Postscripts From The Catholic Spitfire Grill

It's been a crazy week around here. I feel like sometime on Monday the rocket sled I didn't know I was standing on took off at warp speed and I have been hanging off the back trying to climb back on ever since. The big topic of the week on that homeschooling forum was Mary...again...and it ended up in a "discussion" about how Catholics were clearly in violation of scripture if they knelt and prayed with a statue in sight. It was such a productive conversation. "Do too." "Do NOT!" You DO SO!!"....etc. I have suggested repeatedly that those who wish to see me leave the Catholic Church would make more headway if they didn't waste their time trying to convince me that I am really doing something that I adamantly hold that I am not doing rather than just  starting with an area that I of acknowledged disagreement. Anyway...as the conversation was winding to a close I put up a summary of what I believe with respect to the bowing down to statues issue and it seemed like it fit here. Perhaps it will make up for the paucity of blogging for the rest of the week.

First let me start by sharing my personal experience. Today is Ash Wednesday (but who knows when I will finish this and post it) and because of a commitment that I made to my pastor, I had to be present (before and after) at all of the services where ashes where distributed and for the two Masses. My home is not terribly close to our church and at some times of the day it can take 30 minutes to drive that distance and there isn’t much point in driving home instead of waiting at the church for 60+ minutes for the next service. Anyway, I had considerable time to spend at church today without any assigned occupation.

In the early morning, it was very cold and windy outside (although Minnesota residents would beg to differ) and I do not do cold without a great deal of whining. As soon as I was able, I made a beeline for the church to pray.  I had just over an hour to pray in the quiet church…what a blessing! I went to my favorite prayer spot in the church (see the x on my diagram) and I knelt in prayer. Could I have prayed elsewhere? Sure. Would our Lord have heard me? Of course! Was it special to me because it was in the quiet of the church? Yes. The church itself was an aid to my devotion. Sitting in the church it was easier for me to meditate on our pastor and his needs, the needs of the congregation, and even to pray and mediate on the Sacrifice that Jesus made for me and for them. After praying for some time, being the mortal human that I am…or perhaps, just not advanced enough in prayer….I found my mind wandering. 

At this point it is necessary to describe the floor plan of my church. In the front and center of our Church is the tabernacle where the Eucharist is kept in order to be able to take Holy Communion to those who are unable to come to church. That is the central focus of the church and the architecture (early 20th century) supports that. You can see behind the Tabernacle though and there is a walkway that goes behind it that connects the vesting rooms (see diagram). In the wall behind the Tabernacle is a niche on each side and in those niches are statues. From the spot where I customarily sit, you can see a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In the really crummy pictures I scanned from our church directory, you can see a little arch of brown behind the ficus (yes really) on the left. That’s where the statue is. The other niche, which I cannot see from my favorite spot, is one of Mary.

X marks my favorite place to kneel and pray

1. Tabernacle

2. Sacred Heart of Jesus statue

3. Mary statue

4. Altar

5. Ambo (pulpit) 

6 Presider's chair

(Sorry that it's such a bad picture...it came from our church directory.)

Back to my mind wandering. Today there were no plants or flowers of any kind in the church because it is the start of Lent which is a “desert time” liturgically; thus, no flowers or plants. This had the effect of making the statue more visible that it is customarily. As I knelt in prayer and my mind wandered, I caught sight of the statue and I began to think about the origin of the image portrayed in the statue. I thought about St. Mary Margaret Alocoque and how she had been written off as insane and a kook for most of her life. She was horribly maligned by her fellow sisters in her convent. I thought about France at the time she was living and how the awesome holiness of the Lord had been emphasized almost to the exclusion of the Love and Mercy of Our Lord. I thought about how her perseverance in spreading the message of the Mercy of Our Lord was a gift to me. That without her, I might not have the privilege of praying in church in preparation for receiving Holy Communion as a lay person on an ordinary day. (Holy Communion was received only infrequently by the laity at the time because of their sense of unworthiness.) These and many other thoughts went through my mind as I knelt in prayer before that statue. And as a result of that meditation I returned again to my prayer to Our Lord in thanksgiving for those who persevered in obedience and for the Precious Gift of His Mercy that welcomes me even when I am unworthy. Was I praying TO the statue? No. Was I as unmistakably close to the statue as the people in the picture? No. But I was close enough that if someone had seen my gaze they might have snapped MY picture and put it on the internet as further proof of Catholic-statue-worshipping. It was an aid to my devotion. Period. It was an aid both to meditation and prayer. Could I have been closer and done the same thing and had it look more “incriminating”? Probably. Does the distance from the statue matter in this case? If I am 10 yards from the statue am I not bowing to it, but I am if I am 5 feet from it but using it in the SAME WAY as if I was 10 yards away? 50 yards?

Later that day while I was waiting for a service to finish, I occupied myself by pulling weeds in the church’s landscaping. At one point, I was down on my knees in front of a statue of St. Francis looking for weeds. I looked up and realized where I was and almost looked around to see if anyone had a camera. Fortunately, I was all by myself and there were no Jesus-is-Lord spies there. I also took a few minutes to think about the life of St. Francis, the joy with which he served Our Lord and what He taught us about appreciating God’s creation. Again, a statue served as a visual reminder that drew me into meditation about God’s gifts to us.

Now contrast this aid to devotion to my behavior at another time. Our church has an Adoration chapel. What that means is that the Eucharist is exposed in a monstrance 24 hours/day. People at our church take turns spending an hour before the Eucharist in prayer and Adoration. We do this in response to the scripture in which Jesus asks His disciples, “Could you spend an hour with me in prayer?” On Tuesday mornings, I rise in the wee hours of the morning and head to church. As soon as the person I relieve leaves, I veil myself, remove my shoes, and I prostrate myself in Adoration and Worship before the Blessed Sacrament. (I wait until the other person leaves because I really don’t want anyone thinking that I do this for show.) There is no question in my mind what I am doing. This isn’t an aid to Worship. This isn’t to help me think about Our Lord.  This is Worship. It isn’t the primary act of worship which is the Mass but in a spiritual way, I unite this time that I spend in Adoration with the Mass.

Now I am not a Hebrew scholar but I do know that there is more than one word for “bow” used in the OT and since I DO bow in worship and it looks different both in my heart and in my body, I can’t help but think that the Hebrews were lucky enough to have a word for “bow” that looks like what my “bow” does in Adoration and one that also translates “bow” that looks like what happened in the church and in the garden. I have had people that I trust tell me that my understanding is correct.

That’s just my experience and indicative of nothing except how my understanding of scripture plays out in my devotional life. If that leaves me open to the charge of intellectual duplicity because it “looks like worship but isn’t” well then I stand convicted. It is my opinion that it “looks like worship” because of the very different understanding of worship that exists outside of the Catholic Church.  For the Catholic the central and most important act of worship is what Jesus declared it to be in the New Covenant at the Last Supper. Catholics believe that during the Mass we enter into the eternal worship of heaven itself.  It is not hyperbole when a Catholic compares marital intimacy to receiving Holy Communion. Holy Communion is the Sacrament that renews the New Covenant just as marital intimacy renews the marital covenant.

That leads me to my next part. There has been a lot of discussion [on that forum] about this picture:

This picture was originally found on The Sacred Immaculate Heart of Satan page on the Jesus-is-Lord website.

In conjunction with these verses:

Exodus 20:4-5 “You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; you shall not bow down before them or worship them. For I, the LORD, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their fathers' wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation”

Deuteronomy 5: 8-10  “You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; you shall not bow down before them or worship them. For I, the LORD, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishments for their fathers' wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation but bestowing mercy, down to the thousandth generation, on the children of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

So first, I would like to ask the reader if they pray in their closet? Well why not? Sacred Scripture says CLEARLY….in no uncertain terms, from the words of our Savior himself….

Matthew 6:6 “But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.”

But you say….the context of the passage in Matthew is that we aren’t supposed to do things for show! It didn’t mean that you should literally go into a closet.

Yes I say, and the context of the passages in Exodus and Deuteronomy is that we should not worship things that are not the Creator of the Universe. And bowing in and of itself, is not worship.

And so we are left with a debate like all the other debates that have split Christianity into countless and counting denominations. Each Christian reserving unto him or herself the right to interpret Sacred Scripture as seems best to that individual. Is that what Jesus intended? Should scripture be interpreted by an individual or within a community? Which community? By whose authority? How does a new Christian determine which church is the correct church if they have not developed appropriate spiritual maturity?

And where did this book that we call the Bible come from? It did not drop from Mount Sinai leather bound with gilt edges. The first books of the New Testament were not even written for decades after Pentecost…..the Apostles guided the first Christians you say….well that’s true. But were there more than 12 communities of Christians? What did the communities without Apostles do? Did the Apostles lay hands on some and bestow them with the same kind of authority? If they did, why doesn’t that authority continue to this day? And who has it? Who picked the books of the Bible? When? The New Testament canon was not finalized until almost 400 AD. That’s over 300 years without a Bible. Some churches before that preach as scripture from books that did not make the New Testament canon, and some churches refused to teach as scripture from some books that did not make it into the canon. Most churches were able to afford only a few of the books anyway. How did Christians pass on the faith in the centuries that followed the adoption of the canon without their own copies of the Bible (that they couldn’t read since most were illiterate)? And why is it that the same people who had the authority to set the canon that is accepted by so many Protestants without question, not have the authority to explain what it means?

The canon set at the Councils of Hippo (393 AD) and Carthage (397 AD) was set by the authority of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and the men that were so full of the Holy Spirit that they were able to establish the canon that remains to this day not only believed that using visual aids to devotion was acceptable, they also believed that same Church rightly reserved to herself the authority to provide a definitive interpretation of those same scriptures.