I will be the first to tell you that going to mass at 4:00 pm on Saturday drives me up a wall.
It feels like smack in the middle of the afternoon and on Saturday it was 100 degrees outside when I left my house. But there’s a reason I do it and this weekend I had quite the reminder of what that reason was.
When I go to church, I’m forced away from the many distractions at my house– there are always a million things I want and need to do. But at church, I’m a captive audience except for maybe my overflowing brain activity.
Four years ago, my friend Ann gave me the journal in the photo for my birthday because she knew I had been writing homily quotes on the weekly church bulletins. She thought this way I could keep them in once place and she was right. But that book has morphed into more than homily quotes. What you don’t see in the photo– because I took the photo first– is that I filled two pages with ideas. Part of it was the idea for this blog and the lines I didn’t want to forget. There also was a caption for a photo that I wanted to post.
And sometimes there are color ideas– even the order and colors of a women’s shirt stripes some weeks ago.
I remember sitting in my hometown church, Sts. Pete and Paul, some years ago. It was a hot afternoon and I was the only person in the church. It was so quiet and I felt like I could stay there forever, to write sitting there, to hear God so well.
But what I realized later was that we have to venture into the world because part of our task is to learn to hear God with all the distractions around us. Life isn’t meant to be a cake walk (why would we be here if we had nothing to learn?) and I see part of my path is to learn to hear God even when the voices and distractions surround me.
By the time I leave mass on Saturdays, I feel as though I’ve had a reward because so many ideas have come to me. It’s as if God is saying, “I know you were trying to listen all week, but this is what I think you missed.”