Sunday Sermon

When Caroline decided that she wanted to come stay with us for the year, one of her few requests was that we go to Mass each Sunday.  Jeff and I are pretty much your standard "C & E" Catholics - we go on Christmas and Easter, and even then it's wholly dependant on how the children are behaving.  But how do you turn down a 16 year old that wants to go to Mass? 

Taking the whole family to church every Sunday is not an option.  I'm a firm believer that if you're spending the whole time entertaining/diciplining your two year old, you might as well not be at church anyway.  I don't want to be a distraction to others either, however, Ellie is five and that's plenty old to learn how to sit still for an hour.  So we decided that one of us parents, Caroline, and Ellie would be attending each week. 

Each week, Ellie whines and complains and moans and cries about going.  Yesterday it was my turn to take the girls and I was prepared for the onslaught of "It's boring!  I don't like standing.  I'm hungry.  I'm Jewish." that I knew would start as soon as I told her it was time to go.  Luckily, I had the threat of a birthday party to hang over her head and with the proper motivation ("If you don't stop complaining, you're not going to Mr. Taylor's birthday party") we were off.  Of course, there was much kvetching and dramatic sniffling from the back seat and I commented offhandedly to Caroline that yet another generation learns to hate going to church and that started me thinking about my own journey through the practical part, not the religious part, of churchgoing.

My dad is the driving force behind my church upbringing.  He's Catholic and has gone to church every Sunday, with very few exceptions, my whole life.  As a child, my recollections of church are of being lost in a forest of adult legs, staring at the pew and tracing the wood grain patterns with my fingers.  My favorite part of Mass was when my dad would carry me up to receive Communion.  Communion was also my least favorite part, for when I got old enough, he would leave us in the pew and I believe he acted as an usher from time to time.  Sunday school was always kind of a drag, but I LOVED my first Holy Communion... I loved the dress, I loved the hairpiece I wore, I loved the party afterwards and I certainly didn't look askanse at the gifts. 

After that, Communion continued to be my favorite part of Mass, but not for the 'transubstantiation' (when the bread becomes the body of Christ in Catholic mass), but rather because in good Catholic tradition, we weren't allowed to eat before Mass.  So the wafer was generally the first thing I'd eaten that day and they're actually kind of tasty.... in an unleavened bread sort of way.  Jeff and I both discovered our mutual taste for Hosts recently and had a good laugh about how we both wished you were allowed to get in line for another.  I can rememeber being very stressed out about chewing it though, cause there just seemed to be something terribly wrong with the idea of chewing up Jesus' body.  I would hold it in my mouth for as long as I could and try to let it melt.  This almost always resulted in the wafer sticking like plaster to the roof of my mouth, causing me to spend the rest of Mass surreptitiously trying to scrape it off with my tongue. 

As a teenager, my favorite part of Mass was actually the drive home.  And not cause it was church was over, but rather, after my brother went into the Army, it was just me and Dad in the car.  It was probably the only time I was alone with my dad and we had the best conversations.  We would talk about boys, college, careers, religion... you name it, we talked about it.  These were the times when my dad told me that I was capable of anything I put my mind to, and that I should never accept less than total respect from my boyfriends, and he may not know how carefully I listened.  Lord knows I tried to pretend like I wasn't.  To this day, I love going to church with my dad.  It's like putting on your comfiest pair of slippers. 

Now that I'm a grown up, my favorite part of Mass is the time after Communion, when the priests are putting everything away and there's a few minutes of just music.  People are still kneeling and praying, and I usually take this time to talk to my grandparents.  When I was a kid, I'd talk to my grandfather Moran, who died when I was 7.  I'd tell him about myself and I'd use that time to consider if he'd be proud of me.  These days, I tell my grandmothers about my kids and what they're doing, and I still talk my grandfather and ask him for advice.  I think I've always had the idea that my problems might not be important enough for God to get to right away - it's not world peace or anything - but my grandparents have to be interested, right? 

So for now, I know that I'll have to deal with complaining and whining for a few more years... as each kid gets old enough to be allowed to go to church.  Hopefully, they'll have something of the same process as me though and find out that church is a quiet place to think and that being still isn't always a bad thing.