{"id":7640,"date":"2004-03-25T07:28:36","date_gmt":"2004-03-25T07:28:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/whats_the_alternative.html"},"modified":"2004-03-25T07:28:36","modified_gmt":"2004-03-25T07:28:36","slug":"whats_the_alternative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/whats_the_alternative.html","title":{"rendered":"What’s the alternative?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I suppose that is what I don’t understand in these liturgy discussions.<\/p>\n

You’re faced with an imperfect celebration of liturgy.<\/p>\n

What’s the proper spiritual response, while you’re sitting there? Get ticked off? Nurture your sense of pride? Thank God that you’re better than everyone? Be griefstruck? Mentally compose a letter to the bishop, the pastor, the editor or your next blog posting?<\/p>\n

What would the saints do?<\/p>\n

Sure, I guess there are problems that need to be solved and problems that need to corrected and directions that need to be shifted, and we all play a role in that, but what I am really most interested in is what we do with our hearts when we are sitting there.<\/p>\n

I cannot imagine that rage and bitterness is what we should be about.<\/p>\n

There are things that, at any given moment, you can and cannot control. At a liturgy, what you can control is your spiritual stance and your openness to God, right here and now. And believe it or not, it is possible to connect with God’s Real Presence in any liturgy, anywhere. Sure, there are circumstances that make it more challenging – as there always are. And if a situation is impossible, we find one that is more amenable, in terms of the externals of liturgy. <\/p>\n

But in the moment is what I’m talking about. And harboring anger and resentment during the liturgy is not an act of opening one’s heart to God. I just don’t see it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I suppose that is what I don’t understand in these liturgy discussions. You’re faced with an imperfect celebration of liturgy. What’s the proper spiritual response, while you’re sitting there? Get ticked off? Nurture your sense of pride? Thank God that you’re better than everyone? Be griefstruck? Mentally compose a letter to the bishop, the pastor,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat's the alternative? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/whats_the_alternative.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What's the alternative? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I suppose that is what I don’t understand in these liturgy discussions. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}