A reader writes

I’m a Catholic at heart and believe I’ll convert someday, but every time I visit a Catholic parish, I find the reality of the worship less grand than the wonderful spirit and teaching that I find at, say, an EWTN or Franciscan University conference.

Where can at find this wonderful spirit every week (every day)?

I’m not altogether convinced that it has ever been God’s intention for the average Mass to be a peak experience such as we encounter at a High Mass or some wonderful conference. My reason for this is simply reality: it’s not what we typically encounter, and God, in his Providence, could certainly cranking out the Pentecostal thrills if that’s what he wanted to do. It seems to be, from the beginning, that God is much more interested in coming to us in our averageness. That’s why the New Testament is full of counsel from Paul such as “bear with one another”.

That’s not to say we should not aim for the stars. But it is to say that if we are coming at the Faith in search of exalted feelings we are going to be disappointed most times since it does not seem to be anything like the common life of the Church.

One of the dangers a convert faces is the shock of discovering the distinction between the Universal Church and life at the local parish. It becomes tempting to think one was somehow defrauded. But in reality, I think this is like expecting everyday to be the Feast of the Transfiguration. The Transfiguration showed us Jesus as he really was: full of the Glory of the Uncreated Light. But when they came off the mountain, the apostles were not being cheated by seeing Jesus in the humility of his ordinary, sweaty, busy, overcrowded humanity. They were seeing the divine humility and they were being asked to enter into it, not go on demanding more thrills. So are we. The point of parish life is that we average Catholics are average and it is just here, in the normal averageness of human life, that God enters in through extremely average things like bread, wine, water–and me and you.

Doesn’t mean we should settle for crappiness in liturgy, morality or spirituality. But it does mean that our first response to whatever God gives us should be gratitude, not a critical palate. God is, says George MacDonald, easy to please but hard to satisfy. His call for our humble acceptance of whatever he sends us in terms of local parish life is ordered towarded making us the same. We should be grateful for the parish he gives us, yet also be laboring to make the worship more worthy of him (particularly in our own hearts).

My two cents, FWIW.