Having Lost the Bliss of Ignorance

Notre Dame students will hear, at least a few times, during our four years there that the rest of the world isn't like it is on campus. We know all too well that we live in "The Bubble": a student center with its own (way too expensive) convenience store, Subway, and Burger King; our two awesome dining halls; dorms that are either great communities or pretty nice buildings to be living in; everything we need well-centralized to a beautiful campus; oh, and a really strong, great, and pervasive sense of Church.

Notre Dame gives you thorough permission to be Catholic and even critical or skeptical. And, though I don't have the personal experience, apparently gives you solid permission to be Christian, non-Christian, or even areligious. You get the a sampling, even if it's small, of the whole range.

You have your chapel-in-every-dorm faith that gets people to mass who might not otherwise go and gives you a chance to hit mass when you otherwise couldn't have; from your raucous, packed-to-the-walls Sunday night masses and often-criticized-by-me but usually crowded weeknight gimmicks to your sparsely populated but solemnly pious weeknight masses, you can find a solid dose of formal spirituality and stability right in the building you live in. We even have a basilica on our campus. Ridiculous. And there you get the range, too: midday and pre-dinner daily mass on the weekdays and then your Sunday morning choice of chanty and traditional stuff at the 10am and congregation-focused folk music at the 11:45am mass.

While you're there, you know that the dining halls and the general convenience of life on campus are fleeting. When it comes to the spirituality, it hits differently when you're gone. I knew that Church life on campus wasn't a realistic yardstick for the rest of the world, and I knew I couldn't have the same standards for post-grad life. However, I didn't appreciate the specificity and magnitude of the tension that would result after I moved on.

Working in a parish, in some grey area between super-active parishioner and actual member of the church team or pastoral council, I have some influence on the way things go around here. However, I am a foreigner on a limited clock, and I'm engaging with norms that are cultural and social, tracing back a generation or two or even for centuries on end.

Our parishioners kind of mumble the responses while racing through them because they like mass to be quick and fast, but they also remember their ancestors who celebrated mass in secret on mass rocks in the countryside with people serving as lookouts to warn them of others who would come slaughter them for practicing their faith. We have people who won't sit in the middle section of the church or the front bunch of rows because they are generally sheepish and shy, but they also live int he shadow of a time when the place you sat in mass reflected the confidence you had in your relationship with God (how do you even measure that?) and/or your wealth - some people still think they're too spiritually poor to hold their own in the front or middle. We have priests in our parish who want to encourage and empower lay involvement, but they are trying to lead a Church that as a whole still treats priests as holier and on a pedestal, meant to be alone in the sanctuary to execute all the offices of the mass and lead the parish.

It's tough because most frustrations have an explanation that usually carries a solid level of legitimacy, even if it's cultural and beyond my complete appreciation.

The question here is something along the lines of how do you engage with the tensions? The approach would be different if I weren't actively involved and vaguely influential, so maybe my response won't be exactly applicable to yourselves. However, the tensions will likely come up for anyone who found any kind of levels of growth and comfort with liturgical and spiritual life on campus.

I wonder if it's really our place, even if it's my place in my role, to be effecting change in those kinds of norms. Almost six months into being here, I almost feel like all I can and should do is talk about what I see and how it doesn't jive with what I'm used to and what I believe is right practice. If I think the second reading should never be skipped, should I put up a big stink about it? If I think the lectors (who move up to the ambo during the opening blessing) and EM's (who are in the sanctuary before the Our Father is even over) should wait longer to get up for their ministries, should I be complaining? If I think mass ministers should sit in the sanctuary and altar servers should be more active, should I say something?

It's tough to know what the answer is, especially because we function as something in between official people and really active volunteer parishioners. I feel like at home, if I saw something and said something, the response would likely be, "Then, you do something about it." And I probably would. But here, things are stickier, slower to adapt, and when changes are suggested, they're mulled over for a long time and often shelved.

So, I'm settling more into a mindset of wanting to find a way to simply air my "grievances," simply throw around the observations of this stick-up-his-ass church-goer. I don't think I can effect change, and I don't necessarily want to. But it'd be nice to find a way to say something more often. I'm not even sure that it's saying something to the people in charge here; I think it's informal conversation, with my housemates, with the friends I've made here, with friends back in the states. I think it's cataloguing all this stuff to put in my liturgical file cabinets. And I think it needs to take on the formula of observation/criticism-hearing of response-affirmation of their response. Drop the need for constant rebuttal.

And another question for me is, "what next?" What happens when I do go back and potentially am establishing myself as a parishioner at a new place? I've always been wary of the idea of church-shopping, but there may be some merit in it. I am still not a fan of choosing your mass or your parish based on a particular priest, but maybe I just need to exposed to a situation where a priest and parish just don't fit together at all.

I think the key for me will be finding a place where the snobbish liturgist that lives within me can be at least mostly content with the norms in place because the thing I've discerned most in my time here is that being at mass cannot be part of my job - if I lector or EM or usher, it'll because I want to and I've volunteered extra time. I want to be ignorant, at least for a few years, of the decision-making processes that shape parish life and liturgical norms. I want to come to church not knowing the music and never having practiced it, so I can just be a confident congregational singer and not a musician watching a director for consonant cutoffs.

Notre Dame ruins your life in so many ways. It educates you so holistically that you don't get the chance to be ignorant about a lot of stuff anymore. Liturgy and church life is a realm where, theology major or not, a lot of us have, do, and will struggle.

In the meantime, amid the frustrations over decisions, I take solace in the fact that Jesus still comes before me, right in my face, and one of my brothers or sisters proclaims, "The Body of Christ." I get to say Amen, because I believe. I know that this is the same Jesus, the same God, coming to be with His people all over the world, throughout so much space and time. So then I return to my place, kneel in prayer, and bask in the delight of watching hundreds of other people, and knowing millions elsewhere, do the same.