2/365 Cry Room

"Who set up the Utah Vestibule that way with the gates?" Becky asks me at coffee.

"I'm pretty sure that was Sr. Joanna," I answer, not sure what the impression is.

"It's great," she tells me.

"It makes a really nice space," I agree.

Our Utah Vestibule is a small room on the left side of the church as you face the front of the building from the street. When you walk into the main vestibule through the front doors, you step into the main part of the church (the nave) and turn directly left. It's another anteroom, another small space to gather yourself before you enter the church properly. It is the old baptistry, and was called that for many years after the baptismal font was moved up to the sanctuary. There is a stained glass window of the baptism of Christ and two cherub faces carved into the tops of the columns that would have surrounded the font when the church was built.

For a long time between the time when the font was moved and its most recent changes, the Utah Vestibule was a storage room. It was still a passage from Utah Street (hence the current name) into the church, with a door leading out onto the steep north side of the building and down many steps to the street level. But in in vestibule itself were random liturgical items--two astonishingly beautiful statues, one of St. Anne and one of the Sacred Heart, placed there like an afterthought; candle stands for devotions to....what, exactly, I'm not sure; plants that lingered and died under a fluorescent lamp too high up on the ceiling to really do them much good; and so forth. It was a place to hurry through and ignore.

A few years back, this began to change with the appearance on our parish's scene of a new pastor and a pastoral associate and other folk who decided finally it was time to clean up around here. I don't know all the details--I was just creeping back into parish life myself at that time and although pleased with the results, did not have much to do with it coming to fruition. This room was painted and cleaned and refurnished. Not as an afterthought but purposefully, as a sort of cry room.

I am not a fan of cry rooms. I believe that babies are part of the community and should not, with their mothers, be shunned behind glass with sound piped in through a speaker. But I also know that babies and toddlers (and Maeve) sometimes do not agree with sitting in pews and being quite for an hour or more at a stretch. I don't like to be a hindrance to others and so for a long time I'd walk to the back with a baby and stand there listening. Later, the Utah Vestibule was furnished with soft side chairs and even a rocker--and then that's where I took babies and uncooperative toddlers.

Now there are two gates, one at each entrance into the church. They're the kind with a lever you can step on to open it like a door. Nice. Now I can take a mobile child back there and let him burn off a little steam in the coming months--which I'm sure will happen. On Christmas Eve there was a mom there doing just that. It is separated from the assembly but not so separate. You can hear what's going on, but not on a speaker that makes the mass seem like it's happening on TV far away. You're in the back of church. It's your time of life to be in the back of church. At least now there's a way to make it comfortable.