Amoris Laetitia and building bridges: “stay as close as you can”

I’ve had time to skim The Joy of Love (Amoris Laetitia) by Pope Francis. It bears closer reading, and I’ll get there eventually. For now, it evokes words that had a profound effect on my life – words uttered a decade before Pope Francis even became a priest, and a year before I was born.

The pope’s recent message reinforced the Catholic Church’s recognition of the truth about the dignity and indissolubility of marriage. At the same time, he urged readers to build bridges of mercy and patience and acceptance for other people as they are, where they are.

Can one be “accepting” of people in unsanctioned unions, without compromising on truth? Let me tell you my family’s story, and you’ll know why I say yes.

My parents had a whirlwind courtship: they got married five months after they met. There was one sticky point that probably kept them from getting married even sooner: my father had been divorced.

Both my parents were Catholic, my mother more observant than my father. Before going through with the wedding, Mom needed to talk to a priest.

She knew what it meant to marry someone whose marriage had been dissolved under civil law. She did not ask the priest to re-write the rules.  She was going to marry my father, and that was that. At the same time, she had faith in God and in His Church. What, she asked the priest, could she do?

His answer was simple. “Stay as close as you can.”

No threats. No thundering denunciations. No compromise of the truth. Just a clear, merciful invitation for Mom to participate in the life of the faith community as best she could, with the clear understanding that she and my father were choosing to forgo the sacraments.

And so my parents were married in a civil ceremony. I was born a year later. Mom took me to church every week, we were active in parish activities, and when the time came I had religious education. One day when I was very little I asked Mom why she didn’t come to Communion with me. “Just pray that I can someday,” she replied. Stay as close as you can, she must have been thinking.

When my father’s first wife passed away – may she rest in peace – my parents had their marriage solemnized in the Church. It must have been one of the happiest days of my mother’s life. It was therefore a happy day for my father, regardless of his ongoing irritation with the Church.

When I became an adolescent, I started asking why I had to go to church when Dad didn’t. “Listen to your mother,” he growled. I muttered mutinously but I complied. A couple of decades later, Dad listened to her, too.

A funny thing happened when adulthood snuck up on me: I realized my mother had put down roots for my faith, and those roots stubbornly refused to be torn up.  My mother brought me up in such a way that I couldn’t escape the truth if I tried.

All that time, she lived by the merciful and encouraging words spoken by a priest I never knew: stay as close as you can. Had she not received mercy and encouragement at that critical moment, she might have fled the Church in despair, and her life and mine would have been very different.

My mother didn’t tell me about her conversation with that priest until a short time before she died. When she told me, I thought to myself, now it all makes sense.

I have been the beneficiary of encouraging words spoken at a critical moment to a person whose marriage was for several years not in accord with Church teaching. I’ve seen the generational effect of those words. As I read The Joy of Love, I knew that Pope Francis understood how powerful mercy, acceptance and encouragement can be.

I wish I knew the name of the priest who counseled my mother. I ask God to bless him, wherever he is. There’s a good chance he was a military chaplain, since my parents met on an Army base. That’s a tough pastoral environment. I’d say he knew how to rise to an occasion.

My parents had 42 years together. The first dozen of those years were spent outside the sacraments but still inside a warm and faith-filled parish (stay as close as you can). My mother’s example brought my father back to the practice of the faith. I am Catholic in large part due to her influence, which in turn has affected my own husband and children.

Stay as close as you can. Those words anticipated The Joy of Love by more than fifty years, and they built a bridge that my parents were eventually able to cross together. Witnessing my parents’ eventual full reconciliation with the Church, I learned that mercy and truth are essential – and we separate them at our peril. I’m grateful to the Holy Father for reinforcing that lesson.

Advent: hold the Christmas carols, please

It’s Advent, the beginning of the liturgical year, penitential and contemplative in tone as befits preparation for a great feast. It’s a blessed relief from any number of things. I enter it this year sick at heart due to some recent events, ready for a time of prayer and quiet and humility and renewal.

Keep that elf doll away from me. Throw a curtain around that poinsettia display for a few more weeks. And in regretful (some will say regrettable) defiance of my bishop’s directive, I am fleeing my parish church for the duration in order to avoid Christmas carols at every Advent Sunday Mass.

Yes, carols. He used the plural and I assume that means more than one. It’s not as though Bishop Libasci is ordering the choirs to sing “Holly Jolly Christmas.” Nevertheless, I am not on board. I need Advent for the next not-quite-four weeks, not Christmas Lite. Carols at the kids’ concerts or at the store are one thing. Carols during an Advent liturgy are another.

The Mass is the Mass, and my feelings about the music are irrelevant to that. (We liturgical music critics can be insufferable.) My reaction to the bishop’s directive, though, isn’t a matter of mere distaste. I fear we’re diluting Advent and thereby losing something important.

I’ve worked retail, and I remember how we depended on November and December sales. Santa-shaped chocolates on the shelf and “The Little Drummer Boy” on the speakers put people into the shopping mood, so by golly we had the Santa chocolates on display and the music playing by Thanksgiving. We worked long hours. Our paychecks and material support for our families depended on that.

Wanna know what Christmas Eve is like for a retail worker after the store closes? There’s a lot of sleep involved – unless there are kids to be settled. Mass the next day, in all its glory and joy and beauty, is something to be gotten through.

I learned in those days to treasure and crave Advent. My attention to the Advent liturgies was renewed and sharpened. I hadn’t realized how much I had always taken the season for granted. The Old Testament prophecies, the old plainsong chant we now know as O Come O Come Emmanuel (however far from plainsong it’s been dragged by contemporary arrangements), John the Baptist’s blunt call to repentance: all became balm to my spirit when I realized I had to seek out and intentionally participate in Advent rather than just let it happen somewhere in the background. The beauty of the Incarnation, contra my bishop’s concern as expressed in his directive, wasn’t dulled by such preparation. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I mean no disrespect to Bishop Libasci, who has gone out on a limb as a Catholic leader in this very secular state of ours to advocate for refugees and defend religious liberty. The other aspects of his directive make sense to me, especially in view of the coming formal opening of the Jubilee Year of Mercy.

Christmas carols during Advent liturgies, though, affect me like physical blows. I’ve heard them before, albeit by the choice of music ministers rather than directives from the Diocese. However scriptural the lyrics, they don’t fit Advent any more than Easter songs would fit into Lent.  The carols’ ill timing evokes for me the malls and commercials and movies that hijack them before Thanksgiving.

I guess I’ll be crossing the state line for a few Sundays, although it’ll be odd not to be amid familiar faces. What’s going on at the altar will be familiar enough.

Reblogged from Leaven for the Loaf by the same author.

A note about Mitt Romney

This morning, Mitt Romney announced that he wouldn’t run for President in 2016. I wish him well.

I was a Rick Santorum backer in the early 2012 presidential primary process, before he bowed out of the campaign. When later in the year the New Hampshire GOP – and by extension, the Romney campaign – invited me to join the campaign staff, I did so.

One of the ways I evaluate a candidate is by seeing how much she or he annoys the security detail. The security team is charged with guaranteeing a candidate’s safety. The candidate’s job, at least here in the home of the First in the Nation Primary, is to maximize contact with voters. Something’s gotta give. Thereby hangs a tale.

In July 2012, Governor Romney was scheduled for a campaign stop in Bow, New Hampshire. It was a small venue, capacity 200 or so. Enthusiasm ran high, and we took calls throughout the preceding week from people wanting to attend.

Just a few hours before the event was to take place, the horrible shootings were committed in Aurora, Colorado. Both President Obama and Governor Romney briefly suspended campaign rallies, recognizing that it was unseemly to hustle for votes while victims of a mass slaughter were still being identified.

The Governor was already in New Hampshire when the news from Aurora came out. It was too late to cancel the Bow event; people were lined up hours in advance. Word came down from the Romney staff that the planned speech was going to be replaced with brief remarks. Those of us on the local staff got an urgent request from the Governor: could we please line up a local member of the clergy to offer a prayer at the event? One of my more resourceful colleagues did so.

Finally, about an hour after he had been scheduled to speak, the Governor quietly stood before the crowd. The minister who had come to offer the prayer preceded him at the microphone. Then Mitt Romney spoke for less than five minutes, somber and respectful. No campaign pitch. Pure class.

When he was finished, the dark SUVs of the campaign lined up just outside with engines running, ready to go. Serious-looking people wearing dark suits and earpieces attempted to usher the Governor to one of the vehicles. Nothing doing. Without the slightest hesitation, as though the security detail and the idling vehicles were nowhere in sight, the Governor created an impromptu receiving line. He then shook hands with every single person who had come, saying thank-you for patience and support. He did not look at his watch. He did not glance down the line to see how many people remained. That’s the Mitt Romney I’ll remember all my life. I was the last person in line, and I wanted to hug the guy. (I refrained. Couldn’t afford to lose the job.)

The security crew looked like it was going to have a collective breakdown. It was beautiful sight.

As I said, I wish him well.