God is Beautiful

At this tender stage of another Lenten season, I have a confession to make. I do not attend Roman Catholic mass, but I do make an occasional visit to Catholic churches, usually during the lunch hour, for the purpose of prayer and meditation.  Although I don't exactly stealth my way in with paranoid glances over either shoulder, this incognito custom goes against the religious grain of everything my mother instructed and practiced--stay away from anything Catholic as one would a staph infection.  She didn't come out and say 'They're of the devil," but her eyes betrayed the sentiment. In light of my upbringing, stopping by a Catholic Church to kneel and pray is as out of sync with my past as was the woman that stopped by our Ash Wednesday service in Bosqueville this week and declined to receive the imposition of ashes simply because she was "a Baptist." What draws me to these forbidden zones is not the confessional booth or any other particular Roman Catholic procedure.  I don't consider myself a Protestant--I'm not protesting anything--but I'm not Catholic either, simply a follower of Jesus Christ wanting to be fully his. So, that which beckons to me irrepressibly is the otherworldly artwork, transcendent glass windows containing a kaleidoscope of heavenly hues, candles and incense, statues that both inspire and humiliate, and peace, most of all the peace. For the few moments I allow myself to battle my childhood training and bask in the divine shadow of extravagant artistic expression tuned to whisper Christ's glory, I am transfigured. Utilitarian architecture has its place, I guess, but my soul always longs for more. I think this is what I edge closer to when the peace and filtered light wrap around me like a favorite blanket. And at that moment, maybe for just that moment, I lose sight of everything except that God is beautiful.

Prayer

I have my own way of thinking about prayer, that it is much more of an alignment than an activity. I pray best when my heart aligns with God himself and the moment his interests begin to dictate my own. In this way, prayer consists largely of listening, granting space and thought to what the Father wants. Along the way, my prayer life becomes my life, and every thought translates into divine dialogue. I love the way Buechner paints it:

"We all pray whether we think of it as praying or not. The odd silence we fall into when something very beautiful is happening, or something very good or very bad. The "Ah-h-h-h!" that sometimes floats up out of us as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the skyrocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else's pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds we use for sighing with over our own lives. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to ourselves, but to something even more familiar than ourselves and even more strange than the world."