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EasterJoy
Guest
You can have a 40-hour-a-week job and be a lector or an EMHC. Being an EMHC could be done with a 70-hour-a-week job! Preparation is necessary outside the spiritual practice one would hope every Catholic would have, but it doesn’t take that much personal sacrifice in terms of scheduling, unless you count promising to show up at one particular Mass once a month as a scheduling sacrifice.I also agree that parents should be involved in Youth Groups when needed & invited. Of course, the lay sponsors of the RCIA candidates should attend all sessions. However, having members of the laity TEACH the candidates has not proven successful.
It was quite strange in my previous parish. I worked in the kitchen of our “House of Bread”, actually fixing food & serving the poor & homeless, some of whom were alcoholics & drug abusers, some were people with mental problems who didn’t understand their need for medicine, some women raising 3-4 children alone, etc., etc. There were three of us who did this & we could NEVER get enough help, even on holidays. However, people were lined up to be EEM’s & Lectors. It seemed as if the “up-front” positions were favorites, while no one “had time” to mix with the “rabble”. Women most often volunteered…yet, we had not **one **woman from our parish become a nun during the 20 yrs. I spent there.
The kind of work you are talking about, on the other hand, is the kind that separates the sheep from goats, the most fundamental kind of answer to the call of the Gospel. I don’t mean this as a put-down of lectors or EMHC, I know you are blessed to be doing it, but…bless you, bless you, bless you.
I think women who answer the call into the religious life, though, need to be more than just willing to open their hearts to the poor for a certain number of hours a month. Atheist kids have been known to do that. To hear one’s vocation, one needs to be aware that one has a spiritual life, too, a private life of prayer outside of Mass that would make her want to consider foregoing having a man and children to take care of and forego having a career that she controls (or thinks she does) in order to be intent only on the things of the Lord. It is that second thing that makes it more difficult to find girls to join the convent now. There was a time when the religious life was the only path open for a Catholic woman who knew she wasn’t intended to marry. That is no longer true. It also helps if her parents openly express the opinion that following her vocation is what is important, a vocation which might or might not include finding a decent man and giving them grandchildren. IMO, though, the constant message that keeping one’s options open and controlling one’s own destiny is a fundamental human need is killing vocations, just as surely as it is killing marriages. We have been told of our liberty, great, but we have been lied to as to why we have it.
Nevertheless, one of our Serra speakers is convinced that work such as you describe should be part of the formation of every priest and religious, it is that fundamental to what the priestly and religious life is all about. Again: bless you!
May God have mercy on our Churches …please pray for us…
]. I now go to the TLM, where there is no blurring of the distinction [and there IS a distinction, in spite of what the liberals say] between the clergy and the laity. I decided that, in going to the TLM, I wouldn’t be an accessory to the destruction of the priesthood.
