What lurks down the street….
I contributed a picture of a church within walking distance of my house to the Terrible Tabernacle contest. I’m a bad person, but it’s an ugly tabernacle. Looks like a dollar-store Christmas decoration gone horribly wrong.
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I thought that was pretty bad, but then I saw this picture of the altar. Which at first I thought was a timpani. The resemblance is hilarious.
I have to admit, when I saw pictures of this church on the Web site, I realized that it was not quite the parish for me. They have healthy attendance and a fine school…just not my “scene,” as the kids say.
Mixed blessings
I forgot to mention that on Sunday at the Tridentine Mass, there were a fair number of women with uncovered heads. Bad for the rite, but good in general. Why? Well, there were so many people that I think they ran out of loaner veils!
The indult parish is part of a group of three parishes (the Tridentine community is “non-territorial,” but the other two are regular urban parishes) together under one pastor, due to the dwindling number of practicing Catholics in the city, and the priest shortage. A wonderful priest in his eighties who is otherwise retired celebrates the Tridentine Mass, but the pastor has done it in the past.
For Sunday Masses, the indult Mass’s attendance is about 120, which is delightfully high for a service around here. People travel from three different states.
I love the aesthetic of it. Attending the cathedral’s long, solemn Novus Ordo Mass occasionally was a big step, and the catalyst of my reversion. It reminds me of what is special about being Catholic, as opposed to most mainstream parishes where the only glaring difference between that and Protestant services I’ve attended is that you don’t hear any female voices reading the Gospel.
Man, I’ve gone all rad-trad lately. I promise that I’ll be back to normal soon. I just finally absorbed how wonderful the old Mass is.
I finally made it!
Last week I slept in and missed Latin Mass. Which is kind of sad, since it’s at noon. Today I slept through my alarms and somehow woke up twenty minutes before the start of mass. I hurried to wash my face and put decent clothes on, then grabbed my veil and missal but failed to bring my directions to the church. I had a vague sense of what street it was on, but I don’t know that city well at all, and I was traveling there more or less blind. And late.
Somehow I made an accurate guess as to where to get off the highway, then made a left turn, scanned the skyline for a familiar-looking steeple, and found a sign pointing to the church. Yay! There I was, with other people toting missals heading in late, too. I felt bad, but not as bad as I would have if I had been the only one heading in then.
Using missals is completely foreign to my generation of liberal Catholics. I’ve never had one before, and even with bookmarking the Pentecost pages ahead of time, I got a little lost, gave up, and just sat there absorbing the atmosphere instead of following along. I felt sort of secluded in my veil, which added to the meditative feel.
Receiving communion kneeling at a rail was a first for me, too, and like most of what went on during the hour and a half that the Low Mass took (!!), felt foreign but also somehow “right.”
The parish has a luncheon for Latin Mass folks to socialize. I grabbed lunch and ran away, not really talking to anyone. I hate being shy sometimes.
Tripping the switch
Since I started getting serious about reversion during Lent, my struggle with going back to confession got worse as I examined my conscience more. The last time I went was 10 years ago, when I was required to before my confirmation. I’ve been trying to gather up the courage to do it for months now, but always failed. I had an incentive today, though…I’m busy all day tomorrow, attending my first Tridentine Mass this Sunday, and I wanted to do so able to receive communion.
“Joan,” I told myself in the car as I fought the urge to go to the pet store instead, “being an adult means making yourself do things that you don’t want to do, even when only you and God are watching.”
Finding a church with open reconciliation hours I could make it to has been really tricky, since most churches around here only have about half an hour on Saturdays, if any time at all. (Doesn’t anyone in the Northeastern USA confess?) After some digging, I found a chapel that has priest taking confessions all day, from 10:30 AM to 7:30 PM. I went to mass yesterday for the Ascension at the same chapel, to check out the layout and the atmosphere.
It was my first time confessing with a screen separating me and the priest, which I found wonderfully liberating. Apart from the sacrament, I found the priest’s empathy and advice much more useful than that of my last few psychotherapists.
I feel so serene, from both the absolution and the way I framed and categorized the last few years of my life and saw the threads of my various weaknesses that seem to have intertwined and formed a net that I didn’t even realize was there.
Enough serious talk. There was one funny thing–in the reconciliation room, when you kneel down, there’s a doorbell button set in the cushioned bench, so it sets off a bell and the priest knowsthat someone is there. I found this very funny for some reason.
*Ding-dong!* “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Oooh, a sale!
Halo Works is running a great Mother’s Day sale right now on some of their chapel veils and many other items. I took the opportunity to order two–the Junior V in white and the Spanish Essence in silver. I normally wouldn’t have bought two, but the sale made the prices very reasonable.
I have two antique chapel veils that I need to be careful with, one white and one black. I haven’t had the nerve to wear them to Mass, though. I might be able to pull it off at the cathedral, but not when I go to little churches here in the city. At those churches, everyone wears jeans (even the lectors) and I stand out for wearing skirts and dresses (aka my work clothes from my Sunday job) and my insistence on kneeling at all during any part of the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Even the church’s staff sister doesn’t wear a veil, so I think I might frighten people by wearing one.
All of this casualness turns me off.
Demographic Changes
A few blogs have discussed parish (s)hopping recently.
I find this a tough problem for many reasons. It never occurred to me that it’s proper to attend one’s local church; we always drove across town because we felt more comfortable at the other one, which was in the same neighborhood as my school so I knew most of the kids my age in church.
I’ve been writing in my blog about my parish-shopping adventures. I live in a city where in my five-mile drive to the cathedral from where I used to live, I would literally drive past three Catholic churches, and bypass a half-dozen more a few blocks away that were closer to my apartment. I travel even farther to attend a Tridentine Mass. I enjoyed the more orthodox service and beautiful environment at the cathedral, and I don’t feel at home at any of the churches closer to me.
I believe that the idea of the “neighborhood parish” ended with demographic changes in America, at least. As Catholics migrate out to the suburbs (and the population in the areas surrounding many urban churches is no longer predominantly Catholic) this leaves us with a problem–if the urban parishes are unable to survive since their parishoners have all died or moved to the suburbs, do we shutter and sell those churches?
If that were the case, here in Albany we would have shut down the cathedral decades ago, since the construction of a government office plaza razed the predominantly Italian neighborhood of 7,000 people (not a typo) that formed part of its parish. These people dispersed, mostly out to the suburbs, and the Cathedral would not hold regular Masses if people (like me) didn’t commute in from other areas. You can also see a few smaller churches in that photo that were eminent domain’d out of existence. There were three torn down to build the Plaza.
Following the demographic shifts means closing older churches with history in favor of building very bland and modern churches in the suburbs. This is going on in upstate NY quite literally right now. The Syracuse diocese recently outlined its plans for closing and merging parishes, and reducing the number of priests needed to minister to the region’s faithful. Ogdensburg did the same thing recently. As one would expect, this involves closing or merging parishes in the cities or in rural areas. The Post-Standard explains:
The diocese is reorganizing to address a declining number of priests and population shifts from urban and rural communities to suburban communities. By 2010, fewer than 100 priests are expected to be able to minister full time in an area that now has 161 parishes and 14 missions.
Vocations are low, and the population is either shifting or leaving the area entirely. Plans in Central New York include closing smaller churches and building new, larger ones that will serve entire swaths of the rural areas that people like me have been fleeing.
The next generation in upstate NY will be difficult for all institutions, not just the Church. Young people simply don’t want to stay, and young people sustain the economy. And the parishes.
Un-Christian impulses
I went back to St. J. this evening since I didn’t manage to make it out of the house on Saturday. I thought I’d give them a chance when it wasn’t a holiday.
Well.
I have never walked out of a church with such an overwhelming desire to drag pastoral musicians out back and beat them senseless with their hymnals. (The guitar edition of Breaking Bread could probably do a number.)
If you’re going to miss cues, at least stay sort of remotely close to on pitch.
If you’re going to be wildly off-pitch, at least hand someone a tambourine so you’re all remotely on the same measure at the same time.
If you can’t accomplish any of that…just don’t pick songs that sound like theme songs to ’80s soap operas. (I’m looking at YOU, Haugen!)
There were a few things that would make people other than me cry “liturgical abuse,” and it bothers me profoundly that people there are not in the habit of kneeling during any part of the mass whatsoever.
Those are things I could almost overlook if the music there weren’t so wretched. As a former musician, it distracts me to no end.
Parish shopping: St. P
I was hoping that my parish-shopping adventure would stop with the lovely 19th-structure that’s a few minutes’ drive from both my house and my weekend job. Turns out, well, no.
One of the more amusing insults for overly-liberal music and liturgy over on the DCF Board is “happy-clappy.” I thought that this was excessive until I saw it in action–the priest encouraged us to clap along with the choir/folk group during the last song. And applaud afterward. As a former pastoral musician (guitar) I have to say…I never liked getting applauded, except maybe at the end of a Christmas or Holy Week marathon of rehearsals and masses. Regular performances were what was expected of us; they weren’t worthy of applause. Just a regular day at the “office.”
The homily was short and enlightening, and I liked the priest a lot, but a lot of the details I couldn’t deal with. The picture at left is of this church in the mid-’50s. Lovely, isn’t it?
The entire interior (even the ceiling) is now painted white, and there is only a plain crucifix on the wall over the altar, a regular table-style altar, and the pews have been replaced with interlocking chairs. It’s bland and doesn’t match the church’s neat 19th-century exterior at all.
I’m not comfortable without kneelers. We always avoided mass at the church in my hometown that lacked them, except when the mass time was convenient and we had nowhere else to go.
I liked how the population there was very young (the church borders a college campus, and so draws many of the students.) It’s neat to be in a church of people close to my own age. What’s not neat is to see that both of the lectors were in jeans (one in ripped-up, worn ones) and one of the ushers was wearing jeans and an Aerosmith tour t-shirt. Maybe I’m being snobby, but that just didn’t sit well with me. We would have been peer-pressured out of doing that when I was in college–Newman was small and close-knit, and that just wasn’t done. It wasn’t expected.
There’s a difference between casualness and lack of respect, and I really think that people mean well. Casualness and a lack of what I call a “sense of the sacred” is what drove me away from the church, years ago.
In summary: St. P is a very friendly place and very close to my work and home, but so liberal and casual that I felt ill at ease. I feel bad saying so, since the priest and staff and parishoners were so nice, but I can’t help how I feel.
My shopping continues. Good thing I live in a Northeastern metro area with dozens of churches to choose from.
Parish Shopping: St. J
I attended Palm Sunday Mass after work at a small, very beautiful church on the edge of the city. It was an odd experience, and I’m not sure that I’m going back. The service felt thrown together, disorganized, and poorly timed. One of the readers for the Passion didn’t understand the basic principles of speaking into a microphone, and was so distractingly bad that I had to tune her out.
Let’s call the church St. J. The Sunday evening Mass happens to be the “contemporary music” one. Speaking as a former pastoral guitarist, it’s possible to do folk Mass without being chirpy and making people feel like they aren’t in church.
Here, I will digress and present Joan’s Hints for a Successful Folk Mass:
1. If you must have multiple guitars, have the players fingerpick and not strum whenever possible.
2. Use any songs written after 1970 sparingly.
3. When the choir is mostly female white sopranos around age 60, don’t let them do gospel.
4. Turn down the guitars.
5. Make sure your singers can stay on key.
6. Come to think of it, don’t use any hymnals published after 1980.
7. No vigorous tambourine.
8. Maybe hide the tambourine.
9. Don’t start up the guitars, piano, percussion, and choir just to lead the congregation in singing “Lord, hear our prayer” during the Prayer of the Faithful.
10. You probably should just unplug the guitars.
Anyway, St. J. has a beautiful interior with statues and lovely carved wood confessionals. I’m weak for that kind of thing, since I grew up attending a mid-’80s “in-the-round” church with no real aisle, no crucifix, no stained glass, contemporary statues, and light oak wood everywhere. It was like going to church in my parents’ living room.
The oddest part of this service was that nobody seemed to know when to sit, stand, or kneel. I don’t think of Palm Sunday as a service that brings out people who don’t attend regularly, so I wonder if that’s a regular occurrence there. For me, it just added to the feeling that no one had any idea what they were doing. For some reason I really dislike informality and the feeling that everyone–priest, lectors, musicians–is making it up as they go along.
I want a small, liberal, young parish, and I also seem to want High Mass every week. I’m not going to get that. I’m not going to get either one of those.
Starting out
After getting all of this set up, I had wanted to write a bit more of a substantive debut. I’m too tired, though. My body has decided to stage a rebellion and inform me that it can no longer manage on three hours of sleep. It rebels, making me curl up and snooze at 10 pm on weeknights, and sleep for most of the weekend.
This is relevant to the topic of this blog. Really. See, I haven’t been to Mass since Ash Wednesday–working on Sundays means that I can go at 8 am or not at all, and I grew up going to 5:15 Saturday evening Mass ans I strongly dislike it.
I ought to stop the excuses, but I still haven’t found anywhere comfortable for me to go as a single young adult. It’s easier to make excuses not to do something that makes me so uncomfortable and makes me feel so out of place. Even when it’s something that I ought to do and am in fact obligated to do.
