4/6/24

Saturday, April 6, 2024

 Lights out on the BL at 10:30 after the Iowa-UConn game.  Up at 2:30 for a PS and moved to LZB, up again at 3:30 and let Lilly out.  31°, high of 46°, sunny day ahead,  The wind is NNW at 7 mph, 2-8/13. Sunrise at 6:23, sunset at 7:53, 13+0.

Pain, etc.  Typical pain during the night in the left shoulder and right wrist/hand, plus some pain in the right shoulder which semi-terrorizes me, i.e., the fear of losing functionality in both shoulders.  It's hardly the same as being a double amputee by any means, but having both shoulders restricted by bad pain has at least some similarities, i.e. the inability to reach and grasp.  Plus, there is the pain associated with limited ROM.   

I'm grateful for my days at St. Francis of Assisi parish and at the House of Peace.  I'll need to write more about this tomorrow, but the start of my thoughts are in the entry below.   

The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust: Many Americans seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community iThe True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust.  Many Americans seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community according to an article by Derek Thompson in the current The Atlantic online.  Excerpts:

More than one-quarter of Americans now identify as atheists, agnostics, or religiously “unaffiliated,” according to a new survey of 5,600 U.S. adults by the Public Religion Research Institute. This is the highest level of non-religiosity in the poll’s history. Two-thirds of nonbelievers were brought up in at least nominally religious households, like me.

Suddenly, in the 1990s, the ranks of nonbelievers surged. An estimated 40 million people—one in eight Americans—stopped going to church in the past 25 years, making it the “largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history,” according to the religion writer Jake Meador. In 2021, membership in houses of worship fell below a majority for the first time on record. 

That relationship with organized religion provided many things at once: not only a connection to the divine, but also a historical narrative of identity, a set of rituals to organize the week and year, and a community of families. PRRI found that the most important feature of religion for the dwindling number of Americans who still attend services a few times a year included “experiencing religion in a community” and “instilling values in their children.”

When I read the PRRI survey, this emphasis on community is what caught my eye. . .

It caught my eye also and led me to reflect on my history with God and with the Roman Catholic Church, both as a child and as an adult.  During much of my childhood, I believed in God.  My mother was a 1st generation Irish American and a Catholic through and through.  She insisted, over my father's objection, that my sister and I attend our parish's grammar school and that we attend Catholic high schools.  (As far as I know, there were no 'middle schools' when and where we grew up.)  We were surrounded by Catholic iconography: pictures and statuettes of Jesus and Mary, Nativity creches at Christmas, holy cards. rosaries, scapulars, St. Joseph purity cords, and crucifixes on bedroom walls.  We had a special crucifix that contained 2 little candles and 2 vials of holy water and of chrism for use in Extreme Unction or the Last Rites.  Every classroom in our school had a picture of the dour Pope Pius XII, and perhaps images of The Little Flower, or of Francis of Assisi preaching to attentive birds.  We attended mass every Sunday and on holy days of obligation, though none of the adults in our family did.  We were also in church on Saturdays for Confession, and for Benedictions, and in Lent, for 40 Hours Devotions, when we took turns adoring the exposed Holy Sacrament, i.e., a large unleavened bread wafer, in a splendid gold monstrance on the altar.   We attended annual spiritual 'retreats' usually but not always, led by a professional Retreat Master, skilled at making us reflect on our sins and on God's love for us and His intention to consign us to Hell for eternity if we disobeyed His rules.   We were also urged to discern whether He had gifted us with a calling, a vocation to the priesthood or the religious life.  Indeed, in my high school group of 4 Irish Catholic best friends, two of us  (Johnny Flynn and then Jack O'Keeefe) joined the Irish Christian Brothers after graduation.  At Church we sang proper Catholic (never Protestant) songs, lit candles for the dead or for 'special intentions', and we were censed by the priest or an altar boy swinging a thurible emitting the pungent fragrance of burning incense.  In 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, I was an altar boy so I attended mass on early weekday mornings as well as on Sundays and holy days.  Growing up in those circumstances, it was almost impossible not to believe in God, and to fear His Justice that would consign us to Hell if we had, e.g., unconfessed and unforgiven "impure thoughts or actions".  Nonetheless, I recall feeling guilty sometime in 6th grade because I had doubts about what I was being taught about God by the nuns and priests because, as I understood it, not believing the truths of the Church was sinful.  I think that childhood dubeity never left me unless to be replaced by simple disbelief.  

I attended mass sporadically during college but rarely attended church during my 4 years in the Marines, and never during my tour in Vietnam.  Anne and I were married in a Catholic mass.  We had both Sarah and Andy baptized but I'm sure it was mainly because we were enculturated Catholics, raised by Catholic families and educated from elementary school through college at Catholic schools.  It would have been unthinkable not to have them baptized.  But when it came time to send send them off to school, we never seriously considered sending them to Catholic school.  Neither of us thought that Catholic schooling would be a good thing for them and we never thought of having them attend CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) classes at our local parish.  Anne and I were members of the second largest religion in America: fallen away Catholics.

     So how was it that around 1994 or 1995 I started going to Sunday mass at St. Francis of Assisi Church at 4th and Brown Streets in central city Milwaukee.  I'm not sure why I went but I went (no pun intended) religiously for about 6 years.  I was the regular driver of the church van on Sunday mornings, picking up and dropping off parishioners all over the inner city.  I was reluctantly persuaded to let myself be nominated and elected to the Parish Council.  I was friendly with the three Capuchin priests at the parish, Fathers Niles, Paul, and Bob.  When I retired from the law faculty, I became the executive director of The House of Peace, a prominent inner-city  community center started by the parish.  I became friends with the two Capuchin priests who lived there, Al Veik and Matthew Gottschalk, and I attended early morning mass every morning in the chapel.  Did I believe in God during those years?  I don't think so.   Did I believe in the Catholic Church?  I don't think so.  What brought me back into the fold?  I believe it was what the author of the article in The Atlantic suggests, i.e., the desire for community and, in my case, a community that wasn't exclusively or predominantly comprised of upper middle-class, professional or managerial, relatively affluent White people.  Or, in more high-faluting language, perhaps a yearning for a sense of an ordered existence in a world where 'God's in his heaven, all's right with the world.'  Rites, rituals, canonical hours, religious seasons, holy days, sacraments and sacramentals, customs and traditions provide a stable framework for a life that is otherwise buffeted by strong secular winds  Holy cards, holy water, ashes, palms, 'beads', icons, etc., contriubte to a sense of order in the universe, the absence of chaos, absurdity, purposefulness, and meaninglessness,  Even if you can't believe in any traditional, Thomistic concept of God or of any personal, or 3 person, God, these things can tend to steady a person on his journey through this "vale of tears."

ROBERT BROWNING

Pippa’s Song

THE year ’s at the spring,

And day ’s at the morn;

Morning ’s at seven;

The hill-side ’s dew-pearl'd;

The lark ’s on the wing;

The snail ’s on the thorn;

God ’s in His heaven—

All ’s right with the world!