Nuns 'n Such

I just noticed how long it's been since I blogged. Seminary work has gotten the better of me in the last couple of weeks. As usual, I'm trying to read everything, compulsive as ever. The best part of last week included our Preaching class (a class in which, oddly enough, we will not preach). Well, that's not exactly fair. The title is Christian Communication and our professor intends it to be preparatory to next semester's TRUE preaching course. So, we had a 13th century Eucharist, a mass that was so far away from what we do now that I thought I was back at Our Lady Gate of Heaven in 1955. It wasn't that different from the good old Tridentine Mass. The priest and deacon/altar boy were on the altar, but only the Lord and Lady of the manor and the local, attached anchoress (me) paid attention to what was going on. (A word about anchoresses. They and the anchorites (males) withdrew from ordinary life in the middle ages and spent their time praying. They weren't hermits who went off into the desert. They usually lived in cells attached to churches from which they could view the altar, counsel people, get their meals, and pray a lot. Some were gifted gossips. I decided I'd be one of those although no one gave me the opportunity to gossip.) The rest of the class did what the people of the middle ages did in church: they milled around, talked to one another, took a tour of the stained glass windows, and generally ignored what was going on up on the altar. On cue, they paid attention when the Sanctus bells rang.

The Mass transported me to my childhood and my first worship experiences. I’d forgotten how pre-Vatican II services emphasized the interchange between priest and servers, how any other person present was irrelevant. I’ve come to expect modern Eucharists to begin with a priest announcing his or her presence and to offer cues for my participation. There was none of that on Thursday. In the gloom, with no clear beginning, I suddenly realized that the priest was saying the Confiteor, sotto voce. I couldn’t even hear him finish, but the server began the response, so that became my signal to begin.

I felt like a spectator watching a play, albeit one in which I participated a bit. The Latin of the Ordinary of the Mass and its meaning were familiar to me, and I was able to recognize enough Latin in the Gospel to know that the priest was reading about the “lilies of the field,” but, even then, I felt distanced from the experience. When I was a child, this type of service was all I knew, so it was normal and appropriate. Now, I experience it differently. The priest reading the biblical texts in Latin while facing the altar seemed especially exclusionary. All of us, even the lord and his lady, were separated from the sphere of influence of the priest. He controlled the space around the altar; none of us would have dared approach him. Wouldn't go back to that for all the artwork in the Vatican.

Speaking of nuns, the two I've attached represent the orders that ran my elementary school (Sisters of St. Joseph-on the left, black habit) and high school (Adrian Dominicans - on the right, white habit).