A prayer for everyday holiness
Wherever I am,
whatever I do,
whomever I am with,
there, Lord, is your Church;
there, Lord, is where I
must do your will.
In every hour, in every place,
in all company, Lord,
guide my hands to work
for your good,
guide my ears to listen to
those around me,
guide my feet to walk gently
with those beside me,
guide my lips to speak your love.
Open my heart, Lord, to
welcome all your people.
— Julie L. Rattey |
When I was a child of 6 or 7, my parish church was an attractive, semi- Gothic building with pillars forming arches inside the church. In the highest part of the arch in the sanctuary there was this very large triangle with rays of light emanating from it, and inside the triangle was this single, enormous eye. Although l liked the church, I was always intimidated by that large eye high above the altar always looking at me.
One day when I went into the church for a quick visit, an old woman saying her Rosary noticed me gaping at that eye. “Son,” she said, “some people will tell you that that eye means that God is always watching to see you when you are doing wrong so He can punish you. I would rather have you remember that God loves you so much that He can’t take his eyes off you.”
What a difference that made! God was in love with me, just like my mother and father were. Ever after, when I went in for my visit I would wave at the eye and say, “Here I am. It’s me, Billy.”
My other childhood memory is when our pastor visited us in class one day with, much to our surprise, Mr. Curry the janitor. “I want you children,” Monsignor said, “to look at this man’s hands.” The janitor, embarrassed but obedient, held out his palms. Calloused and dirty, they were the type of hands that marked you for immediate dismissal from the dinner table in my house. Monsignor held Mr. Curry’s right hand up for us to see. “These hands,” he said, “do the Lord’s work.” We looked at each other. Some of us were thinking of those very same hands grasping a mop to clean up a third-grader’s spilled lunch and wondered about the extent of the Lord’s interest in the task.
“This man’s hands,” Monsignor continued, “have cleaned our church, kept your school running, and have washed the statues of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that grace our lawn. This man’s hands — this man’s life — are dedicated to the Lord in each and everything he does. Take a good look at your hands and see that they do the same.”
These two stories point up a forgotten truth about the Feast of Pentecost and underscore an enervating misunderstanding we have about it. When we say, as we were taught, that Pentecost is the feast of the birthday of the Church, the idea that immediately pops up is that Pentecost is the birthday of the hierarchy — bishops, priests, and Religious — who form less than 1 percent of the total Catholic population. As a result,we tend to think that the closer we are to the things they do, the more we are engaged in churchy, institutional things, the holier we are. On the other hand, the less we are engaged in churchy things — we really don’t have time to teach CCD or be a lector or extraordinary minister of the Eucharist or clean the church — the less we are near God. And it hasn’t helped our attitude, I admit, that of 177 saints in the official liturgical calendar, 172 are celibate clergy and Religious and the other five are widows or widowers.
The result of this mindset is that, starting from the pinnacle of full-time Church work, everything seems to devolve in descending order of unworthiness, if not moral pollution, as far as holiness and mission go. As a kid, I remember that the most we non-churchy folk could hope for was that we could sneak into purgatory with a scorched rump. Even the retreats for the laity gave this message by focusing mainly on prayer and the
