Sometime when I was young, the Catholic Church began allowing Saturday Vigil Mass to fulfill Sunday obligation. Permission was granted in the document Eucharisticum Mysterium. (All our best stuff is in Latin.) It was a gamechanger for high school and college kids who wanted to sleep in Sundays after carousing the night before. There isn’t much carousing left in my life, so that’s not an issue.
A few years ago, Cathedral in New Ulm began offering 6:30 Sunday night Mass. I attend that a few times a year. I enjoy the setting. As large as Cathedral is, it feels intimate compared to Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s.
Before Mass is time to check in with God. “How are you doing God?” And “How am I? You got a few minutes?” There were things weighing on me. Family members are dealing with challenges. Friends are facing some issues right now. Health, relationships, jobs, finances: I offered those up. None of this was news to God, but it relieves me to share it. It is a prayer, one of solicitation, “Help Lord.”
Of course, there is much to be thankful for, the point of the holiday just passed. I try to be mindful of that. But some days, the heavy stuff tips the scale its way, worry getting more attention than gratitude. This was one.
I looked around at the couple hundred people scattered in the pews. I wondered what things were on their minds. Each has positives and negatives in their lives. The balance shifts back and forth, depending on a thousand things around us. We control some of those. A lot we don’t.
When I’m in church, I have this habit of seeing all of us there as a group, a temporary team, united for this. We are sharing this one hour, so there is a real temporal and spatial connection. In church parlance, we are the Body of Christ.
I do that other times I’m gathered in a group. Admittedly, that might be odd. If I’m at a Twins game or a play, I perceive a bond with others in the crowd, with our shared attentions on the field or on the stage. My family knows I can strike up conversations with people around me spontaneously. It comes from that sense of sharing this moment. Occasionally, I get a “Why are you talking to me?” look. More often, I have agood little visit with a new person.
The procession began, and it was time to stand. I left my thoughts and moved to the moment at hand. Father Jerry Meidl was the celebrant. That was good. I was feeling burdened, but Mass with Father Jerry comes with a sense of lightness, even joy.
The opening song was from the missals that were in the pews. The missal was new. Then it occurred to me that this was the First Sunday of Advent. The beginning of the church year means perfect missals, free of bends and folds. I handle it with care, kind of like opening a pack of baseball cards.
Despite having lived 65 Advents, it surprises me when another comes around. For the part of me that is Christian, this is new year’s day, the first day of the liturgical year. Advent is the time for personal house cleaning in anticipation of Christ’s birth. Christ was born two thousand years ago, but the Church calendar lets me relive the story every year.
At Cathedral, there are paintings of angels above us along with saints and scenes from the Bible. Sitting in back, my gaze goes up to them for a moment. Then, my eyes fall on the Stations of the Cross around us on the walls. It is an awful irony that on this day we begin preparation for His birth, we know how the story ends. Well, not exactly ends. But it will wind through the Passion and Crucifixion on the way to the Resurrection. All that is ahead for the child in the manger.
I thought of our group of worshippers assembled there, our “team.” Each of our members is weighed down by something because that’s the way life is. M. Scott Peck opened his book “The Road Less Traveled” with this: “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.” Not remembering much else of the book, that has stuck with me. The Christian story is that into this difficult life, this troubled world, Jesus comes.
After Mass, as Coach Meidl was leading our team off the field, I lingered on the bench. Er, pew. Enjoying my shiny missal with that new-missal smell, I paged through the readings for Advent. A favorite was there on the Second Sunday of Advent. It is from the Book of Isaiah where the prophet is foretelling Jesus’ birth:
“Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid: the calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them. There shall be no harm or ruin on all the holy mountain: for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord.”
Those are amazing images. Isaiah means to amaze. We look around, and calves and lions aren’t browsing together. It doesn’t take great theological insight to see Isaiah was using poetry to talk to our species. It’s a message of the possible. It’s a message of loving and caring.
If so, our species has a way to go. We have divided ourselves into groups that if they don’t hate each other, they sure aren’t kind to each other. Left and right, churched and unchurched, dark-skinned and light-skinned, native and immigrant. I could come up with a thousand words for the divisions we’ve created. We’ve become really good at not getting along.
I thought about this as I left the warmth of the church and stepped into the cold. According to Isaiah, the child leads us to a new way. “For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord.” We’d do well this Advent to imagine what that would look like.