Scraps From The Lord’s Table

Two months ago a good friend’s mother died, less than twenty four hours after my own father-in-law passed away. We lived in the same area, so our families used the same funeral home and the same cemetery for burial. Our friend and her father came to my father-in-law’s Mass of Christian burial, and we in turn attended the Requiem Mass for her mother.

A few days later I texted my friend to see how she was doing. It was a Tuesday, and she asked about Mass times. Knowing that she, like us, attends Mass in the Extraordinary Form, I replied, “Well, the Latin Mass is on Monday and Wednesday evenings. It’s Novus Ordo on Tuesdays.” I’ll never forget her response:

“I need Jesus.”

The implication, of course, was that at that moment, liturgical form was secondary; the desperation for the Lord, primary.

We Must Find Jesus

It’s reminiscent of a parable I once heard of a proud young man seeking wisdom. The sage he seeks advice from leads him to the sea and then holds the young man’s head under water until his arms start to flail. “What was it you seek again? Wisdom?” he asks. When the young man bursts up from the sea, he yells, “Air! I need air!” The sage replies, “When you want wisdom as badly as you want to breathe, you shall have it.”

In meditating on the Mystery of the Finding of the Child Jesus in the Temple, I try to recall the scene of Mary, the Mother of God, desperately searching not only for her Son, but for her God who seems to have been temporarily misplaced. I once lost my four-year-old son in a public library for two minutes, and the anxiety that grips you in those moments feels like an eternity.

Mary was separated from her Son Jesus for three days with no idea where He was. “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you,” Mary asks when they find Him. In my meditation on this mystery, I often repeat the words to myself, “We must find Jesus. We must find Jesus” to put myself in their midst, assisting in the search.

Jesus in the Mass

Although I don’t consider myself a traditionalist per se, we almost exclusively attend the Latin Mass on Sundays and have done so for the past three years. I find great beauty and reverence in the Extraordinary Form, and many of our friends and those in our Catholic circle feel similarly.

The Novus Ordo Mass is more or less foreign to my children. I have written articles defending the Extraordinary Form of the Mass – expressing what a gift it is to the faithful – while trying to be careful not to denigrate the New Rite of the Mass and stressing that the old Mass is not a “silver bullet” that automatically makes one holier just by attending.

Some folks we know are more, for lack of a better word, liturgical hardliners. I don’t write that pejoratively but in the recognition that they feel they cannot attend the Novus Ordo for various reasons. I recall attending one First Saturday Mass when we first started attending the Latin Mass. At the last minute, the priest who was to offer Mass in the Extraordinary Form was unable to, and a local priest filled in. “Novus Ordo,” the usher whispered as I walked in, to give me a heads up. When some people realized Mass that morning would be in the new rite, they walked out. Whether it was a matter of protest, conscience, or something else, I’m not sure.

The Need for Jesus

If it weren’t for the many good-hearted, kind, and faithful people we know in person who are traditionalists (in our parish, and outside of it), I may fall into the trap that is often seen online of maligning this contingent as “rad-trads,” “Pharisees,” and other titles of backhanded slander. This has not been our experience of them.

Nevertheless, I have questioned my own spiritual trajectory over the past three years. What has changed in my walk with the Lord? What has drawn me closer to Him, and what has pulled me away?

Often, I have found myself feeling like I’m on a kind of plateau. I have been Catholic for almost twenty-five years, but now in my forties I find myself lacking the zeal and desperate pining for intimacy with the Lord I possessed in my twenties. Back then, I would often find myself overcome by tears of compunction in the pew–a gift of grace.

Once, after a particularly egregious fall into sin, I hitchhiked almost a hundred miles to a monastery to confess my sins to a monk and do penance for a number of days. Other times, I would spend hours in the adoration chapel before the Lord, but because I couldn’t sit that long I often got tired and lay down, occasionally being taken for a vagrant.

When I came into the Church at the age of 18, the Novus Ordo was the standard liturgical fare. I knew nothing of anything else until three or four years ago. What I did have then, however, was the acute knowledge of my need for God and my glaring inadequacy in justifying myself before Him. Much like the young man who knew he needed air more than anything, I knew I needed the Lord desperately and was reminded of it often in fall after spiritual fall.

Ask for What You Need

In the fifteenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, it is a Canaanite woman with a demon-possessed daughter whom Jesus aids. Her uncouth earnestness is desperate, almost embarrassing. The disciples ask Jesus to send her away, for “she keeps calling after us.” Like blind Bartimaeus, she addresses him with the same title, “Son of David, have pity on me!” Like my friend, in that moment, the Canaanite woman’s objective is straightforward: she needs Jesus.

Matthew contrasts this hot, unrefined desperation in verses 21-28 with the cool, dispassionate presentation of the Pharisees in verses 1-20 about Jesus’ disciples breaking the tradition of the elders. Jesus’ response: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

I often wonder for myself which of the two parties I resemble more when I am preoccupied with various rubrics in the Mass or find myself debating various liturgical nuances.  Am I like the boy seeking wisdom but forgetting that I need air to breathe?

Religious Snobbery

I don’t think these are mutually exclusive facets–an earnest Catholic who worships in the New Rite or a dispassionate Latin Mass-goer who takes refuge in the externals. After three years of worshiping almost exclusively by way of the usus antiquior, however, the temptation to “rest in the form” is ever present. It is equally tempting to want to turn my nose up at those less liturgically refined who have nothing but their desperate need for grace and mercy.

Religious snobbery is not a good look. Scripture is replete with figure after figure of those who fall outside the fold – the Samaritan woman at the well, blind Bartimaeus, the woman with the flow of blood, lepers, the woman caught in adultery, etc. – who, despite their embarrassing states, find great favor with Jesus on account of their untamed faith.

It’s easy to fall into a kind of exclusivity and “pride of place” for having found a liturgical pearl of great price, for which you are willing to sell everything and buy. But I have often found, in my most desperate times, that when I cry out internally like my friend who “just needed Jesus” in her moment of need, any newly-adopted elite liturgical mentality falls by the wayside.

Gratitude

At those times, I find myself simply grateful for my local neighborhood Novus Ordo parish that offers an adoration chapel, or a priest willing to hear my confession in the middle of the day, or an anointing for a sick relative, or even a weekday Mass when you Just. Need. Jesus.

That’s not something I want to thumb my nose at, lest I be judged. I’m no better than that Canaanite woman who recognized her place as a “little dog” pining for scraps of grace leftover from those who didn’t feel they needed it, crying simply: “Lord, help me.”  Lord, help me.