Home in the Church

Living an Embodied Catholic Faith

Jessica Ptomey

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642797091
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Rituels et pratiques chrétiens

A Catholic covert and scholar discusses why it's important to retain ritual and spiritual symbolism in modern Christian faith.

While many Catholics feel a pull to conform to the conventions of modern culture, Home in the Church offers an inspiring call back to a distinctly Catholic way of living. It shares a vision of Mother Church as the home on earth that will lead us to our heavenly home. Author and Catholic convert Jessica Ptomey describes her journey to a more embodied Christian faith in the Catholic Church, and she invites readers to discover—or rediscover—the same experience.

Home in the Church explores the various elements of church liturgy, teaching, and tradition that help believers to live a faith that is embodied—lived out body, mind, and soul. Home in the Church discusses the embodied nature of faith in the home, in the celebrations of the liturgical calendar, in the liturgy of the Mass, in personal prayer, in the intercession of the saints, in the sacraments, and in a redemptive view of suffering.

Chapter 1

The Mass: Embodied Faith in Worship

“When we begin to see that heaven awaits us in the Mass, we begin already to bring our home to heaven. And we begin already to bring heaven home with us.” —Scott Hahn⁹

Discovering the Mass

Protestant Sunday morning worship experiences can look vastly different across America, depending on the church’s denomination. As I have mentioned, my family had been members or attendees of numerous churches and denominations while I was growing up. One of the reasons for frequently changing churches was that we moved a lot—I count eleven times since I was born until I went to grad school. (No, we weren’t a military family.) The other, and more significant, reason was that my parents were earnestly seeking correct Christian doctrines and the expression of those doctrines in the life and worship of the local church. You see, while my parents grew up in nominally Christian homes as children (the Presbyterian/Baptist and Episcopal traditions), their early adult lives were void of any personal faith. They both had dramatic conversions to Christ around their thirties, and they spent the years following sincerely searching for some solid foundations when it came to doctrine and Christian life. Unfortunately, human moral failure appears in every Christian tradition. Between experiencing a few pastoral scandals here and there, as well as bumping into problematic theological teachings or doctrine that went off the rails from orthodoxy completely, our family ended up all over the spectrum. I’ve experienced just about every type of denomination and worship service expression throughout my childhood, from fundamentalist Baptist churches to lively charismatic fellowships. You name it, I’ve seen it. The only expression of worship that I had not experienced was a liturgical service.

My husband’s experience was much more consistent. He grew up in the Assembly of God denomination, at the same church his whole life. When we married in 2005, we decided that we would start our life together back in Mike’s hometown, and we ended up making his childhood church our church home for the next two years. We experienced a wonderful community of Christians who cared deeply for us, since most of them had known Mike his whole life. And they all accepted me with much warmth and love. This was quite a foreign experience for me when it came to a church community, simply because the longest we had been at one church was during my high school years. Even then, there was more of a connection for me and my siblings with our youth group than there was for our whole family in the life of that large Southern Baptist church.

Mike and I ended up leaving his childhood church in 2007. Though there were a variety of reasons for our choice, we had ultimately been wrestling for months with a few important questions: What is Sunday morning supposed to be? What is the local church supposed to look like? What is worship? Now we were both raised in church, had been educated at Christian schools, had numerous Bible studies under our belts, and had been involved heavily in youth group and college ministries. We had even considered being part of a couple of different church plants. It’s not like we were newbies asking these questions. Quite the opposite. We were young adults raised in the Evangelical tradition who greatly cherished our faith in Christ, but we were realizing that there were some major gaps between the Church and her worship of God that we read about in Scripture and the structure of most Sunday morning services that we had experienced. At this point, we hadn’t yet discovered that our core struggles were actually Protestant/Catholic issues. Our questions seemed to be more in regard to stylistic observances about the format of many Evangelical worship services. (Though we soon discovered that questions of substance were really at the heart of various issues that appeared, on the surface, to be about style.)

Sometimes it’s difficult to analyze a faith tradition while participating in it, and we realized (soberly) that we needed a break from church. I don’t remember exactly how long we stopped attending Sunday services; maybe it was a few months. We finally ended up at a popular and large “community church,” just to have somewhere to worship on Sundays and have space to consider what was next. We had friends who were asking similar questions, and we often discussed shared concerns and convictions until late in the evening. We had considered the model of “house churches” and various other church plants that were popping up here and there. There seemed to be post-Evangelical authors writing all the time about new models for “doing church”—some ideas sounded plausible; some sent us running in the opposite direction. I was nearing the end of my PhD program, and Mike (continually considering a pastoral call) was contemplating a PhD in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary in Los Angeles, a place he had long wanted to attend. We had talked about California many times, and we finally just made the leap. Mike was granted a “sabbatical” year from his teaching position at DeMatha Catholic High School (his alma mater), and off we went across the country to see what new vision the West Coast had to offer us. We would give it a year, and Mike would know after a few classes at Fuller if this was really what he wanted to do. As it turns out, we knew after about six months that this program wasn’t it, and we planned to finish out the year there (while I defended my dissertation and graduated) and then head back to Maryland and start a family. But our time in California had offered us exactly the space the Holy Spirit wanted to expand our concept of “worship.”

We experienced our first liturgical service at an Episcopal church in Pasadena, CA. The liturgy was a completely new experience for me. Standing in the beautiful church, I felt a new awareness of my role in worship. I whispered to Mike at various points that it didn’t feel like we were members of a passive “audience” the way it felt at a lot of other churches, especially ones that seemed geared toward entertaining the people in the seats. The space was distinctly sacred and reverent; you would not confuse what was happening there with any other type of event. The congregation verbally responded throughout the liturgy, stood for the Gospel reading, and knelt in a receptive posture near the altar to partake of communion from the priest’s hands. Everyone was participating in the liturgy; and I noticed that all the intentional elements of ritual pointed to Christ—both Christ in Scripture and Christ in Communion.

We visited this Episcopal church a handful of times that year, and each time I would try to decipher why the liturgical rituals of the service—and my participation in them—were so significant. It was during this time that I was studying Smith’s work on cultural liturgies for my dissertation, particularly the concept that we are first and foremost desiring beings, not primarily thinking beings. I was realizing that it is our hearts, not our heads, that are fundamental in our spiritual formation, in our development of the “religious sense.” Smith was telling me that I don’t love things because I’ve thought a lot about them; I love what I worship.¹⁰ But what is worship? This was the primary question I had been asking, and Smith helped me discover what I had been bumping up against but was unable to articulate—worship is embodied and liturgical. It is ritual. It is that thing that is practiced until it becomes habit. Our worship of God does not automatically stem from filling our minds with facts about God, but rather it is the agency of our prayers and bodies in the liturgy that actually put us in the posture of worship. The physical and vocal rituals that I was participating in on those Sunday mornings were actually forming my faith, forming my desire for God.

Despite the fact that we were starting to make these connections between worship and liturgy, we church hopped quite a bit during our time in LA. We hadn’t quite given up on the Evangelical (or post-Evangelical) church plant model, and we decided to attend one that friends of ours had started once we moved back to Maryland in the summer of 2010. In hindsight, it was our “last hoorah” with Evangelical church culture (lasting a couple of years); the same problems kept repeating themselves. It wasn’t long until we started feeling a pull back to the liturgy that we had experienced in California, only by this time we had actually followed the history of the liturgy back to its genesis—the Catholic Church and the Mass.

It’s not that we didn’t have a general knowledge of Church history all along. We obviously knew things were different before the Reformation (although my upbringing basically deprived me of fifteen hundred years of Church history). It was just that becoming Catholic was not on our radar…until we started actually befriending practicing Catholics and reading persuasive conversion stories,¹¹ and we realized that we couldn’t avoid looking into the Catholic answer to all of these questions of worship and doctrine. We thought we should do our due diligence and leave no stone unturned. However, upon our cursory investigation, all of these liturgical traditions seemed to have the important elements of worship in common. In our estimate, Anglicans, Episcopalians, and Catholics were similar enough for us to avoid swimming the Tiber in order to practice a more liturgical and embodied faith. Maybe we can just become Anglican, we mused to ourselves.

About the same time, we became friends with the pastor (and his wife) of a small local Anglican church plant. It was a group of lovely people, formerly Evangelicals like us, who had been drawn to the beauty and embodied worship of the liturgy as well. It was a blessing to be part of that community while we continued to learn about the liturgy. But our reading, relationships with Catholic friends, and contemplation of the Eucharist had us considering the Catholic Mass more and more. My husband began having mystical encounters with the tabernacle in the school chapel at DeMatha. He didn’t realize at the time that the consecrated Host was kept inside, and he wondered why he would feel “a warmth” the closer he sat to it. Needless to say, when he found out what it was he considered Catholicism in earnest. The Eucharist was always a primary question in the back of our minds, and we gradually grew more certain of our ultimate conclusion: If that is the real body and blood of Christ, then we have to become Catholic!

It was the spring of 2013, and I was very pregnant with our second child, due at the end of April. Mike and I had been seriously investigating Catholicism for several months. I had just finished reading Scott and Kimberly Hahn’s conversion story, Rome Sweet Home. We had binge-watched Robert Barron’s Catholicism series, making the move to the Catholic Church more and more plausible with every episode. Most importantly, we realized that the sacrifice of the Mass—the Eucharist—was the center of the liturgy and of worship. All signs, both in Scripture and Church tradition, pointed to that focal point.

“I’m becoming Catholic,” Mike announced to me one day. “And I hope you are ready too.”

We had been married long enough that I knew what that meant. When my husband decided to do something, it would be happening in the immediate future.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m with you. Let’s just have this baby and then figure out what the next step is.”

“Nope. I don’t want to wait.”

He was firm. He knew, and he didn’t want to waste any more time. Not every couple that enters the Catholic Church does so on the same timeline, and I am so thankful that we were on the same page all along. I have gone back in my mind to that moment so many times since we became Catholic, and my heart overflows with gratitude for the grace to trust in my husband’s certainty. I tend to be the measured one; he likes to run headlong into what he knows is the right direction. I’d like to wait for the boat to come close enough to step in gently; he’d much rather jump. I’m so glad he was ready to jump; and I’m glad that I jumped with him. Because I listened to my husband, three months later we stood surrounded by glorious mural-covered walls at Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian Roman Catholic Church in Washington, DC, being confirmed side by side, witnessing both our boys being baptized, and receiving the Eucharist together for the first time.

Embodied Faith in the Mass

If I could condense into one statement all of my convictions about the structural and stylistic problems with most of the worship services of my pre-Catholic faith, it would be this: worship is not about us. It seems strange to have to clarify this point, to have to remind ourselves that we, the body of Christ, are gathering to worship God. Yet the clarification is needed, since the structure and design of many current Sunday services seem crafted to appeal to the sensibilities of those attending, to offer some sort of therapeutic message that lifts people’s spirits and helps them live a better life. But such ends are not the purpose of worship, though they should indeed be a by-product of it. Many Christian services have become—in style and substance—an accessory to a highly commercialized life of faith. Mind you, this has not just happened in Evangelical and mainline Protestant churches. Many Catholic parishes are trending in this direction as well, rejecting the liturgical guidelines from church traditions and documents that have guided the liturgy of the Mass since its beginning (as early as the first century). If we do not understand exactly what the liturgy is, and its role in the practice of our faith, then we may become susceptible to notions that the Mass needs updated to appeal to modern tastes and trending cultural objectives.

At the outset, we have to understand that the liturgy of the Mass is not a style of worship, but rather the action of worship.¹² It is an action performed publicly by the “whole community” of the Body of Christ,¹³ and that action’s purpose is this: “the glory of God and the sanctificati...