Reawakening Wonder Through Faith and Imagination

Come join me and Father Kenneth Parsat as we lead a pilgrimage to France in April of 2027 and trace the paths of some of the greatest French saints, like St. Dominic, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bernadette, Saint Joan of Arc, and more. This eleven day pilgrimage includes visits to Louis , Normandy, Paris, Mont Saint Michel, Rouen, and Lourdes, where we will celebrate daily private mass in some of the most iconic chur ches. Learn more at ycatholic.substack.com slash pilgrimage . I have a cousin who is crazy about Star Wars. When we were younger, before the days when you could buy movie tickets online, he would stand in line for hours to get into the midnight premiere. He just had to be among the first to see the newest Star Wars movies It's quite a phenomenon, isn't it? There's this intoxicating craze about the Star Wars movies where people get sucked into the story so much so that they don't want to just see the movie. They want to be a character in the experience, and they show up dressed as though it's Halloween. And it's not just Star Wars. There are other fantasy series like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter that don't just capture the imagination of patrons but actually, lure them into the lore. What if I told you that is exactly the type of imagination that we need to bring to the mass? Hi, this is Justin Hibbert and you're listening to Why Catholic, my podcast about the what and why of Catholicism. If you're new to this podcast, a sincere welcome. As a brief introduction, I spent thirty-nine years as a Protestant, including eleven years as an evangelical pastor. After a couple of years of discernment, I came home to In this podcast, I take theological concepts, historical events all related to the Catholic faith, and try to present them in a way that's easy to understand and digest in episodes that are about 17 minutes in length. My aim isn't just to talk about what Catholics believe, but the why behind our beliefs. If you like this podcast, if you're blessed by what I do, I would love for you to be a partner and support Y Catholic. You can easily do that by going to YCatholic.substack dot com slash subscribe and for five dollars a month you can help keep this podcast going. Thank you so much for your generous support . Today we're beginning a brand new series, a series that dives into the Mass. Whether you are a child or an adult, whether you are a cradle Catholic or new to the Catholic faith, I want to take you on a journey that I hope will not only make you see the Mass in a whole new way, but fall in love with it like never before. And so the place to begin this chapter is by talking about the wonder and the magic of it all because Mass is where heaven kisses Earth. I want you to say that with me. Mass is where heaven kisses Earth. No, seriously say it. Mass is where heaven kisses earth. Mass is where heaven kisses earth. What if you could time travel? What if I told you that you actually could time travel? What if I told you that your parish isn't a church building , but rather a time traveling machine. What if I told you that it wasn't just a time traveling machine that could take you back in time, but it could actually take you to multiple places in time all at once? Not just the past, but the future. This is mass. And maybe it's like no way you've ever thought about it. Maybe you need to be like Neo and see that all along there's been this deeper matrix, this undercurrent of the supernatural. You thought you were just sitting, standing, and kneeling. You thought you were just repeating the same thing week in and week out. Oh how mistaken you've been. You've been looking at the world all wrong. You've been looking at it like a human. You need to start seeing it like a saint. You know how people, like my cousin, get sucked into the myth of a fantasy movie and they wait eagerly in line to experience a movie made by a bunch of men. That's the energy you should bring to mass. Only you're not watching a movie made by a bunch of actors. You're entering a portal opened by God himself into the greatest story that this world has ever known. I want to tell you about a thirty two year old atheist who was good friends with the Catholic. One day they were discussing Christianity, and the atheist referred to the Christian religion as a myth. This wasn't off putting or insulting to the Cathol ic, rather he used the atheist's frame of reference of myth to help him understand that Christianity was the great myth from which all other myths derived. Later, the atheist reflected on how this explanation moved him to wards Christianity. He said, Quote, Now what he showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a pagan story, I didn't mind it at all. Again, that if I met the idea of a God's sacri ficing himself to himself, I liked it very much, and was mysteriously moved by it. Again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god, Baldur, Adonis, Bacchus, similarly moved me, provided I met it anywhere except in the gospels. The reason was that in pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp, even though I could not say in cold prose what it meant. Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened. End quote. The atheist was C. S. Lewis, and the Catholic was J. R. Tolkien. C. S. Lewis went on to write the Chronicles of Narnia and J.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, and I want to suggest to you that along with the Bible and the catechism, those two series ought to be required readings for every Catholic. The premise of the Chronicles of Narnia is that there is this undercurrent of another world that existed all along, and one day four children stumble upon it. It began, well, it began for them, when the youngest named Lucy played hide and seek in a wardrobe. Only the wardrobe led to a snowy forest with talking fawns and a whole narrative that was completely foreign to her. Her siblings eventually followed her into the wardrobe, which was a portal into Narnia , and not only did they realize there was a whole world and a whole story of which they were clueless, but they quickly became a part of the story. And every time they went back to the other side of the wardrobe, into the English countryside or what we might call the real world, time had not moved a second, and soon the real world became less real. The real world for them was Narnia . I think this is a stunning description of the Mass. The church doors you don to go to Mass are no different than the wardrobe in the English countryside in C.S. Lewis's novel. You are not walking into church, you are walking into another realm where, time moves at a different pace, where matter acts differently, where what may seem seemingly unimportant has infinite consequences, and you are entering the story and becoming part of the story. You are in many ways like the hobbits of the Shire in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. You were one day content on just living a laise faire life, eating breakfast, and then second breakfast, followed by eleven's and so forth. And then you saw what could not be unseen . You held what could not be discarded, and you became part of a story. Ha, not just a story, an epic. All at once you found that you have enemies, awful, horrific enemies, legions of them even, all wanting to tear you to shreds . But you also discovered you had allies, allies of all stripes and kinds joining you in the epic journey to defeat Sovereign . That is how you should see the Mass . Mass isn't just about remembering an event as though it were a cognitive exercise. It's about entering it. And it isn't just one event, it's a bunch of events all wrapped up into one. There is only one mass. Mass is the last supper, it is the crucifixion, it is the current moment, and it is the marriage supper of the Lamb. No, not a pretend version of it like a passion play. Mass is the Lord So when you go to Mass, you are in the upper room, celebrating Passover with Jesus. You are at the foot of the cross, you are at your parish with your priest and fellow parishioners, and you are in heaven at a banquet with the saints. When Jesus said do this in rem embrance of me, many often make the mistake of interpreting that in the Western mindset. The Jewish understanding of memory is much different. It is mystical. Leon Wesseltier, a longtime literary editor of the prestigious magazine The New Republic and an observant Jew explained the Jewish idea of remembrance this way Quote In the age of tradition the past was present. It was one of the primary purposes of Jewish ritual and liturgy to abolish time, to make Jews divided by history into contemporaries, and those divided by geography into neighbors. In this way, the many communities of Judaism were unified into a single people and the experience of This is why if you go to a Passover Seder, you'll notice that the liturgy is always in the first and second person. It's not when our ancestors were in Egypt, it's when we were slaves in Egypt, when God rescued me and you and led us out of slavery. In mass you are not retelling a story that happened two thousand years ago. You are entering the story and sitting at the cross with the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and John the Apostle. You are a part of the story because the story is eternal and meant for you. And it feels quite at home because you remember it. Your soul remembers it. God has set eternity into our hearts, and so when we experience it, it isn't so much a new story, but a familiar one. You can feel it deep in your bones, can't you? I once was walking by a classroom where confirmation classes were taking place , and I overheard the catechist giving a list of rules. Don't chew gum, do this when the priest does that, do this, don't do that, and I glanced into the room to see a bunch of teenagers who looked like they wanted to be any other place but there. No wonder these kids will be confirmed and then never come back to church. And no wonder people don't understand the Catholic faith and then leave it. They're being taught these rules, this etiquette of behavior , but they haven't been shown the world. The Matrix, Narnia , Middle-earth. They don't know their part in the story because they aren't being shown the stor y. It is like pulling a newly married groom aside before his wedding night and giving him a lecture on the mechanics of lovemaking. Step one, do this. Step two, do that. Instead of telling him, Oh, you're about to experience something that transcends anything you've ever experienced, fall in love with the woman beside you, give your whole being to her. There will be mechanics to refine, but first you need to experience everything before you know what to refine . Reverence doesn't happen when we just do A, then B, and then C. That's compliance, not reverence. Reverence happens when we realize that bread and wine are no more, but have in some mystical reality, because we are in a different realm after all, become God Himself. When we realize that, when we realize the implications of it all, how can we not help but fall on our knees, let alone refrain from chewing gum? This seems hard, doesn't it? How do we get people to see the mass like this? Oh, I tend to think it's a lot easier than we might imagine because already programmed deep within us is this love for story. C. S. Lewis went on to say quote I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than, from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian, we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth, fact though it has become, with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths, the one is hardly more necessary than the other end quote. The one who gets excited about the new Star Wars, or the one who says ain't baseball romantic. They have within them the capacity to fall in love with the mass. Now what they need is the story, the whole context of the Mass. They need to understand the story because this story has far more implications than a fictional movie or sports game. I'm fond of the show The Big Bang Theory, and here's what I find so cliche and ironic about it. One of the main characters, Sheldon Cooper, is the scientist who loves to solve the world's biggest math and physics mysteries, but he can't get enough of Star Wars and Marvel Comics and Battlestar Galactica, Sci-Fi this and Superhero that. Stories he knows to be fiction, oh but any talk of Christianity he scoffs at, as though it's nothing but fictional fairy tale nonsense. Isn't that ironic? Or as C S. Le.wis puts it, quote, I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. End quote. So what if we were not to ignore the myths we don't believe, but rather elevate the myth we know to be true? That is the key to change everything. When we sit down to watch a movie or a sports game, there's a part of our brain that lights up . Yet when we attend mass, there's probably quite a different part of our brain that becomes activated. And maybe that's the problem. We've let the fairy tale part of our brain activate during the movie and the government compliance part of our brain activate during the mass. And so we need two ingredients to reawaken our sense of wonder when it comes to the mass. First, we need to understand the story , and then we need to reawaken our imagination . The story is this: the God of the universe came down to heaven and became man, he became one of us, but only he experienced life quite differently than us, much more extreme than any of us will. He was born from a woman, but not just a woman, a virgin. He was born not in a hospital, but a stable. He had an ethnicity , but his country was always under foreign occupation. He faced temptation like us, but he did not succumb to it. He ate like us, but he also fasted for forty days without food or water. And he died like all of us will, only he died a horrific and brutal death. And of course in extraordinary form he rose from the dead. Every myth, every epic, every story you love has some element of this story. And now that we know the story, we need to reawaken our imagination. This is something we foolishly suppress as we get older. Imagination is not for children only , it is for all of us. Imagination is not make believe, it's faith. It's seeing the reality that is right there, that we know is there, but that elude our senses. Sometimes mass es drab, and the priests' mannerisms are distracting, and the music is uninspiring, oh and that's when we really need our imagination . I often altar serve at my parish, and sometimes Not make believe. My mind is tuning into the frequency of an eternal reality. In that moment, I am not just at my parish in Utah. I am at the cross. I am not just kneeling on a hardwood floor, but on the dirt and gravel at Galgatha. ames, stop for a moment and contemplate the saints. What makes them saints? It isn't that they did their earthly duties well, but rather that they did them without leaving the perspective and transcendence of heaven. Imagine reading the Chronicles of Narnia and hearing the Pevensy children, Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter say, I can't wait to leave Narnia and go back to the English countryside? Imagine if they refused to believe that Narnia was real. Or imagine if they stumbled back into the wardrobe and into the English countryside and went back to life as though nothing ever happened , we would throw the book across the room because of the dense dim wittedness of the characters. Now imagine our story. Our wardrobe is the mass, and our readers are the angels and saints. They watch us as we venture into another realm. What will we become? Will we leave Mass and go back to our life in the quote-unquote real world as though nothing ever happened? Or will we realize that the real world all along was in the mass ? Thank you for joining me for Y Catholic. Be sure to subscribe to Y Catholic wherever you get your podcast. And you can also subscribe to my Substack site and get the next episode in your email inbox. As a subscriber, you get a special discount code to the YCatholic Etsy store. If you've been blessed by this podcast and you're feeling generous, there's also a way to financially support it and patrons get some extra perks. To become a free subscriber or a patron, just go to whyCatholic.substack .com/slash subscribe. Also join me on Instagram at Y Catholic Podcast All One Word. Thanks again for listening. My name is Justin Hibbert, and this is Y Catholic. God bless you.