For today’s post, I thought I’d lighten things up a bit! One of the real challenges of becoming Catholic is kneeling so much!

At no other church denomination I’ve ever attended can I recall kneeling, but it’s one of my favorite parts of Catholicism. It shows so much respect, reverence, humility and piety to be willing to kneel down before your God. But boy does it hurt after a while :)…

The hardest for me has been kneeling while saying the rosary. Thank goodness for padded kneelers, but even with those, after 20 minutes on my knees, these nearly 40-year-old knees ache pretty good.

Can I say I’ve found a solution for you? Not so much… At a retreat I attended, the church there did have some sort of special stool to help, but it probably would be more appropriate for the elderly rather than a healthy individual hogging one. I also try moving my knees slightly between decades of the rosary to get the blood moving again I suppose, but not sure how much that helps.

I suppose part of what we experience as children of God is suffering. Not that kneeling is any great suffering, but it’s a reminder of suffering and the pain of Christ on the cross. A little discomfort could do us all good. It keeps us humble and reminds us God is worth the sacrifice. I suppose kneeling also helps keep us in the present moment, keeps our thoughts from floating to the worries of the day and instead focused on our knees and what it is we are doing here on our knees.

I’m thinking that after a while of praying the Liturgy of the Hours (prayers that occur at regular hours during the day) and attending Daily Mass, the old knees ought to develop some stamina. Can anyone out there confirm? Any tips on developing kneeling stamina?

One of my biggest objections in going to mass throughout my marriage to my husband, which usually was only on special occasions, was that I didn’t have a clue what was going on and that in turn made me feel stupid.

But after I heard the gentle calling and determined to take my family back to mass, I decided then and there I was going to participate fully and give it a real shot. But how to do that?

Well for starters, I picked up the guide in the back of the pew which tells you what to say at different parts of the mass. However, at our church, the guide did not seem to go in order and was quite confusing. Sometimes they said this, sometimes they said that and sometimes they didn’t say either.

So I resorted to a bunch of methods to get myself up to speed so I could fully participate and wanted to share them with you so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel!

Here are my tips for getting to know the mass as a newbie:

• Get yourself a “guide to the mass”. I actually found a book for kids at a local Catholic bookstore that explained it best to me! They break it down into the beginning where we ask forgiveness of our sins, the readings, the Apostle’s Creed, the general prayers, the Eucharist and the final blessing. It will show you the different options for saying different things at different times. Keep it close at hand :).
• Pick up the guide in the pew and hold it with you the entire mass. When you see the priest pick it up, he’s cueing you that it’s something you’ll likely need to read like the Apostle’s Creed.
• Follow everyone else (though occasional y this can backfire!). Stand when everyone stands, kneel when everyone kneels, pick up the guide card when everyone else does.
• Memorize the key portions. I found that if I didn’t make the effort to memorize the “Lamb of God” portion or the “May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands” portion, it took me too many months before I truly knew it. You’ll feel so much better being confident at knowing what to say with a little practice at home.
• Remember you’re not alone in learning the mass. I’ve been at mass several times now where the entire group stood by accident or failed to repeat after the priest what they were supposed to. Both times the priest handled it with a laugh. No one’s perfect!
• Attend as much as you can. The more you go, the more second nature it will become.
• Just go for it. By participating as much as you can, you’ll get the most out of it.

Here I am, nine months after attending my first mass in earnest and I still don’t know the whole thing. Every now and then the priest will throw in one of the other options I’m not as familiar with. But for the most part with a little effort to memorize portions and attend mass weekly, if not multiple times weekly, I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on it and that feels great. Now that I know the mass, I can focus on the spiritual side of things and not that I’m going to stand when everyone else is sitting!

Have you been intimidated or fearful at not knowing the mass? How did you handle it?

Let’s see yesterday it was … the kids, my husband, even my cat… As much as I desperately want to carve out some holy QUIET, quiet being a key word :), time to myself it is so difficult.

I am attempting to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, something monks and nuns do as well as deacons and some others. The Liturgy of the Hours is a series of prayers that incorporate the Psalms and are said at the same times throughout the day (for the full version, seven times a day). I’ve made it a goal to pray first thing upon waking, 9 a.m. or right after I get the kids to school, Noon and before bed. I work in 3 p.m. when I can.

The as-soon-as-I-get-up-one has been the most challenging as have been the prayers on days when school is out like Labor Day yesterday. I go to our bedroom or the guest bedroom and shut the door, but it’s hard to concentrate with kids playing rambunctiously downstairs or your cat rubbing up against you as you kneel in prayer. I suppose it’s better than not praying, but I get frustrated at my inability to focus on the words due to lack of quiet. It’s hard enough to focus on the words and really try to take in their meaning when it actually is quiet. With any distraction, it feels hopeless.

So what is the answer when I desire so much, “thirst,” in fact, to use the verb often used to describe spiritual longing, for as much prayer and spiritual reading time as I can find? But yet live the life of a lay person, a mother, a wife, a business owner, a cat owner J?

I prayed about it this morning in front of the Blessed Sacrament to Mary and this is what came to me in response. First of all, I am carrying out the work of God as a mother. Wasn’t that Mary’s call? To raise the son of God? So time spent there is doing God’s work in itself. But, also, I found encouragement to wake early, before the house does (even the cat!), where I can enjoy an hour of solitude. Quiet reading. Prayer. Silent meditation. Even 6:30 a.m. mass.

I’ve been working on this morning thing for a while now but it’s a struggle for me. It’s not that I’m a night person, but just that I’m not really a morning person either. But as I cannot seem to find a way to fit it all in to my spiritual satisfaction otherwise, I am going to take Mary’s advice and pray to be awakened early with vitality (at least enough to get out of bed) and the anticipation of what lies before me if I do put those feet on the floor and stand myself up.

I’ve also instituted an hour of quiet on the weekends for my whole family to encourage everyone to understand and value “silence” in this noisy world. I even encourage “no words” for that hour, especially challenging for a 4-year-old who wants to verbalize his every thought. But silence can be powerful and I want them to realize that as they grow up.

Have you struggled to find time for quiet prayer amid life as a mother and wife or father and husband? What has been your solution?

I’ve come across the same passage from Corinthians several times, first in the book “The Cloister Walk” and then at mass. It speaks to God’s dismissing the importance of knowledge, learning and wisdom and lifting up instead “faith,” a virtue which defies logic. A message that’s incredibly impactful and relevant to me at this stage in my life…

The passage:

1 Corinthians 1:21 “For since in the wisdom of God, the world did not come to know God through wisdom, it was the will of God through the foolishness of the proclamation to save those who have faith.”

This theme has come up again and again for me. Our priest discussed how in another passage Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, distances himself from the learned academics who came to convince and sway the people (which very much reminds me of politicians).

He asks the people instead not to believe him because he is most convincing but to instead, to take a moment, listen to their hearts and believe him if their hearts tell them they are called to what he is saying: the good news, “the way.” As my heart has said to me…

There is also another biblical passage where Jesus praises the child-like over the learned:

“At that time, the disciples approached Jesus and said, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ He called a child over and placed it in their midst and said ‘Amen, I say to you unless, you turn and become like children — you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven…'” Matthew 18:1-3

And I love these two quotes from St. Augustine:

• “If you understand it, it is not God.”
• “Do not seek to understand in order to believe, but seek to believe that you may understand.”

Faith versus wisdom.

This is a HUGE paradox I have experienced since my calling to Catholicism. I’d always rejected religion on the premise of logic. How could people really believe all this craziness to be true and fall prey to the many preachers and evangelists out there, believing whatever was said to them? It defied logic, so it couldn’t be.

And when I look at myself now, attending mass as much as possible, reorienting my life toward prayer and holy reading, praying the Liturgy of the Hours, guiding my family on the path toward holiness, I can NOT believe it. It defies logic.

I often stop and say to myself “What is going on here? What has happened to me? This is not the person I thought myself to be. How am I overcoming my past objections? This makes no sense.” And indeed it doesn’t, and that is just the point.

I have to follow my heart. My heart has been called and it feels so right and so good and so full of complete and utter joy; I cannot question it. It MUST be right no matter what my logical mind says.

Every step I have taken since feels divinely inspired and I see reminders and signs constantly that I am on the right path.

It makes no sense, but it doesn’t have to. I am guided by faith; knowledge was just in the way…