Listen to Me When I'm Saying "I Love You"

Hey there...so a lot has gone on in my life since I last posted. Most of it involves decisions that are relatively unimportant. However, there is one choice I made that has altered my life greatly in just the past couple of weeks: I have become an EMHC. That is to say, I have become an Extraordinary Minister of the Holy Eucharist. It's a fascinating thing really...and not just because any time I think of the word "extraordinary" I think of how when I was little my big brother would always say "Now, Faith, we are all made equal...I'm just more equal than you are." So naturally when I think of the word extraordinary I always wish I had responded "Oh yeah? Well I'm more ordinary than you because I EXTRAordinary!" Pathetic...yes...but this is the relationship I have with the younger of my older brothers. Anyway....

I first served at Mass as an extraordinary minister on the first Friday of this month at Saint William's 12:15 mass. It. Was. The. Most. Terrifying. Thing. I've. Ever. Done. Like...seriously. So scared. If you ask my homeschool friends some of them noticed how much I was trembling. But it was beautiful. I was able to give Christ to my friends in a way I never had before...in the truest sense of the way. And yes, that first day most of my thoughts consisted of "Lord...please do not let me drop you...please..." (it's true...). 

However, it is also a crushingly humbling experience. I have served in Mass in many different ways. When I was about eleven I began lectoring and ushering at Mass, and when we moved to Texas I dropped both but after a year picked lectoring back up with a fervor I previously lacked. But this, was different. I expected it to give me the same sort of feeling inside as lectoring does–like I have successfully allowed the Holy Spirit to work through me to deliver Christ to people through his word–but it did not. Two days after my first time ministering, I served at my first Sunday Mass, and it was beautiful (and strangely much less scary than the daily Mass was...). I went through everything flawlessly and was so proud of myself (I think that it is okay to be proud of oneself for not messing up and causing a distraction during communion....right?). But I felt horrible...and terribly responsible. For you see, I was holding between my fingers the flesh of the one person who loved me more than anyone else and I was FEEDING it to another human being. 

I never looked at communion quite the same way as I do now. I always knew it was the "Body of Christ" and that Christ died for me and that communion is celebrated in remembrance of the last supper to obey Jesus' command of "do this in memory of me." But...perhaps it is just a little different when you go into Mass after meditating deeply on the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary. Imagine someone you love. It can be anyone, really. Do you have a significant other? A close sibling or parent? A best friend? I'm sure you do. Imagine them, stripped of their clothes, lacerated to the point where their flesh can take no more. Covered in gashes to the point where...I can't even describe it. It hurts too hard to envision it much less put it to words. Close your eyes and imagine that. Parents, imagine your children that tortured. Husbands/wives, imagine your spouse like that. Now think of it this way, they have Christ inside of them. They reflect the love God has for you. Now picture yourself pulling away some of that wounded flesh and sticking it into the mouth of people you do not know except for that this person who loved you and whom you love...also loved them. And know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that that loved one, Jesus Christ, went through that agony so that you wouldn't have to and so that the person you are feeding wouldn't have to. That is what communion is for me now. 

Before I went up to the alter to receive communion and to take it to give to the people in my section the past two times I ministered the Sacred Body I prayed this simple prayer "Thank you, Lord, for giving me the honor of giving your Son's body to my brothers and sisters...please forgive me for what I did to Him." and honestly...it's hard not to tremble when I say those words. But it's exciting too. Because I have the privilege to remind people that Christ loves them. I get to tell them "The Body of Christ" before I pass him over to them. I could go very deep into what they taught me, but I'm just going to stay on the surface of things and stay out of my deep ponderings on the subject. When I tell them that simple phrase "The Body of Christ" it really translates to "I love you." Because the body of our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross, His sacrifice to save us from eternal suffering...that is pure love. That is the truest love there is. So when I call to mind that image and say it to a person it means "you are loved" it means "Jesus loves you" and, since I am up there feeding you the flesh of the love of my life, it means "I love you."

And you know what? My primary responsibility is to protect my Lord. I constantly am on guard up there for someone who would hurt him. And yet...almost every other person up there breaks my heart every time I've ministered. And if it breaks my heart, it certainly hurts Christ. For when I am saying "the Body of Christ" when I am saying "I love you" for both me and Jesus...they interrupt. Do you know what they say while I am still saying "Body?" They cut me off and say "amen." They want it over with. They just want to get it done and go back home. I almost cried when I got home this past Sunday when I realized that they just wanted to get the best gift they'd ever been given and go without even bothering to know what it meant. It also makes me a bit angry. I just want to glare at them and say "Listen to me when I tell you I love you! Listen to me when I tell you that you are precious, that you are worth dying for, that you are worth everything to your creator...listen...and know you are loved by the most powerful being in existence...just listen...and know you are loved." But sadly, I cannot tell them that during communion...but I can, and will,  pray that they learn to understand what they are interrupting. 

Who I Am

Just now I was asked by an agnostic "Have you ever been certain you were in love with someone?"  I closed my eyes and thought for a couple of minutes before answering him.  As anyone who knows me could guess, my answer was "yes."  To expand on that, my full response was this, "Yes.  I am in love with God.  In relationships, I desire to find the spouse that will love me in a way that reflects God's love for me.  That, I have not yet found."

For you see, I am still fifteen years old (for a couple more weeks ;) ), and at this age it is impossible to "be certain" that I am "in love" with someone.  I can like people romantically.  I can love people platonically.  I can even love people romantically.  But I cannot, for certain, say that I am "in love."  For this cannot be said until marriage.  When I meet a man whom I can love truly, who has the courage to offer his life to me in the form of an engagement ring, whom I can have the courage to give my life to  through putting it on, and together we can make the marital vows, then, and only then, can I say with complete certainty that I am "in love" with someone.

This is because only when God's grace binds myself to the one whom I love, can I be in love.  Until that point,  I am outside of love.  I can partake in love, I can get my hands in it, I can mold it into whatever design I wish, I can taste it, hear it, smell it, feel it...but I cannot be in it.  Love is in me, and I am in the presence of love.  Love has created me, love defines me, love gives me life.  But I cannot be in love through my Father's eyes, until I have become love.  Whenever I give myself, body, soul, heart,  mind, and spirit to my future spouse, and I take my spouse's body, soul, heart, mind, and spirit upon myself for protection, then, together, we become love in each other.

Whenever I become love in my husband, and my husband becomes love in me, then I shall be in love.  "The two shall become one."  If he is my love, and we are one in each other, then I am in love.  For together, as we build a family, we reflect the love above all love, of the Holy Trinity.  Through my husband and myself loving each other as the Father and the Son loved each other, our children shall come forth from us as the Holy Spirit came forth from the Father and the Son.  Whenever I can reflect the Holy Trinity through my marriage, I can be in love and not just a witness of love.

Now, whenever I told my friend that I was in love with God, but none other, he asked me to take religion out of the picture.  He wanted me to answer his question without bringing in God, so that I could answer his question on the same page that he asked it.  The problem is, however, that he and I can never be on the same page unless we are in the same book, which we are not.  And so, I cannot take religion out of my answer, for my book is my religion.  My life is my religion.  In the words I said to him "There is no aspect of my life where I can put religion aside.  My religion makes me who I am."  And who I am, until after marriage, can only be "in love" with God.

THE Giant Dust Bunny

My dear friends, I have reached spiritual enlightenment. The ways of the world came upon me as I was packing up for my biology class the other day (we were studying protists, so I didn't need to focus). I opened up my binder, and I just started drawing. My hands just drew away and it all made perfect sense to me, to the point where I had to tell the world, or at least part of it, how we all came into existence.

Picture nothingness. Not hard right? It's like you are laying in bed in the darkness of night. Only...you don't have a bed. And you aren't there. And your room doesn't exist. And it's not night, because night doesn't exist. And the darkness isn't darkness, it's nothingness. Get it? Good. See the nothingness? Of course you don't. Because you don't exist, and the nothing doesn't exist...because it's nothing. But then, you, although you don't exist, see a Giant Bunny. And the Bunny evolved from a speck of...dust...because...it's a Giant DUST Bunny. So, since it is a Giant Dust Bunny, it is allergic to itself. And so, it inevitably sneezes. When it sneezes, a great phenomena occurred. It didn't sneeze like normal bunnies do, because it is a Giant Dust Bunny, so when it sneezed a number of things came into the nothingness. Two types of gasses to start with, a big block of ice, a large fire, and thousands of little blocks that seemed like they needed to be activated. And then...the Giant Dust Bunny left the things floating in the nothingness, that was now more like a void for misfit things.

Now, over the course of millions of years, the gasses slowly drifted toward each other, losing potency along the way. So it was like this: driiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiift....lose some of the gas....driiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiift....lose some of the gas...ect. For MILLIONS of years. So now, very little gas is left in the two clumps right? And then they collide. What happens next? If you said "BIG BANG" you guessed right. Only...it was more like a little bang. That wasn't exactly a bang. They collided and created a giant mass of lava. This grew and grew as it ate the nothingness. As it grew, the outer edges hardened and then softened, and then broke up into soil. Now, as it was a BIG BANG, it couldn't rightly form a perfect ball, right? SO it was all warped and had these massive holes, bumps, and canyons carved into it. When the Giant Dust Bunny saw this, he thought "my sneezes make miraculous things" and thus he went back into hibernation.

Now, over the next few trillion years the big block of ice and the large fire had been floating around. But then they saw each other. It was love at fire sight. Fire and Ice were determined to be together so they floated toward each other at an alarming speed of 1MPY (meter per year). It took them 20,000 years to collide. Do you know what this was called by the Giant Dust Bunny? If you guessed the "Major Meltdown" you we correct a second time.  The fire floated up and hugged the ice, completely enveloping it. This melted the ices heart...and...y'know...everything about the ice. As the water fell because of gravity (the Giant Dust Bunny never did figure out what part of his sneeze came up with THAT ridiculous invention), the fire swooshed down and tried to catch its love. This failed, however, as the melted ice, which legally changed its name to "water," extinguished the fire. The water then crashed down upon the land and filled it's every crevice. Here it has stayed forever more, trying to drown the sorrows of its lost love away. This made the Giant Dust Bunny sad–not to mention wet–and so he again went away.

Not too long after the Major Meltdown–about 83,000,000 years–came the deciding factor of our universe. You see, as the original two gases drifted toward each other and left so much of themselves behind, those gases evolved. Through the years, the gasses slowly started to drift together again. This is the big one. Do you know what the Giant Dust Bunny named THIS event? If you guessed "BIG BANG PART TWO" you are sort of right. He tried that, but decided to was too long, so he changed the name to the "Cosmic Collision." The Cosmic Collision was by far the most violent occurrence, as well as the most impacting. As the gasses game together, they erupted into flames (yes, the water was very excited). But the force of the Cosmic Collision was so powerful that the flames scattered all over the sky, thus creating tiny balls of fire and gas that named themselves "stars." Now, some of the stars were very close together and became lonely. So they made a pact and squished back together into one giant star, and called themselves the sun.

The Cosmic Collision is the only phenomena that had a consequince. So you remember the thousands of little unactivated blocks? Here is where they came into play. See, two of them had drifted down and landed on the earth. These two noticed the sun the first, and were immediately activated. Upon activation, they expanded into two humans, a man and a woman, fully clothed (because the Giant Dust Bunny had very modest sneezes). They were...blessed(?) with being able to watch the rest of the activations. The closest blocks to earth activated and expanded into cats and dogs and all members of those families (such as tigers, foxes, wolves, and panthers). This, dearies, is where the phrase "raining cats and dogs" came from. The animals fell and landed on the earth and immediately began frolicking in the newly activated grass (little blocks that were so tiny they were like specks that had covered the earth). Then the other various animals and critters were activated and came plummeting to the earth, creating fish, mammals, reptiles, trees, and the sorts. Also activated by the sun's rays, were the other giant blocks that expanded into planets that have ever since played a sluggish game of tag...with themselves.

The Giant Dust Bunny saw what his sneeze had done, and he saw that it was good. And thus he rested and was never seen again...but his descendants are seen all over the world today, hiding behind refrigerators and bookshelves. They all hold back their sneezes, because they know the horror that was created the last time that a Dust Bunny sneezed. For although the Giant Dust Bunny saw what was good, the Little Dust Bunnies see what is horrific.

And this, is what was shown to me while I was packing up for forensics. I believe it to be truly divine. Now I know that the Catholics have been around for over 2000 years, and the Lutherans, Anglicans, Calvinists, Presbyterians, and congregationalists for about 500 years, the Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopalian for 400 or so, the United Bretheren, Disciples of Christ, Mormons, Salvation Army, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian Science for 213 years or less, and lastly the Four-Square Gospel, Calvary Chapel, Harvest Christian, and Saddleback Church (I don't even wanna know about that one...) have been around for less than 100 years, but I really think that I have finally found the one and only truth. There truly was a Big Bang...but it was accompanied by the Major Meltdown and the Cosmic Collision. There is no God, other than the Giant Dust Bunny that sneezed everything into existence.

See, friends, it is not hard to come up with a story on how the world came into being.  This story of mine is every bit as accurate as the Big Bang theory. More so, really. See, I accounted for much more. I gave how the Big Bang happened, just not how that tiny speck of dust came into existence. There is truly no logical explanation for how the world came into being. In all cases, there was something at the beginning. At least in Christianity, that something had the power to create other things. That is the fault with the Big Bang theory. Bit Bangs destroy things, explosions break down, they do not build up. There can be no comprehension of how some sort of gas found its way into the nothingness, collided with itself, and created a giant collection of rocks (planets), liquids (rivers, oceans, lakes), fires (stars, the sun), and sludge. Now, even if I could believe that little dose of sanity, what is the sludge for? Oh, well that is simple, that sludge over the years changed form until certain party of it became Cherry Trees and other parts became Persian cats, while still OTHER parts of it became you and me. Preposterous. There has to be a creator of it all. And I am here to tell you, today, that that creator is the Giant Dust Bunny...*cough*...sorry, I meant the Lord our God.