Is Charismatic Renewal for Real? part 15

Letter to Kerry Zmatick, continued (please, won’t somebody put a stop to this endless harangue?)

Let us again refer to St. Paul.   

“When you come together, let each of you have a psalm…” 1Cor. 14 26.   

This will never work. You can’t just let anybody sing at a prayer meeting. A prayer meeting has to have a music ministry, the purpose thereof, to get the people going and to make the whole thing a better experience of worship.  (What this really means is that a meeting without decent music can be numbingly boring.) We are a spectator society. We want to have someone else do the work for us. 

When I was a lad, we still used to learn how to play a musical instrument and would sing while we dried the dishes. Now we put the dishes in the dishwasher and watch television. The Charismatic Renewal has a strong element of the consumer culture. 

“How do you expect me to pray without someone leading worship and a decent music ministry? I come to prayer meetings to be uplifted.”   

Oh. I thought you came to praise the Lord. I have actually heard people say, “Tonight we’ll have to cancel the prayer meeting . We don’t have any music!” What they actually mean is that they have no one to play instruments. The old ladies I mentioned earlier who would lock themselves in church for the night with pillows and coffee pots had music. They had it in their hearts and souls. They would come armed with nothing but tambourines and determination and they would sing for hours as the Holy Spirit prompted them. I am not against good music, but again, one can structure the brains out of a prayer meeting. 

The point of a prayer meeting is to hear from the Holy Spirit. I have been to prayer meetings that seem more like a show with five or six acts. If there is a lull in the doings the choir gets up, goes to the microphones and sings an inspiring number and when they are done the prayer group leader says “Let’s all stand up and really just praise the Lord.”  

When I was a lad and first involved in these things, our group had an out-of-tune piano and an old lady for the music ministry. Somebody in the meeting would start an old chorus like, “We see the Lord, He is high and lifted up..” The piano would chime in exactly on key. (I call this the charismatic gift of ukalalia. For the humor impaired, I am joking.) We would sing those words from Isaiah over and over again, because in our hearts we did see the Lord, high and lifted up. (Isaiah 6:1) I remember a night of wonderful testimonies and as each of us shared a story of what the Lord had done in the past week, we would break into the old chorus “In the name of Jesus, we have the victory...” It was schmaltzy,  it was childish and it was wonderful fun. Nothing was planned, no two songs were alike, and no one led music.

As I said, I have nothing against good music, or even bad music for that matter. My problem is with self-aggrandizing music.  I remember a retreat for all the prayer group choirs in Frostbite Falls. I asked if any of the choirs ever went into the church privately and serenaded Our Lord in the tabernacle. Of the thirty or forty prayer group choirs present, one said they actually did that regularly. I was shocked that one choir actually had thought of it. I expected no one to have made music just for the Lord. 

I once read an old article from a Boston newspaper that read, “At yesterday’s gathering the Rev. Doctor Blatherworth delivered the finest prayer ever offered to a Boston audience.” It could also have read “the finest hymn ever sung to a prayer group.” If you have a music ministry that is absolutely in love with the Lord and which sings and plays solely because they love the Lord, that’s great. If you know of such a group, I’d like to meet them. You know how to tell such a group? I’ve already said it. Take away their microphones. I have had more difficulties with prayer group choirs than I care to remember -- power struggles, hurt feelings when a lead singer is replaced, choir directors storming out, recriminations about failure to attend practices, fights about money and record profits. You can tell when a Charismatic music ministry is on the skids spiritually. They decide to record an album. Then they get invitations to go to other meetings get invited to do conferences. They have finally made the big time. Incidentally, one can buy their recordings at the book table. 

“But Father, we are doing this to help people. They can listen to our music at home and in their cars and feel closer to the Lord.” 

They may feel closer to the Lord, but God would rather they BE closer to Him by obeying His perfect will. When it’s about how you feel, it’s no longer about the Lord.

Church choirs need practice, but I would venture that a real prayer group choir shouldn’t practice, except when they are going to sing in a locked church before the Tabernacle with no spectators present. Offer the best to the Lord, but let the Holy Spirit inspire the prayer meeting. No practices, no microphones, no adoring fans. Do it for the Lord. If there are no musicians, sing songs yourself -- flat, out of key, rasping, cat-howling songs. If they come from the heart and are inspired by the love of God, Heaven will really enjoy them, just as you enjoy songs that your children make up. A prayer meeting is a gathering of the people of God for the free exercise of the gifts of God. It is not a polished liturgical performance for the amusement of the congregation. So, dump the music ministries. Keep the music but dump the music ministries.

Next, the absolute worst idea of all! Dump the Charismatic Mass. It is a liturgical abuse of the worst kind. Mass is the unbloody re-presentation of Calvary, not of Pentecost. Mass is the solemn Sacrament, the New Covenant in the Blood of Christ. 

You must be tired of my telling you that the Latin word Sacramentum means an “oath to the death.”  I go to Mass to swear my blood oath to give my life for Christ and His Bride, the Church. I certainly receive at Mass, if I am properly disposed to God’s grace, but that is not why I go to Mass. I go to offer my life with His on the altar. That’s why we call it the sacrifice of the Mass. We don’t call it the sacrifice of the prayer meeting. Mass is a covenant ceremony and as such it is a carefully and beautifully structured liturgy. 

“But I get so much more out of a Charismatic Mass! I am so bored at those regular Masses.” 

You sound like the kind of person who, standing at the foot of Christ’s cross, would have gotten bored about an hour and a half into the crucifixion and gone off to see if there were a concession stand nearby. If Christ had been crucified in a mega-church, at least then you could have gone out to the lobby and gotten a cappuccino. 

There is nothing spontaneous about Mass. Everything should be spontaneous about a prayer meeting. It seems that sometimes Charismatics want spontaneous Masses and structured prayer meetings! Have a prayer and praise session before Mass. Pray for the sick after Mass, but please let Mass be Mass. To conform Mass to a particular modern taste is to cut it off from the well springs of history and the communion of the Church. Mass is something we do in fellowship with a billion people alive today and with billions more who have left this world or have not yet entered it. At Mass we are made one with all believers in space and in time and beyond time. 

At a prayer meetings we struggle to hear the Holy Spirit. Mass is worship. A prayer meeting is not worship. A prayer meeting is wonderful in its prayer and praise, but Mass is true worship, because there is no worship worthy of the Majesty of Heaven, except the perfect sacrifice of the Son of God on Calvary. My hand clapping enthusiasm is a wonderful thing, but it cannot compare to the Blood shed on the altar of the Cross. 

When people invite me to say a Charismatic Mass, I always say, “Sorry, I only know how to say a Catholic Mass," and I mean exactly that. The structured nature of the Mass makes it universal. I am doing what they do in India and Africa and China and in Heaven. A prayer meeting is a wonderful thing. In a sense, it is the opposite of universal. It is local. The Holy Spirit makes the universal and unchanging Word of God specific to the needs and the situation of a small local group. This is a good thing. 

The intimacy of the prayer group is wonderful. It should not be made liturgical. It is not meant to have a structure. It is meant to be spontaneous. A good prayer meeting can make the Mass more meaningful but it is not the Mass. Don’t confuse them. Dump the Charismatic Mass, no matter how nice it is and how good it feels.

Next week: What is this speaking in tongues nonsense?

Is Charismatic Renewal for Real? part 14

Letter to Kerry Zmatick, (as if anyone is still reading this nonsense.)

Once again, the best definition of a prayer meeting: "A gathering of the people of God for the free exercise of the gifts of God."

We have already dumped the microphones and, more importantly, the teaching and the teachers. There is still a problem. Prayer meetings have always attracted a group of people whom I call the “Sacred Screwballs,” or the “Loons of the Lord.” They have a tendency to see the prayer groups as their own private therapy group. Shouldn’t there be leaders to pounce on them when they begin to dominate the prayer group? This question is related to the wider problem which I call “the Church oughta do something about this...”   

People come up to me all the time and say, “Father, you need to tell that lady in the eighth pew on the left who wears enough perfume to gag a goat that she should tone it down.”  

To which I respond, “Have you told her that?” 

To which the complainer usually responds, “Oh no, Father. That would be impolite. I would never dare to do that. What would she think? You’re the pastor. Isn’t it your job?” 

No, it is not my job. It’s your job. My job as pastor is still two steps away.   

“If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church.  If they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.” (Matt: 18:15-18) 

That means you talk to them, then if they don’t listen, go to them with a couple other people in the group and then if they still don’t listen. Discuss it publicly in the group. Right there in the prayer meeting. Right out loud. In front of everybody!!! But isn’t that impolite? No, it’s honest, and it’s what Jesus tells us to do. No one person should be able to foist his agenda on a group of people. That’s not what a prayer meeting is for. 

Let us consider some scenarios.  One of God’s little helpers comes to the prayer meeting with the express purpose of getting everyone into the "Eighteen Hail Mary Every Leap Year Devotion" that

St. Baldric received during an ecstatic vision and which he explains for us in his third locution for

St. Swiven’s Day. It becomes evident our devotee of St. Baldric is going into a rant of more than two or three minutes. 

If you ("Who me?" "Yes, you.") are uncomfortable with the direction of the rant, take authority. Raise your hand and say, “We don’t have teachings at our meeting. Perhaps you can share this with us over coffee.”  Say it with a smile. Pretend to be open-minded and tolerant. If they refuse to shut up at that point, then a couple of you can ask to see the Locutor outside, and explain the situation. If the Locutor is still intent on taking over your prayer group, bring it up in front of the whole group. This is the Biblical “One, Two, Three or More Ecclesial Heave Ho” approach. 

Pretty soon people will stop using your little prayer and praise group as private therapy. It’s hard at first, but it really works. When someone wants to take over the group let him know right away, that is not what we are here for. You have no teaching. Maybe a brief testimony, two or three minutes, a prophetic word, but never more than two or three of those. That’s what St. Paul says. (1Cor. 14:29) 

I get the biggest kick out of those conventions where five or ten prophets line up at the microphone with their prophetic note books in hand and start off with “My little children....” Haven’t these people read the Bible? If someone writes a prophecy down, you can pretty much count on it not being a prophecy, unless of course it’s Isaiah or Habakkuk or one of that crowd. 

What about prayer for the sick? 

I would suggest that if someone asks for prayer, let the group pray for them. If a lot of people ask for prayer, pray for the sick and the needy at the end of the meeting. But by no means allow a collection to be taken up at any prayer meeting. Any money collected must be accounted for by the parish office. That’s the law. 

 

“But how will we meet expenses?” 

What expenses? 

"There’s always cake and coffee at the end of the meeting. How does that get paid for?"

Have people bring a coffee cake. Don’t take up any kind of collection. Few things corrupt a group faster than petty cash. If you have to have any committees, make it a cleanup committee. Remember?  Jesus said that true leadership is about being a busboy or busgirl. (Is that a word?) If some representative of the group needs to be sent on a mission, it should be a member of the clean up committee. 

Speaking as pastor, I can tell you these are our favorite committees. If somebody does clean up, I tend to listen to them. If someone comes in and says, “Roving Avars have stolen everything we own,” and asks to take up a collection. Don’t do it. It is against diocesan and IRS rules and 99.999% of the time it is a scam. 

I remember a poor fellow who would come to a prayer group with his desperately ill son in a wheel chair and weep as he explained his plight. Outside, after the meeting his kid would get out of the wheel chair, pack it in the car’s trunk and move on to the next prayer group. You are on for charity in your private lives, but not at the prayer group. You are not a church. You are a prayer group. Nothing more, nothing less. Remember what the Lord said, “Where you find the corpse, the vultures will gather.” (Matt. 24:28) Believe me I’ve known a lot of vultures who never missed a prayer meeting.

How will we make decisions? 

What decisions? Decisions on theology are the responsibility of the church, not the prayer group. Decisions such as what time should we start the meeting -- the meeting starts when the church hall is opened and someone starts praying. 

How will we decide when the meeting is over? 

It’s over when people have prayed long enough. If you want to pray for an hour and a half, pray for an hour and a half. If someone else want to stay praying until midnight, what harm is there in that? Go home. Get some rest. Do what the Spirit prompts you to do, not what everyone else is doing. ( I would, however suggest that those who want to pray through the night be automatically made members of the clean up committee.) If there is a decision to be made, ask the Holy Spirit. If that fails, ask the pastor. That will surprise him.  

How do you ask the Holy Spirit? 

It’s easy. Someone in the group asks the question: “Lord, should we have blueberry muffins or walnut muffins after the meeting?" Then pray. If a consensus forms, you’ve got a decision, a consensus being two thirds plus one. If it’s good enough to elect a pope, it’s good enough to decide on pastry. If there is a majority, that’s not good enough. Don’t do anything until you’ve got a consensus. Remember what the disciples said in the Acts of the Apostles. “It seems good to us and to the Holy Spirit...”  (Acts 15:28)

Also, smaller is better. All you need for a prayer meeting is two or three people. Small can be a good thing. Remember, you’ve got no microphones, so if the group gets too big, start a second group. Meet in your homes until there is no more room, then meet in the church hall or in a classroom. DON”T MEET IN A CHURCH!!! (unless you are going to behave yourself.) 

In the presence of the Blessed Sacrament there is no conversation, no shouting, no prophecy. You are in the Great Presence. Everything should be directed at the Lord, present in the Eucharist. Prophecy is directed to the hearers, not to the Lord. We are in the presence of the Lord in His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity. Our prophesying is imperfect. Let the perfect Presence speak in its silence without you kibitzing. 

A prayer meeting is not to be confused with Eucharistic Adoration. They are two different things. If you are going to have a prayer meeting, meet downstairs where you can swing from the chandeliers, shout at the top of your lungs, jump up and down, share testimonies about the Lord’s wonders and have coffee in Styrofoam cups along with your blueberry (or walnut) muffins. I love that kind of prayer meeting. It is abhorrent, however, to do all that, especially the Styrofoam cups, in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. 

“But the prayer meeting is so wonderful with the Blessed Sacrament present! There are so many blessings!” 

Fine, go upstairs and be blessed, just mind your  manners, because when you are in the presence of the Sacrament, you are not at a prayer meeting. You are in the presence of the Great King. Behave that way!

So let’s get this straight: dump the teaching, dump the microphone, dump the leadership, dump the collections, dump guest lecturers invited and uninvited, dump the time schedule, dump meetings in the church. (I suppose meetings in the church are okay if they really are prayer and praise.) 

What will this bozo want us to dump next?   

I’ll tell you what this bozo really wants! Dump the music ministry.

Next week: “Be still and know that I am God.”

Is Charistmatic Renewal for real? part 12

(Letter to Kerry Zmatick continued, like you’re surprised.)

I like prayer meetings. I really do. Despite my recent comments I think prayer meetings are a good thing. It’s just that most prayer meetings aren’t prayer meetings. They have more talking than praying. 

In the early days of the Charismatic/Pentecostal movement, we were starved for teaching. Remember? This was 1968. Catholics had just rediscovered the Bible, some Catholics that is. As a child I had the Bible rammed down my gullet. I could never understand it when I heard Catholics say they didn’t read the Bible in the good old days. All the great authorities I knew from my father to Monsignor O’Brien, the local pastor were always pushing the Bible. 

One of my earliest memories is looking at the pretty pictures in the Bible while sitting on my mother’s lap. We had Bible history, we owned Bibles, I had children’s Bibles bought at the parish bookstore. I still have my mother’s old Bible that she had as a school girl back in the first world war when Henry Ford was a ne’er do well farm boy down the road apiece. (His father thought he would never amount to much. Didn’t do a lick of work, just sat in the barn all day tinkering with motors. I‘m not making that up either.) When we cleaned out Grandma’s attic we found all sorts of Bible study books in German from around the 1880's, and Grandma was as Catholic as a Cathedral gargoyle! We read the Bible. Trust me. Big family dinners usually ended with a Bible, a bottle of wine and a theological argument at the table. I thus can’t figure out why people were hungry for teaching, but they were. 

I got my start in the teaching biz right about then. In about 1970, I wandered into a prayer meeting in the old town section of Frostbite Falls and when they found out I was in the seminary, I was appointed to lead the introductory seminar for those who were first time visitors to the prayer meeting. I was to explain the history, the Biblical nature and the theology of the Pentecostal movement and then field questions. It didn’t matter that I had been coming to the prayer group for only a week and that I knew absolutely nothing about the topic I was supposed to explain. It didn’t matter that I was a recently re-converted college student of questionable sanity and recent sobriety. ( It was the groovy 60's, and I was a part-time hippy.) I had a pulse and was thinking about becoming a Catholic priest. It was all good. 

That was what passed for teaching in the early days of the movement. If you could compose a sentence that contained both nouns and verbs and you mentioned God occasionally, you were golden. When there wasn’t a likely victim to throw to the teaching hungry crowd, there were always plenty of non-Catholics who were willing to come and rustle, er... I mean, feed the sheep. It was rhetorical, theological bedlam. And I was in the thick of it, blathering away about something about which I knew almost nothing. 

We were big on John 14 :25  

“All this I have spoken while still with you, but the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.”   

We interpreted this to mean that the Holy Spirit would infuse Biblical and theological knowledge. We failed to notice that the text says the Holy Spirit would remind us of what Jesus had said. 

Discipleship precedes teaching. If you haven’t learned anything then there is nothing of which the Holy Spirit can remind you. We appointed ourselves as teachers and ascribed to ourselves what amounted to infallibility. I am sure I have told you about one of great teachers of the Icelandic renewal to which I was the bishop’s representative, a deacon who stood up before all the assembled leaders of the movement and directing his comments at me, and said, “I don’t need a pope or a bishop or a priest to tell me what to say. I have the Holy Spirit.” He also had a sweet deal with the movement’s steering committee that gave him $5,000 for a down payment for his a new car and also funneled thousands a year to the parish where he was employed, guaranteeing his job and his salary. 

There were some really good teachers and there were some  infallible, self appointed  teachers in the renewal who taught things like smokin’, drinkin’ and dancin’ were all mortal sins and that when the saints were raptured into heaven after the three days of darkness and the thousand years tribulation of the seven-headed beast the sinners who smoked, danced and drank would be left behind. And all this was going to happen on February 30^th next year because a truck driver in Arkansas had taken a picture that was obviously Jesus walking on the clouds, but we didn’t have to worry because we were saved and once saved, always saved. Oh, and you had to be re-Baptized by immersion because infant Baptism and sprinkling didn’t work. (I may be exaggerating, but not by much. I think I still have a copy of the photo of Jesus walking on the clouds.) 

We were hungry for teaching -- any kind of teaching -- and we would believe just about anything if it was said with enough intensity and phrased in Biblical sounding language. A prayer meeting had to have a teaching. The “leaders” met every week to plan these spontaneous prayer meetings and inevitably the question was asked, “Who is going to give the TEACHING this week?”, or even “Whose turn is it to give the TEACHING this week?”  It never occurred to us that it is nowhere written that a prayer meeting must have a teaching. Of course a prayer meeting had to have a teaching! That’s somewhere in the Bible isn’t it? So we created a whole class of quasi-ordained preachers, many of whom were cretins, some of whom were predators. We would even impose hands on them in blessing, asking for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It looked just like a Congregationalist ordination ceremony. The prayer meetings seem to have less and less prayer and more and more teaching. The teachers were a special group, the superstars of the movement. Exciting dynamic teaching was wonderful. It meant that I could sit in a padded seat and absorb. I could gauge my level of charismatic-ness by the frequency of my goose bumps during a good sermon without actually having to use any of the charisms in the service of others.

An inspiring teacher was revered. His or her tapes and recordings would make the rounds of the groups. People came to meetings with tape recorders and note books, and if a teacher was really good, he would be invited to speak at a..... CONFERENCE! He was then in the big leagues. He would fly to places like Guatemala to give talks, meanwhile people from Guatemala would fly to Frostbite  Falls to give talks. It occurred to me at one point, why don’t the talkers from Guatemala just talk in Guatemala and the Frostbite Falls talkers just talk in Frostbite Falls. It would have saved a lot of money, and I still wonder where all those frequent flyer miles went. The big league teachers were on the road a lot and they weren’t part of a community anymore, really. They didn’t actual go to prayer meetings to pray. They went to give the TALK. And while they were on the road talking about the Christian life, their spouse would occasionally make new friends and sometimes their children would meet interesting new people in jail. It was, as I have already explained, bedlam -- sometimes Bedlam and Breakfast. Prayer groups risked becoming fan clubs as people “piled up teachers to suit their own fancy.” (2 Tim 4:4)

There were a number of things that came together to change the meetings from places of spiritual power to a spectator sport. The hunger for knowledge was genuine, but somehow what we had always been taught wasn’t exciting. People found most of the clergy boring, which in fact we often are. I remember the hushed buzz if a charismatic priest came to a meeting, even if he was boring. I also learned that if you yelled every fifth word for no good reason, waved your arms and turned red people would mistake this for the anointing of the Holy Spirit. (More about the anointing of the Holy Spirit later. It is a very real and wonderful thing and has nothing to do with shouting.)  If you were a priest but weren’t charismatic, well... needless to say, the 99.999% percent of priests who weren’t Charismatic were a bit put off by the distinction. There were not many priests who took the whole Pentecostal thing very seriously and so the Holy Loons and the Sheep Rustling Ministers were happy to take up the Sacred Microphone in their stead. It is a heady thing to be a factory worker by day and then to have a microphone in your hand at night with 500 people hanging on your every word as if it were the voice of God, a heady thing indeed. I suspect that the factory work by day is much more Christ-like than the preaching at night. Let us not forget that Jesus was in the building trades for 18 years, and often tried to escape His fans.  As the Pentecostal movement grew, and morphed into Charismatic Renewal, the big fish in the small ponds became a leadership elite. The power and intimacy of Pentecost faded. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit risked becoming a sort of entertainment.

I would suggest, that if you want to have real prayer meeting, dump the teaching. If you want to have teaching, have a teaching seminar. Don’t confuse the two. Teachers must be tested. “Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.” (James 3:1) Anyone can pray, and “the Lord dwells in the praises of His people” (Psalm 22:3) not in the teaching of the leaders. Teaching is a very important thing, but it is not prayer. The apostles spent nine days in prayer; “These all with one mind were continually devoting themselves to prayer, along with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brothers.” (Acts 1:19)

Admittedly, they did pick a replacement for Judas, but even that was done by means of prayer. There is no mention that they did Bible Study for nine days. After the Holy Spirit fell on Pentecost, Peter delivered one of the great Bible studies of history, but it was the result of, not the cause of Pentecost. So, having dumped the microphone, I would suggest that you dump the teachings. 

When you pray, pray. When you study, study, albeit prayerfully. There are lots of competent teachers out there now who take the charisms seriously. There is now and always has been plenty of good teaching in the Catholic Church. You don’t need to find 20-year-old recently converted reprobates like me to guide you in the use of the Lord’s favors.

When I came home from my first year of college I told my parents all about this new Pentecost, I told them that you could have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and that God healed the sick and that the Bible was God’s word and prophesy was real. They were mystified. They had always tried to teach me those things. That’s why they had crammed the Bible down my throat ever since Henry Ford left the farm. I realized they were right and I stayed a Catholic. I am awfully glad that I did.

Is Charismatic Renewal for Real? part 10

(Letter to Kerry Zmatick continued)

Let me begin by saying that this current extended tirade may be nothing more than a confession of my own sins. I am a very bad Charismatic and the true

Charismatics whom I am insulting are guilty of none of these things. If you are offended by my remarks, please understand that they couldn’t possibly refer to you. Keep that in mind as I continue to rant.

In my last installment, I tore up prayer meetings pretty thoroughly and then said that I really like a good prayer meeting. Allow me to explain. Most prayer meetings, so called, aren't prayer meetings at all. There isn't a lot of prayer that actually goes on.  At a mediocre prayer meeting, there is music, the purpose of which is to get people in “the mood.” There are testimonials that are also helpful, to get people in the mood. There is a lengthy teaching, which as often as not is supposed to inspire people about how to get into the mood.  Then there is the mood, and everyone leaves happy.  Remember, elsewhere I have told you that Martin Luther redirected the sacrifice of the Mass when he said that the Mass was not a sacrifice, but that it existed for the consolation and instruction of the people. Luther took the focus off God and made the congregation the object of the service. The service was no longer directed at heaven. It became earthbound. The earthbound liturgy of the reformation ultimately has no means of gauging its success other than the way that it makes people feel.  This error has made its way into every kind of Protestantism including Protestant Pentecostalism and now makes its way, like an infection, into Catholicism by means of an inauthentic ecumenism. (“There really is no difference between us.” “We worship the same God.”  “In our hearts we're undivided .” That sort of nonsense.)

"So what should a good prayer meeting be?" I thought you'd never ask!  The best definition  I've ever heard is that "a prayer meeting is a gathering of the people of God for the free exercise of the gifts of God.” Now that I have thoroughly demolished the idea that the charismatic manifestations are “gifts”, we’ll let it slide this time. Add to this the classic definition of prayer as “a lifting of the heart and mind to God” and you’ve pretty much nailed it. What passes for a prayer meeting is really the liturgy of a kind of parallel charismatic church. But a prayer meeting is simply a meeting where people pray spontaneously. 

The best prayer meetings I’ve ever attended were completely unscripted. The old Pentecostals had something called the “tarry service.” An old translation of the Bible put it this way: “And, behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high.” Luke 24:49. The disciples were told to “tarry” that is to wait in Jerusalem for empowerment by the Holy Spirit. 

The old time Pentecostals would spend a night in prayer and intercession on Saturday night preparing for Sunday services. They would just pray and wait until the Holy Spirit showed up. Remember that the beginnings of Pentecost in the 20^th Century reach back to the Azusa Street Revival where Rev. Seymour would come into the building sometime in the early evening and Frank Bartelman, an early chronicler of the Pentecostal Movement,  recounts the congregation sat on wooden planks for pews and that “Brother Seymour generally sat behind two empty shoe boxes (packing crates), one on top of the other. He usually kept his head inside the top one during the meeting, in prayer. There was no pride there.... In that old building, with its low rafters and bare floors...”  The ceiling was too low for a raised platform for “the leadership” or for a formal pulpit. Brother Seymour would pray, face hidden away in a packing crate and the place would fill with a Holy Presence that changed lives and eventually changed the direction of Christianity, Protestant and Catholic alike. There were no microphones, no order of service, no music ministry. There was just utter, prayerful simplicity. The congregants would sing and pray and prophesy. The sick would be healed and the Gospel made visible, all without anyone looking at a watch or a printed sheet of instructions. 

The old Catholic Puerto Rican Charismatics (Oops! I mean Icelandic Charismatics) would do the same thing. They would lock themselves in church at night with their Bibles, their blankets, pillows and a coffee pot, and of course a few tambourines and they would seek God. They called it a “Vigilia”. They would stay there until they were done and they weren’t done until they knew that God had answered. How did they know that God had answered? They simply knew that they knew that they knew. These gatherings were amazing; the intensity, the joy and the sense of the nearness of Heaven. They were wonderful meetings because people really wanted God. When my time as the Bishop’s liaison to Spanish (Oops again) speaking prayer groups was over, they still had the Vigilias, but they ended promptly at 10 and were conducted by the “leadership.” There was a choir and a sermon and God was expected to sit quietly in the back of the church and let the leaders do the talking.

Those old tarry services and vigilias were like torrents in the desert, the thirsty soul revived and encouraged. These were very poor people. Their lives knew real sorrow, but they were capable of so much joy when they knew that they had encountered the Almighty. It was as if they had spent a few moments in Heaven, and I believe they really did. One of the most interesting things about those meetings was the profound silence that often fell on the group.

These days, a Charismatic meeting is gauged as successful only when there has been measurable auditory damage. This is achieved by the use of electrified instruments and microphones. But I remember meetings during which a hush  as thick as fog would fall over the crowd and one was almost afraid to look up. It was a kind of stillness that vibrated and glowed. In the midst of that tangible silence it seemed that someone had entered the room. It was like the beating of the wings of some great dove. You felt that if you lifted up your hands and stretched as far as you could, you could touch the silence. It was a silence that radiated strength and power from on high. Then the rejoicing would begin. There was shouting and weeping that was not forced or manipulated. God was in the silence. We human beings made the noise with our whole hearts and minds and souls and with all our strength. The excitement wasn’t divine, it was humanity meeting divinity and one understood what St. Irenaeus meant when he said, “The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God.” We used to sing an old chorus: “No puede estar triste el corazon que ama a Cristo, no puede estar triste el corazon que conoce a Dios. Por eso le canto...” “the heart that loves Christ cannot be sad, nor can the heart be sad that knows God. That is why I sing to Him...”

I am almost in tears to remember the joy of those meetings, and almost in tears to think of what has become of such a great favor bestowed by Heaven on the 20^th century, until now the worst and most fratricidal of centuries. God poured out a healing balm in the renewal of Pentecost and the in the Vatican Council, but the balm was stolen and replaced with a spirit of division and dominance. The scriptures say that “the gifts (charismata) and calling of God are irrevocable.” (Rom. 12:6) I hope with all my heart that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit called for by good Pope John in preparation for the Vatican Council can be rediscovered under the pile of nonsense by which it has been buried. 

You may have guessed, I have some suggestions about prayer meetings and the nature of  Charismatic manifestations. Thank you for letting an old man reminisce.

Next week: A few casual suggestions.