As a Discalced Carmelite, I belong to a community dedicated totally to contemplation. That means that we have no outside ministry. We do not teach or nurse except to care for the members of our own community. We do not do parish work or run a migrant hostel or an orphanage or provide legal help to the needy. We remain in our monastery, and we pray.
People understand this, and they ask us to pray for their intentions, for the countless concerns with which they are struggling and for which they want God’s help and support and grace. They write us letters and emails, they leave us notes and voicemails, they come to the monastery and share their concerns with a Nun at the Turn. They ask us to pray for family tensions and for broken relationships, for health concerns of every kind, for financial difficulties and job problems, for emotional challenges, for spiritual struggles. They share with us their heartaches and heartbreaks and all their struggles that can even make them feel it is almost impossible to keep on going through life.
One of the most painful intentions that people confide to us is the loss of faith within their families. Parents especially, who are deeply religious, are heartbroken to find that their children have left the Church and have no interest in religion. They have done all they could to raise their children in the faith. They sent them to Catholic schools or enrolled them in CCD. They were faithful to Sunday Mass, they made sure that the children were baptized and made their first Communion and received Confirmation. They prayed at home and promoted the rosary. And as the children grew up, their parents saw them drift away from the Church and leave their religion behind like a sweater they had outgrown.
For parents who are believers this is an agonizing situation. They want to give their children all that is good, and, for the parents, their faith is the greatest good they can give, and they see the children disdain it. They pray incessantly, as St. Monica prayed for her son Augustine. They hope that the children, grown up and on their own and often living a lifestyle that has no place for the faith of their parents, will in the end find their way back to the love of God that is such a sustaining support in the parents’ own life.
And they ask themselves how this could have happened. They ask themselves what they did wrong, what they failed to do, what they should or could have done to ensure that their own vibrant faith became a vibrant part of their children’s lives. They rarely find any answer. They entrust this, their deepest, most heartbreaking intention, to our prayers, and we pray with them.
We also ask how this evaporation of the faith between generations comes about. The rise of the “nones” has been noted and discussed in recent years. These are the people who say they are spiritual but who have no religious adherence. There is much speculation, about this rise of a new group in the religious landscape, and the explanations will probably differ depending on who you ask.
In this article, I want to ponder on what is involved here. I want to explore a thought that came to my mind from a remark I heard from a priest in an online discussion.
Recently, I was invited to join Fr. Francis (Hank) Hilton in his video series, “Fireside Faith”. Because of the Eucharistic Renewal, the participants, led by Fr. Hank and his co-host, Phil Russo, were discussing the book “101 Questions and Answers on the Mass” by Fr. Kevin Irwin. At one point in a recent episode (53 minutes into the video), Fr. Hank used the phrase “ritual vs reflective vs relational” to describe a certain action during the Mass. The phrase “ritual vs reflective vs relational” implies that there is some tension between the three facets. Of course, one can consider the Mass from each of the three angles. The Mass certainly is a ritual, and there is an infinite depth to it that one can ponder when reflecting upon it. Finally, as both a sacrifice and a meal, it is the ultimate form of relationality for us human beings. Each facet enriches the other two.
Yet I think that we miss the mark when we consider the three facets as existing in some sort of tension. True, we can learn much from such reflection, but it seems to me that there is a much more practical way to consider them and that is to see them as a progression. They form a pathway, a corridor, leading us into the depths of the action of the Mass, and I think that this approach can help us understand the reticence and resistance, and even revulsion, that more and more people experience toward the Catholic faith.
The Eucharist is “the source and summit of the Christian life.”[1] We encounter the Eucharist at the Mass and we have said that the Mass is a ritual. A ritual is “the established form for a ceremony, a ritual observance, a ceremonial act or action.”[2] For those of us who were introduced to the faith as children, we encountered the Mass first of all as a ritual. We were taught the words to say and the movements to make, and, those words and gestures were the most obvious aspects of the Mass to us at that age.
As we grew older and attended (or endured!) religion classes, we were taught the meaning of the various prayers, gestures, objects and events that made up the Mass. We progressed from the Mass as ritual to the Mass being reflective. We walked along the path, we traversed the corridor, from one aspect of the Mass to another. In this progress we were guided by our parents and teachers. We were introduced to the first two aspects of the Mass by others. They handed on to us their knowledge of the Mass.
Since there are many different ceremonies and liturgies that express the Catholic faith, (the sacraments, various forms of blessings, prayers in common, pilgrimages), the aspect of ritual is not restricted to the Mass. It is found throughout Catholicism. Wherever two or more people gather to share their faith, they will find themselves expressing themselves in some form of ritual. Since human beings are rational beings, they will almost involuntarily begin to ponder what they are doing and what they are saying. It is almost impossible to separate ritual and reflection in any action flowing from the faith. And it is in these two ways: ritual and reflection on what we do and say, they we most commonly pass on the faith to others, especially to our children and other members of our family.
But what about the relational aspect of the faith? Is the faith relational? That is the first question that we need to ask ourselves. Considering that the Creeds, the different confessions of the faith, are expressions of a belief in a Trinity, one God in three Persons, a being who is “pure relationality”, as Pope Benedict stated,[3] to leave out the relational aspect of anything in the Catholic faith is to emasculate the faith. It reduces what we believe to meaningless words and gestures. The words may be sublime, the gestures may be beautiful, but they are not the faith.
The faith is a relationship, but a relationship — unlike information, unlike practices — cannot be handed on. I can introduce you to a close friend of mine, but that only gives the two of you the opportunity of developing a relationship. I cannot hand on to you my own relationship with my friend. You and he must develop your own relationship together. This is true with human friendships, and it is true with friendship with God. Parents, teachers, and mentors can each have a deep relationship with God, but they cannot hand that on to those that they guide. The most that I or anyone else can do is to lead you to the doorway of your own relationship with God. That relationship is between you and Him.
Does that mean that the faith cannot be handed on? I titled this article “Can the Faith Be Traditioned?” not “Can the Faith Be Handed On?” The word “tradition” means “handing on”, but Tradition, with a capital T is a unique form of handing on. We can hand on heirlooms, memories, thoughts, ideas and customs, and all this is handing on to others what we value. We can teach rituals and prayers and practices, and all this is handing on the faith to others. But none of us individually can hand on our relationship with God in faith, for that relationship is Tradition. Only the Church can do this, and she does it primarily in the sacraments, beginning with the sacrament of Baptism. At Baptism, the priest asks, “What do you ask?” the catechumen, or the godparents in the case of the Baptism of an infant, reply, “Faith.” And in the sacrament the Church hands on the faith. This act of Tradition creates the relationship between God and the new member of Christ’s body that individually cannot be handed on. This relationship of faith is then strengthened through the other sacraments, through prayer, through sharing in the actions and works of the Church, through all acts of faith, hope and love.
It can also be lost. Like any relationship, I can turn my back on my friend. I can turn my back on God. This is part of the freedom of the children of God. Like the Prodigal Son, each of us can walk away from our Father. But He never walks away from us. The Spirit within us, whose very breath is Tradition, is always at work to bring us back to the relationship we have abandoned, and our Father is always on the lookout to welcome us home.
Sr. Gabriela of the Incarnation, O.C.D. (Sr. Gabriela Hicks) was born in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in the Gold Rush country of California, which she remembers as heaven on earth for a child! She lived a number of years in Europe, and then entered the Discalced Carmelite Monastery in Flemington, New Jersey, where she has been a member for forty years. www.flemingtoncarmel.org.
With thanks to Where Peter Is, where this article originally appeared.
[1] Lumen Gentium #11 – CCC #1324
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ritual
[3] “Caritas in Veritate” para 54
