{"id":40406,"date":"2018-01-14T13:55:22","date_gmt":"2018-01-14T19:55:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/?p=40406"},"modified":"2018-01-19T19:56:25","modified_gmt":"2018-01-20T01:56:25","slug":"at-night-there-are-tears-but-joy-comes-with-dawn-lords-day-reflections-on-a-shrinking-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2018\/01\/14\/at-night-there-are-tears-but-joy-comes-with-dawn-lords-day-reflections-on-a-shrinking-church\/","title":{"rendered":"At Night There Are Tears, but Joy Comes with Dawn: Lord\u2019s Day Reflections on a Shrinking Church"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As we gathered today around Word and Table to keep the Lord\u2019s Day, many of us will have noticed, as we increasingly do, that the congregation was small and the church rather empty. And those who did come were largely over 50 or 60 years old. Yes, some younger people, and some parents with children, but not a lot. High schoolers? Young adults? Hardly.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s shocking. And depressing. And fear-inducing. Where will we be in 10 years if this continues?<\/p>\n<p>Then we regularly see headlines such as<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cDenomination X membership has declined by 20% in only Y years\u201d;<\/li>\n<li>\u201cDiocese X\u201d is closing 75 parishes\u201d;<\/li>\n<li>\u201cFewer than X% of Gen-Z Post-Millennials have a favorable image of church\u201d;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>and so forth, and on and on.<\/p>\n<p>Where\u2019s the hope? Where\u2019s the joy? Where\u2019s the reason to trust in God\u2019s providence?<\/p>\n<p>The place to start, I believe, is not with reassuring Happy-Talk, but with sadness.<\/p>\n<p>It hurts to see so much decline and decay. It\u2019s painful to contrast the present with our memories of 10 or 25 or 50 years ago. There is even bitterness. (When one diocese called its plan \u201cMaking All Things New,\u201d I heard of someone calling it \u201cMaking All Things Disappear.\u201d) We want to lament in the words of Psalm 42:5, \u201cHow I would lead the rejoicing crowd into the house of God, amid cries of gladness and thanksgiving, the throng wild with joy.\u201d The crowds are gone now, the throngs are a distant memory.<\/p>\n<p>The psalms are our friend in these struggles. The psalter is highly attuned to painful human emotions, and it does not shy away from expressing raw feelings of sadness, fear, and anger.<\/p>\n<p>It is a fundamental dynamic of the psalter, over and over, that God moves us from sadness to joy, from fear to trust, from hardship to wellbeing. \u201cAt night there are tears, but joy comes with dawn.\u201d (Psalm 30:6)<\/p>\n<p>But we have to go through the night, long though it be. There are tears, and we have to cry them.<\/p>\n<p>It is a basic human insight that we have to mourn and grieve in order to let go of what is gone. We have to <em>feel<\/em> the sadness in order to move toward acceptance.<\/p>\n<p>In my experience \u2013 and I admit I\u2019m not very good at crying or feeling sadness \u2013 it is only after a period of tearful letting go that I can accept painful reality. (St. Benedict refers to \u201cprayer with tears of compunction\u201d so readily in the <em>Rule,<\/em> it makes me wonder whether maybe 6<sup>th<\/sup>-century Mediterranean males weren\u2019t more comfortable with emotions than Minnesota farm boys. Who knows?) After I&#8217;ve cried through the sadness \u2013 and this always comes as a surprise \u2013 I discover new joys in the\u00a0unexpected future that begins to shape up before my eyes.<\/p>\n<p>New joys? Really?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Maybe a smaller community offers deepened experiences of fellowship and mutual support.<\/li>\n<li>Maybe the acoustics are less difficult in a smaller worship space, and you only need 3 singers to have great-sounding chant. (And a smaller group is easier to coordinate.)<\/li>\n<li>Maybe a smaller congregation can better sing unaccompanied in parts at times \u2013 with a little help from a few strong singers \u2013 and the experience is delightfully inspiring.<\/li>\n<li>Maybe it now becomes possible to have home-baked eucharistic bread and wine for all, and the communal experience is deepened of being drawn into the Lord\u2019s self-giving sacrifice.<\/li>\n<li>Maybe the \u201cother\u201d becomes non-believers, rather than Christians of other traditions, and one comes to the ecumenical realization that \u201cthose Prots\u201d or \u201cthose RCs\u201d are really my allies.<\/li>\n<li>Maybe the realization that church-going Christians are a minority deepens one\u2019s sense of Christian discipleship.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One way to avoid the tears \u2013 and also miss out on the new joys \u2013 is to stay stuck in simplistic blaming masquerading as analysis. Optionally, mix in some anger and sarcasm. When you\u2019re angry, you feel so powerfully in charge \u2026 and you\u2019re able to keep at bay the tears of sadness.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cIt\u2019s vernacular Mass facing the people that drove them away.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cIf we hadn\u2019t given up the King James and the old hymnal, we would have kept our identity and staying power.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;They shut down the glory days of 1980s progressivism, and that explains our difficulties.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>\u201cThe crisis of the church is at root a crisis of liturgy.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Yeah right. Longing for a forever-gone past is so often a coping strategy of staying in one\u2019s head, or perhaps in one\u2019s anger, in order to avoid sadness. But it comes at a costly price. It prevents us from moving forward. (Constructive, fact-based analysis is another thing.)<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAt night there are tears, but joy comes with dawn.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Christian name for the movement from tears to joy is, of course, Death and Resurrection. Christian faith tells us that, precisely in the midst of church closings and a vocation shortage and denominational shrinkage , the Resurrected Lord is powerfully at work in unexpected ways.<\/p>\n<p>Believe the promise. Accept the tears. Be\u00a0open to new joys.<\/p>\n<p>awr<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Where will we be in 10 years if this continues??<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":40410,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[3119,2480],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-plaza-new-ws","category-secularism"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>At Night There Are Tears, but Joy Comes with Dawn: Lord\u2019s Day Reflections on a Shrinking Church - 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Anthony Ruff, OSB, is a monk of St. John's Abbey. He teaches liturgy, liturgical music, and Gregorian chant at St. John's University School of Theology-Seminary. He is widely published and frequently presents across the country on liturgy and music. He is the author of Sacred Music and Liturgical Reform: Treasures and Transformations, and of Responsorial Psalms for Weekday Mass: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter. He does priestly ministry at the neighboring community of Benedictine sisters in St. Joseph.","url":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/author\/aruff\/"}]}},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Empty-Church-2.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40406"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40503,"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40406\/revisions\/40503"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}