Part 17: Prayer for discernment: full, conscious, active participation at Holy Mass
Full, conscious, active participation at Holy Mass is helpful when you are trying to learn if God is calling you to be a single person or married, a religious or a priest.
How’s that?
We participate in Holy Mass, not only to offer worship to God, which is right and just, our duty and our salvation, but also to be transformed, and so to be agents of transformation for the world.
The Church points to the transformative purpose of Sunday Mass when it teaches that it is the indispensable source of the true Christian spirit.
And at the end of Mass as well, with the dismissal, which is not giving us permission to leave, but commanding us to go, and with the purpose of transforming the world, nothing less.
But worship at Holy Mass also forms virtues in us, like humility, which disposes us to accept God’s plan for our lives, as well as to answer God’s call to continue the mission of Jesus in the ministries of his Catholic Church.
The very beginning of Holy Mass forms humility in us, when we are invited to acknowledge our sins.
This is intended to remind us we are sinners, who have a Savior, Jesus, whose mercy meets our misery as an undeserved gift, which leaves us flabbergasted with amazement, full of praise, acknowledging our debt of gratitude to God.
Worship at Holy Mass forms in us the virtue of charity, which disposes us to imitate Jesus’ gift of self in service of God and others.
For the sake of charity is why we’re invited to donate in the collection, to give a sign of peace, and to lose ourselves in a holy communion with God and others.
This is intended to make us sensitive to the needs of others, and to our interdependence, expressed in sharing and service.
First, though, we have to get people in the pews, and to return Sunday after Sunday. To do that, we have to offer a spiritually-speaking satisfying experience.
And to achieve that goal we pay attention to what I call the four H’s: hospitality, hymns, homily, and how we celebrate Holy Mass, especially this last one.
Towards that end, check out the series called The 4thH, which comments on how to worship at Holy Mass fully, consciously, and actively. It can be accessed on the website dbqarch.org, then click on the icon Archdiocesan News, and then click on Featured Content.
