The Catholic faith, in her loving wisdom and beauty, invites us all to join her
By Claire Collins
I was recently at a funeral for the father of a dear friend. After his courageous and valiant battle with cancer, we were there to celebrate his life and, most importantly, to storm heaven on his behalf and implore God’s mercy to bring his soul into eternity.
We sang the beautiful hymn, “O God Beyond All Praising,” heard God’s Word in the readings, and received the Eucharist all while praying for Ivan’s soul and entrusting him to God, asking the angels to lead him on his way.
In attendance at this funeral were friends from my time as a missionary with FOCUS, the family whose example led to my husband’s reversion, a friend recently ordained to the priesthood and who celebrated the Mass, and others whom the Lord has allowed me to know because of our beautiful Catholic faith.
We’ve all been to many Masses with one another over the years as students on retreat, as missionaries preparing to “go and make disciples of all nations,” at conferences and on mission trips, at weddings, at beach houses in a makeshift chapel, and now, at a funeral to remember a life well lived and ask the angels to bring him to paradise.
As we sat there in the pews, many of us with babies and families and jobs and lives that we had no idea would happen when we first met one another, it hit me in a new way just how much the Church, our Mother, had shown up for us in it all. She was there when we first entered into the family of God, there for so many of life’s most important milestones, and would even be there for us when our earthly life was complete.
No matter how far we strayed, she was always waiting for us with open arms, waiting to nourish us with Jesus’s very body and blood, and treat whatever wounds we had incurred to send us back out stronger and better and ready to love the world. Mother Church has and will always be there for us, whether or not we’ve been ready to acknowledge it.
Many of us have experiences where we feel members of the Church have let us down, and thus see the Church in a strange, distant, obscured light. Maybe a family member who was Catholic hurt us, a priest disappointed us, a Catholic friend turned their back on us, a particularly hard teaching of the Church left us confused or uncomfortable.
These have made it tempting to disregard Mother Church in her beauty and motherly wisdom because of the hurt incurred, and to look elsewhere for the care and love and compassion we all need.
But like a good and loving mother, she does not hold our hurts or hard hearts against us.
She waits patiently and tenderly, gently inviting us back to her. One step into the confessional and she is ready to wash us with mercy through Our Lord Jesus. One Mass in grace and she gives us that nourishment in the Eucharist once again. Even the great act of excommunication is actually just a last effort to try and bring her children back to her fold.
It’s easy to forget just how humbly and beautifully Mother Church loves us. I know it is, because many times I have wanted to turn away from her, too.
For one reason or another, she wasn’t good enough for me and I began to stray from her loving embrace. And yet even when the world hates the Church, she remains firm. Her members might turn from what is true, but she never gives way to the world’s pressure.
The gates of hell cannot prevail against her, no matter how much it seems like they just might. And how do I know this? Because Jesus said it. And as one of my children’s favorite little shows reminds us, the Scriptures say, “God is not a man that He should lie, or a son of man that He should change His mind.”
It can also be easy to treat our parish simply as, “the place I go to church.” We can lose this mystical, mysterious, and sacred sense of just how important the Church is to our souls and to the world, carrying us through our earthly pilgrimage. Mother Church wants to accompany us on this journey, memorializing our milestones every step of the way.
I invite you, for a moment, to put aside any frustrations and struggles with the Church or her members in order to look through your experiences to the reality of the matter—the Church is for us. She wants our good. She loves us and wants to journey with us, no matter what baggage we are bringing. And she, through her Son, Jesus, will continue to pursue us as long as we live.
