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I don't want to talk with anyone at mass. I require 12 to 15 feet of social distancing (my wife excepted.) I certainly don't want anyone holding hands with me during the Our Father or scurrying around Church to hug me at the Sign of Peace. A distant wave suffices. A benefit of the Covid: no more hugs or hand holding!
I do NOT want friendship or community at Church. I have more than enough outside of Church.
I go to daily mass. I have been a parishioner for 40 years. I know almost no one by name. I like it that way. We have been going to mass about twice weekly at our new parish at the Jersey Shore for several years. I know no one by name. I like it that way.
I come by it honestly. As a child I would go to mass with my grandmother, bachelor uncle and unmarried aunt: we would drive to Church and then they would separate to different parts of the Church. I get it: they live together, eat together, aggravate each other: Why sit together in Church?
My mother, the most sociable and convivial of people, described that when raising the nine of us she cherished the one hour at mass and the 10 minute walk to and from because it was the ONLY time she had to herself.
In part it is my introverted streak: I value time alone.
In part it is that my life is filled with friendship and community: I came from and raised large families; I have a strong network of good friends; my work has always involved working with people, always with serious responsibilities involved.
Mass for me is: Quiet. Peace. Rest. Solitude. The Presence of Jesus.
I know that the "Spirit of Vatican II" has liturgy as community, friendship, celebration. Not for me!
There is irony here. For most of my adult life I had an obsessive desire to find a deeper form of Christian Community. Coming out of college I was interested in the politically radical "Basic Christian Communities" of Latin America. Early in our marriage I drove with my new wife up the Hudson River and we visited a Catholic Worker Farm and the Bruderhoff Community. Both intensive, countercultural Christian communities. The first anarchistic and chaotic; the second super-organized and controlled. Clearly we would fit into neither. Later we participated vigorously in a Charismatic prayer group; but we never joined a covenant community although I was fascinated by the idea. I myself walked, for a time, with two different Neocatechumenal Communities, but eventually left both.
I never found my Community.
Instead, my life has been movement and flow in and out of a diversity of friendships, involvements, movements, tasks and associations. My one foot is firmly planted in the sacramental life of the proximate parish or Church. My other foot is wandering like a pilgrim, a mendicant, a searcher, a missioner. It has been stable and rooted (in the parish); but always interesting, novel, dramatic, eventful.
My conviction has been that the broader society has become so hostile to our faith and the Church so compromised that our Catholic life cannot flourish outside of intentional, intense, countercultural communities like the religious orders and the lay renewal movements.
I have found such support, inspiration and energy...but in a smorgasboard of engagements and encounters.
I am concerned, of course, for my children and their children. One daughter is fully engaged living the evangelical life as a "Memores Domini" within the Communion and Liberation Movement. One son with wife and children is passionately devoted to his Neocatechumenal Community. They stand on solid ground.
My other five are firmly connected to their parishes but, for the most part, no other intentional community. This makes them, especially my grandchildren, vulnerable to the broader, hostile culture. Will they be blessed, as I have been, by a rich variety of holy connections?
That is something I pray for ... quietly...at mass.
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