Corpus Christi Blog

Spiritual warfare tends to be a topic that people are either very comfortable or very uncomfortable discussing. I personally know people that do not want to even talk about the existence of any sort of evil entities for all kinds of reasons. However, sticking our heads in the sand and pretending certain realities don’t exist, simply to remain comfortable, is not really doing us any favors as we try to grow in our spiritual lives. Let’s consider then a little bit about what is going on in the spiritual realm all around us.

Before I get into this week’s reflection, I want to provide a little background. As a catechetical writer, I always have ideas floating around in my head, and I do a lot of reading and research to prepare for whatever it is I write about for the week. For the most part, I am led by the Holy Spirit and do my best to communicate the truths of the Faith in a way that would be pleasing to God.

Last week, we examined the various postures we use during worship in the context of the Mass, how they enable us to worship with our whole being, and what they each signify with regard to our relationship with God. Perhaps you now are wondering where all of these postures came from. Did early Catholics just make these actions up out of some vain display of piety? No, everything we do in the Mass is taken right out of Scripture. So, this week, we’ll dive a little deeper to understand how our postures and gestures have been appropriate before God throughout all of salvation history.

Have you ever heard the term, “Catholic calisthenics”? It’s a funny term used to describe all of the actions and postures we Catholics perform in the context of the Catholic Mass. Non-Catholics who join us at Mass can be confused (sometimes overwhelmed!) by all of our activity without knowing its purpose and, as Catholics, we can run into the problem of performing these actions in a robotic sort of way without giving much thought to what we are doing. In the first part of this two-part series, we’ll look at each of these actions and postures to get a deeper understanding of why we do them.