This is a repost from two years ago – you remember 2020, when most churches were closed up tight?
I was born in 1960. Which, yes, makes this The Year I Turn Sixty. Whatever.
Anyway, as I have often related, even though I was born in the pre-Vatican II era, I have absolutely no memory of the pre-Conciliar Mass, for I wasn’t taken to Mass regularly until I was about five years old. Why? My mother was a devout Catholic, but my father wasn’t – a “lapsed Methodist” he would call himself. I, it was said, could not behave in church. (which I find..hard to believe, considering my normally compliant nature, especially as a child. But perhaps I was chatty? Perhaps my mother just wanted to pray in peace?). So it wasn’t until 1965 or 1966 that I started going to Mass, and at that point, to a Catholic student center at a university – so they were, as we say, ahead of the curve on liturgical innovations, as is usually the case.
And, to sketch out the details a bit more – although my mother was French-Canadian, there was no strong ethnic component to our faith practices, at all, either as individuals or in terms of where we lived and practiced as I grew up (college towns in the Midwest and South). My upbringing was very much mid-century suburban/college town, with no huge spiritual dimension. I went to public schools until high school. My religious education before that was…let’s see. 1st and 2nd grade CCD. Then nothing, I don’t think, until maybe 5th and 6th grade. Then nothing else until 8th grade, when we moved to Knoxville and I ended up being prepared for confirmation in a few sessions with a few adults. The actual confirmation was with the Catholic school kids at Holy Ghost Parish, but I guess they didn’t have confirmation prep for kids not in Catholic schools? Or we were too late in getting to it? I have no idea.
An aside: I’ve referred to this experience of my young childhood Mass-exile before in discussions of Children in Church. While I’ve always said that yeah, duh, children belong in church, and folks who give normal, restless children or squawking babies the side-eye are jerks, at the same time, frantic parents should not feel terrible about leaving babies and toddlers at home. Don’t fetishize “WE MUST WORSHIP AS A FAMILY.” Split up, if schedules allow, leave a child who’s making you miserable at Mass at home for a couple of months – or years, and then come back together when it’s over and small people can respond to, if not reason, then threats. And then – I’ll add – once they reach teen-age years, split up again. Encourage your teens to go to Mass by themselves. It just might have the effect of loosening the connection between Faith and Things My Parents Make Me Do That I Can Hardly Wait to Stop Doing When I Bust Out of Here.
So anyway. What I was saying was about my childhood. And Holy Week.
Many of us are currently stressed about Holy Week at home and missing parish-based ceremonies. It’s sad, no doubt about that.
But I will also tell you, that for most people outside of strongly culturally Catholic areas, this is the norm – doing most of Holy Week at home, rather than spending the week in church. People have jobs, first of all. If you do go to Mass on Holy Thursday, for example…is the church full? Maybe. Maybe not. I’ve definitely noticed bigger crowds for Good Friday over the past ten years, which is great.
But no, most people don’t – and, as I said, outside of culturally Catholic areas – do much parish-connected activity for Holy Week.
So, for example, when I was growing up, this is what we did, my mother and I, there in DeKalb, Illinois or Lawrence, Kansas:
We’d go to Mass on Palm Sunday.
On Good Friday, my father would drive us to a church (my mother didn’t drive) where my mother and I would would pray the Stations of the Cross. My recollection is that we tried to get there around 3, but that may be wrong.
We’d go to Mass on Easter Sunday.
That’s it. I have no idea what those parishes were even doing during those years – the mid-to-late 60’s through the early 70’s – for the Triduum.
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No Chrism Mass, no Mass of the Lord’s Supper, no Liturgy of the Presanctified, not even a parish Stations of the Cross, no Easter Vigil – and no sense that a complete experience of Holy Week was dependent on participating in any of that.
I don’t have sharp memories of that time, but I do still have the children’s religious books that were mine as a child, those that I was expected to look at and read during Holy Week. There were no Holy Week Crafts engaged with, and there wasn’t even family prayer, except, in a way, on Good Friday afternoon.
Maybe it was harder because we didn’t have a lot of resources to help us – no community traditions where we were, no big Catholic community, no coloring sheets to download. But on the other hand, it was, in a way, easier, since there were far fewer distractions. No, we weren’t pioneers or hermits, but yes, before the Internet and other forms of easily accessed mass communication, there were, indeed, fewer distractions.
I’m not saying it was better or worse. I’m saying that is what it was. But here’s the other aspect of it:
There was, as I recall and as I still carry with me, a sense that each of us had a duty, no matter what our state in life or no matter what else we were doing or where, to try to imitate Christ in his Passion that week: to die to self, to sacrifice in some way, to put His suffering and love at the center of our consciousness.
To follow Him.
It was, fundamentally, my responsibility, as a Christian, to be serious about this time, think about it, and orient my prayers and daily life in a certain way that reflected that. It was my job, because it was my soul and it was my responsibility to do penance, try to be more like Christ and grow in love and hope.
Catholic culture grows up in families and communities to help us remember and live that out. We experience it most deeply in the liturgies of the Church during this week, and we sorely miss being able to be personally present for those moments.
But perhaps something that this deprivation can help us recall is that in Baptism, we are joined to Christ, we take on the character of Christ, we bear His name.
That means that every moment of every day, our call is to follow him, to walk in his steps, to accompany him on the journey, to be accompanied. To open our lives so that it no longer us, but he who lives in us – laying down our lives, letting go of our own wills, loving unto the Cross, trusting.
He knows where we are right now. He knows exactly where we are. He knows what’s available to us, where we can go, who we can be with and what we can do. He knows. And still he invites, still he calls us to follow. Where we are. Now.