Mass as an Immigrant Experience

Today I went in search of the other parish in town, not the one I've been going to, because I wanted to try Confession there. At first I was confused, only seeing a school, and then I crept inside carefully, scared I'd set off an alarm or something and inside the lobby, saw a single door open.  Inside that door, my breath was taken away by a place lit by candles (at least for then), statuary scattered about, and a high altar the likes of which I've not seen since I attended a Traditional Latin Mass. Well...I waited and never got to Confession.  However, before I could leave, Mass began, and so I settled in for a liturgy I knew like the back of my hand, but a liturgy flavored in different dialects of speech and careful worn years of experience.  As the priest began in strongly accented English from Eastern Europe, I found myself transplanted from the Midwest of the United States to another time, even if it was the same place.

I felt connected to those who have come before me in a way that I rarely do, and in particular have felt three times since becoming a Catholic.  The first was walking through the fog and mists to RCIA, in secret from so many who knew me, and chuckling that I was being so furtive about it in a free nation of tolerance, when early Christians had to go through the fog to meet and do so in fear of their lives.  In that moment, I felt a connection to them, born of an understanding that came as a flash of insight.  The second time was in San Diego at the Mission Basilica there and before the Mass began I knelt to pray and could pick up at least half a dozen languages being spoken, and all around me we were a display of seemingly every race in the city, and it hit me, "Unlike so many 'whites only' churches I've been to, this is what Heaven will look like one day."

Today, was that third such experience.  I felt connected for the first time to the roots of the Catholic Church in America, how it would have been for small groups of settlers to bring their faith with them as they lived their hardscrabble lives.  Priests were speaking in broken English, other times in Latin.  The lectors spoke with very pronounced Scandinavian accents, as if they had just come from Ellis Island, not as though they had been raised here in the United States.  And we weren't in a dedicated church to be built as such; no, as I discovered, this was their 50th anniversary as a parish, and they had never left the space attached to the school that was supposed to be temporary.  But generations of immigrants to this nation, poor as they were, had made it their own, especially in the years following World War Two.

The priest spoke in his homily about the history of the parish and of the temporary space that had become home to them.  How the organ took years to assemble and get to work.  He asked what part of the space was most moving to people:  Was it the Tabernacle?  The high altar?  The hand made pews created by those first parishoners?  Or, he asked, was it something that he often found himself reflecting on; was it the main aisle?  He had watched generations come down that aisle in his time as a priest, new parents bringing their children for baptisms, those children later coming down the aisle for Confirmation, then those children coming down the aisle as bride and groom, only to repeat the cycle again as they brought forth new children for baptism.  Eventually, he said, he had seen so many people brought down that aisle, no longer able to walk, but carried for their funeral Mass with their casket upon the altar, the crucifix above them, and also hanging there, the promise of eternal life that Christ offers.  I nearly cried at that point.

However, he said, even the aisle wasn't the most important thing in the parish to him, as much as it represented.  Rather, Christ was.  It seems elementary, but so often overlooked.  None of this exists without Jesus.  The liturgy is empty without Him, the praises would ring hollow, the words merely words upon a page penned by lunatics long ago.  Nothing matters without Christ.  and that fit well with the day's readings about love, because we know the simple and often unspoken truth of our faith, deus caritas est, God is Love.

As my experience as a stranger in a somewhat familiar land came to an end, two things struck me.  The first, is that everyone should have an "immigrant experience" once in a while in their own faith, as it were, to be able to see things from a perspective they normally do not.  The second was another simple truth that is overlooked so often in faith; none of us is a native of Heaven, for the trek there, the embracing of Christ and following that path, we are all immigrants to an eternal kingdom.