With Christmas just around the corner, I have been pondering how to follow up on my previous post about the liturgical year and our faith journeys as individuals (the image above is a visual representation of Christianity’s liturgical seasons). In my last post, I wrote “On a personal level, Church seasons and religious holidays provide opportunities for us to journey deeper into our faith experience. When we truly engage in the processes provided in the Church’s liturgical calendar, what I have heard called ‘the genius of Christianity’s processes’ brings us into a deeper relationship with God. Our own inner workings are stirred in such a way that our spirituality broadens, deepens, and matures.”
There is a deep spiritual beauty in the flow of the church’s liturgical seasons that stirs us.
There’s also a question of whether one’s faith journey is expected to be organized around the liturgical seasons. Is Advent automatically when we should be prompted toward anticipatory hope (i.e., us looking forward to the Saviour’s birth)? While the established liturgical seasons offer rich faith development opportunities for us, each of us are also experiencing our faith journey at times and in ways that are specific to our own lives. For example, I’ve written about my re-conversion experience here; my re-conversion experience began unexpectedly in October, 2015 – during Ordinary Time. Similarly, I meet people who arrive at churches because they feel compelling faith stirrings that propel them into church pews. In the last couple of years, I have journeyed with several individuals who arrived at churches because they felt stirrings in which God was reorganizing their emotional lives in fruitful and amazing ways. They arrived in churches at times when they felt prompted by the workings of the Holy Spirit – not in accordance with a specific liturgical season.
Journeying with people whose inner lives are being transformed by the Holy Spirit is a blessed journey. Individuals having such experiences can’t be identified by looking for some outer clue (i.e., “look for the person where a specific color shirt standing at X location”). Rather, encountering people having such experiences requires talking with people – often, strangers – and listening to what they have to say (and, being attentive in looking for people having such experiences). People often want to talk about these experiences (I did!). Often, efforts to talk about such experiences can involve clunky or disjointed communication. We are all on our own journey toward a deeper relationship with God and it can be hard to articulate our own person encounter with the divine – especially if someone is new to such experiences. What I am finding is that there are ways to “talk around” such experiences – verbally acknowledge a person’s experience (“I recognize that you are having a profound inner experience”) and being present with the person. Reflectively find ways – even if the ways feel superficial – to compare notes on their and your faith journeys. Communicate joy that a person is experiencing a spiritual transformation.
What matters about liturgical seasons and our individual faith journeys? It matters that each of us be intentional about being on a faith journey. It matters that we respond to promptings of the Holy Spirit (those unexplainable inner promptings that come along occasionally). It matters that we be attentive to our inner experiences and look toward an ever deeper relationship with God (it can be tempting in today’s frenzied world to avoid one’s inner experiences). It matters that we learn to better love God and love our neighbor (putting faith into practical action in the aspects of our lives beyond our own internal experience). Engaging with religious liturgical seasons provides a communal structure for deepening our faith experience and for walking with each other in faith.
Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist (and is a member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). Blogging is sustainable via blog readership (i.e. readers/subscribers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you subscribe to follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them and invite them to subscribe (thank you!).
