In the article “The Orans Posture is NOT the Problem" that I recently wrote, I addressed this subject a little, but I want to go into more depth on it here. I understand that part of the fear of emotion comes from the desire to distinguish Catholicism from Protestantism and all things Protestant. In truth, emotion does play a big part in the life of many Evangelical Christians and at times gets carried to extremes resulting in actions that, in reality, I don’t feel are pleasing to the Lord. But just because there are extremists doesn’t mean that emotion is evil or undesirable.

“Let Us Make Man…”

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created him; male and female created he them. “ (Genesis 1:27)

When God created Adam and Eve He created them in His “Image”. Now God is a spirit, the Scriptures tell us, and until the Incarnation was without physicality in which to have a physical “image”. I’m reminded of my days as a copier technician. When you make a copy on a copy machine, the drum is charged electrically and when it scans the original the places where the white spaces are lose their charge. What is left on the drum is what is called a “latent image” and is quite invisible until toner is applied. The same is true of the “Image of God” in which man was created. It is a spiritual image (the Latin term is “Imago Dei”) and shouldn’t be taken to extremes to say that God looks like us. Unlike what TV preacher Kenneth Copeland may say God is not “6’5” tall with a 36’ hand span…” and so on.

Since we are descended from Adam and Eve, we also possess that “Image”. We are creatures composed of “body, mind and spirit” … like unto the triune nature of God. We are also in the emotional image of God. God has emotions? Absolutely! We’re told in the Scriptures that God loves, sorrows, hates, experiences anger and can be grieved. How can we then imagine that we shouldn’t experience emotion in our relationship with Him?

The Joy of the Lord

“… for the joy of the LORD is your strength.” (Nehemiah 8:10)

One of the most frequent words used in both the Old Testament and New to describe the attribute of worship and of our relationship with the Lord is “joy”. If we do a word search in the Bible we find that the word “joy” appears in 155 verses in both Testaments. The word “rejoice” another 183 times. There are several Hebrew words for joy. One is “ranan” and it carries an idea similar to what we see when we read about King David returning the Ark of the Covenant that I mentioned in the other article. The Greek word “chara” carries the same idea into the New Testament… and it’s the word that Saint Paul used when he instructed us to “Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice.” (Philippians 4:4)

Saint Peter showed that our joy is one of the signs of our love of Christ and our true relationship to Him. He said in his first Epistle, “Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory:” (1 Peter 1:8)

The Fruit of the Spirit

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22-23)

Notice that in his list of the Fruit of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those in whom He dwells Saint Paul lists “joy” as the second right behind “love”. The Lord said that by our love all people will know that we are His disciples. In 1 Corinthians 13 he tells us that the greatest of these is love, so it’s reasonable to say that “joy” is the second greatest. It is the second witness to those outside the walls of the Church that our relationship with God is real and not just religion.

When someone we love and who we haven’t seen in a while suddenly shows up at our door we are overjoyed. How much more should we feel that same emotion when we are in the community worship with our Catholic brothers and sister in the Real Presence of the Eucharist and all it entails? But we bring that “sacrifice of praise into the House of the Lord” with us from our daily lives. It must be part of our daily walk with the Lord.

The Root of Our Problem

In saying “our problem” I am mostly speaking of the Northern Hemisphere ... Canada, the U.S. (except the southern U.S.) and Europe. The Catholic Church in most of the Southern Hemisphere isn’t losing people, in fact it is growing every day. I bear witness to this fact here in the Philippines. In any case, the root of our problem and why the Church in those areas listed is diminishing is not the Liturgy (Novus Ordo versus TLM), it’s not families holding hands during the Our Father and it’s not the Sign of Peace. It’s that the ability to express the Joy of the Lord in simple worship seems to be absent from most Catholic Churches. It’s not that people want to “be entertained” as those who pass judgment on others accuse. They want to feel the emotions that should flow from our relationship with the Creator of the Universe and express it in their worship.

No, the problem isn’t that some feel this joy and want to express it. The problem is that the majority seems to neither experience the “joy of their salvation” nor like to see others express theirs. But the Protestants, and especially the Pentecostals, have no trouble allowing such worship. So the people leave and the Church shrinks and shrinks and shrinks while modern day Pharisees worry about form and ritual and want to take us back to an unknown language and a stoic observation of worship rather than participation in it.

The problem in our brothers and sisters flight to Protestantism is that while their “worship” may appear freer, it is devoid of the Real Presence. In short, it is wells without water. I’m reminded of one of my favorite scenes from the movie “The American President”. Louis says to the President, “People are so thirsty that they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage. When they find it’s a mirage they’ll still drink the sand”. This is what those leaving the Church are doing: crawling through a spiritual desert toward those wells without water. But as the President reminded Louis, “People don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty. They drink because they don’t know the difference.” It’s up to us and our Church which has the “springs of living water” to show them the difference and allow people to drink from those springs … freely.