Where Have All The Devotions Gone?

To my delight, during the week I discovered that the Church celebrated the Memorial of Saints Joachim and Anne, the parents of the Blessed Mother. You may think what a devotional thought on the part of the author. Actually what has become the “Memorial” of Joachim and Anne since the renewal of the Vatican Council II was, in my youth, the Feast of Saint Anne! I celebrated the Mass with the appropriate prayers of the grandparents of Jesus, but had many thoughts associated with my home parish outside of Philadelphia dedicated to Saint Ann. (We dropped the final “e” in deference to the spelling of the donor’s mother’s first name.)

I well remember many a hot July afternoon or evening in our non-air-conditioned church, where twice a day the church was full of parishioners to observe the Novena to Saint Anne. It was like a prayerful family reunion, when whole families attended and even relatives from the other side of town came to pray and honor the mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus. There was the appropriate singing of “Blessed Anne, Judah’s Glory” set to a wildly 19th century romantic hymn tune. Then came a set of novena prayers, which most old timers knew by heart.

The huge fans were turned off so we could hear the sermon. How talented the preacher who could stretch Saint Anne’s life over a half hour each day for nine consecutive days! There’s not much known about Anne except the tradition that she was Mary’s mother, named Anne, and married to a man named Joachim. After the assistance of a whole team of altar boys and

smoking thurible, the prayers concluded with benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. I can still pray the Divine Praises and sing “ Holy God We Praise Thy Name” from memory. Perhaps better would be to pray and sing “by heart," for that’s what these prayers have become.

Devotions of the Heart

Devotions are an experience of the heart. They are prayers which occasion memories of the action of God through the intercessions of his saints. It was what I later learned was affiliative faith. We come to know God through association with our family and friends within the Church. In fancier theological words, it is a real experience of the communion of saints. We learned in these devotions that prayer was what we learned in Catholic school, the “lifting of our minds and hearts to God."

Devotions, like exposition and benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, allow for a revelatory experience of God. One can long for the warmth and glow of all those candles on the altar. Many of us are fortunate enough to remember the fragrance of the incense and the rising clouds like our prayers before God. These were special times for many of us.

The heart, our emotions, are vehicles of what we would later come to call liturgical memory. Such memory is a delightful mix of a bit of nostalgia, faith, family relationships, ethnic Catholicism, and emotion. In prayerful remembering, God reveals himself to us. The stronger the memory, the less abstracted and the more experiential is our being embraced by God’s love and our embracing other believers in the process. This is how we were Church and how we became Church in those now long ago days.

CDH