The Living God My Shepherd Is

Today at church the sermon was about how our relationship with God is important, and we should focus on that, and on the mystery, rather than trying to know everything. TNTK (the need to know) is something that consumes us, and it can keep us from realizing that God is alive and wants to have a relationship with us. Although I sometimes think our relationship is pretty dysfunctional, I’ve been lucky enough not to lose sight of that.

It just made me think about what it is that God is telling me. I feel like part of my vocation – or maybe this is better described as a pipe-dream – is to somehow bring the fire and energy of charismatic worship together with a high liturgical tradition. I don’t want to feel rootless, I don’t want to lose the gestures. I love the tradition. But, at the same time, I go to Catholic churches and high liturgical services and I feel like…like so many people are just going through the motions, like there’s so little feeling in the moment, so little emotion, so little passion in the congregation. Obviously not everyone’s like that, but I can’t help feeling that people come alive afterward at coffee hour as if the Mass is a separate part of their day, totally solemn and rehearsed, somber, old, and familiar. I want to live the Gospel in every moment of my life (or try to, anyway).

I like the high tradition because I love to pray and I love church and Mass is like an hour long prayer for me. I want to pray with my whole body and all of my senses, I want to get lost in God, I want to respond authentically to overwhelming feelings of awe, joy, and sometimes even sadness or just, like, overfullness. I want there to be passion in the liturgy: we are praising God, why aren’t we more dynamic? Does everything we say have to be perfect beauty without emotion, flat, rushed? Why can’t we burst out into a smile? I just…I wish that somehow I could find a way to bring them together, the two halves of my life that sometimes seem so far apart.

I know at times I try to contain what I feel because for whatever reason I think it’s not appropriate. Is it appropriate to just raise your face and look up with your eyes closed when you experience beauty and evanescence? Is it okay to smile, maybe even to laugh? Sometimes I feel such joy welling up like tears, but one should not of course cry in church. During the consecration, I feel so overcome with awe and littleness, gratitude and unworthiness, but how can you express it? Can I put my head in my hands? Of course we can’t cry out, like ‘woohoo’ or something, but sometimes I secretly want to. Should I pray in church (an odd question I know), really pray, allow myself to just go up and see what’s behind, above, inside and around these walls? I feel like I don’t want to be conspicuous. But it also sucks that I feel I can only have long encounters with Mary in a church if I sneak in mid-day when there’s no one around. I guess that’s why when I was going to St. Pat’s for daily Mass I’d sometimes come in an hour early, to be by myself, to hear, to listen, to see and to feel what it is that God wants to reveal; a place of companionable silence, neither saying anything, just being as if time has stopped. Sometimes I move through the liturgy as if I’m in a bubble, there and not there, focused in something else but still seeing everything and being a part of it.

Is that normal? Am I normal? Sometimes I really do wonder. I long so badly just to be with God, a kind of desperation sometimes, for there to be nothing else and nothing left but me and Him. I want to feel safe enough to let my eyes flow over with tears and laughter spring up at the same time, this awe, this feeling of being carried away, the light and the voice, the feeling in my hands and my face, the sometimes searing pain and overwhelming despair and sadness. But I don’t know how to feel totally safe when the focus is on dignity and propriety. And I don’t know how to feel safe when the visceral aspects of worship are absent, truncated, simplified. I do not long for simple worship. I wonder if there is a place for me anywhere, if there ever will be, if I’ll ever find another person who understands what I experience and long for, someone whose world this is too.