I didn’t attend Mass regularly after college, aside from Christmas with my family although we dipped back into religion when my husband and I had a Catholic wedding. It felt like the Jesuits were speaking to us as young people, as real people, as smart people-it also helped that while at school I studied “The Problem of God” with Father Thomas King, which made my brain ache, so Mass felt like a lighter, chattier version of that. I just didn’t want to go.Īs a student at Georgetown University, my ears perked up for the first time in a long time at church. Once I had the freedom to pull away from weekly Mass, I did. I got caught once or twice not showing up when I had told my parents I would, but getting in trouble didn’t make me want to go more. When I was old enough, I became an altar server and played music with a recorder choir at Mass, because those activities gave me something to do, a new perspective from which to observe the up-and-down the aisle proceedings of the ushers, the laypeople, the communion-receivers.īy high school I was allowed to go to Mass on my own.
Most weeks, as I sat in the pew, my mind wandered, and I played mental games to pass the time, such as discovering how many of the alphabet’s letters were in that week’s bulletin. My brain rarely connected with what I heard from the altar. For me, Mass was a thing to get through so that we could go home and have donuts for breakfast, what I thought of as the reward for going to church. As a child I attended a K–8 Catholic school and went to church with my family every Sunday.
0 kommentar(er)
