As a Catholic, as a person of faith, I find myself needing to explain to friends, inquiring parties, and even to myself again just why we, and I, need Church. Here I present an assorted chocolate box of responses to that question. They’re not intended to be definitive nor authoritative but are just points of reflection on faith and the different ways to intentionally engage with Church.
Physical Space and the Senses
This would be a hot take for Martin Luther, but, questionable sources of funding aside, I love the beautiful architecture and art of Catholic churches. I do like pretty things in general, but there’s something so beautiful and unearthly about walking into a still, empty Gothic cathedral or even your local church. Afternoon light softly streams into the sanctuary, colored in rainbow hues by the stained-glass windows, softly illuminating the particles in the air. Churches are beautiful in a singular way unlike any other contemporary building. For me, it heightens a sense that this space is different, and I want to focus on that a little bit. Of course, faith is not just a feeling, but as humans we engage with our senses in order to understand things. So it makes sense that Church offers multiple sensory ways to enter into the Mass and the mystery of faith. Mass engages our sight through the light of candles and figures in sculpture, our hearing through call and response, our taste through Communion, our smell through the wafted aroma of incense, and our touch through the sign of peace and the joining of hands in communal prayer. I take all this as another reminder that while God is beyond anything we could ever imagine, we do deeply know God literally through our physical senses and, I would add, our sense of wonder.
The Community of Faith
In Matthew 18:20, Jesus tells us “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (NABRE). Through this lens, I recall Church as the community of faith. Our God is Trinitarian and Jesus is by definition probably the most relatable and personable aspect of the Trinity. However, I don’t see a Palestinian-Jewish man in his late 20s knocking on my door in Walsh every week looking to chat about social justice, so in that sense it is kind of challenging to “know” or develop a personal relationship with Jesus. Yet, by gathering in the physical space of the church every Sunday with fellow members of the Christian family, I can know Christ as he is made manifest in Tyler from Ballroom Dance or Monica from Differential Equations. If the community of faith is to be our closest physical experience of Christ, then belonging to Church cannot just be passively showing up to mass once a week and checking off a box. It means active engagement with the people around us: meeting people’s eyes to share the sign of peace at mass, attending lay-led services, and contributing to various church social events or liturgical ministries. Activating our membership in the body of Christ grows our personal relationship with Jesus and fortifies the body of Christ as a whole. In drawing strength from a relationship with our fellow brothers and sisters (Christ included!), we become better people of God and people of faith.
The Presence of God
Personally, I’ve always found it awkward to talk about the Real Presence of God in the Eucharist because it’s not the easiest to integrate deeply into my faith, aside from prayer practices like Adoration. Nevertheless, I am trying to bring more of a sense of the Real Presence of God into my vision of Church because it takes Christianity from simply a philosophical practice into Religion.
If you go investigating, you’ll certainly find God present and at work in the world, but God is always readily present where God promised to be in the Eucharist, entrusted to the Church. There are several signs that remind us of this: a candle next to the tabernacle, the Eucharist in a monstrance, and a crucifix—usually hanging above the altar—among others. My point is that these aren’t necessarily the point. When we say God is present we look for tangible things, we can’t help it; we’re human. However, all of these signs are finite in analogy, street signs to give direction to the journeying traveler. As the Ultimate Love, God is infinite, bigger, and grander than anything we could possibly imagine. The leap of faith is to recognize and leverage the guidance of the street signs to cannonball into the infinite ocean of the Trinity. Objectively, that’s a really tall order to expect from just sitting in church, but in reality, there are probably few other spaces that might usher our minds in such a direction. And after all, that’s where the faith part comes in.
Featured image courtesy of fzban via Pisqsels
Noella D’Souza is a senior studying Chemistry with a minor in Medical Humanities. She’s is deeply devoted to BC Full Swing, Hillside Oatmeal Raisin Cookies, puns, and the Oxford Comma, in that order.
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