Building the Benedict Option by Leah Libresco

Author:Leah Libresco [Libresco, Leah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781642290431
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2018-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

Whose Streets? God’s Streets!

Sometimes it was enough to gather people, to share joy or sorrow in one of our homes or in church. But for some kinds of worship, it seemed untrue to pray privately together in my home, just as it felt untrue to work on job applications individually, vulnerable to despair. When we prayed quietly, sedately, at home, it felt as though prayer were something we were choosing—something we might as easily not choose. Prayer isn’t gratuitous; it is natural and necessary for us and for the whole world: it is our reaction as creatures to being loved into existence by God.

When Christ entered Jerusalem, the Pharisees were appalled by the joyful shouts of His followers and asked Him to command His disciples to be silent. Christ answered them, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out” (Lk 19:40). Christ’s words apply to our time as well. His foot does not tread upon our streets, but He is present at every Mass and carried out into the world by us, when we receive Him in the Eucharist and become living tabernacles. On some days, we carry Him out with public eucharistic processions, but every Sunday, our Shepherd is entrusted to our care. If we step out into the street after Mass and head into the subways indistinguishable from all the other Sunday-morning travelers, whose bellies are full of eggs Benedict, isn’t our incognito an implicit lie?

The pressures that pinch public worship aren’t all anti-Christian or even broadly anti-religious. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg hypothesizes that our culture has mistaken lively joy for a public nuisance. We confine high-spiritedness to the indoors but then wind up abolishing those refuges, too. Oldenburg laments the decline of casual gathering places such as bars, parks, stoops, and so forth, which offered people a place outside of work and home to be sociable. He sees, with their closing, a further decrease of acceptable fora for public acts of delight.

The latitude for spirited expression in modern society is lessened. People are made nervous by it. The public pays no attention to the young man walking along with a radio blaring next to his ear nowadays, but let him sing—let him make his own music—and they’re apt to frown at him. . . . The “world out there”. . . doesn’t want men to dance together or gather in the local parks and sing in harmony ‘round kegs of beer. That which, in a less constricted but better ordered society, is emblematic of peace and goodwill, is likely to be regarded as disturbing the peace in our own. . . . The average person, popular opinion suggests, ought to be content with a little singing in the shower.3

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