it is almost too much to grasp. And yet, we do grasp it enough to say, “Amen” when we come face to face with God the Son. The next time someone asks you if you know Jesus personally, the answer must be one resounding yes.

A Common Dictionary

Roman Catholic Preacher's Kid

Roman Catholic Preacher’s Kid

My journey from Protestantism to Catholicism is as complex and beautiful as the God who orchestrated it.

During my early childhood, my father was a Wesleyan minister. When I was eleven, Dad changed denominations and became a Presbyterian minister. Dad’s faith journey wasn’t easy. He had high regard for the Wesleyan focus on holiness and sanctification. But his scriptural study had given him a new appreciation for infant baptism and many other things which the early church held sacred, things spelled out in the Apostle's Creed, things that were more Presbyterian than Wesleyan. The importance of seeking God’s Truth at any cost was the most important faith lesson my father taught me.

In October of 2003, Dad underwent surgery for a herniated disk. Six weeks later, an MRI showed that Dad had developed a massive staph infection and sustained a fracture to his back. They began immediate intravenous antibiotics and put Dad in a back brace. Before the medication could work, Dad died unexpectedly of a pulmonary embolism. It had not been an easy death. He was only sixty and had spent the previous eight years battling a number of neurological disorders as well.

Following his death, I went on a quest for answers as to why the Lord of love and mercy would allow my dad to endure such suffering.

After a lot of seeking and searching, I found the answer in a book by St. John of the Cross. In his book Dark Night of the Soul, this saint explains that we should rejoice when we go through profound suffering, because God has not abandoned us, even if it seems like He has, but rather He is making good use of us (Starr translation 138). Protestants believe we are to pray for healing from our suffering or for strength to endure our suffering. Protestants do not subscribe to the teaching that they are to “contribute to the good of the People of God by freely uniting themselves to the Passion and death of Christ” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1499). In other words, they do not see the eternal value for the Kingdom of God in simple or profound human suffering. To them, suffering for the cause of Christ is primarily limited to persecution for one’s faith. What about a sore throat or a herniated disk? Could those be crosses as well? Could they be united to Christ's suffering and somehow be efficacious for the Kingdom of God?

While my father’s life taught me to seek the Lord for answers, his suffering provided me with the question the Lord wanted me to ask. By asking that one question on suffering and by seeking with all of my heart for the answer, the Lord was able to lead me home to the Catholic Church.

When my father died, I inherited much of his personal library, and I perused those books in a quest for answers. Once I had exhausted his library, I borrowed books from Saint Louis University library and purchased others at a local book store. By June, I had read some fifty books, including Confessions by St. Augustine, Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross and The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila.

I suppose my life as a Protestant was over at that point. When a Protestant falls in love with the saints, there’s no turning back. That’s how it was for me.

That fall, I enrolled in RCIA classes and began to explore the tenets of the Faith. I learned that the Catholic Church places a high premium on holiness and sanctification, AND they hold firmly to all that the early church taught . . . because they WERE the early church. I had followed Truth, and I had found my way home. On August 14, 2005, in the Year of the Eucharist, I received Our Lord, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in my First Communion.

Roman Catholic Preacher's Kid