Holy Reminders

During the days of discernment just prior to our reception into the Catholic Church, I wandered into our local Catholic bookstore. It is now one of my favorite places to visit, but then it was a strange, almost alien place to be. There were statues everywhere I looked , of every description: tall, short, plastic, wood, porcelain, some attractive and some just plain hard to understand. The Infant Jesus of Prague was among the more mysterious statues I saw that day. For a few brief minutes I asked myself "What are you doing in a Catholic bookstore anyway? " I felt dislocated, yanked from my Protestant garden before the final freeze of the winter and put into a Catholic garden with no roots tough enough to survive what was to come.

As I said, Sacred Heart Books is now one of my favorite stores and I seek it out for every conceivable kind of book, statue, and sacramental related to our growing immersion in Catholicism. The Infant Jesus of Prague statue happens to be a particular favorite, though I don't yet own my own. I am on the lookout for just the right one.

The wonderful thing about statues, and many other things you can find at Sacred Heart Books, is the way they keep you alerted to the passing days in the liturgical year, and the devotions associated with those days. Adult converts such as myself have no way to discover the treasures of the devotional life of the church other than bit by bit. There is simply too much to take in, in one large gulp. I have said often that I regret all the "lost" years before becoming Catholic when I didn't know about the rosary, or novenas, or the difference between abstinence and true fasting. There is seemingly a lot of ground to cover in a short amount of time!

I had not remembered until a few days ago when my husband mentioned it, that today is the Solemnity of Saint Joseph. I missed the entire period of novena prayers and barely had time to reflect on the significance of the feast prior to today. Providentially, I have been reading a book about St. Joseph so that he and I are at least nodding acquaintances.

How many other novenas, or days of recollection, or saintly lives have I been missing that might fill out my devotional life in ways I can't now know? And how many life- long Catholics allow these days and with them their associated practices to speed by, unheeded?

I suppose we all need what Mother Angelica calls holy reminders, visual cues to a rich treasury of prayers and devotions available to help keep our lives focused on God's time more than on our own. That's the point, really, of all these statues. They help us live in a kind of parallel time, a broadly liturgical time, during which our days and hours and minutes are directed to God and united to his unceasing actions.

Or so it seems to me. Without all these reminders I could not keep track of the church calendar, beyond the most basic observance of Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter. The rest is not deeply ingrained in my life the way it once was for most Catholics, and still today for a few hold-outs.

I have Mary on my kitchen counter, my rosaries hang in my bedroom, and with those treasures my prayer life has taken on wonderful new dimensions. Padre Pio, Therese of Lisieux, Mother Theresa, all greet me on a bureau, and an angel sits on my piano. I plan to keep adding to the holy reminders, unless of course they stop serving as reminders. But I don't expect that to happen. I can't imagine I will live long enough! And then my daughter will be left with the lot, and she will have to decide what to keep. She will also have to decide what to keep of my husband's treasures, including his books. But that is a subject for another posting!

For now, all three of us in our small family have our reminders, our prayers, our ways of living in consecrated time even as we live in the material world. And may God be praised for each moment that we are able to offer to him because someone or something reminded us it was the time. Holy time, sacred time, God's time.