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I admit I can get emotional watching sports. I’ve been known not to sit down once during an entire hockey game, pacing incessantly in front of the TV telepathically “coaching” the electronic images flickering on the other side of the screen.
When I’m at the game and the Rangers score, I’m right there with the rest of the Garden faithful singing the Rangers GOAL song.
At church I’m considerably more circumspect. Unlike some, if not most of my fellow parishioners, I do sing the hymns. I don’t consider myself a “pew potato.” But my singing voice seldom rises above a near whisper, audible probably only to those in my immediate vicinity.
So I had no trouble recognizing myself when Pope Francis gently questioned why some Catholics have difficulty generating the kind of effervescent enthusiasm we exhibit at sporting events when we pray.
“We find it easy to understand praying to ask God for something and also to thank the Lord,” he said at his Jan. 28 early morning Mass. But prayers of praise “don’t come so spontaneously.” He focused his homily on a line from the day’s first reading, which described David as “dancing before the Lord with abandon.”
He said he recognized some people might think they just can’t pray that way. But then he countered, “You’re able to shout when your team makes a goal, but you cannot sing the Lord’s praises?”
I have to admit he had me.
But then he added, “I wonder how many times we scorn in our hearts good people who praise the Lord naturally, spontaneously.”
Yikes! That could be me too. In church I’m a formal guy. I wouldn’t say I scorn them exactly, that’s kind of a strong word, but I admit I have trouble with some of the more overt aspects of faith, the joined hands during the Our Father, any spontaneous exclamation of praise, of the “hallelujah, praise the Lord” variety. I find myself thinking, “OK, let’s have some decorum in here, folks!”
Explaining more of the reading from the 6th chapter of the Second Book of Samuel, Pope Francis noted how Michal, the daughter of Saul, reproached David for dancing in public and making a spectacle of himself. (I’m picturing iconic Ranger fan Dancin’ Larry here.) The chapter ends abruptly relating that Michal remained “childless to the day she died.”
“Prayers of praises make us fruitful,” the Holy Father continued. “Those who close themselves in the formality of cold, careful prayer might end up like Michal in the sterility of their formality.”
So can I transfer a little bit of the enthusiasm I display at the Garden on a Thursday or Saturday night to church on a Sunday morning? I admit it will be hard. I’m not a “praise the Lord!” kind of guy. But maybe I can start by singing just a little louder.
Dancing with abandon? I’m not quite there yet.
