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.
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.
Color me in white lace
I left a comment on this post at Holy Whapping that made me smirk, and so I decided to post it here.
No, you’ve got it all wrong. Here’s what’s off:
The bishop expects them to have LEARNED the Baltimore Cathechism. I never owned or read a cathechism until I was in my mid-twenties. That’s with ten years of standard religious ed and preparation for three sacraments under my belt.
We didn’t have Confirmation class until many of us were old enough to drive, and then it mostly consisted of talking about God’s love, making felt banners with our patron saint’s names on them, and being encouraged to hug each other all of the time.
Color me jealous. Jealous of those adorable white mantillas, actually.
Maybe if my parish had tossed the ’70s aging hippie crap and given us something substantive and engaging to learn, so many kids in my class wouldn’t have considered Confirmation their graduation from Catholicism.
Had they really wanted to court goodwill, they could have not held classes at 8 AM on Saturdays. That’s when 15-year-olds in my hometown are hung over!
If you want to wear a hat
GRATUITOUS MANTILLA IN LIBERAL POLITICAL BLOG.
Yay!
I wish I could wear a veil to church without looking completely wacky and out of place. I don’t think I could even get away with wearing a hat. I like the symbol, but not necessarily tthe reason people cite for the symbol.
The veil is a beautiful symbol of the natural order affirmed by Scripture: “Man was not created for woman, but the woman for the man” (1 Cor. 11:9). The man was not to cover his head “because he is the image and glory of God.” But “the woman is the glory of the man because she came from the man… Thus, the woman is under the power of her husband.” That women should remain veiled in church while men do not is one symbol of this harmonious natural order establishing the husband’s authority over the wife.
