St. Al's

This morning I took Sarah to St. Alphonsus, the church I was raised in. A while back she was interested in going to a Catholic mass, experiencing it and just seeing how it was different from the way she and I do church. I told her I'd take her to St. Al's, but it took us awhile to actually make the trek to Brooklyn Center on a Sunday morning to do it!

So anyway, that was this morning and it was very interesting. As a disclaimer, when I started following the Lord, I went on kind of a tyrade against the Catholic church for various reasons, but as I've grown a bit more mature, I've realized that there is good found in all churches, and God works in the Catholic church in a uniquely different way than He does through The Rock - and that is good because different people need to be reached in different ways. So please, if you're a Catholic follower of God please know that I fully respect your beliefs, your worship, and your genuine faith.

Having said that, I just want to describe the experience Sarah and I had today. So we got to the church, we went through the motions of the mass (every once in awhile with me whispering in Sarah's ear about a memory or two from childhood). It was a good sermon, on using every opportunity that is given to us to love each other because God has told us to be prepared at all times for His return. Good stuff. It was cool to be there with Sarah because what I was a lot more used to was pretty new to her. So she had some really good, fresh, perspectives on it.

For example, afterwards we were talking about the powerful, life-giving words everyone was speaking together (the Our Father, the creed, etc). She described it in a really good way, she said “I kept listening to the words, and thinking the whole time that there is so much truth and life in these words they were all saying, but it sounded so...dead...on their lips.”

Those familiar words, memorized by nearly everyone, are sadly not even thought about by so many people going (myself included all the years I attended). Maybe they end up sounding dead because the people who don't think about them or understand them end up drowning out those who do understand them...maybe they are meant to sound that way because they are meant to be said solemnly, but in my opinion, these are exciting words! We should be shouting them!

When the priest told us to go in peace I gave Sarah a little tour of the church, showing her various things, like where I drank the holy water like it was coming from a water fountain when I was really little. She wanted to see what a confessional looked like, so we went into one. I showed her the statue of St. Alphonsus, and the baptism area that always reminded me as a kid of the scene in Willy Wonka with the bubbles. I took her back to the Sacristy. We could see the priest and another lady back there. The lady came towards us and asked if she could help us, I just explained to her that I used to be an altar girl and was showing Sarah where I used to get dressed. She warmly invited us to come back and look at the rest of it (where the priest prepares for mass).

So we go back there. But then the priest and her started this conversation with each other that we were just there to witness. He mentioned someone in college who was a “born again Christian,” the tone of his voice contained a fair amount of disdain, who was concerned about her parents’ salvation. He sort of rolled his eyes and said that his reply to this girl was that she just had to look at her parents lives and realize that they didn’t have anything to worry about. Sarah and I looked at each other, both knowing that the bible clearly teaches that salvation does not come from how good someone is, or the good things they do. We kept listening as the woman talked about a church downtown where the teaching is on video (I think she was talking about John Piper’s church because he goes back and forth between two locations so half the time his teaching is on video). She shook her head and said:

“What does a video have to do with religion?”

She was so right! A video has nothing to do with religion!

Now I do understand what she meant, watching a video is rather impersonal when compared to someone actually being there to speak. (Sarah said later, in response, that "they come to church for truth, and if that truth comes from a video then so be it"), but it was humorous to me the way this lady phrased her question. Religion is a set of practices that is meant to express our beliefs. These can be good and encourage a strong faith (for example, being religious about reading your bible every day will probably do a good job of strengthening your faith), but it can also encourage a false faith (for example, the Pharisees were described as religious). So the practices can be very genuine and good and certainly come from those intentions, but they are not the truth itself.

It was a very surreal experience to be watching two leaders of this church speaking to Sarah and I about people that might as well have been Sarah and I.

Like I said earlier, by this entry I do not mean to be bashing Catholicism, there is definitely something to be said for it. Many of the traditional religious practices of Catholics shows an important reverence for God that is often ignored by other churches. True, because of the events at Calvary we now have no barrier between us and God and can now freely go to Him, but He is still our almighty Lord and deserves our reverence. And to be honest, I do disagree with many of the things this church teaches and the way they teach them, but I also believe that God is working through the church, and to attack it without understanding is equally harmful to those that have found a relationship with God through it.

In conclusion, my favorite moment of this morning came after communion - I saw an older woman being escorted to her seat by her daughter. Although she didn’t have the hymnal in front of her, she knew, and was singing, every single word. Just watching this woman expressing her love for God warmed my heart. It was touching and beautiful to look around and see faces like hers that were clearly there to simply praise God and to be obedient to Him.