Twelve Reasons I Love Resurrection Chapel

Resurrection Chapel, at Morris Chapel

Resurrection Chapel, at Morris Chapel.

This is a post I’ve been thinking of for a little while. Here are a few reasons why I love my new parish, Resurrection Chapel:

  1. My connection: The sudden revelation of a deep, historical connection with the church here — one that God knew I would appreciate and be attracted by — lit my path here, and reminds me that He is guiding my steps. Just this past week, I discovered yet another connection: my mom’s closest cousin Dana is a dear friend of Rick Chenault our parish director and Peggy his wife.

  2. The building: Not only is the church building a lovely and cozy place, but I learned this past weekend that it is apparently built around the church’s original log structure, founded in ca. 1852 and moved here from the church’s original location a few miles down the road. When I go to church, I am standing not merely in the same locale, but in the same building and the same spot as my ancestors. It makes me giddy to think of.

  3. The name — Resurrection — is apt on so many levels. This parish signifies the rebirth of Catholicism in this area, which was actually the location of the first Catholic church in what became the Diocese of Birmingham. It is the calling back to the Church of so many lapsed Catholics who have been away from the Sacraments. It is the rising again of a vibrant church on this spot, where a Methodist congregation flourished for so many years. It stands alongside an old country cemetery, where so many faithful Christians are resting in the hope of a glorious resurrection.

  4. The very idea of a rural parish appeals to everything I love — to my Southern, agrarian, hobbitish ideals. We are pioneering the Church at its frontier, delving into an area darkened not only by the recession of Catholicism but among so many, of Christianity in general. We are bearing the torch of the Gospel and the light of Christ’s love where no Catholic has gone before, or at least not in a very long time.

  5. hobbit church

    But not small like this hobbit church.

  6. It is small, like me. I have a hard time in a big place. I was going to Mass at the parish most local to me for months before I even spoke to anybody or anybody spoke to me. I felt lost in the crowd, swallowed hole, overwhelmed. But I set foot in Resurrection Chapel and immediately people saw me and greeted me. Mr. Rick* welcomed me warmly and invited me back, and a dozen or more people introduced themselves after Mass. I felt love, and connection, and fellowship, from the very first moments, when those are things that have always come so hard for me. I don’t fault the people of the larger parish at all: it’s not a failure to love; just a failure of the dynamic of a large parish, and of me to reach out and take the connection that would be there if I did.

  7. * I never know what to call Rick. It feels so cold to just call him “Rick,” after all he does for us and for the parish. Being Catholic necessitates a new set of terms of endearment. I can’t call him “Brother Rick,” as per my Evangelical inclination, because he’s not a brother in any order. I can’t call him “Pastor,” because he’s not a priest, and that’s not a title he claims. “Mister” will have to do for the time being, until I can call him “Deacon.”

  8. Following from that point, the people in general. It’s not just any people who would reach out to me in the way these have. They are so loving and welcoming and full of charity in a way that does go beyond so many other churches. My dearest friends at St. John’s, found over the course of so many months, can compare. And here, after just a few weeks, I feel fully a part of their family.

    They have made some additions since this photo was taken, but it still has the distinct feel of a country Methodist church inside. Also, it's not easy to retrofit Methodist pews with kneelers.

    They have made some additions since this photo was taken, but it still has the distinct feel of a country Methodist church inside. Also, it’s not easy to retrofit Methodist pews with kneelers.

  9. Opportunities for ministry: Part of it, I guess, is that I was just a baby Catholic when I was at St. John’s (in so many ways, I still am), but from the very beginning here, I’ve been offered the chance to minister for the Lord. Mr. Rick asked almost immediately to be thinking about any ways I would like to minister: as a lector, or an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion, or anything else. I am still a neophyte! I feel so unworthy. But this past Sunday, I was given the opportunity to present the gifts — something that has always been such an important part of the liturgy for me. And my dear new friends Leo and Harriet have welcomed me so warmly as a helper in the RCIA class. And Mr. Rick invited me to be a part of a meeting of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, which is truly doing God’s work in our community of ministering to the poor and hurting, the very first time I came to Mass.

  10. There are certainly many downsides of not having a dedicated priest as pastor in our parish, but I also value the upside: I can get to know many priests. I have already met half a dozen or more dear priests on a personal level, and that is so valuable to me in my growth as a Catholic.

  11. It’s a bit of a drive to get there — something I have really missed for so long, living in a small town like Oxford and especially now living at home. Time alone in the car, to revel in the open road, if only for a few miles and minutes, time to listen to my podcasts and my music, and to decompress and destress, is so precious to me. And I love Lawrence County and love going there and should go much more often.

  12. Resurrection Chapel, with altar rails

  13. Altar rails! ‘Nuff said. But the traditional mode of taking Communion, of reverencing our Lord in the Eucharist and receiving him humbly, is to kneel. And we didn’t build these — they came with the church, a gift from the Methodists. I know God saw us coming, and prepared this place for us.

  14. Miracles: God is at work here. It shows in everything we do. But it especially shows in several miracles I heard about this past weekend. Especially this: A woman, eaten up with cancerous tumors and given not long to live, was prayed for and anointed with oil, and on her next CT scan, her tumors had begun to shrivel up. On the next scan after that, they were completely gone. That was a year or two ago, and she is still healthy. Another one I heard about may not be for public consumption, and I might be forgetting something else.

  15. And most of all, I love the great miracle the Holy Spirit gives to us each week, the Eucharist. I love that Christ comes to meet us in the flesh, in His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity. I love the intimate communion Holy Communion brings, made all the more intimate by sharing it with people I know and care for and can truly commune with. I love that Christ is in our midst, in His Church, and this in every parish on earth, anywhere I go.

When Church is Good

Giotto, The Last Supper

The Last Supper (1306), by Giotto. Scrovegni (Arena) Chapel, Padua.

Every week when my parents get home from their church and I get home from my Mass, they ask me “how church was.” Growing up Protestant, this was a common way of talking. “Church sure was good.” “That was a good service.” Just yesterday, they came home telling me how “good” their church was. Now, as a Catholic, I’m struck by how foreign this mode of speech has become, and I’m never quite sure how to respond.

They mean, of course, that the sermon was good, edifying or inspiring, or that the worship was stirring or emotional. Which are good things. That’s why Protestants go to church — to hear good preaching, or experience good worship, or have good fellowship.

Eucharist

But that’s not why Catholics go to Mass. We go to Mass for the Eucharist — to partake in the intimate communion of Holy Communion; to share in the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ; to receive Him in person, in our person and in His person. And that is always good — beyond good; it is divine.

So asking a Catholic if “church was good” is like asking if Jesus is good. Why yes, of course it was good. The homily could have been dull, and the music could have been grating; but Jesus was there in the Eucharist. He came to meet me, to touch me and be with me. How can that be anything but good, wonderful, awesome, overwhelming? Evangelicals like to brag that their faith is not a religion, but a relationship, and yet they only experience Christ in the abstract in their services, through their singing and someone else’s preaching.

Poussin, Institution of the Eucharist (1640)

Institution of the Eucharist (1640), by Nicolas Poussin.

It strikes me, too, that I never really understood what “Communion” was about as a Protestant. Who is it that we were supposed to be having “Communion” with, and in what way? I guess many Protestants think of it as a meal in common, a symbolic gesture of unity, a sign that the church is together in following and serving the Lord. They are sitting down to a meal, symbolically, with each other and with Jesus. But the very term Communion evinces something much deeper and more intimate, and I can now see why many Protestants shy from it, calling it instead only the Lord’s Supper. But St. Paul himself testifies to what it is:

The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a communion [Greek κοινωνία (koinōnía), often translated participation or sharing] in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a communion in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.
(1 Corinthians 10:16–17)

The Eucharist: The Source and Summit of Our Faith

Juan de Juanes, La Última Cena (ca. 1562)

La Última Cena (ca. 1562), by Juan de Juanes. (Wikipedia)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all. Yeah, I’m a little late on that one, but it’s been a busy and stressful few weeks. I’m still trying to settle back in at home, and re-situate my books and my life, and make progress on my thesis.

I’ve been stressing, too, you know, about the next post in my series on the Sacraments: an introductory post on the Eucharist. How can I do such a subject justice in a single brief post, or even in a dozen? It’s had me bound up for weeks, researching fervently and never feeling worthy. So I finally decided to sit down and give you, rather than the ultimate, perfect, authoritative post, a human and personal reflection.

Eucharistic adoration

We Catholics say that the Eucharist is “the source and summit of the whole Christian life.” (Second Vatican Council [1964], Lumen Gentium III.11.1, lit. totius vitae christianae fons et culmen — those words are a lot richer than they come across in English: fons is the fount from which the blessings of our faith flow; culmen means the very peak, the summit, the apex, the culmination). As a Protestant growing up, I had no notion of this — we rarely celebrated Holy Communion in the churches I was a part of — and even early in my conversion, after I’d begun attending Mass, I couldn’t comprehend it. I used to think as a Protestant that the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was merely a pious superstition, one inconsequential to the substance of the Christian faith and message: what does it matter whether He’s really there or not, as long as we believe in Him and follow Him? What is the big deal about the Lord’s Supper? Why make Communion the central act of the Christian life — the very reason for going to church? Don’t we have better things to focus on, like edification through preaching and teaching, and fellowship and support through community, and ministry to the lost and hurting? As I heard Mass, as I witnessed it and stood in the presence of the Eucharist, though unable to partake, a glimmer of the truth began to dawn on me; but it wasn’t until the very moment of my First Communion, the first time I came to the Eucharistic table and experienced it for myself, that the full reality, the full mystery, hit me and overwhelmed me.

van der Weyden, Seven Sacraments Altarpiece (1450), center panel

Seven Sacraments Altarpiece (1450), by Rogier van der Weyden. The center panel, showing the Eucharist, the source and summit of our faith.

The Eucharist is the source and summit of the whole Christian life because it is Christian life itself. In the Eucharist we have the very Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ, really and truly present. In Holy Communion we share in His full humanity and His full divinity; we partake of His eternal life itself — the love and the life of God delivered to us directly, not just spiritually but corporeally and viscerally. We are united with Him more intimately than we can ever be united with anyone else, in the flesh as well as in the spirit; united with the very Body of Christ, in Communion not only with Him but with all the saints and believers who have been united with Him over the ages, in the Church on earth and in His eternal kingdom. The Eucharist is our font and our apex because from it flows all else: all the grace by which God forgives us and saves us; all the faith and hope and love with which He imbues us; all the power and authority and ability He gives us to turn from sin and follow Him, to pursue His righteousness, to love and minister to others. All the preaching, all the teaching, all the ministry, all the fellowship are subsumed to the Eucharist because without the Eucharist we could have none of those. It is the source of our life; our very food from heaven.

In the grace of the Eucharist, I find so much strength, but at the same time see how truly weak I am, how desperately I need Christ, how I am nothing without Him. Where before the Lord’s Supper was “no big deal” to me, a nice symbol and memorial, now not only my faith, but my entire life orbits the Eucharist. I know I cannot live without His Presence; the Lord’s Day is the center of my week; my soul and my body ache to be departed from Him even the few days in between. What is this miracle, what is this mystery, what is this treasure God has given us?

The Protestant will ask, can you support that biblically? And yes, Jesus states it plainly (John 6:22–71):

I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. … I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.

Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. Somehow, by some tragic blindness, Protestants interpret this passage as symbolism and metaphor. But the universal witness of the early Church attests to the belief of the earliest Christians in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and of its centrality to the Christian life. For Christian life is about communion with Christ — even Protestants should admit this — and it is only in the Eucharist, the Most Blessed Sacrament, that we have the true and full Communion with Him that His Body was broken for; that He gave to us for all time.

Why Catholics go to church

(This is a little bit I wrote as a comment to a post of my dear blogfriend JessicaHof, “Why go to Church?” The discussion there is worth reading, but I also thought my response here might make a rare, short, succinct post for The Lonely Pilgrim.)

Catholic Mass

The deeper Catholic reason why Catholics must go to Mass, and why it’s a mortal sin to miss it, is because we are members of the Body of Christ; we are the Church. The Eucharist is the source and summit not only of our faith, but of our lives. To abandon the Body is to abandon ourselves, and to neglect the Body and Blood is to neglect our own spiritual and even physical well-being.

Many Protestants, especially evangelical, “Bible” Protestants, have it in their heads that they can be Christians just by being alone with God and with their Bibles. Such a thought is incomprehensible to a Catholic; because we are members of a Body. How we worship God, how we receive His graces, is what we do together, in communion with each other and with Christ. We go to church because it is only in our corporate worship that we come face to face, flesh to flesh with Jesus.

Before I became Catholic, I wrote a lot to myself and made a lot of lists trying to establish the reason for going to church, and therefore what I was really looking for in a church. I decided that the primary purpose of the church was to “support and nourish the body of believers” — I used that very word, nourish. What I had in mind was fellowship and a system of support, to hold up believers and see to their well-being; to see they are being fed (I used those words, too) with the Word of God. When I first came to the Catholic Church, I didn’t immediately find that fellowship I was looking for — but I found what I really needed, what my soul cried out for: communion with Christ and with His Body on earth, being nourished and fed by His very Body and Blood.