The Church's Toolbox

It's been a while! Since my last post we've entered the great season of Lent, I hope it has been fruitful for everyone so far.

While at mass on Sunday, I was admiring our lovely church and pondering the incarnational aspect of our faith, the sights, sounds, smells, sensations of touch, and even tastes which make the spiritual truths of Christ tangible to us as physical beings. I was wishing I could share this beauty with everyone I know and, especially for my non-Catholic friends, explain the various depths of symbolism and meaning in all these tangible things surrounding us. It was then that an idea for a series of blog posts struck me!

I've talked before about a comment my husband made long ago when I asked him, essentially, what was with all the extra-biblical...well...stuff? His answer was that these were tools available to us, they were there to help us live the Christian life.

Now that I'm coming up on the 7th anniversary of my confirmation and reception into the fullness of the Church, I've had some time to see and experience just how truly helpful these tools are. And so, I thought it might be interesting to open up the Church's Toolbox and examine many of her tools, one by one. These tools range from small things like candles and incense to our different forms of prayer to making the sign of the cross, to larger things like our most precious gifts of the sacraments. I hope to take a look at 40 different things over the next weeks, in honor of Lent, and to examine scripture and tradition to learn a bit about them in the process.

I'll be aiming for a post a day, and I'm adding a tag called "The Church's Toolbox." I look forward to sharing the sights and sounds of Catholicism as much as I can through this series!