the body, and The Body.
I've been reading Lauren Winner's memoir Girl Meets God and, apart from the generic title, I'm really enjoying her voice. She converted from Orthodox Judaism to Christianity, and has a lot of interesting and quite thoughtful things to say about her identity as falling in the crack between the two religions.
In particular, she says a lot about what drew her specifically to the Episcopalian church, and I'm reminded in what she says about liturgy of much that I've been appreciating about St Rose, my Catholic church in Bay St Louis. Keep in mind I'm speaking as a born-and-raised Protestant, only very recently attending Mass with any regularity.
I love the emphasis on the body: crossing yourself, kneeling, standing, moving up to receive communion, entry and exit processions, the body of Christ on the crucifix. The babies all around. Reminders of our flesh every five minutes. Sometimes I think Protestants want to believe we are exempt from our bodies, that because they are sinful we can and should aspire past them to the realm of the ethereal. Catholics say, yeah, my body's sinful, but I'm stuck in it, so I'd better not forget about it or pretend like I can get past it somehow. I like this. For all you hear about Catholic guilt, there's a humility here, a constant awareness and owning of our fallibility.
The Body, relatedly, is another wonderful part of the Church. You are Catholic - you do not go it alone. There is no sense of frontier religion. You are tied into your community at the base, and you must rely on them, and they will rely on you. Your priest is himself tied into a system of checks and balances. It is the Church, and the membership is according: at St Rose you see black people and white people, rich people and poor people, young and old and Hispanic and Asian. The liturgy ties you all together, and there is no sense that churches are breaking along fault lines of differences between groups of people. Catholicism says, we are all different, but we are all here for Christ, so we need to get along with each other. Breaking off into a new denomination whenever there's a quarrel is no way to learn to love each other, and no way to carry out Christ's work. "You are the Church, so act like it."
There are things I don't agree with about Catholicism - I take the Eucharist but probably shouldn't because of that transubstantiation thing. St Rose rarely mentions Mary but she is an important part of the church, and I am uncomfortable with her near-deification. I don't like how strict and patriarchal the Catholic hierarchy is, and I think it's sometimes too easy to fall into speaking the liturgy by rote without using it as a stepping point to worship. I also think it's true that being part of the larger Body doesn't lend itself to figuring out how you yourself need to worship God - it seems everyone needs to fall into the same groove in Catholicism, which becomes problematic. A bit like the chain store moving into the neighborhood, maybe? Like, Subway. You know what you're going to get there, and it's comforting, but there are so many different mom-and-pop places that all make really individually tasty sandwiches. So it's a trade-off, being part of a Body.
So I couldn't convert, fully, to Catholicism; but, I am here for now, and so I go, and kneel, and hold hands with my neighbors while singing the Lord's Prayer, and I feel part of something organic and much, much larger than myself. And that is more than enough for now.
***
In particular, she says a lot about what drew her specifically to the Episcopalian church, and I'm reminded in what she says about liturgy of much that I've been appreciating about St Rose, my Catholic church in Bay St Louis. Keep in mind I'm speaking as a born-and-raised Protestant, only very recently attending Mass with any regularity.
I love the emphasis on the body: crossing yourself, kneeling, standing, moving up to receive communion, entry and exit processions, the body of Christ on the crucifix. The babies all around. Reminders of our flesh every five minutes. Sometimes I think Protestants want to believe we are exempt from our bodies, that because they are sinful we can and should aspire past them to the realm of the ethereal. Catholics say, yeah, my body's sinful, but I'm stuck in it, so I'd better not forget about it or pretend like I can get past it somehow. I like this. For all you hear about Catholic guilt, there's a humility here, a constant awareness and owning of our fallibility.
The Body, relatedly, is another wonderful part of the Church. You are Catholic - you do not go it alone. There is no sense of frontier religion. You are tied into your community at the base, and you must rely on them, and they will rely on you. Your priest is himself tied into a system of checks and balances. It is the Church, and the membership is according: at St Rose you see black people and white people, rich people and poor people, young and old and Hispanic and Asian. The liturgy ties you all together, and there is no sense that churches are breaking along fault lines of differences between groups of people. Catholicism says, we are all different, but we are all here for Christ, so we need to get along with each other. Breaking off into a new denomination whenever there's a quarrel is no way to learn to love each other, and no way to carry out Christ's work. "You are the Church, so act like it."
There are things I don't agree with about Catholicism - I take the Eucharist but probably shouldn't because of that transubstantiation thing. St Rose rarely mentions Mary but she is an important part of the church, and I am uncomfortable with her near-deification. I don't like how strict and patriarchal the Catholic hierarchy is, and I think it's sometimes too easy to fall into speaking the liturgy by rote without using it as a stepping point to worship. I also think it's true that being part of the larger Body doesn't lend itself to figuring out how you yourself need to worship God - it seems everyone needs to fall into the same groove in Catholicism, which becomes problematic. A bit like the chain store moving into the neighborhood, maybe? Like, Subway. You know what you're going to get there, and it's comforting, but there are so many different mom-and-pop places that all make really individually tasty sandwiches. So it's a trade-off, being part of a Body.
So I couldn't convert, fully, to Catholicism; but, I am here for now, and so I go, and kneel, and hold hands with my neighbors while singing the Lord's Prayer, and I feel part of something organic and much, much larger than myself. And that is more than enough for now.
***