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!

Ten Signs that You are a Catholic of "A Certain Age"

1.  While saying the Rosary, your mind wanders and you get mixed up counting the prayers on the beads.  You say an extra Hail Mary at the end of the decade, just to make sure you got all ten of them in.

2.  You once told a priest what you thought was a pretty big sin in the confessional and were both relieved and surprised when he only gave you a penance of five Our Fathers and didn’t tell you that you were going to burn in hell for what you did, which is what your mother said when she caught you at it.

3.  You still have your old First Communion picture but you never show it to anyone because people laugh at it.

4.  You express exasperation by raising your eyes and hands to the ceiling and making the Sign of the Cross.  If you are Italian, you accompany this by saying, “Madonna Mia!”

5.  You bring your dog to the blessing of the animals on the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi and pray that he'll behave (the dog, not St. Francis).

6.  You have a go-to saint for just about anything:  St. Francis of Assisi for your pet(s); St. Anthony of Padua for finding lost items; St. Jude for impossible cases; etc.  You carry little prayer cards around in case you have a sudden urgent need for help from a heavenly specialist.

7.  You had a little glow-in-the-dark angel statue in your bedroom when you were a kid, and another little statue of the Infant of Prague.  You prayed to your guardian angel every night before getting into bed, and you gave your guardian angel a name.  (Mine was "Nina.")

8.  You can still remember, word for word, some of the questions and answers from the Baltimore Catechism.

9.  You can sing “O Salutaris Hostia,” “Tantum Ergo,” “Ave Verum Corpus,” “Panis Angelicus” and an entire Gregorian mass in flawless Latin, but you have a sketchy idea, at best, of what the words mean.

10. You still wonder if the nuns who taught you in school had to shave their heads.

 

And she's really tired of being asked that question.

***************

Have you ever thought about opera and wondered if it could actually be entertaining?

No?

Well, if you want some good laughs at the art of opera and the world of the people who perform it, there is my new book, Opera for People Who Don't Like It.

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!

Funny Things That Didn't Happen to Me Today

Nothing funny happened to me today.  It's not that it was a boring day or anything.  It was a normal Sunday in Lent at St. John's Roman Catholic Church, which meant that I was up in front of the congregation during two masses, singing my lungs out in both English and Latin.  But that doesn't help me, as a humor writer.  When things go completely right, and nothing unusual happens, it's a disaster.

I sang all the hymns and responses right.  I came in at the correct times and didn't misread any of the words in the Responsorial Psalm.  I still can't get used to the new/old version of the Nicene Creed that was imposed on us a while back, but that doesn't matter because everybody is reciting it at once and I just mumble along.  Nobody cares if I get it right or not, least of all me.

I got the second half of a huge load of laundry done today, too.  Now THAT'S something to write about.  I hate doing laundry.  It's not that it's hard.  It isn't.  There is a laundry room in the basement of our building and it's really easy to lug a laundry bag full of dirty clothes down there.  It's just that I hate doing it.  Really.  I'd rather clean the bathroom than do the laundry; it's that bad.

This must stem from my childhood, when I would often watch my mother spending half a day washing our clothes in an old ringer washing machine, then hanging them outside to dry.  It was a holiday in our house when Mom finally got an automatic washer, after almost everyone else in town already had one.  Our family was always behind the rest of the world when it came to mechanical devices.  We could say we were letting others test them out first, but that would be a lie.  We just didn't have the money most of the time.

Another reason was that my Dad was always looking for bargains, and he was convinced that all his friends were as honest as he was.  It didn't take anyone long to learn that if he had an old piece of junk for sale he just had to look up my Dad and make a sales pitch.  As a result, we had a procession of impossible cars, TV sets and what have you.  Once in a while, Dad would come up with something good, like that great stereo console that looked fine, sounded even better and lasted for years.  That was an exception to the rule, though, which stated that anything in our house that originated with one of Dad's acquaintances would end up being a piece of crap.

Most of our TV sets were the kind that worked best if we could get our little brother to stand nearby with his arms out, like he was making a semaphore signal, acting as a human aerial.  Little Brother was not eager to perform this service for more than about 5 seconds, if we could get him to do it at all.  Bribing him didn't work, because we didn't have anything he wanted.  We just had to be content with a lousy picture or take turns doing the human aerial bit ourselves.

Gee, I got all this out of my hatred of doing laundry!  How's that for inspiration?