Tag: Mass

Children in Mass

or, 400 years in Purgatory

There’s a brief window of life—usually in young adulthood while wrestling with purpose and vocation—when one prays more frequently, which leads to an abundance of grace and consolations; silence is golden and Mass is a retreat, even if the music is distractingly off-key or the preaching is dull. Finding a moment to sit in the quiet still of a dark sanctuary is relatively easy to come by, and it’s easy to start fancying yourself a regular contemplative, maybe even a saint-in-the-works. If you are in that stage of life right now, cherish it, but understand with a degree of humility that it’s a gift, a feast of perceptible grace before life gets real. Because, let me tell you, it won’t last.

There comes a time in a person’s life when Mass feels like a stallion-training pen and all wonderful, beautiful, contemplative thoughts that may have flooded the mind and heart during Mass previously are at once snuffed out with a merciless puff. And that merciless puff is called a toddler. Or two or three of them.

If you are in that particular stage of life, when Mass is a purgatory of tantrums, potty-trips, flying plastic toys, a mess of bodily functions (breast milk leakage, peeing, blow-out diapers, vomit, runny noses, take your pick), then I have three things to tell you: 1) I am/have been there, 2) this too shall pass, and 3) until it does, I humbly offer the following.

First of all, I am/have been there; I GET IT

Exactly when this reality hits parents varies, but for me it hit right away with our first. Trying to nurse in a wooden pew is tricky; equally tricky is trying to mix a bottle of formula. It’s not impossible, but it effectively takes your mind off of Mass for sure. But by the time your child is a toddler, forget it. You’re basically wrestling and contorting throughout Mass, if you’re lucky enough to stay in the pew, though a lot of time is spent in the foyer or outside or in the germ-infested cry rooms which are really named for crying mothers while children feel at last free to be as crazy as they like (oh, how I loathe cry rooms—can you tell?). If you’ve decided to brave it in the pew (or if you’re landlocked and forced to stay), it’s a sweaty mess of wrangling arms and legs, and a constant inner struggle of how-and-should-I-discipline-my-child-with-so-many-witnesses, convinced the furrowed brows are meant for you and certain people are wondering how mother nature ever allowed you to conceive a child, unworthy as you are. It’s torture.

Then you get home, everyone’s hungry and tired, all the energy for the day having been spent getting to and through Mass. Not so Sabbath-y after all, and definitely void of any contemplative prayer.

This, too, shall pass

Really, it truly does. This era of the migraine Mass will end eventually. I remember sitting in Mass with scrawly children and looking over to an opposite pew where a family of ten sat almost perfectly. Instead of a beacon of light, they were the most discouraging thing ever to see because it made me wonder what I was getting wrong. But now that’s us—our family of eight sits almost without incident through Mass (though, we still have our turn of stepping out with the little ones when needed). I think it’s a positive form of peer pressure. The little ones watch and follow the older ones. There’s an unspoken oh-this-is-what-we-do understanding, which is why it’s good for little ones to sit in Mass. Eventually they get it. So gird your loins and buck up, this is only temporary!

And until it is over, here is what I humbly offer to (hopefully) help you in the interim:

In stressful situations like Mass, it seems like our children are the ones making us miserable, but in reality we are the ones who make ourselves miserable. A two-year-old is just being a two-year-old. Sometimes I have a hard time paying attention in Mass in the best of circumstances, so I imagine for a child it’s quite a challenge. We have tried bringing church-related books or small toys to Mass, though for our kids that often becomes its own distraction. But maybe it’ll work for your kids. We found the best solution was sitting close to the front, or having our littlest ones sit at the end of the pew near the aisle so they could actually see what was going on. It’s not fool-proof. If a child is tired, hungry, has to go to the bathroom, or just feels especially naughty that day then nothing works, and you resign yourself to pacing the back.

If that happens, try not to get frustrated. Often times the source of my frustration was what people were thinking of me, how they must be thinking that I couldn’t control my child. If that’s a worry for you too, remember that people are not thinking that. And if they are, they have the problem, not you. The Church, taking a nod from God Himself (“Go forth and multiply”, “Let the little ones come to me”), encourages us to have children so the body of Christ should not be disturbed by hearing and seeing them at Mass. They are the future of the Church, so let them squirm and wiggle while they learn to love Jesus in the Mass. As they get older, talk them through what’s happening, point out the tabernacle, the altar, etc. And if a neighboring adult hears you, don’t worry—they might be learning something too.

To be sure, sometimes I was legitimately frustrated with my child because there are days when it was good old-fashioned belligerence on their part. As they get older, there were consequences for bad behavior in Mass. If they kept lying down (and we ascertained that they had slept and were not sick) then they had to lay down in their rooms for a while instead of having free time after Mass, which they did not like. Obviously you as the parent will make the best call. But associating Mass with a lot of restriction and punishment is, in the end, not the best attraction to Mass.

The next time you find yourself growing frustrated that you have to pace in the back with a misbehaving or tantruming child, or you’ve been exiled to the loathsome cry room, or you’re spending much of Mass waiting in the bathroom for your child, remember that you are being formed spiritually by the very act of willful, purposeful parenting. Choosing to care for your child even when you might rather sit and listen to the homily, or spend some silent moments in prayer, is an act of love, a discipline that will form your heart and please our Lord. It also means we have to purposely set aside time in the day for quiet prayer with God, even if it’s brief. But Mass, in the end, is not about what we’re doing. We don’t do anything in Mass that deserves His Body and Blood. It’s a gift. We have a responsibility to receive it worthily, with a clear conscience, in reverence and thanksgiving, but our participation in Mass doesn’t make us worthy. If you’re distracted during Mass by the act of parenting your child, you are fulfilling your vocation, you’re obedient to God’s call in your life. Try to be ok with that.

And if you don’t have children or yours are grown, please be kind and patient with those who do. An encouraging word is powerful. There have been several older women in my life who smile at me while I wrestle an escaping toddler back into the pew, and that little recognition means a lot in a stressful moment. In the reverse, I’ve had dirty looks from disgruntled Mass-goers. At first I felt humiliated, but now I know better. It helps to remember even the Apostles shoe’d the children away and Jesus corrected them: “Let the children come to me, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.”

St. Thérèse of Liseiux

our meet-cute

By January of 2000, I was nearly 18, a senior in high school, and my trajectory towards the Catholic Church was pretty sure and straight. My exterior life—friends, school, the rapidly approaching future—was suspended in mid-air, like an alternate reality carrying on in a thought bubble, while interiorly I was going through an inexpressible alteration. I was sneaking to daily Mass either before school or in between classes. The weekday stillness of St. Joseph’s, St. James’s, and the Grotto were my sanctuaries in every sense of the word.

One morning as I was heading to daily Mass in my ’85 Honda Accord named Bogie (after Humphrey Bogart who, like my Honda, was old and raspy, but so cool), I turned into the parking lot to see more than the usual seven to ten cars. The lot was overflowing. I rolled down my window to ask a parking attendant what was going on.

“St. Thérèse’s relics are here,” he said. I nodded like I knew what he was talking about, but inside I was reeling from the words “saint” and “relics”, having visions of fingernail clippings and femurs.

Why did I go in to Mass that day, then? I do not know. But I did. And in my pinstripe overalls, no less. Why, when I saw the TV cameras and men in funny hats and sabers, did I not turn around and leave? I do not know. Though the sanctuary was over-full, I squeezed by the anxious families in the foyer, slipped through the glass doors, and took a tiny spot alongside the wall. In the front of the church, at the foot of the altar, was a wooden casement surrounded by what I could only assume was bullet-proof glass. It was all very strange. Compelling, but strange.

The Mass began and I was quickly lost, as this was slightly different from truncated daily Mass. After I fumbled through the Gloria and the Nicene Creed, an older, handsome gentleman in front of me with dark, thinning hair and glasses turned around and said, “You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?” I answered, “No.” With a gentle smile, he said, “My name is Conchi, short for Concepción.” He pulled out a missal, stood beside me, and tried to explain what he could in a whisper. The lady in front of us looked back with a mean glare to hush us at one point, but Conchi ignored her and faithfully coached me through the Mass.

People were starting to file towards the relics. He told me what to do—to kiss my fingers, touch the casement, then make the sign of the Cross. I eyed the TV cameras in the back, hoping I didn’t make it on the news in my pinstripe overalls, then my secret of going to Mass would be out—and not just going to Mass, but doing whatever I was about to do with those relics. I did what Conchi said, mechanically, feeling like an imposter.

It came time for Communion and Conchi asked me if I wanted to go up for a blessing. In all my attendances of daily Mass, I had never gone up for a blessing, but had remained kneeling until it was finished. He told me to cross my arms over my chest, so I did.

I was starting to worry about the time at this point, concerned I’d be late for class since daily Mass usually didn’t take this long. As soon as it was over, I turned to thank Conchi, but he was gone. As I maneuvered my way through the crowd and out of the church, I kept an eye out for him, but I never saw him again.

As I walked by the St. Joseph statue outside, a strange awareness caught me by surprise: I had a sense that there was something over me, like a thin veil covering my face, a substance that I could see through, but that was protecting me somehow, hiding me. I wondered at the time if this was what “grace” felt like, that thing I had read a little about, that thing the early Church Fathers talked about with the Sacraments. Not the vague—though wonderful—grace I had learned about as a Protestant, the over-arching power that Jesus imparts to reach out to us and save us. This was different; it was an actual, tangible something.

The rest of the day passed in a fog; again I felt like I was going through the motions of my daily life: school, friends, play rehearsal, family, while this great secret tectonic shift was happening in the depths of my being.

When I got home late that night, I remembered a little green, musty book I had bought at a garage sale a couple years before, Wisdom of the Saints. I leafed through it and found the last chapter about St. Thérèse of Lisieux, which included an excerpt from Story of A Soul. As I read through this tiny piece of her writing, I was shocked by the amount of Scripture she quoted from memory, as though it flowed out of her heart as purely and freely as her own words. I cannot say what struck me most about St. Thérèse; I don’t remember feeling an immediate kinship with her. I was, however, struck by how she was called to the religious life so young, yet had confidence in God’s loving plan for her.

What I didn’t know at the time was how this little saint would become a companion through my life, a novice-mistress of sorts for my own spiritual life.