Do Pro Life Rallies Go Too Far?

It's not uncommon to see Catholics protesting against abortion outside abortion clinics. I've seen many a news clip featuring hordes of men and women all screaming and shouting for their cause... and they aren't necessarily all pro life.

Though slightly off topic here, I've developed a somewhat dim view of all rallies pro anything and that's not because I don't agree with the goal that they are trying to achieve. Naturally, there are some rallies that I don't agree with and some that I do. The reason that I decline to place my support behind any rally these days is because we've forgotten how to protest in a way that doesn't come across as a baying mob and terrifying everyone in a seven block radius. The public deserves to be able to go about their daily lives without feeling fearful to simply walk by any protest site.

I admit that some of my dim view comes from seeing the far left group Britain First protesting against the Muslim community - but I've also seen behavior that would cause me issues happen in a wide range of protests ranging from pro life through to employment issues.

The way that I see it is:- If this bothers me in the way that it does, what effect would it have on others who have autism and other conditions that require their environment to be strictly controlled in order to remain healthy? Rallies don't necessarily have to be audible to have an impact... and nor do they need to have law enforcement breaking apart scuffles between parties who have differing views from each other.

In a lot of ways, I feel that this video just about sums up my thoughts on pro life rallies:-

Get Into A Good Routine On Mass Days

One thing that really helped me to settle into the Catholic faith was establishing a Mass Day routine that I put into action on the days that I am to attend church. In this post, I'll be looking at what your routine could be.

Fasting

Part of my routine before Mass is fasting. I know that the official word says that you only need to fast for an hour to be able to go and receive... but an hour doesn't seem long enough for me - so I usually try to fast for the entire day prior to receiving the Eucharist. With that said, I have fasted for shorter periods when it hasn't been healthy for me to hold to that routine because I need to eat with medication or I've felt faint for example. The point isn't in seeing how long I can fast for, in my eyes, it's more about sharing in Jesus' suffering for me.

Bathing

Bathing is also a part of my preparation routine because I like to be clean on the outside before I go to be cleansed on the inside. It also reduces the chances of being refused to receive in the hand if you are freshly bathed. I'll take this time to reflect on my baptism ceremony and the way that God chose me for His own.

On a side note, ladies, timing is important for this one! Don't wait until right before Mass if you want to dry and style your hair after you have bathed. I know that I've had to go to church with my hair unstraightened or a little damper than I might have liked it to be because I didn't have enough time to finish my look and there have been times when I've risked hypothermia doing just that in the winter months.

Clear Your Mind

This step presented itself to me at a point when I was in a depression and I incorporated it into my routine when I saw how beneficial it was to me. The first thing I did was gather together a bunch of hymns that lingered in my mind after Mass. I would call it my "favorite hymn list" - but some of them, I'd never heard before that night and they were in my brain, so that doesn't seem accurate.

Once I had a short list of three or four of these hymns, I would listen to them on the days that I'd be attending church and I found it had the effect of calming my mind ready to focus it on the Holy Trinity when I arrived at church.

As far as my list goes, it's nothing special, just a bunch of hymns that I gathered together on YouTube. My selection process isn't that great either - I'd simply listen to various versions of the same hymn until I found the one that resonated and I would add that one to my list. As a result, I had a "random" mismatch of hymns that I happen to like listening to.

Reflect On The Readings

Once you have a clear mind, you can take the step of reading and reflecting on the meaning of the readings that will be read in Mass.

I've found that this could be beneficial if there is a chance that your preacher could use a shortened version of the Gospel because you have the chance to read the backstory or read on a little further in your Bible if you feel that you need a little extra context than is presented in the shortened version.

Though our pastor tends not to do that as much since my group at RCIA class bombarded him with requests for a little more context than was contained in the shortened version, it's still nice to have a little personal quiet reflection time before I go and see if the pastor has picked up on any of my thoughts in his homily.

Give Yourself Time To Arrive

We've all had them... those Masses where we've had to dash to church like Satan himself was chasing us down the road. The thing is that those hurried arrivals certainly aren't beneficial to us and they certainly don't help you to feel calm and collected.

Once you've been to Mass a few times, you'll have a routine of the things that you like to do in your mind. Typically, I like to say my prayers, read the announcements in my bulletin and mark out the hymns that we'll be singing during this service before Mass starts - that way, I only need to knock my page marker down after each hymn that we sing. Because of that, I like to try and arrive at least half an hour before Mass begins and spend whatever extra time remaining gazing at Jesus in the tabernacle.

At Christmas and Easter, you might want to give yourself even longer to arrive to church - especially if you need a place to sit because the pews fill up fast... and if you spot a guy at the front, signaling like crazy before Mass has begun, investigate further because he could be indicating to you where there is pew space! A lesson that I learned as I attempted to free up standing room towards the middle of my church.

Finding my Faith

As far as my faith goes, I spent much of the first nine years of my life attending my local baptist church with two of my aunts. For the most part, I enjoyed attending church and learning about Jesus' life. Some of the activities and clubs also helped me to increase my faith... maybe a little too much for a child as young as I was.

I'd be sitting there listening to the sermons that they were preaching and I'd get questions in my mind. I couldn't research all these questions by myself because I didn't have the knowledge or understanding as a child. One day, I asked my mum a question about my faith that she couldn't answer as an atheist - so she did the only thing that she felt would help me and guided me towards her sister-in-law who should have been able to have helped me. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to help me in a way that stopped my young mind from working in circles and she ended up getting frustrated and accusing me of doubting the word of God.

For me, that was the pivotal moment that began my twenty odd year hiatus from the church. I was just nine years old. During my teenage years, I found that I missed the youth groups that the church offered, but there was no way that I dared to return when I couldn't try to make sense of the Bible without being accused of questioning God's word.

After I left the church, I quickly became spiritual and spent the twenty years seriously involved in things like witchcraft, tarot and empathy. Though this sort of thing doesn't fly well in the Catholic faith, it served me well at the time because it kept me aware of the fact that there were beings higher than me... though, at the time, I wouldn't necessarily have accepted God in my life exactly as He is.

With that said, I accept that God never really gave up on trying to call me back to His church. During my teenage years, a few things happened to me that I still can't fully explain to this day. I became interested in a Christian duet group that would put on shows at what I would later find out was my local Assemblies of God church or the local sports centre.

These events weren't necessarily the safest things for me because I am asthmatic and often found that their heavy use of dry ice during the shows would affect my asthma before the night was over. It was at this time that my first "random unexplained event" happened. I was at a show that the Christian group were preforming at the sports centre when my asthma struck. Because of the layout of the building, I was able to remove myself to a (closed) bar area upstairs, where I was still at least able to see the group - even if I wasn't able to actually hear them singing anymore. Unbeknown to me, there was a group of Christians up here having some sort of meeting. One of them came over and engaged me in conversation and I got to explaining that I came to see the group downstairs and that I was sick.

She asked me if she could pray for me and I hesitated for a moment, remembering why I left the church and became spiritual in the first place. In the end, my logical mind reasoned that prayers were about all that I had at this point in time since my medicine was a mile away at home and I still had at least another hour before mum came to picked me up - so I agreed to allow her to pray for me. She returned to her group and explained to the others about my problem. I soon found myself surrounded by this group of people to the point where I started to feel claustrophobic. They all reached out their hands towards me and began to pray. I don't recall much of the prayer itself because I was too focused on a strange warmth that I felt and a golden aura that I could see around me. They left soon after that prayer and I never got the chance to tell them that their prayer took me from the point where I was seriously considering going to reception and asking them to call an ambulance to take me to hospital to being able to go back downstairs and enjoy the last half an hour of the event that I went there to see.

Both times I saw this group, I felt the call to return to the church... though I didn't feel like this was the church that I belonged to. The more I thought about it, the more I kept recalling a weird event/dream that happened before I joined the Baptist church as a child. I had a dream in which I saw a particular church in my locality. The fair was in town, so it had to be autumn in my dream. We were returning home from visiting family members on my mum's side of the family and the route would have taken us past the Catholic church - though I was too young to understand that the church was Catholic... to my young mind, all churches were basically one and the same.

The church was in darkness, though I could see candlelight shining through the bottom half of the stained glass by the front of the church as we passed by. It was to take me twenty years to even set foot in that church to at least begin to try to make sense of that event - but, once I did, it became clear to me almost instantly that there's no way that what the child me saw could have been a candle or even a collection of candles because 1) there were no Masses celebrated in darkness at that time of year and 2) the light was coming from the place where the tabernacle was - the window is too high for any light pollution from candles lit inside to escape into the outside world and illuminate the glass as brightly as that. No matter how much I've sat and thought about it, I've never been able to come up with a plausible explanation for how that window came to be lit quite like it was that night - or even if it was a dream or a reality.

In the days leading up to my first Mass, I've never really done well with men in general and I have a deep distrust of strange men, then I had to enter a church that was led by a strange man by myself, that was a terrifying thought. This was after the Catholic abuse scandal had blown up the media - so, from the outside, it probably would have presented itself in a way that might have implied to someone that I sort of expected to be abused as soon as I stepped over the threshold.

When I did finally set foot in the Catholic church for the first time (it was the exact church that I saw in the event that I described above), I felt like I had finally found the place where I belonged. I wasn't scared or nervous... I just felt strangely calm and at ease, though I did mess up a few things during that first Mass (and a few after that).

One of the hymns that I sang that first Mass was Colours Of Day. I vaguely remembered it as one of my favourite hymns from the Baptist church of old and I saw it as one of several signs that I was given that night. I have added it below for those of you who might want to listen to the song for reference There is one sign that I received that night that I won't be talking about here in this post because of the deeply personal nature of it. Only a handful of people know about that sign and I intend to keep it that way out of respect to other people who were involved in it.



Attending RCIA class in preparation for my baptism just reinforced my belief that I had found the right church for me - though I was often too afraid to speak and preferred to listen quietly as I fiddled with the beads of my rosary (my rosary is a huge source of comfort and reassurance for me). I had finally found a place where I could ponder on the Bible and ask for guidance without being made to feel like I was doing something that I shouldn't be doing. In fact, it was something that we were actively encouraged to do as part of our RCIA class.

Even at this late stage, I was given opportunities to step out of the church and return back to the discerning phase of trying to find the right faith for me... but I didn't falter in my path because I knew that I was on the correct path - though I was very much afraid of the unknown. I would obsessively search the Internet looking for clues on what to expect. I soon found that every Catholic I spoke to was hugely secretive, preferring to leave my interpretations of these Masses untainted by others' interpretations of them... little did they know that I was asking more about what to expect rather than interpretation help at the time. Had I walked into my baptism, not knowing that the lights went out and there was a fire lit at the back of church, I would have freaked right out. It was scary enough for me as it was and I'd been warned to expect these things as it was.

Almost a year later, I'm still happy with my decision and glad that I joined the Catholic church. Over the course of the past year, I've been growing into my new faith and as a result of that, I'm becoming more aware of the ways that God is working in my life and using me as a tool to reach out to others.