VIEW FROM THE PEW
Here it is, spring, and our thoughts turn lightly to _______.
The shopping list? Time to add chocolate bunnies and jelly beans? Or were you thinking spring break? Head for the beach with hibachi? Get some seedlings to put into the ground? Aha, almost time for the first baseball to be tossed by someone sorta famous. Of course, you probably filled in the blank with “Easter” since this is a church publication.
Rituals. That’s the word I was seeking. When you think of it, that’s what all of the above are. They’re just a tiny sample of the deliberate, prescribed actions that we humans adopt to affirm our role in the universe, celebrate being part of something bigger than us. We created them to feel we have a handle on our lives, step by step, season by season.
I’m just coming down from the annual spring ritual of radiating Irishnicity on St. Patrick’s Day. Many rituals, I should say. The ones that get the spotlight involve fun times, music, parades, drinking, green dye in the hair, the beer and the rivers. They draw crowds of wannabe-Irish who know to wear green, and happily spend green, but don’t know the words to the songs or the reason so many of them are sad. Most wouldn’t pass the “Who was Patrick, anyway?” test. Don’t get me started on how clueless the businesses profiting from this holiday are about the difference between four-leaf clovers and the theologically significant Trinity symbol, the shamrock. Some of us retreat to be with ourselves alone to share stories, songs, toasts … our rituals.
The little private family ritual that I’ll share evokes our Grandpa John Murphy from County Louth. We vie to be first to call with the greeting “The top of the morning to you.” The response is “The rest of the day to yourself.” For my grandfather’s generation, it was a gentle civility recalling the land the immigrants left behind, as well as an insider affirmation, for ourselves alone. As I grew older, I found it a ritual expression of good will and hope that cheered Murphy’s children and grandchildren. I hope our youngsters continue to use it, and to get it.
Speaking of insider rituals and getting them, I have always been uncomfortable and awkward with variations on the handshake. I mean, I get the handshake in theory. And you know the history of it, right? Show your open hand not carrying a sword, come in peace, let’s talk not fight. I’m of an age that knows it was a meaningful statement of women’s status when it became routine to shake hands with a woman. No, that wasn’t distant history.
But there’s all these other variations. We Catholics were warned off the Masons and their secret handshakes and signs, which just made you curious about what do they do. Some hand-to-hand variations that bewilder me — slap palms down, knock knuckles right, squeeze to the left — started as African-American insider rituals but are widely adopted as cool or hip, whatever the current word is. I won’t even venture into those rituals; my fingers got tangled doing “patty cake, patty cake” as a little kid.
But I did get a new vision of the fist bump version of handshake recently. I thought I was a little old to mimic that professional ballplayer thing. But then a doctor presented his fist for a knuckle bump, explaining how much safer it is, germ-wise, than a full-on handshake. That idea radiated out in medical circles since the 2009 swine flu epidemic. Now that I get it, I might try it in the pew at “sign of peace” time. I confess I do work the “high five” thing quite a bit because all kids really get into that ritual.
But now that I’ve worked my way into the pew, so to speak, it reminds me of how I got to pondering ritual in the first place.
We are approaching Holy Week, that centerpiece of ritual observance of our Christian faith. We recall Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem when we hold green branches and sing alleluia on Palm Sunday. The church dramatizes the Gospel account of Jesus’ Last Supper with his Apostles on Holy Thursday, with every priest from Pope Francis on down recreating the humble feet-washing ritual. Most of us are spectators for that, but what Jesus did at that gathering by instituting Holy Communion, made all of us participants in the ultimate act of worshipping God. Not outsiders or spectators, we are insiders in the most holy of rituals, receiving the Body and Blood of Christ in the sacrament.
Then there’s the sadness and solemnity of Good Friday, when feelings of guilt are a shared attitude. It doesn’t seem right that it’s only an hour long nowadays; suffering through three hours in church as a child was cathartic. And ahead are the new fire and light of Holy Saturday and the glory of Jesus’ resurrection on Easter Sunday.
Part of the glory of being involved in the Easter celebration is knowing that we’re following the traditions of centuries. If my mind wanders during the Mass, it is to wonder what it was like to worship God in earlier centuries, standing for hours in unheated stone churches without pews or benches. How hard was it to practice your faith when there was no written word that you could put your hands on, when only an elite few understood Latin and you couldn’t read anyway. How fortunate you were if you had a teacher priest explaining what Jesus’ words meant for you; how unfortunate if yours was a time when the emphasis was on punishing sinners rather than helping them see the light.
All that was flowing through my mind as I sat with 30 others in a class on how to be an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion at Mass, more universally, colloquially known as eucharistic ministers. We were quickly reminded by Sister Doctrinaire that “extraordinary” doesn’t mean we’re special; it’s church talk for not the normal routine (by clergy only) for distribution of the Body and Blood of Christ to the congregation. There’s a twinge of wishful thinking in that distinction. With the shrinking supply of priests a fact of life in the Catholic Church, it is a normal routine, at least in American parishes, for laity to be part of the ritual distribution of the Body and Blood of Christ.
My classmates and I have served in that role, some for many years, and I know we all find it humbling and joyful, as well as a purely practical necessity. I wish I could explain that to the handful of communicants who change lanes thinking communion is only real from the priest’s hand.
Speaking of humbling, there is an element of that in the “formation and training” that all eucharistic ministers in the diocese are undergoing these days. Never mind that you are a longtime volunteer, mature in your faith, you are now in need of an official certificate, too. Shades of the good old regimented days of parochial school: you must be taught where you will stand, when you will move, how you will dress, what you will say and what you will not do. What are the proper names — all Latin-based — for the bowls, cups, napkins, vessels and vestments with which we recreate that simple last supper in the upper room in Jerusalem. “You don’t have to be perfect,” Sister Teacher says. God knows we’re not.
Who doesn’t already know that the Catholic Church is The Big League when it comes to rituals? It’s time to just embrace the experience of being a link in the history of this sacrament most holy. It’s time to fight getting distracted in class by wondering how different this might be if Christianity hadn’t been endorsed as the state-backed religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. What spin did those Romans, masters of pomp and ceremony and lovers of gilded and bejeweled things, add to the breaking of the bread?
Okay, I’ll stop wondering. I do get it. If Pope Gregory the Great and other church fathers hadn’t set the orthodox order of the Mass early on, who knows how many variations would have evolved through the centuries. All I need to do is recall Protestant services I’ve attended, where communion is a memorial only, with grape juice and crackers, even coconut water and taro at one memorable experience. It was relief when Sister Orthodoxy made it clear that the 21st Century addition, the “Ritual of the Hand Sanitizer,” must end or at least be practiced privately by germaphobes outside of the sanctuary.
Our first short course on Ritual 101 ended, with more to come. And though I came through it with mixed feelings, as you can tell, I’m grateful for the rituals that help us put ourselves in the presence of God and in communion with the whole Body of Christ, past and present. With them we are insiders in the upper rooms where we join in the Last Supper and in the Apostles’ awe when the resurrected Lord appeared in their midst.
We’re not limited by spring. Easter isn’t a limit, either. Like the disciples described in the Acts of the Apostles, who encountered Jesus on the road, we will “know him by the breaking of the bread.” Every day.
