Approaching Church

This morning I will worship for the first time in a church new to me, the church at which I will spend ten or so hours a week in the coming year to meet my field education requirement. It's a very old and historic church in the heart of the city, with a magnificent sanctuary, many outreach ministries, a dwindling congregation, and a new pastor.

A couple of years ago in my home church, we talked about what it might be like for a newcomer to experience one of our worship services. We are a vibrant suburban congregation with a long history of social justice work in the local and broader community, a senior pastor who has been there for 20 years and an associate for five, a sophisticated and diverse music program, a multi-generational and enthusiastic congregation. I have friends from other cities who tell me that if they could find a church like ours they would go, and friends at seminary who express surprise at the breadth of our educational offerings and the openness and eagerness of our members to learning and discussion. And yet we do not grow.

When we had that conversation some time back, we talked about how many roadblocks a new visitor with little or no experience of church, or even just of a Presby church, might find in a first visit. Even the bulletin, intended to be helpful, contained words like processional, confession, pardon, assurance, commission ~ I counted once and found 22 words that someone unfamiliar with our service might not understand in our context. (I just looked at last week's bulletin and see that in this past year in which I have been mostly absent, many of those words have been excised in favor of more familiar ones and/or short explanations. Very interesting.) There is a visually appealing brochure in the pews which tells about the history and internal activities and outreach of the congregation, but there is not, to my knowledge, anything which explains the design and purpose of the sanctuary. If you were to visit, I think that you would feel most welcome, but I'm not sure that you would have much of an idea of that to which you were being introduced.

As many readers know, I have often attended Catholic mass this past year, in an effort to worship quietly and anonymously. Even though I was somewhat familiar with the mass, it took a number of visits for me to feel comfortable. I have gone to mass in four different places and, with the exception of the Jesuit retreat house earlier this month, there has never been anything in place to clue a visitor in to what goes on. No welcoming announcement except, in two of them, an announcement of who the presider is and, in the case of the retreat house, the homilist, as that is usually someone else. No bulletin. No one in the pews or seats who talks to you. These services have suited my purposes, but they are clearly designed for those who already know what happens and what its significance is.

So, in a couple of hours: a new place, which no doubt will strike me as glorious in some ways and nudge me with doubts in others. It's a dark and dreary day outside. I have not slept well in nearly a year and last night was no different. In other words, there is nothing outside or inside to foster the openness of spirit I need for this morning, nothing except the Spirit herself who has led me to a new place in spite of myself, and the longing for a God who has remained mostly hidden for a very long time. A new kind of new beginning.

Women in Religious Leadership

Interesting.

I had remarked to someone a couple of weeks ago that the Reformed faith seems so ~ masculine ~ to me ~ so male-oriented in language, liturgy, experience ~ and that it had occurred to me that the Roman Catholic church, despite its rejection of women in the roles of priests and deacons, has a strong sense of female spirituality, fostered no doubt by the attentiveness paid to Mary and by the prominence of women saints, many of whom were emphatically determined administrators, scholars, healers, and educators.

As I spend this week-end co-directing a retreat at which I am the only Protestant on the premises (one of the reasons I was asked to come was that last year about 25% of the retreatants were Protestant -- but apparently they didn't return!), the reality of the official Catholic take on women is painfully apparent. Several of the women have asked me about the ordination of women in the Presbyterian church -- they are accustomed to and expect limitations. A couple of stories have surfaced about women doing parish work equivalent to that of men on parish staffs, but being refused appropriate titles and acknowledgment. And as it was announced that there would be a mass this afternoon, I was reminded of the words of a Jesuit in a book on spiritual direction, describing women with whom he meets who are called to the priesthood but precluded due to their gender -- how, for instance, they run retreats and then have to invite a priest to drop by to say mass, a priest who has no connection to the experience or community of the reteatants.

I was reminded of reading of a new priest's excitement about saying mass for a community of nuns and thinking: they could say their own mass, couldn't they?

Monday Meanderings 10 Minutes Max

Encounters today: met with a friend to talk and do lectio for a hour or so -- restorative. Met with my grief counselor -- not sure how to characterize that. Pretty much on my own since then, but Gregarious Son just came home from work.

Long walk all the way around both Little Lakes (3.5 miles?). I was moving pretty slowly by the end. The merganser pair is still there, and when they zoomed across the lake they looked magnificent. Remembering a swimming break on a Canadian canoe trip with the boys as a family of common mergs fished nearby. Remembering the loons. There might be a loon or two on the Little Lakes soon. There is a wonderful article in the new Christian Century about God and silence, and I took it with me and prayed through it on my walk.

Drafted my Homiletics assignment. It is a challenge to preach without energy, without . . . . Just without.

Paid a couple of bills. I wish I had a bill for something fun. I don't. Washed dishes, did laundry, dissed The Shack, started to get organized to drive back to school at the crack of dawn tomorrow. Lots of driving this week, as I have my spiritual direction class back here in the middle of everything else. I am imagining how unhappy our professor is; this past week-end the Catholic Diocese announced the closing of some 40-plus parishes and her vibrant, inventive, energetic parish is one of them. Their recently restored church is magnificent and may soon be empty.

That's it; off to the post office.

Inquiring Gannets Want to Know

Gannet, who is always attuned to historical and liturgical context, is curious as to why her little Ash Wednesday survey reveals a predominantly Anglican/Episcopalian presence here. Gannet herself being apparently Celtic by name, Puritan by ancestry, Methodist by childhood, Catholic by friendship, and Presbyterian by confession, wonders if all of that equals the Middle Way?

Or is it just that the survey happened to be about ashes?

Maybe if she asked about election, all the Presbies would show up.

Doing Things Differently

Last night I went to Mass and this morning I went to my own Presby church. Our pastors are both leading a group traveling in Israel, and today's guest preacher was none other than my very own CPE supervisor from Giant Famous Hospital.

After the service I asked her about one of the quotations she had mentioned, likely to appear in my other blog soon, about God holding our tears in a flask. "I think it's in Psalm 56," she said. "Let's check." And we pulled a Bible out of the first pew rack, and then a pencil so that I could make a quick note, and I chuckled and told her about going to Mass.

I've probably written this before, but the difference seems striking to me. In the Catholic churches and chapels I've frequented: no Bibles, no notepads, no pens in the pew racks. The readers identify Scripture passages by book ("A reading from Galatians"), but not by chapter and verse. You don't have a citation, and you can't look it up anyway unless you have your own Bible, and you can't make a note for later reference unless you have your own paper and pen.

I smiled at the assumption inherent in our conversation. A Baptist and a Presbyterian, we expect a Bible to be within reach anywhere in the sanctuary.

Don't get me wrong. I love both worship services, and I am able to accomodate what sometimes seems lacking in one or the other. But the Reformation emphasis on Scriptural accessibility and literacy really does jump out at me in the context of the most ordinary encounters.

The Spaces We Inhabit, Part I

Mrs. M over at The Kitchen Door has posted an interesting piece on the spaces in which we live. Prompted by considerations involved in moving to a new apartment, she moves on to what she has seen and experienced in various churches and what the different frameworks for worship mean. I am always fascinated by physcial space, and so I thought that in response to her questions I'd give it some thought for a few posts. Today I'm focusing on a few churches, Protestant and Catholic.

The Presbyterian church to which I belong, which I have served as an elder, in which I have participated and been supported in so many ways:

Think austere and elegant New England. The walls are a pale shade of white with a hint of blush, the trim a bit more on the creamy side. Two sets of pews with aisles down the center and down each side. The communion table on a raised platform, a lectern for the readings to the right side as the congregation faces the front, a pulpit for preaching to the left. The cross, a contemporary rendition which I have contemplated a great deal and hope to use as the subject of a sermon someday, hangs from the ceiling over the steps leading up to the communion table. No artwork whatever in the sanctuary. The windows are clear glass panes. The choir stalls are in the front, behind the communion table, and the organ is built into the wall behind them, so the choir is always visible and the music pours directly into the sanctuary.

The Methodist church in which our entire family participated energetically for many years:

The main sanctuary is modeled on a 13th century French Gothic cathedral, huge and cavernous, with breathtaking stained glass windows and elegant piers, columns, and arches. The layout is almost identical to that of my current church, with the exception of the music-related features: the choir stalls are in the left transept, so that the choir is all but invisible to the congregation, and difficult to hear, and the organ is built into the back wall above the balcony. When the church is full and everyone is singing and the organ is playing, the effect is impressive. The pulpit, lectern, and baptismal font are all made of wood, intricately carved exponents of the theme of vine and branches running through the entire space. A Renaissance reproduction painting of Mary and Jesus hangs over the baptismal font.

The sanctuary of my Presbyterian seminary:

Again, New England and austere, but without the intimacy of my home church. High, high ceilings, and high, high, clear glass windows. Now that I think of it, the interior shape must be something of a half-hexagon; the pews do not follow the lines of the walls and the effect is somewhat confusing. (From the outside, the building appears to be a square.) One of my readers may correct me here. Both organ and choir stalls are in the balcony. And here's something Mrs. M mentions in another context: the single pulpit (no lectern) is smack in the middle of the front. I had never heard of such a layout until just before I went off to seminary and wondered what it would look like -- and there it is! To me it seems rather an astonishing illustration of the Protestant emphasis on Word at, perhaps, the expense of Sacrament. It was awhile before I was able to shake off the sense that the human preacher rather than God was at the center of the worship service. When we have communion, it is served from a small table below the towering pulpit.

The Carmelite chapel, where I have spent some time this fall:

Another austere space, this one shaped somewhat like a barn, with white plaster walls. There is a statute of Mary with the baby Jesus in a side alcove, and that's it for artwork. The windows are clear glass and the furnishings are made of wood, with simple and spare lines, and entirely mobile. When I have been there we have always sat in rows forming a semi-circle the long way across the rectangular space, with the altar front and center and the lectern/pulpit off to the right. No choir; a small organ in the back, but I think it can be moved around.

The suburban Catholic church I sometimes attend which is, not surprisingly for me, also a Jesuit church:

You might call this one a contemporary version of the Methodist church described above. It's huge, wide with high ceilings, but no arches, no columns, and boxy rather than rectangular. Most of the stained glass windows have geometric art deco designs, except for those in the front which tell some of the Ignatian and Jesuit story. The organ is in the balcony, which is usually where the choir is, too, although often the music is provided by soloist or small group vocalists and musicians from the front to the right. There are a couple of very small side chapels, and large statues of Mary and Joseph, one on each side in the front, and a large lectern/pulpit to the left. The priests sometimes preach from the pulpit, and sometimes walk down and stand in or wander the aisle There is no doubt that in this church the emphasis is on the celebration of the Eucharist: the elevated altar is huge and set back at some remove from the congregation and the majestic crucifix takes up the entire wall above it.

My current favorite, even though I have only been there once ~ a downtown Catholic church restored over the last decade or so:

Inside, a wonderful semi-Gothic space with soaring arches and white walls and huge stained glass windows that somehow still enable bright light to filter through. A little bit in the way of sculpture and statues, not at all intrusive. There is an altar but, as with the Carmelites, everything is moveable. The day I was there, we sat in two vast semicircles; the reading was from the (beautifully carved) lectern placed toward one end and the homily was preached from the center of the congregation. The communion elements were consecrated on the altar, but the entire congregation of several hundred surged forward and encirled it, as we had gathered and encircled the bapismal font in back half-an-hour earlier for the full dunking baptism of a baby girl. I can't describe this church as well as I'd like since, as I've said, I've only been there once, but its combination of elegant and historical stone, glass, and archways with contemporary and spare furnishings and artwork, its infusion of bright light, and its generous balancing of space for both Word and Sacrament, is completely appealing to me.

Faith and Politics

With one day to go, perhaps a post on the election is in order. Truthfully, I have paid little attention to it. But I did vote, and so did the kids, and so will the Quiet Husband, and I think that for once we are all united in our views, and it looks like our guy may actually win. Whatever the outcome, I hope that the new occupant of the White House is paying attention to Nicolas Kristof's Saturday column in The Times, urging us to "Rejoin the World," because I think that the way in which we have isolated ourselves into a corner is our most pressing foundational concern.

That said, what interested me over the week-end was what local religious leaders had to say to their congregations about the election. In my own small personal orbit:

At Mass, the priest did not mention the election once. It was All Souls' Day there and he focused on purgatory. However, during the prayer time, individuals prayed in gratitude for our right to vote, in hope that we would use it wisely, and for the safety of both candidates. And when I went out to the parking lot, I discovered that each car bore an election placard checking off John McCain as the "right" vote for those concerned with issues from what might be termed a Catholic point of view. Of course, each issue is so complex that one could, in my view, hardly identify a "Catholic position." I suppose that if I gave it some thought, I would be offended by such a partisan interruption to an experience of worship, even after the final words were said and even in the parking lot and regardless of my personal viewpoint. Whatever.

In my own Presby church, the prayers of the people also included prayers that we would exercise the gift of the vote with wisdom. And our pastor did a masterful job of weaving the matter of the election into a sermon 0n Jesus' groundedness, arguing that at the core of the agitation in our nation is a question of identity and that we have lost touch with our ground of vaues. Jesus, he pointed out, identified himself with the humiliated, the powerless, and the poor. And then he segued from Jesus' identity to our own, from the election to All Saints' Day. The core of our being, he said, is a gift of God, and our dead are beloved because they had God's breath in them.

So ~ how did it go in your place of worship this past weekend?

From My Perspective...

My goal was to get through both Catholic and Presbyterian services this morning without having to endure either the marching-band quality of For All the Saints or the jauntiness of I Sing a Song of the Saints of God, and without breaking down as the litany of names of this year's deceased was read. It was my first attempt to return to my own church since the memorial service for our son two months ago, and I managed to achieve none of my desired ends, but the morning brought other gifts ~

An early morning email from my spiritual director ~ yes, he has some extra time for me as I begin to address the question of whether/when to return to seminary, which could be as soon as in four weeks ~

Beautiful mass readings from Wisdom, Romans, and Matthew ~

(And then: Thought I was on target until after the final hymn when, sure enough, the recessional was For All the Saints ~ Which was then the processional at my own church, where I arrived just a couple of minutes too early to avoid it ~ And was eventually followed by, again, sure enough, "I Sing a Song . . .," which actually gave me a little smile as three darling little girls crowded into the pulpit to sing the first verse, and I have wonderful memories of the time period when the Lovely Daughter would have been one of those little girls) ~

Redemption (for me) with the choir's singing of Agnus Dei from Durufle's Requiem during the offering ~

The solemn reading of names, through which I remained dry-eyed until the very last and unexpected insertion of the name of the father of the friend with whom I was seated; as I said to her, "It's always the surprises that get you" ~

The hands and arms reaching out to touch and embrace me as I walked down the center of the church toward communion, and the tears of our pastor as she served me ~

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful communion music: In the Singing and Jesus the Lord Said, 'I Am the Bread.'

So. I made it. And I feel cared for. Maybe I can do it again.

A Protestant at Mass

A seminary friend of mine, unfamiliar with monastic practice until last fall, questioned the usefulness of people who spend much of their largely sequestered lives in prayer. Utility is sometimes, in Protestant venues, defined in a rather limited way. As my readers know, I consider it a great gift of God in my life that both Catholic and Protestant worlds are accessible to me. My participation in one or the other is frequently marked by some discomfort -- I am always aware of what is "missing" or different -- but I suppose that that is a small price to pay for the grace of versatility, and for doors that are opened more often than they are closed.

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The Carmelite chapel, its spare contemporary architecture almost devoid of decoration, is about half full when I arrive at the last minute, almost blown in the door by a bitter fall wind at the end of the day. I slip into my usual place on the far side, where I have been hiding out these past weeks. I had not realized until this terrible event in our lives occurred that there is no place in our usual church services for those whose days and nights are enveloped in grief. Our worship, albeit usually traditional and even stately, bespeaks energy, joy, life -- and crowds out those whose endurance does not extend that far. The Carmelites are filled with a gentle sense of peace, and offer a spiritual space that encompasses people in all states of being.

I note that in the opening hymn the congregation, mostly Carmelite nuns and people my age or older, sings the word "God" whenever the word "He" is printed in the hymnal. And then I am startled by the immediate appearance of the priest, wearing bright red vestments. Why red in October, I wonder? The color really stands out on this dreary day. "The Lord be with you," he says. "And also with you," we respond. He is young, and earnest, and hopeful, and sweet. He reminds us that it is the feast day of Saints Simon and Jude. That doesn't mean much to me, but I reflect on how I have wished, more often lately than usual, that we Protestants had not abandoned attentiveness to saints. I am much in need of role models these days, and grateful for my knowledge of the medieval women mystics, women whose encounter with the presence of God was not diminshed by hardship and loss.

The mass proceeds. One of the Carmelites reads the epistle lesson, and she and another of her sisters sing the responsive refrain to the psalm so that the congregation can follow along. One of the most striking things to me, as I have attended these and other masses, has been the lack of Bibles in the pews and the lack of information on the readings in the bulletins. It seems odd to me that Scripture is read and sung without citations or texts being provided. And also difficult -- I am much more visual than auditory, and so I am considerably hampered in my attentiveness with nothing in front of me with which to connect. When I mentioned this to a friend last week-end, she told me that her priest believes that the Word should be proclaimed and the congregation should listen. All well and good for those of us who are natural listeners, I suppose. Those of us who are not are somewhat deprived.

When the priest reads the gospel passage I am in better shape, having already spent considerable time with it earlier in the day. And he does a nice job of delivering a carefully considered homily. The text is the Lucan call of the disciples, an episode of some relevance to me personally, as I try to discern in the wake of disaster whether my call to ministry has been completely eradicated. The priest's thesis is that the twelve whom Jesus calls could not possibly meet any contemporary management guru's idea of a stellar corporate team. They are, instead, "extravagantly flawed" individuals. As extravagantly as I am? I wonder. I also catch in passing that this priest always uses the pronoun "He" when he refers to God. I still like him. His love for God is all over his face.

We move on to the eucharistic portion of the service. I drift in and out of awareness at this point; I can never keep track of the order, I have to remember not to say the Protestant ending of the Lord's Prayer out loud, and I can't participate anyway. Sometimes I spend these minutes in an internal consideration of the various Protestant attitudes and beliefs with respect to Communion, but today I don't feel particularly analytical. I just wait for the actual distribution, when I can sit quietly and open my heart to God. I am extremely grateful for this interlude of five or so minutes of peace in the presence of others who are praying at a time when my own capacity to listen for God is considerably diminished.

When the mass is over, I step to the back of the chapel to look out the huge windows at the walled garden courtyard behind the monastery. I had not noticed it before; it's beautiful, even in what has now become something like sleet. As I walk back through the chapel toward the doors, a couple of the sisters stop to hug me and thank me for coming. They have probably forgotten my name, but they know what has happened and why I am there, and they always thank me for joining them. I am, as always, so touched by their gentle and unobtrusive acceptance that I cannot manage my own words of gratitude.

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"Useful" seems such a crass word in these circumstances. I would argue that gracious, and loving, and generous, apply. Words that one might apply to Jesus.

Mass with the Carmelites

That's where I've gone the past two Sunday mornings. I can't go to my own Presby church, full as it is of celebratory beginning-of-the-year-ness. I need a mass that is a sacrifice. For those of you familiar with the Ignatian Exercises, my life now is an immersion in Week 3. Week 4 looks light years away. And I need a place where I don't know anyone.

So today, of course, an acquaintance of mine, mother of former classmates of my children, was there, and came up and asked me whether I knew any of the sisters. "A couple of them," I said. "Would you like to be introduced?" "No," I said. I tried to soften it. "Another time."

Of course, there are things I miss. The celebrants are always male and, so far, not trained in preaching Protestant-style. It is often difficult to follow the homilies. They seem to be thoughtful and well-prepared, but the delivery somewhat misses the mark. Nevertheless, I get bits and pieces. From last week:

Know yourself. (Socrates)
Be yourself. (Cicero).
Give yourself. (Jesus).

And from this morning:

Sometimes people are under the impression that faith is like being covered by a huge electric blanket. But it is much harder to believe than it is not to believe. (Flannery O'Connor).

I have no idea what the point of either homily was, and the quotes are unlikely to be accurate. Close enough, though.

I did go and speak to one of the sisters this morning. I suppose it is of those degrees of separation things. A couple of years ago, my former spiritual director had preached there (and he is, in fact, a brilliant preacher) and referenced my photographs of Chartres Cathedral. She had talked to him about it, and he had asked me to call her, which I did. We never did get together to talk about Chartres, but we did meet, walking around the Little Lakes one day, and so today I re-introduced myself and told her a little of the circumstances of my being there.

The Carmelites pray all the time.

Feat Day of St. John Lateran

Today is the Feast Day of the Lateran Basilica of St. John in Rome.

True enough, Protestants don't officially celebrate Catholic feast days. But that's no reason not to take advantage of them to explore some history, and the many-centuries history of the Lateran is fascinating. Probably all (if anything) that most of us know about it has to do with the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, when the doctrine of transubstantian was affirmed. Here's some more.

Summertime Miscellany

Last night I went with the Lovely Daughter and two of her friends to see the Harry Potter movie. I found it a bit tedious at first, but we were all mesmerized by the end. And then a bizarre experience on the way home unfolded as a young boy dashed frantically into the street right in front of the car ahead of us, followed by a furiously gesturing man who looked to be in his twenties, who was himself followed by a prancing little dog. Two other boys stopped themselves on the curb, and we all gasped in relief as we saw that neither boy nor man nor dog had not been run over. We called the police, and drove back after dropping off one of the girls to find four squad cars lined up at the corner.

The dog was the most bizarre element of the rather unnerving scene.

Between yesterday and today I've had maybe five seminary related conversations, with administrators and other students, on topics ranging from the practicalities of moving in to some of the more esoteric challenges ahead. Just as it took several weeks for the reality of leaving my teaching job and Jewish community to sink in, now the realization that I am beginning new work in a new community is washing over me with increasing momentum.

I called the Ontario Jesuit center today and made my final deposit on my eight-day retreat, which is only three weeks away. I've never done this before and, while I'm really looking forward to it, I'm also having trouble imagining a large community of people spending a week in almost complete silence together. I suppose that by the time it's over, I will be struggling to imagine people spending most of their time in conversation with one another!

I find that I am increasingly perturbed by the Pope's remarks earlier in the week about the Protestant churches. They have been well analyzed elsewhere; all I really have to note is my personal distress. I know that he hasn't said anything new, and I knew that most of my own Catholic friends are probably more unhappy about the situation than I am. Of course, we have all had our own contribution to make. When I have taught the Reformation to my Jewish high school world history students for the past several years, I have presented it as follows: a day on the social, economic, and religious climate in which frustration with the church fermented; a day on Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII; a day on Luther's anti-Semitism, distasteful and horrific as the topic is, but to me seemingly mandatory in the interest of full disclosure and honesty toward Jewish students; and the usual final day wrap-up of ask-whatever-you-want-about-Christianity.

It's been a long 500 years.

The photographs are of the ruins of the Iona Nunnery. I took them exactly one year ago this week, and I think most of them enlarge pretty well with a click or two. Before I went to Iona, a good friend of mine, a nun in her seventies who has spent most of her life in that rural convent I described a few entries earlier, told me how powerfully the Nunnery had resonated with her on her two visits there. "I imagined those women," she said, "working there, out on that isolated island, eight hundred years ago, and thought: they were trying to do exactly what I try to do!" The Nunnery is in ruins thanks to the Presbyterian Reformers of the sixteenth century. Enough of it remains that it is easy to imagine those women at work, at prayer, at dinner, stopping to stare out the window toward the sea -- and painful to imagine the disruption of their lives by those who thought they had a clearer vision of the will of God.

And so today my own life feels unsettled ~ by the man chasing the little boy into the dark and busy street, by the prancing dog who followed them, by the unknown future, by the persistent voices claiming power and supremacy of vision.

I do need that retreat.

Oddly Enough

In the book A Vision of Light, which the RevGalBlogPals are reading at the moment, one of the characters adopts the view that God is absorbed by and adept at instigating irony.

It makes sense, when you think about it.

I myself found it rather ironical yesterday that just as I had been posting about my educational-religious-spiritual past as influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, and feeling expansively ecumenical (as I pretty much always do), the Vatican was apparently feeling quite differently.

Describing Christian Orthodox and Protestant churches as "wounded" by our failure to recognize the Pope and his (yes, always "his") apostolic succession, the Vatican has reiterated its view that "it is . . . difficult to see how the title of 'Church' could possibly be attributed to them."

A slightly different report can be found here.

And thanks to Beyond Assumptions, who raised the topic earlier today, a response can be found here.

As it happens, I dealt with the heat yesterday by staying inside where the fans are and watching Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ which, thanks to Netflix, had just landed in the mail slot. I had not seen it before and I don't imagine it's going to make my list of movie favorites. However, assuming that the unremitting violence it depicts is accurate, I am again struck by a certain sense of irony: Did all of that anguish and agony occur so that we could argue about how to structure our churches?

Well, I had a few things to say earlier today, but my plan now is to return to my generally ecumenical and open-minded stance of gratitude that there is more than one way. His Holiness has an open invitation to accompany me to church any time at all.

Getting Here (III): Catholic Life

This post turns out, quite by accident, to have a certain timeliness to it. Our Catholic brothers and sisters are embroiled in controversy over the Pope's decision to extend opportunities for the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass to be celebrated where requested. I read a number of Catholic blogs, so I am aware, albeit to a limited extent, that "neoCaths" and "radtrads" are trumpeting victory and urging that the Vatican II generation retire itself to a few isolated monasteries, and the latter are objecting strenuously to what they perceive as backward steps taken by a Vatican which has acted with radical disregard toward its legions of experts in liturgy and its laity, most of whom it simply did not bother to consult.

I suppose that a Latin mass would not bother me; I never studied Latin but I remember enough French and Spanish that I would probably be able to follow it. However, the language barrier would make it unlikely that I would find in it the magisterial awe and sense of reverent mystery that its proponents claim. I would, on the other hand, be seriously disturbed by a mass in which the presiding priest faced the altar rather than the congregation -- a clear symbol of the line of demarcation between clergy and laity and an implication that God's presence is more profoundly available in certain locales than in others.

All of the "woulds" in the preceding paragraph underscore the obvious: I am not Catholic and this is not my battle. However, much of my spirituality has been formed by the Catholic faith, and much of the support in my journey toward seminary has come from the Jesuit priest who as a spiritual director provides me with endless challenge and encouragment. Consequently, I am extemely interested in the direction in which the Catholic Church is moving. Its influence in my life originated in my early teenage years:

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Picture: A scrawny twelve-year-old girl with humiliatingly nondescript short brown hair and bangs, wearing a brand new plaid jumper, a pastel blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and black flats. She is being ushered through the high-ceilinged corridors of the convent, hugely built in the mid-1800s and home to classrooms, dormitories, elegantly crafted shelves and woodwork, well-appointed parlors, kitchens, dining halls ("refectories" in convent parlance), and cloistered chambers for nuns. Her guide is a nun -- and whatever that might be, the place is crawling with them. They are all decked out in long black habits and starched white wimples (new vocabularly words for our heroine), with crosses jammed like hunting knives into their black belts and lengthy strands of black beads swaying against the folds of their skirts. (The word "rosary" is, also, as of yet unknown.)

As they reach the enormous Gothic chapel, our young lady discovers that most of the women and girls, upon entering the door, dip their fingers into a container of water and make a mysterious sign across their bodies. They kneel in the aisle and then sidle into the long pews, where they again kneel on little cushioned benches that seem to have been placed there for just such a purpose. Being sort of Methodist, our observer has never seen anyone kneel in church -- not that she has ever encountered holy water or the sign of the cross, either. But she is willing to wait things out patiently. She is only twelve, but she has encountered enough new situations in life to know that there is no point in assuming or expecting anything. Whatever happens will always be something far different from anything that could have been anticipated.

The only man in evidence, grandly dressed in long robes, is at the altar, where he lifts an enormous round gold container of sorts into the air and chants something unintelligible. Most of the crowd in the pews chants right back. Within a few moments, all is made transparently clear: nothing will ever be comprehensible again. There will be no clarification of beads, crucifixes, water, hand signs, kneeling, nuns or chants -- it turns out that every single word is spoken in Latin.

And thus I was introduced to the Roman Catholic faith. A pre-Vatican II faith, in which young women were graduated from high school and immediately entered the convent, in which priests were placed on pedestals so high you could barely see them.

What was I doing there? My father and his brothers were graduates of a high-profile New England prep school and, while he wanted the same for me, my dad was convinced that our local school system was not up to the job of preparing me (to be prepared). He knew the nuns who ran the school -- it was 20 minutes further out into the country from our home. Many girls from our community attended the nuns' school, albeit as day students. I have my stepmother to thank for getting me out of the house on a permanent basis by the beginning of seventh grade.

In other words, I had arrived at a Catholic boarding school, kicking and screaming against my forced spearation from my friends, for academic and family reasons. No one in my family seems to have given a thought to the RELIGIOUS facet of the school, which would come to permeate my daily life. I can only conclude now that my family was so a-religious (not anti-religious; just oblivious to the whole concept of religion) that it never occurred to them that anyone took it seriously. Not even nuns.

Here, in a nutshell, was life in a Catholic girls' boarding school in the mid-1960s:

blue wool skirts and white blouses designed in, oh, maybe 1940;

daily religion classes, Catholics and nonCatholics segregated from one another, but both taught by nuns;

long and narrow dormitories in which we slept on beds in rows of cubicles curtained off from one another;

the Beatles, the Stones, and the Supremes blasting from deeply recessed windows in hundred-year-old buildings;

a weekly liturgical music class and a weekly choral music class;

cigarettes in the bathrooms and in the fields behind the school;

skirts rolled up to reveal several inches of thigh;

Sunday Mass, Friday Mass, and, often, several other masses;

basketball with nuns in ankle-length habits;

Saturday morning sewing classes, which I avoided by hiding out on the soccer field;

Latin, statues, holy water, medals, missals, lacy caps for entering the chapel, tattered books on the gory and self-sacrificial lives of the saints, crosses all over the place, brief periods of freedom on late afternoon horseback rides, prayers before meals and classes, slipping out and curling up in those deep window wells for late night conversations long after the nuns had gone to bed;

numerous hours devoted to the development of carefully designed plots for infiltrating the cloistered area of the buildings where the nuns lived in order to research the answer to that endlessly challenging and earth-shaking question: What kind of underwear do nuns wear?

and, since it was the 60s: the Smothers Brothers, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Walter Kronkite.

If you watched the tv show American Dreams, you could have seen in Meg's school some strong similarities to my own. The main difference, of course, was that we lived there, 24/7, and so it was nuns, may of them remarkably young and entirely Catholic, who filled in for parents.

I left that school after ninth grade as an agnostic at best, more probably an atheist. I had experienced a very short period of religious sensibility, filled with the sense of the mystery that is God, but that was quickly stamped out by my father, who believed that people should wait for adulthood for faith. Eventually I had my fill of religious indoctrination and, as a nonCatholic surrounded by medieval ritual, I emerged with a vastly enlarged capacity for skepticism. But I did make three gains that equipped me well for life:

In the first place, I became accustomed to a world in which women managed their own lives. The convent sat on land far out in the country and the nuns managed their farm, their convent, and their school. Men were seldom in evidence. Oh, there was a priest, but since I was not Catholic, his presence was of little significance to me. I didn't make confession or take communion or study with the upperclass Catholics, so I had virtually no interaction with him. I never had any reason to surmise that adult women were in need of male approval or cooperation for their endeavors.

Secondly, the nuns were, on the whole, particularly broad-minded women. Probably one of the most significant episodes of my entire educational career occurred when Sister Collette, who taught our nonCatholic religion class in 8th or 9th grade, decided that we would study comparative religions. An extremely young woman schooled entirely in the Roman Catholic tradition, she tried to teach us basic Catholicism, since that was what she knew. We, her irritable and difficult students, did not hesitate to communicate to her that her information conflicted with what we had picked up in various Protestant Sunday Schools. After running into several 13 and 14-year-old brick walls, she announced that she had realized that she knew nothing about religions other than her own, and so we were going to study them together. I don't remember any specifics about what we studied -- although I do know that the only Seder I ever attended until a couple of years ago was the one we put together in our little pastel-painted Catholic classroom in the heart of midwestern farmland-- but I have always remembered her fearless and open-minded decision about what we should learn and how we should do it -- with respectful interest and graciousness.

Finally, I learned, without recognizing it as a life skill, to form friendships with other girls and women. I learned to see the members of my gender as reliable, trustworthy, and desirable confidants. I learned that girls and women are smart, talented, strong, funny, and hugely determined people. Year before last, I attended a reunion, and spent an afternoon with women I had last hung out with when we were 14 together. It was so easy. When you have talked with a good friend all afternoon and late into the night, month after month -- well, it's an incredible way to live as a young girl. I suppose that we were too independent of adult supervision, and too limited in our encounters with the opposite gender (not for want of trying, believe me), but we learned how to be with women. Don't misunderstand me -- I would not recommend that a twelve-year-old live away from home. But there are always compensations, and the company of strong women, whether twelve or 80 years old, is one of them.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: The Catholic Years

Picture: A scrawny twelve-year-old girl with humiliatingly nondescript short brown hair and bangs, wearing a brand new plaid jumper, a pastel blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and black flats. She is being ushered through the high-ceilinged corridors of the convent, hugely built in the mid-1800s and home to classrooms, dormitories, elegantly crafted shelves and woodwork, well-appointed parlours, kitchens, dining halls ("refectories" in convent parlance), and cloistered chambers for nuns. Her guide is a nun -- and whatever that might be, the place is crawling with them. They are all decked out in long black habits and starched white wimples (new vocabularly words for our heroine), with crosses jammed into their black belts like hunting knives and lengthy strands of black beads swaying against the folds of their skirts. (The word "rosary" is, also, as of yet unknown.) As they reach the enormous Gothic chapel,
our young lady discovers that most of the women and girls, upon entering the door, dip their fingers into a container of water and make a mysterious sign across their bodies. They kneel in the aisle and then sidle into the long pews, where they again kneel on little cushioned benches that seem to have been placed there for just such a purpose. Being sort of Methodist, our observer has never seen anyone kneel in church -- not that she has ever encountered holy water or the sign of the cross, either. But she is willing to wait things out patiently. She is only twelve, but she has encountered enough new situations in life to know that there is no point in assuming or expecting anything. Whatever happens will always be something far different from anything that could have been anticipated.

The only man in evidence, grandly dressed in long robes, is at the altar, where he lifts an enormous round gold container of sorts into the air and chants something unintelligible. Most of the crowd in the pews chants right back. Within a few moments, all is made transparently clear: nothing will ever be comprehensible again. There will be no clarification of beads, crucifixes, water, hand signs, kneeling, nuns or chants -- it turns out that every single word is spoken in Latin.

And thus I was introduced to the Roman Catholic faith. A pre-Vatican II faith, in which young women were graduated from high school and immediately entered the convent, in which priests were placed on pedestals so high you could barely see them.

What was I doing there? My father and his brothers were graduates of a high-profile New England prep school and, while he wanted the same for me, my dad was convinced that our local school system was not up to the job of preparing me (to be prepared). He knew the nuns who ran the school -- it was 20 minutes further out into the country from our home. Many girls from our community attended the nuns' school, albeit as day students. I have my stepmother to thank for getting me out of the house on a permanent basis by the beginning of seventh grade.
In other words, I had arrived at a Catholic boarding school, kicking and screaming against my forced spearation from my friends, for academic and family reasons. No one in my family seems to have given a thought to the RELIGIOUS facet of the school, which would come to permeate my daily life. I can only conclude now that my family was so areligious (not anti-religious; just oblivious to the whole concept of religion) that it never occurred to them that anyone took it seriously. Not even nuns.

Here,in a nutshell, was life in a Catholic girls' boarding school in the mid-1960s:

blue wool skirts and white blouses designed in, oh, maybe 1940;

daily religion classes, Catholics and nonCatholics segregated from one another, but both taught by nuns;

long and narrow dormitories in which we slept on beds in rows of cubicles curtained off from one another;

the Beatles, the Stones, and the Supremes blasting from deeply recessed windows in hundred-year-old buildings;

a weekly liturgical music class and a weekly choral music class;

cigarettes in the bathrooms and in the fields behind the school;

skirts rolled up to reveal several inches of thigh;

Sunday Mass, Friday Mass, and, often, several other masses;
basketball with nuns in ankle-length habits;

Saturday morning sewing classes, which I avoided by hiding out on the soccer field;

Latin, statues, holy water, medals, missals, lacy caps for entering the chapel, tattered books on the gory and self-sacrificial lives of the saints, crosses all over the place, brief periods of freedom on late afternoon horseback rides, prayers before meals and classes, slipping out and curling up in those deep window wells for late night conversations long after the nuns had gone to bed;
numerous hours devoted to the development of carefully designed plots for infiltrating the cloistered area of the buildings where the nuns lived in order to research the answer to that endlessly challenging and earth-shaking question: What kind of underwear do nuns wear?

And, since it was the 60s: the Smothers Brothers, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Walter Kronkite.

If you watch the tv show American Dreams on Sunday nights, you can see in Meg's school some strong similarities to my own. The main difference, of course, was that we lived there, 24/7, and so it was nuns, may of them remarkably young and entirely Catholic, who filled in for parents.
I left that school after ninth grade as an agnostic at best, more probably an atheist. I had had my fill of religious indoctrination and, as a nonCatholic surrounded by medieval ritual, I emerged with a vastly enlarged capacity for skepticism. But I did make three gains that equipped me well for life:

In the first place, I became accustomed to a world in which women managed their own lives. The convent sat on acreage far out in the country and the nuns managed their farm, their convent, and their school. Men were seldom in evidence. Oh, there was a priest, but since I was not Catholic, his presence was of little significance to me. I didn't make confession or take communion or study with the upperclass Catholics, so I had virtually no interaction with him. I never had any reason to surmise that adult women were in need of male approval or cooperation for their endeavors.

Secondly, the nuns were, on the whole, particularly broad-minded women. Probably one of the most significant episodes of my entire educational career occurred when Sister Collette, who taught our nonCatholic religion class in 8th or 9th grade, decided that we would study comparative religions. An extremely young woman schooled entirely in the Roman Catholic tradition, she tried to teach us basic Catholicism, since that was what she knew. We, her irritable and difficult students, did not hesitate to communicate to her that her information conflicted with what we had picked up in various Protestant Sunday Schools. After running into several 13 and 14-year-old brick walls, she announced that she had realized that she knew nothing about religions other than her own, and so we were going to study them together. I don't remember any specifics about what we studied -- although I do know that the only Seder I have ever attended was the one we put togetherin our little pastel-painted Catholic classroom in the heart of midwestern farmland-- but I have always remembered her fearless and open-minded decision about what we should learn and how we should do it -- with respectful interest and graciousness.

Finally, I learned, without recognizing it as a life skill, to form friendships with other girls and women. I learned to see the members of my gender as reliable, trustworthy, and desirable confidants. I learned that girls and women are smart, talented, strong, funny, and hugely determined people. Year before last, I attended a reunion, and spent an afternoon with women I had last hung out with when we were 14 together. It was so easy. When you have talked with a good friend all afternoon and late into the night, month after month -- well, it's an incredible way to live asa young girl. I suppose that we were too independent of adult supervision, and too limited in our encounters with the opposite gender (not for want of trying, believe me), but we learned how to be with women. Don't misunderstand me -- I would not recommend that a twelve-year-old live away from home. But there are always compensations, and the company of strong women, whether twelve or 80 years old, is one of them.