A faithful interlocutor of mine reached out this morning to ask:
“Two questions.
“One, are you well? I can no longer offer Holy Communion for my priests and am feeling a little worthless.
Two, how am I to stay close to Christ if I cannot be with Him via the Eucharist? I am afraid the connection will be lost or at least weakened.”
The writer didn’t mind waiting for an answer in text or publicly posted, but I described my alacrity below.
You don’t often wait for an answer from me very long. I don’t tend to wait. My mind is a triage center whose supervisor is out back having a smoke during structure fires and vehicle accidents with multiple injuries. I’ve been up for several hours, though I’ve been making good use of the time, the fruits of which I will share at a later date.
I can take a break from that effort to answer your question. The public posting of such an answer is a good idea, since as you suggest many people are wondering, worrying, downright frustrated about it. Perhaps you read my recent blog post on the subject. I didn’t express my fear of some people’s eventual dereliction of Mass attendance, but it’s present and persistent.
Methods of Natural Family Planning take for granted that couples will not want to or will not be able to achieve fertility at every point in their marriage, even though they are – or marriage and its sexual expressions are, by its very nature – open to it.
We are so to speak in a period of infertility, and certainly not an intentional one. To think that those who habitually or intentionally absent themselves from the sacred assembly for ignoble reasons are also in an infertile period, though theirs happens to their own undoing, perhaps the highest self-abuse or self-neglect.
How do faithful couples achieve intimacy when they are not intending fertile intercourse? They have recourse to many non-genital actions. One priest of my youth preached on romantic/sexual talk as a kind of foreplay to the consummation of the (chiefly-) marital act. It’s a curious but not-for-children appropriate way to consider the Liturgy of the Word.
The weakening of people’s connection has been a concern of mine since the dispensation of the Lord’s Day obligation that preceded the recent ban of public Masses. If so for the first, how much more so for the second!
How are we, then, to stay close? Come to the church if and when it is open (you said yours is not); watch Mass on Internet/television; keep talking to God, voicing every frustration and fear you can think of, whether of your own or others. But don’t let monologue become outright harangue: let supplication be joined by contrition, for whatever deserves it, on your own and others’ behalf; by thanksgiving for what you do have and enjoy, not nearly as it deserves; by adoration of God in Himself and in every tabernacle.
The Church as such is not neglecting Him by forbidding Mass; we are in some sense, I speculate, experiencing the external ratification of a popular internal disposition. The rain that falls on the just and unjust, the rain that falls on everyone for cleansing.
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