The (Ir)reverent Churchgoer

Have you ever had an urge to laugh when you are supposed to be quiet, thoughtful and well-behaved?  What about those times when something that is supposed to be serious and solemn goes wrong and, even though it wasn’t funny at the time, it’s hilarious when you think about it later?

Easter Vigil Mass in France.

A great place for things to go wrong, especially for Catholics, is at church, especially during a service that only comes once a year or so.  If that service contains a procession, watch out.  Processions are flubs waiting to happen.

Anything involving large crosses, books, flowers, statues, holy water or incense usually goes without a hitch.  The priests are pros at this.  Altar servers, readers, deacons and Eucharistic ministers just have to carry whatever they are supposed to carry and go where they are told, which usually means the same direction the priests are heading in.  No problem here.

The worst procession destroyers are lit candles and choir members.

Humankind first mastered fire over 1 million years ago.  Fire has enabled us to cook, keep ourselves warm, and make gold jewelry and swords and Crêpes Suzettes and all kinds of stuff.  It also burns everything, including us.  Nobody knows when humans began to make music.  The oldest musical instruments discovered by archaeologists are about 35,000 years old.  People had to sing a cappella before then, I guess.  Approximately 10 percent of our population is tone-deaf, but you don’t have to be Pavarotti to join an amateur church choir.  If you can sing the same pitches as the person standing next to you and hit most of the notes in your voice range, you’re in.

The easiest procession for a choir to demolish is the one that comes at the end of the evening service on Holy Thursday (Maundy Thursday to you Episcopalians).  This involves the choir chanting the old hymn Pange Lingua, either in Latin or in English, while processing out of the church and into a smaller church or chapel, often down a flight of stairs.  The choir is followed by the priests, deacons, readers, Eucharistic ministers, altar servers and congregation members.

Have you ever tried to walk down a flight of stairs while reading Latin words in a hymnal and singing at the same time?  If you don’t have to do it, don’t.  In addition, if your voice is the strongest one in the choir, don’t stop singing, even if you are about to tumble down the stairs and land on your face.  If you stop singing, everyone else will stop, too, even if you have warned them ahead of time not to stop singing if you do.  I know this from experience.  Being a former opera singer, I have a voice that can take the paint off the walls in every building within a two-block radius.  At age 70, I also have a hard time keeping my balance on stairwells.  Inevitably, I have to stop singing during the Holy Thursday procession downstairs.  Inevitably, the choir stops singing, too, because nobody else wants to take the lead.  When I start again, they do, too.

That should give me a sense of power, but it doesn’t.  It gives a sense of wanting to shoot all the choir members with paint balls.  You can’t do that in church, though.

See that guy second to the right who is staring at the woman?  He's the one who's tone-deaf.

Last year’s Holy Thursday procession was even more discombobulated.  As usual, I tried to lead the choir out the front door of the church and downstairs.  After I had gotten all the way down the stairs and halfway to the destination, I turned around and noticed that only one or two others had followed me.  I started wildly gesticulating and shouting for people to come.  Somebody went back upstairs, then came back down and told me that we had to go back upstairs because Father K____, the pastor, wanted us to go another way.  We went back upstairs, and there was Father K_____, gesturing and hissing in a stage whisper that we were processing UP THE AISLE instead!  We began the Pange Lingua again, walked up the aisle, turned left, then went through the SIDE door, downstairs and into the smaller basement church.  This would have been fine, except that I was walking right in front of Father K____, who wasn’t prepared for my usual hesitation on the steps and bumped into my back.

AWKWARD!

This year I stayed upstairs and the organist led the choir members in the procession.  By this time the route was established, with the organist being a younger guy who can still run up and down stairs, so everything worked.

Lit candles are rarely dangerous when confined to the people walking down the aisle.  They know to be careful.  If you set a priest on fire, however accidental it might be, you will never live it down.  Like Cain in the Bible, you will carry a mark for the rest of your life, or at least until you move out of the parish.  It gets interesting, though, during services such as the Easter Vigil Mass, where everyone in the church has a candle, and they are lit, one by one.  It’s a really cool sight, because the church is dark when this is going on.

There was a lot of excitement in our church last year, when someone in one of the pews set fire to another congregant’s hair.  Maybe there was a story there, maybe not.  Most likely, the amateur arsonist was just an absent-minded clod.  Nobody was hurt, but it put a damper on the proceedings.

Then there was the time, many years ago, when someone sitting near me during an Easter Vigil Mass dripped candle wax onto my raincoat.  I guess I should have appreciated the effort to improve my wardrobe, but I didn’t.  I was up in the choir loft with the rest of the choir, and I didn’t notice the mess until later, or it would have been a memorable Easter for the soprano section that year.

Tranquility, at last!

Holy Week Hilarity

These people understand.

I like to think that Jesus was looking down at us and laughing.

Holy Week in a Roman Catholic church is always nerve-racking for those involved in the services, including the music people.  In the best of circumstances it's easy to forget, from year to year, exactly how each service goes.  If you have a new pastor in charge, though, and that new pastor has ideas of his own, you can end up with a train wreck.

That's what happened to us on Holy Thursday evening.

As "Leader of Song" I was the soloist during the mass.  The choir was there, too, and, as usual during times like this, I was singing with them as well as handling my own music.

That's enough background.  Let's get to the story.

The whole mass went without a hitch, including the washing of the feet.  Several men from the congregation came up to the altar, sat on folding chairs, took off their shoes and socks and had water poured over their feet.  We could only hope they had all showered that day and that their socks were clean.  During this, I sang a solo.  I know that some people were able to listen to me in spite of the more interesting things happening up on the altar, because I actually got a compliment for my rendition.  The compliment was for how softly I sang it, which might not be such a compliment after all, but that's okay.

Anyway, it came time for the end of the mass, where the choir chants the Pange Lingua and everyone processes to the smaller church downstairs.  Our organist, who is very good at staying on top of things and always knows what we have to do, told us that we would sing ONE VERSE in the back of the church, then hightail it downstairs through the main entrance, take our places in one of the front pews down in the lower church, and sing the rest of it when everyone else came down.  Nobody had told him anything different.

This is just what we started to do.  The choir members, who are better at descending church stairs than I am, went first and got well ahead of me.

In the meantime, our pastor was walking toward us, hissing "We're going up the middle aisle!  We're going up the middle aisle!"  We either didn't hear him or didn't understand what he was getting at. I thought he was referring to the middle aisle downstairs.

I made it outside and down the front steps of the church, and was walking toward the lower church when our organist came out and told me that we had to get back upstairs because we had to process up the middle aisle of the MAIN CHURCH, not the downstairs church!

I shouted, "Come back!" and waved my hands around in an effort to get the choir to come back, but nobody heard me, especially the ones who had already gone inside.

I was still doing this when a guy from the church upstairs came down, sent me back up and said that he would get everyone else back in place.

At long last, we all got back up to where we were supposed to be and were led up the middle aisle, chanting the Latin verses, by the same gentleman who had fetched us.  He eventually led us through a SIDE DOOR to the downstairs church.  Because I have to take steps slowly, one at a time, the pastor accidentally bumped into me from behind.  My 1950s Catholic school upbringing makes me think of being bumped by a priest as a major catastrophe.  This time, though, I hardly gave it a thought.  I had more important things on my mind, such as singing the right verses and getting to my pew.

The last five minutes were fine.

And I got a story out of this!