When one’s teaching voice is weak it is often because it lacks obedience. No amount of intonation, of “add-on” liturgy, will help make Holy Mass, or that voice, more efficacious, penetrating, and meaningful than when one worships and speaks from the wellspring of obedience.
“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20)
If you need a revival in your parish, if you need altar servers, or youth action, and a really good harmonious choir (that may be too much to ask of Catholics), then pray for the gift of obedience.
Ask your pastor to read prayerfully for himself a love letter from Rome, Redemptionis Sacramentum. It is a great read! Simple, informative, and inspired. It asks our shepherds, “the stewards of the grace of the high Priesthood” to lead the way to perfect worship; a liturgy infused with perfect obedience, in-sync with the Heavenly Banquet and the Supper of the Lamb.
And so goes the battle and part of the reason Catholic culture, the potency of the faith which flows out through our finger tips, fails to transform all it touches. Sadly, it is all too common to evoke grave/serious and extraordinary clauses, like wild cards in a poker game, to apply displaced innovation into the nuclear core of our spiritual life, the Holy Mass.
Disobedience makes for a weak voice. The Word was made flesh and Christ entered our humanity and placed himself under perfect obedience to the Father. He is our only, only, model of perfect unity and a perfect voice.
Fearless, trusting, Bishop St. Patrick, whose strong voice is still heard today, pray for us!
