I sat in front of a baby at Mass Sunday, and I ended up the one crying.
I actually got to church early for a change, found a good seat and spent some quiet time in prayer before Mass started. As an introvert, having that time in silence was nice after a crazy couple of days. I was grateful.
Then, all of a sudden, a family with a baby squeezed into the pew behind me. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t dread the thought of the potential screeching and crying. Just the thought of what could come was enough for me to get distracted.
Things were going fine through the beginning of Mass and the first reading.
As the Responsorial Psalm was sung, the baby behind me began to babble and giggle.
“In the sight of the angels, I will sing your praises, Lord,” the cantor sang as the little one sang along through her own giggles.
And then it hit me: in the sight of the angels and saints present at Mass, amid the saints-in-the-making in the pews around her, this little one was singing her own praises in a simple, carefree, hope-filled way.
Unencumbered by all that was distracting me, this little one was showing me the way to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Church United at Mass
As Catholics, we believe that Heaven touches Earth in a real way in every Mass. The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that in the Eucharist, “we already unite ourselves with the heavenly liturgy and anticipate eternal life, when God will be all in all” (CCC 1326).
Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, expands on this mystical reality, teaching, “In the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, a minister of the holies and of the true tabernacle” (SC 8).
Through the Eucharistic mystery, by which Christ makes himself truly present anew — Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity — we sneak a peek into the halls of Heaven and are brought into the glory of the Kingdom of God for just a little while.
St. Athanasius, the great Church father, wrote beautifully on this very topic: “My beloved brethren, it is no temporal feast that we come to, but an eternal, heavenly feast. We do not display it in shadows; we approach it in reality.”
At every Mass, the Church Triumphant in Heaven is united to the Church Militant on Earth as we offer our praise to God through, with and in Jesus. “In the sight of the angels,” we praise the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit at every Mass. And at this Mass, the cherubic child behind me reminded me of this spiritual reality and called my attention from distraction back to prayer.
Wonder and Awwww
Soon after the baby behind me schooled me in the spiritual life, a question in Father’s homily hit me.
“How often are we astonished by God?”
Speaking for myself, I often get distracted by explanations, excuses and context. The miraculous often seems all too normal when you factor everything in.
Or worse, amid all the demands on me, I lose sight of the miraculous entirely. It’s all go, go, go. The nice moments fade away quickly on the way to “the next thing.”
But the truth of the Christian life is that God is always working, moving and drawing near to his people: in himself, in the Eucharist and in myriad little ways.
In this little baby’s cute chorus of perfect praise, I encountered a vestige of the divine. That pew was a little burning bush, sacred ground where God chose to be present.
Isn’t that astonishing?
The God of the universe, who set the planets in orbit, who hung the stars in the sky, and who knows the number of hairs on our heads, chose to be present to little old me, to make himself known through a baby?
That moment at Mass was a tiny Transfiguration, a chance to see God in all his glory and to respond in wonder and awe, all because a little child freely shared joy-filled praise.
The good news? There is no shortage of these moments if we have eyes to see and ears to hear!
Finding God in All Things
I’m letting my Jesuit education show a bit here, but there is profound wisdom in the practice of finding God in all things.
Far from a pantheistic panacea, learning to look for God’s footprints throughout our days, and indeed, our lives, is one small way to cultivate a deeper sense of gratitude, wonder, awe and hope.
When I was a missionary, we had a nightly practice of gathering together to pray a “Thanksgiving Rosary.” Led by a missionary in our chapel, we would offer up our day and all its moments great and small in gratitude to the Lord.
“Thank you, Lord, for our conversation with Charles.”
“Thank you, Lord, for good coffee.”
“Thank you, Lord, for a time of rest.”
“Thank you, Lord, for 36 pounds of honey.” (That’s a story for another time)
The daily practice was a great way to learn to see through the eyes of gratitude, and to pay attention to the ways God is moving in our lives.
It begun a shift in our vision, from only seeing the here and now to appreciating the eternal. In short, we slowly learned to see a bit more like God sees.
The more we see and recognize the movements of God in our lives and to thank him for them, the more we see just how radical his love is for us.
God is constantly at work in our lives. He is perpetually present in big ways and small. And if he is present with and in us, then each of our lives are “holy ground,” just like the burning bush.
