I haven’t gone back to church since I went on leave from the Jesuits six months ago. And if I’m really being honest, other than our weekly community Mass or the times I presided or heard confessions, I wasn’t going too often before I left, either.
It’s weird, going to Mass as a priest. They don’t warn you about it when you’re getting trained, but others have told me the same. In the Jesuits we’re taught that going to the Eucharist on a daily basis is important for our spiritual lives. But somehow when it’s now your job to preside at Mass, the idea of also going other times seems wrong somehow. It’s not that I feel like I should be up there doing it, or that I have some high-falootin’ sense of my own ability. It just feels like going to work on your day off. Why would you do that?
I’m sure there’s a strong argument to be made that this take on presiding is some sort of capitalist-deformed interpretation that needs to be challenged. But that is how it feels.
I have the sense that I need to go, in fact that it’s really important that I do, that it’s the next step on the journey for me, that in fact there’s so much in me waiting to be unlocked, and that it can’t happen until I do. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.
Some of it is just busyness. How many weekends have I said that I was going to go, even weekdays for that matter, and then suddenly the day is gone, the busyness and the work of the day like a cartoon puff of smoke behind me, and I never got there.
Meanwhile every hour on the hour my life is marked by bells from the Catholic Church that sits just one block a while. (No, I did not realize that my apartment was one block away from a Catholic Church. Yes, God has a sense of humor.) Like some medieval monk I sit in my own little corner studio in my own little chair loveseat, the bells try to locate me, to tell me where and who I am.
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