wellllll….there was one itty bitty problem here. With the priest facing the altar, no microphone, me sitting in the back, with my ears covered with a scarf, I didn’t exactly hear too well. I could certainly tell that Father was speaking beautifully in Latin, but I was hoping to hear the words more clearly. I do understand some Latin words and I was hoping to try to piece together what he was saying as much as I could. When the priest spoke in English (Gospel reading, homily) he had a microphone, so I heard that all very clearly and that was quite lovely. I think I’d like to go again sometime, but for now I will enjoy Mass in English.

The Mass itself was well attended. Maybe 75 people. The pews were maybe half full…lots of families. The ladies were basically dressed rather modestly, which was nice. Most of the women and girls had head coverings (so glad I thought to bring one at the last minute). Everyone looked pleasant enough, but this church has a real emphasis on silence while inside…this includes before and after the Mass because people are praying. They also offer Penance just before Mass, so I’d imagine that would be another reason for quiet. So, not really any talking among people.

The service itself was quite different. There was no opening or closing procession. There were no times in which the congregation was expected to respond (except during one prayer in English). There was tons of kneeling. The service was a good hour or more. There was no singing….although I know this Church regularly has what they call “sung Masses” with Gregorian chant. Conspicuously absent as well was wishing each other peace. Also, after the service, was a different type of service which they seem to do fairly regularly: the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. I’ve never seen this before and honestly I didn’t know anything was ever don’t to the host prior to transubstantiation. I have to look up the meaning of this ritual.

During the Benediction though, we did get to sing in Latin. Pronunciation is quite easy. There were also translations of the hymns and that made it more meaningful to me.

In order to really derive what I need to derive from a Mass I not only have to hear what is being said (of course), but I’ve got to learn more Latin. I actually don’t think it would be too difficult to gain an understanding of what is being said. We’ll see if I go that route.

I need to reflect on this if I am to move forward in a positive way. Every time I’ve tried to think about what happened with regard to my relationship to the Church, it is too painful and it makes me angry. I have to think past the pain. Part of what has motivated me to do this at this point is not only that this is my last consideration of re-joining the Church, but I was reading about really the “downfall” (for lack of a better term right now) of the Church since the Second Vatican Council. I’m wondering why that happened also. It has to be multi-factorial, but I wonder if some of the reasons that people have for lack of involvement in the Church these days has anything or nothing to do with mine.

I was deeply religious as a teenager. As I remember, so were many of my friends as teenagers. We were in Church all the time and spoke a lot about religion. A relative of my still has old letters from her boyfriend (when they were teens). She reread them when she heard of his suicide. So many of his letters were about how deeply committed he was to his faith. Somewhere though, he broke down and gave up….although I am not even suggesting that this had anything to do with his relationship to the Church. With what I know about his history, there may or may not have been a link. I realize that so many of my old friends were deeply religious although they did not broadcast it, nor were they known for their piety. Their faith was deeply internal.

I had no problem with Church dogma, although I have to admit that over the years, even in RC school, I learned very little. This has been my experience of most Catholics…they know so little. The older generation is an exception. They were taught so much more about the history and dogma of the Church. In HS we had almost exclusively lay teachers….they knew pitifully little about how to teach us anything about Catholicism. No one will believe this, but God’s honest truth is that if I didn’t already know about birth control before entering Catholic HS, that would have been where I learned about it. We had a “health class”. We were an all girls HS. The lay teacher told us how to use birth control and that if we were having sex that we should be using it. She had to have had full consent of the nuns who ran the school, otherwise she’d have been fired. This is obviously not something that the archdiocese knew about. As a teenager, I was shocked. I told my mother (and I cannot fathom how no one else went home and said anything). My mother told me not to “open a can of worms” and that the principal probably agreed with the teacher, that’s why the teacher was allowed to conduct such a class. An interesting fact about this class…..the teacher only failed to bring condoms that day because in her past experience they all got stolen before they made their way around the classroom. I had never seen a condom before and I’m not sure I would have had any interest, especially at age fifteen.

Back to the dogma that I DID know about though…..I had no problem with it. I believed and supported what I knew about the Church and was willing to do so for the rest of my life. Actually I loved our Church (the structure itself) and some of the nuns and priests that we met over the years. Some of them…maybe even most of them…were good people and amazingly dedicated. Speaking of the religious orders….thinking back, I’m surprised at the number of people I knew who had considered a religious life in their hearts. This included me. I don’t know anyone who actually made that choice though. I think there is a myth that people left the Church because they got lazy and didn’t want to follow Church rules. Sure there are rules and sure they can be a challenge. I don’t ever remember having trouble following the rules. Actually, I liked being Catholic and it gave me not only a clear religious identity, but a sense of comfort and warmth and purpose. I was proud to be a Catholic. Now, I’ve got myself dangling in mid-air, not knowing which end is up. I have to fix this.

I can tell you what has always been my perception of why I, and so many others, have drifted from the Church, even proclaiming, at times, a hatred for the Church. Normally I rant a lot about the judgmental people I met in Church, who were rude, thought who they were…that they were better, more religious, closer to God, what have you, than anyone else. As a small child, this affects your self worth and it turns you away from what you perceive as the source. I have an answer for that now as an adult. Of course I will meet people like this in all walks of life. They even seem to have a strange affinity for showing up in churches. First, I don’t have to give an ounce of consideration to anything they say. Second, I can lead by my own example…which is to realize that I am no better than anyone else and also below God. Third, I can show them compassion because there IS an underlying reason why they are behaving this way. Maybe their are just mean people, but maybe they are trying to compensate for their own perceived deficits. Either way, I don’t have to let it affect me in the least. Perhaps, depending on the individual, I can find a way to approach the situation with dialog.

Now some other reasons. I’ll start with the collapse of my family. Heaven knows, at the time my family was collapsing, lots of other families were too. I can see a clear link between the destruction of the family unit of which I was a part and our drifting away from the church as a family. As a small child, I remember my father losing work and, at least early on, I think he was trying very hard to become re-employed and to regain his ability to care for his family. My mother also ended up working. This was an enormous strain on our family and it took a toll. I had two unhappy parents and the whole family felt it. We drifted apart and that meant we were no longer really even like a family anymore. We didn’t go to church together much past this point. I was in, maybe, second grade at this time. It also seemed like my family woes were visible to the entire neighborhood and it was embarrassing. Sure, there were other families struggling similarly but, at least visibly, most did not seem to be. I’m sure there were plenty of others too who had similar financial situations and similar kids of dissolution of a family that was otherwise physically intact. I felt isolated and different from those around me. As a family I don’t think we felt we were as good as other families. This was the beginning of the end of my parents marriage. They had been married maybe twelve years. It just kept getting worse and worse and they eventually divorced after more than nineteen years of marriage. When I look back to the old neighborhood today, I see similar. And, I’m talking about “the older generation”; the parents of my friends.

I don’t know if there could have been anything the Church could have done to help struggling families, but I do know that there was a perception in my neighborhood that the money rolling in was more important than the people staying in the Church. Stories were constantly going about the neighborhood about families not being allowed to engage in certain Church related activities due to lack of ability to pay. This was particularly ironic, since many of these families were huge precisely because they WERE so religious and trying to follow Church rules (no BC, certainly no abortion). I have heard of religious schools (non-RC) which only charge tuition based on ability to pay. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know if it could have been possible for our parish/archdiocese to be different and allow full participation regardless of ability to pay. This was perceived as greed on the part of the Church (at least amongst the people I knew) and as not placing true value on the actual families in the Church. I try to think about why the Church would opt to do things this way. I remember this from back when I was small….say maybe seven or eight…so let’s say the year was ’75. Things never got better. We never felt we were valued if we didn’t have as much money as other families. I know that by ’75 the Church was already in trouble. Maybe they had already started clenching their fists tightly to hold onto what money they could (let’s keep the members with the money???)….although I know the RC Church is filthy rich. SOMETHING had to have changed though because when my mother and her siblings were growing up in the 40s and 50s they were so darned poor that they didn’t have enough food to eat, but all of them still had twelve years of very good, very solid RC education. They were never rejected with regard to remaining in school or making the Sacraments. For the life of me, I don’t know what the difference was. Not only that, but the family was also taking care of elderly parents. They had nothing. Today, people who seem much better off still cannot afford private RC schooling. Has the dollar lost that much value in terms of buying an education?

Today, since my husband and I are much better off than my family or my mother’s family were, we would not have trouble affording a private RC education for our kids. Actually when you look at private schools, RC schools are a pretty good deal. Quality may be another issue though. When I was in RC school as a child, the education was top-notch (academically…not in terms of religious ed) and it was that was as well when my mother was a kid. My sister’s kids were in RC school (the aforementioned “birth control” school). The education was a nightmare. They couldn’t even get a teacher for one grade level, so they had parents standing in to teach the kids. My mother and I were mortified. To public school the kids went…and stayed. Heck, it was better and FREE. I suppose what I would do is look at performance of the student body in standardized testing and choose the school that was best??? Hopefully, that school would really still mean a very solid education for my kids that would challenge their minds and keep them competitive. Somehow, I think FV could do much better probably with a homeschooling curriculum, but that’s another story. RC homeschoolers somehow end up being able to teach their kids an enormous amount of academics but an amazing amount of in depth religious education, completed with Latin.

When I think of the life of Jesus I see his life as an example I want to follow. Maybe I expect too much when I think I should see this 24/7 amongst Church-members. No human can do that. Maybe I have to let up on others. If I want to see a Christ-like life….I should be the example myself already. And, regardless of all the insanity that is going on in the secular world, I can still have my private inner world that is deeply committed to following my faith. In RC, there are countless saints also to look to for inspiration with regard to just about anything life can dish out at you. I don’t want to die someday, dangling just like I am now. I need something to be permanently committed to. In the coming weeks, months I am going to start visiting churches. I’d like to see something different than what I saw before, bearing in mind my own personal responsibilities toward how I must approach a faith, a church and a congregation. I’ll start tomorrow. I’m heading up to Sleepy Hollow NY to hear the Tridentine Mass. I am very hopeful. I’m actually quite excited. I don’t really know what to expect.

….which I think is only wise.

Lately I’ve been having awful pangs regarding my children and bringing them up in the faith that FV and I were raised in. It’s hard to explain concretely. I remember my mother explaining God to me when I was very small and it giving me a great deal of hope. I want that for my children. I want them to have traditional values. I want them to have a deep sense of security inside them that they know themselves, what they believe in and what kinds of behavior are acceptable in their lives. I want them to fully learn self respect and I don’t mean this in just an emotional way. I’m talking about how it translates to behavior. What I’m saying is I don’t want them destroying themselves with drugs, alcohol, smoking, early/risky/promiscuous sex and so on. I want them to have every chance in life and that’s what I’ve been trying to give them. But, I think we need a family religion. We need something that holds us together, that gives us hope, that gives us a community, that offers us a guiding light. Might I still be able to find that in our religion of origin? Will I realize I made a mistake and turn back from that faith should I jump at it prematurely?

My own memories, as well as those of my family, are horrific regarding the Church. It has been suggested to me that some of the greatest Catholics in history were some of the ones who were treated worst by the Church and it’s members, at least at one point in their lives. I wish I had the strength to be one of those people who can survive such and serve as a quiet, excellent example of all that we are supposed to be as Catholics. Maybe I don’t have to worry about the horrific, unfair judgments of others. So long as I don’t judge others and I can carefully explain why, maybe I can serve as an example to others?

Since my new job will have me on the road four hours per day, I am very nervous about the drive and possibly getting injured/killed. Parts of the main highway I will be on are treacherously narrow and windy (stupid way to build a highway!). I’ve been fretting about this for some time. It occurred to me today that I bought a medal of St. Blaise when my daughter was getting chronic sore throats. I bought myself a medal of St. Apollonia when I started practicing dentistry. I am committed to buying my son a medal of Blessed Herman (once I can finally find one!). Anyway, sometime today it occurred to me that maybe I should look up who the patron saint of drivers is/are. I found three. One is St. Christopher. Another is St. Frances of Rome. The last is Blessed Sebastian of Aparicio. Well, forget about finding a medal of Bl. Sebastian of Aparicio. I was able to find some of St. Frances of Rome, but alas, they were too expensive on my current tight budget. I was, however, able to find an affordable pewter statue of St. Christopher which will soon be gracing my car and protecting me. It comes with a chain, but I haven’t decided yet just where I can put it. It seems kind of inappropriate to hang him from the mirror, but we’ll see how that looks.

It has been hard for me to say the word “God” to the children. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s just simply because I’ve never done it before. Prior to adopting DDV, and maybe even before her birth, I was buying her a whole library. Included in it is her own children’s Bible. I loved the idea because I had my own children’s Bible that I actually have until this day. Well, for all the reading FV and I have done with the children, it was only very recently that they decided to pull DDV’s Bible off the shelf and ask me to read it. Well, I’ve never seen a three and a half year old and a four year old sit so still for so long a reading session! They absolutely loved the stories of the Bible and the way they are presented for children. In all honesty I went through nearly one hundred pages of the Book….probably nearly half of it. They kept asking questions and wanting to hear certain parts again and see some pictures again. They were sad that they were too young to do some of the learning exercises that they had at the end of each chapter. We’ve turned to DDV’s Bible several times more during our reading sessions together and the kids never cease to love it.

For some reason I’ve also been thinking a great deal about the Tridentine Mass and how I had always wanted to attend, but never did. We are fortunate to have a church in the next county from us (Immaculate Conception Church of Sleepy Hollow, NY) that is very easily accessible. Every Sunday at three, they have the Latin Mass. I was on their website and for the first time I understood that the Tridentine Mass is more than just a difference in language. There is Gregorian chant, for example. I believe I may have also seen a photo of the priest facing the crucifix during the service….but maybe I’m mistaken. In any event, I’d like to attend this weekend. Actually I’d like to attend services at multiple Roman Catholic Churches that are not too far away, in hopes of my prior experiences being washed away through meeting wonderful people. I am a bit concerned about the kids during the service. DDV has been to Mass several times, but she was easily excused from misbehaving because she was such a tiny bug. I would just take her to the back of the Church where she wouldn’t disturb the service. She was often quite enchanted by what we’d find in our meanderings. Now that DDV is three and a half and DSV is four, they have no excuse for bad behavior, but guess what, they get an awful kick out of being defiant. It’s my fault. I react….and they love it. I wish every church had what one of my previous churches had….a screaming baby/misbehaving toddler/defiant youngster room. I have never seen another one like it. Anyway, do I not bring the kids? I’m not sure. Now that I think of it I remember misbehaving terribly with my sister when I was at Mass. I mean really bad! Forget about it if my cousins were there too. I remember my parents simply giving us a whack….which didn’t really work….and then finally deciding to sit between the two of us…which did work.

So my plan is, over the next few months, to visit numerous RC churches. We have a general idea of the area we’d likely move to should my job work out (which I think it will). Fortunately, the area has plenty of RC churches not too far away, so maybe we’ll choose a few of those to visit.

Signing off on this subject for now….but will certainly revisit it many times in the near future.

Oh, one last thought. I really really truly wish that Roman Catholic ladies focused more on modesty in terms of their dress. This is my concern not only for the Mass but also in general. I would very much like to be an example to my daughter. Even at her age she tells me how beautiful I am and how much she wants to look like me, wear the same clothes as me, etc. I think this is one of my very strong attractions to Islam….the ladies are committed to modesty.