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We’re slowly working our way through (okay, we temporarily lost the book, but I’ll find it soon) The How-To Book of the Mass: Everything You Need to Know but No One Ever Taught You by Michael Dubruiel.
And you know, he is absolutely right: No one ever taught me most of this stuff. It’s not just theology — what the Eucharist is, what the prayers mean, and so on. It’s very practical things like what to do when you’re distracted by other thoughts when you walk into the church. Which you probably are more often than not. What to do?
We may think, or even have been told, that it’s our job to sternly shunt these distracting thoughts away so we can focus on Jesus, who is the one we are there to see. But this is not the way, says Dubruiel.
He says:
“[t]here is a point in every Mass at which we can bring our desires to God. But because many of us do not see the connection, we miss it. There is also a time to hear what the Word of God has to say about our desires. It is not necessary to ignore these desire that weigh upon our hearts, but to bring them to God in the context of what God is saying to us during the Mass.”
He reminds us of the people in the Gospel who literally came face-to-face with Jesus, but wasted the opportunity, because they were focused on someone or something else.
It’s not a problem to have these concerns, Dubruiel says. The mistake is when we do not bring them to God, even though we are in the presence of God… Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
Image: Road to Bethlehem; also known as The Difficult Journey (1890) by Fritz von Uhde via Wikipedia (Public Domain)
