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.

28/365 Universal Church

Long ago I remember sitting in a high school theology class and the teacher, a convert from the Lutheran Church, said that the most wonderful part about Catholicism, for her, was the universality. How she could go into a church in Paris, or in Seattle, or Mexico City, and it would be the same. Yes, in the language of the people, but the same. She would know what was going on. She could find out ahead of time the readings for the week. Nothing was based on the whim of a preacher deciding what to preach that Sunday. Sameness.

And I thought that was a nice idea. Somewhere in the world, at all times, mass is going on, and it's my denomination's version of it. It is still a nice idea. I just don't think it's so true for me anymore.

I visit my in-laws in southern Illinois and when I attend mass there, I have many moments where my feet want to get up and walk out. More importantly, my heart already has walked out. So I simply do not attend anymore because it was getting to the point that it was detrimental to my faith life. Same with traveling. I used to make a point to find a church and attend mass while I was on the road. But not anymore. I'm so much more likely to leave rolling my eyes and thinking what a waste of time that was instead of being inspired.

Why is this? I think I've found my little corner of Catholicism here in South St. Louis (and in a monastery in Western Missouri) and the universality of Catholicism is important to me not because of the sameness but because the world is a big place. In a big place there can be much diversity. I am part of the church--I am the Church--and knowing that, I can find my way.

This causes me great difficulty sometimes when it comes to ecumenism. I have a hard time saying that I fit into the Catholic Church but others do not. This makes RCIA a difficult place to serve, but a good place nonetheless.

40/365 A Tweet from Fr. Miguel

The worst Mass at home is better than the best Mass most everyplace else. Good thing Jesus is in charge of all that and not me.

He's on a trip, or at a meeting or something. I've been gone from the parish for two weekends in a row so I'm out of the loop. But it made me happy when I read that.

125/365 Oh, yeah.

So much of what we have is dependent upon who our pastor is at the time. Whatever he puts as a top priority becomes a priority for the parish, and the things that are not important fall by the wayside. I think about the past 11 years at the parish and how things changed when Miguel first came to us.

Right after the switch, there was a meeting of congregations way out in the county--congregations from all over, but in order to have us fit, we met in this mega-church out west. It was a political rally sponsored by a union of congregations (Catholic, other Christian, and Jewish) from the area. They'd invited candidates in an upcoming midterm election to come speak about their values and see if they would pledge to uphold our values. A rally. Everything had already been decided in advance. We weren't in on the planning stages but that was fine because, frankly, life is busy and that's not where my energies lie.

Our parish got a bus, a school bus, and we rode out there together. I sat next to Dolores and Mike had the girls behind me. In the middle of the light chatting on the way home, one of the nuns who gave lots of time to this organization suddenly asked, "Was Fr. Miguel there tonight?" The answer was no. There was a pause while she worked this out in her head.

"He'll figure it out," she said. "Some things he has to do."

And Dolores turned to me: "Do you know he has the audacity to put on his phone message that he takes Fridays off?" She laughed. "Like anyone can take a day off at our parish."

And while I wondered if Miguel, whom I barely knew, and only from parish council, would in fact figure it out, I thought I felt something, something imaginary and brief on the back of my neck. A realization. Things were changing.

This isn't to say that our parish isn't still active in social justice--of course we are. It just isn't the topic of every single homily. Social justice folks aren't gone. They just don't get 15 minutes after communion to read aloud their platform for change once a month.

I'm not a social justice person (I say that meaning "this is not where I sink all my energy" not meaning "I don't think we should work for social justice"). I'm a liturgy person. I'm not trained (thank you Lynn for reminding me) but this is what I like. This is why I stay. If it weren't for liturgy, our liturgy, the focus on liturgy at our parish now, if it weren't important to me, well, damn it, why wouldn't I just go sit with the Quakers at 10:30 on a Sunday morning and chuck all the baggage that goes with Catholicism?

So I know the world does not revolve around me, but it's a happy accident that Miguel arrived at our parish when he did. It was sort of a reawakening for me. Oh yeah, here we are now.

126/365 Zoo

"When you took Leo to back," I ask Mike after church, "did you go to the Utah Vestibule?"

"Nah," he shakes his head. "It's sort of become a zoo for choir folks' kids."

It has.

I go back and forth on this now. I sat back there on Sunday for a bit after Leo got away from me in the pew at the offertory. Dolores' daughter and her two wild ones were back there, their mom leaning against the wall looking tired. The little girl came up to me after I sat down and handed me a book. "Read!" she shouted.

"I'm trying to listen to church. You can sit on my lap, but I'm not going to read," I told her quietly. She climbed up on my lap.

"Read!" she demanded again. Her mom picked her up, embarrassed or at her wits' end (oftentimes, when I'm one, I'm the other as well). They left with her brother to go downstairs instead.

There was a little girl, a daughter of one of the choir members, coloring on the floor and yelling at her little brother. They are Maeve's and Leo's ages. Leo played with the little boy for a few minutes and then sat on the floor holding a ball someone had brought. The two kids' dad was more engaged, but they had definitely come to play. And even stranger, one of my girl scouts was back there. A third grader. Sort of helping out, sort of causing trouble indirectly, playing with the 5 year old girl.

But what to do? Complain? Mention to the girl scout that maybe she should join her dad in the choir? I didn't want to get her into trouble.

"You're Bridgett, right?" the dad asks me.

"Yeah, we've met before," I say, friendly. "At Astrid's houses, halloween."

He nods. Our sons play together a few more minutes there on the floor, and then it's time for communion.

Zoo, yes. Unnecessary cage for children, maybe. Allows some families to come to church? I don't know. I'm torn.

142/365 Ecumenical Dialogue

Why is it that I can have religious conversations with a Lutheran minister's wife in Texas but can't bring myself to do so with the conservative Catholic who sits behind me at mass?

For that matter, I can chat with and have a good time with the mom at my kid's school dressed in a hijab, a convert to Islam with her blue-green eyes and pale skin and completely white middle class name, but I can't bring myself to be anything more than thinly courteous with the Latin mass attendee on the next block?

My evangelical neighbors know more about my faith life than my Catholic ones.

Maeve's godmother is an Evangelical Lutheran (ELCA, I mean) and Leo's godmother is a Presbyterian (Presbyterian USA).

I share many values more closely with the Mennonite family in my girl scout troop than I do with my Catholic parents.

Why are so many Catholic feminists so very very angry? If they left, we could talk. But they stay and we can't get past the anger.

My few Jewish friends ask important questions about the Vatican, about conversion; my Catholic friends seem to have few opinions about either.

Yet I attended a Jesuit university because the Methodist one that was first on my list treated me terribly on my tour of the college when I visited. Perhaps they weren't interested in ecumenical dialogue. Perhaps they'd been talking to the same Catholics I've been avoiding.

Several times a week I ask myself why I stay. And I've already answered this question and stability is part of it and the biggest part, frankly, but that vow isn't just a promise, it's a deep love for place and denomination and parish and family and I stay because there's nowhere else for me to go, because Sr. Jean Frances told me most people don't have to leave from where they started to find the right place, because I've always been leaving or coming to a new place and I hate starting over and I've already converted too many times to try again now and there is this deep, deep rooted conviction inside me, maybe it's a part of stabilitas, that says:

Stay right where you are. Stay. Down and stay.

But stability isn't my problem. It's the conversion of heart: being a good monk, essentially. How do I be a good Catholic to my fellow Catholics? I'm so good at hospitality across scarred battle lines, but I'm fearful of my nearest neighbors?

Maybe it's because, within the Church, Ecumenical Dialogue has turned into Ecumencial Diatribe. I get sick of flinching.

146/365 Religious Tradition

Catholicism has an undeniable culture. There are many different shades of this, and Catholics attending two different parishes in the same diocese might have vastly different ideas of what it means to be Catholic. Forget the universal/worldwide church--there are plenty of differences between me and the folks at Resurrection or St. Clement of Rome. Geography, as usual, is destiny.

But walking into almost any Catholic church, I find myself at the front or side vestibule. There's a holy water font. There are almost always pews or some sort of seating. I'm not the biggest fan of pews, but there's something very homey and comfortable about 90 year old quarter-sawn oak pews. There's some sort of sanctuary with a chair, an ambo, and an altar. There are usually images--stations of the cross, stained glass, tapestries, statues, mosaics, something to help tell the story of our faith. There's a crucifx. Fire. Pathways and kneelers and silence. There might be parts of the mass that seem odd to a newcomer--at one parish I attended in Texas, after communion every Sunday we recited the words: O Sacrament most holy, O Sacrament divine, all praise and all thanksgiving be every moment thine. Other places don't sing as much or don't have as much silence or celebrate sacraments differently. But they are all fragments of the same mirror, reflecting God.

I am thinking about this because of the Unitarian blog I read; she is visiting her dad's family this weekend and is surrounded by Catholic tradition. She is originally Catholic, and she likes that her kids are experiencing this, even if just a few times a year. Because her kids will not make first communion or witness baptisms. They won't say a rosary or know the parts of the mass by heart. They see these things with fresh eyes, but with eyes of strangers.

She and I, on the other hand, know these things from childhood. And my kids, in some similar ways, some different, are learning and living these things, too. And in the end, this was one of the things that kept me Catholic when it really looked like maybe I wasn't supposed to be. Religion kept me going with faith wavered. I realized I wasn't strong enough to find God on my own. I needed a community to help me. I needed tradition and ritual and practice and rules. I'm not talking about morality--I could have managed that just fine on my own. I'm talking about religion. About finding one's way through the noise and static. I'm not going to find God in a pink crystal rosary. I'm not going to reach great spiritual insights sitting at vespers. But if I don't do these things, have these things, teach these things, then I don't have any hope of finding God at all. There are too many ways to lose focus.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
--Leonard Cohen

148/365 Pews

We have democratic pews. Some churches of our era, or perhaps a little older, have a little metal slot where you could put a "reserved" card--which would be convenient, of course, but what they were originally for was for a family name. At St. Joseph's down in Macon, Georgia, where I unfortunately spent a year and a half, some pews were still assigned to specific families. Some of the pews had gates at the end, too, like a tame roller coaster might, to keep folks in and organized.

We don't have any of that. We have hat clips, like in the background image here, but we don't even have book holders on the backs of pews anymore. Two books get stacked at each end of the pew. Pass 'em down. Our pews aren't ornately carved with symbols of the church or beautiful columns and curlicues. Just this simple Latin cross.

Each pew is distinctive in its woodgrain, and sits at a slight angle for comfort. About half the pews have been refinished, and I think it was supposed to be my job to do that after Dolores left. I haven't even gotten started--I still have a cabinet in my dining room that needs varnishing. Not a woodwork gal. But I check for rough spots and nails when I can, and hammer the nails in and consider what I might do about splinters.

They're no cloister choir stalls, but they'll do.

160/365 Utah Vesti-friggin-bule

The law of unintended consequences is at play here.

One thing, a minor thing, but still a thing that I always liked at our parish is that we didn't have a cry room. We didn't have a glass-walled piped-in-sound enclosure for mothers and infants to sit and sort of be a part of things. And because we didn't have that, babies were a part of our community just like everyone else. Yes, an unruly toddler would be taken to the back, and a crying baby would be handled out in the vestibules. But there was no assumption that children would be neither seen nor heard.

As time went by, though, and more children did appear in our church, the Utah Vestibule was set aside as a place for a mother to sit with a tired crying baby. A place for toddlers to look around for a moment as a distraction. Still a part of the community, still seen and heard, but a nice place, cleaner than before, without dangerous mechanical objects or giant statues or dead plants in the way.

Then a member of parish council made the suggestion that the room be made into an even more child-friendly space, with gates at the two doorways and a rug covering the tile floor. I saw this and thought, that is really smart. That way, a wriggling toddler could be placed on the floor a minute to walk around but not be able to run up the aisles and disturb everyone else. I thought it was so nice that we had this spot, not a cry room but still a place to go. It seemed brilliant.

But like all technical and scientific advances, there were unintended consequences. Through the winter and spring, it became a place for the choir to dump their children--with spouses or babysitters, but there were too many older kids. Kids brought toys and threw them around or fought over them. Cabinets got opened and the contents dumped. Food came and got ground into the rug. Children hung on the gates and squealed.

I began to notice more and more mothers of small babies, the ones who used to go back to that room and nurse or rock, were standing in back instead. I wouldn't go in with Leo unless it were empty. Fathers took their young toddlers out onto the front porch, or downstairs to the basement.

I walked in today, and there were four kids already there, before mass began. One was the wife of the parish council member. The other was the choir babysitter with two children of one of the choir members and one from another (the "babysitter" is actually the wife of one of the singers--not like a teenaged girl or something). Two of the kids, though, were 5, and had taken the furniture apart to build a fort.

I'm a teacher and am not afraid to call out errant children, even in front of their caretakers. This does not make me popular, but it keeps me sane. I told them they weren't doing the right thing, and I rearranged things so that this wasn't her playroom. They had brought lots of toys, and the babysitter explained to me that she had brought even more to leave here in the room for future children. So the floor resembled a sloppy daycare room and Leo proceeded to fight over a puzzle piece with one of the other toddlers. But that didn't bother me as much as the 9 year old who just walked in and started playing alongside the other school aged children, or the two boys who just showed up, with no parents, and started climbing on the gate.

I shooed them away, but they came back after I'd had enough. The family whose baby was baptized today showed up in back with their older child, and a few other children from their entourage. Adults sat around and chatted. There was no connection at all to being at mass. A traditional cry room with piped in sound would have been better. The kids reached critical mass, and I walked out with Leo to pace in back instead.

Gone was the distraction and in its place was a noisy mess. My father commented to me on his way out after mass that he probably could find a cheap swingset to stick in there if we wanted to. He had been sitting about 6 pews from the front and could hear it all the way up there.

When you create an attractive nuisance, children are drawn to it. Children weren't drawn to the Utah Vestibule before--it was a place to sit quietly for a moment before moving on to some other distraction. Now Maeve asks me why she can't "go back and play in the playroom" since she has age-peers sitting back there doing that very thing.

Maybe the families of some of those toddlers wouldn't feel welcome if we didn't have a cry room. That's what Astrid suggested to me. But maybe if the whole community realized that children are part of the Kingdom of God, we wouldn't feel like we had to be necessarily separate from the childless adults in the congregation. And maybe there's a way to make a room like that work--maybe limit it to toddlers and babies and their parents only. Maybe take away the gates, or the rug, or both. Make it less like a family room in your basement and more like church.

I walked up to Fr. Miguel after mass and expressed my annoyance. He put it back on me (fairly): how do we make the change, how do we educate or dictate or whatever needs to be done to make the place welcoming to parents of somewhat unruly children without creating a loud and obnoxious nuisance that draws in older children and parentless children to come play?

I'm thinking about it. I think taking the gates away would be a good start--as nice as they were when Leo was by himself or with one other child back there, they make the room an easy place to dump your kid and stand around and chat. Simply taking the gates away would make it far less attractive, and maybe make parents realize they need to do more with their kids at church than just bring a bunch of toys and let them jump on the furniture.

It's like free parking. Everybody likes free parking. Can't get enough of that free parking, and so there's never enough. But if you charge people to park, then some people will walk or ride a bike. If we build a room designed like a nursery that takes away all adult responsibility, tired parents are going to drop that responsibility like a hot potato. But the room pre-gates was never treated like that. You could nurse a baby back then without being disturbed. A parent and toddler might wander back for a minute to sit and look at a book, but parents had to be engaged because they were, essentially, paying for parking--it wasn't a free ride. Parents of seriously unruly children would have to take them outside or hold them in back like I had to with Leo today. Parents won't see those gates and think "I'll just let my kids wander back there and play."

Because this was, yikes, totally over the top. And I know the child-free amongst the congregation heard all that noise and were not impressed. Critical mass, like I said. We need a better way.