Our family has the habit of going to Saturday vigil mass as opposed to Sunday service.We got into it because it was too cold to wake up early for mass on Sundays and now, it has become a way of life and unlike daylight savings time, we stick to this routine and want to be Arizona and not Oregon! No flip flopping. I am sure catholic doctrine somewhere will relegate us to purgatory at the minimum for this issue of convenience over conscience...
We carried over this practice from our old church to the new and the upside is that you meet new people and they are, like you, constant fixtures at that specific service and in a few months you nod and acknowledge some of them, talk to a few more and in general develop a sense of community with them.
You also come across the actual sampling of society at large in that microcosm...physically, ethnicaly,intellectually.....we've had the service interrupted by homeless people with mental issues, we've have odd looking people straggle in in mid service and march up the center aisle nonchalantly...we've even had a young lady sit in church and tear up a bible page by page and change seats every five minutes until the service was over...
And there are the regulars...this lovely lady with a doll of a daughter , whom we have seen grow up...she was a few months old in her stroller when we started going to this church and now is almost three, a fiery looking doll, who has, take this, twin sisters!!Two more lively dolls!
And we absolutely love the two liturgical ministers who ask my older one to help with the offertory and always acknowledge us with a welcoming smile and make small talk. When I gave them goody bags from Noe's first communion celebration, they immediatley pulled out $5 bills and handed it to him. When I asked them why, I was shushed....
There is this one regular who walks in just before service begins, a tall guy, with a huge paunch...he marches right up to the middle of the church and settles in and always, always, says all the responses a step ahead of the rest of the church....you would notice if he isn't there in church by the unison of voices without that misnote!
And then there is this younger guy, maybe in his twenties, he sashays into church and settles down with aplomb. He always has a fanny pack and once used his cell phone inside the church...he preens in church, adjusts his hair and in general is a bit of a distraction...A friend of mine later told me that he has some intellectual issues and maybe on the autism spectrum. So these days when he walks in, I don't judge...I appreciate the fact that he comes to church....remembers his creator. I acknowledge the fact that the world belongs to all of us...not just the supposedly "normal" ones.
Last saturday we went to church as usual, but with a slight difference...my parents were with us. We sat at our usual pew and things were humming along when the young man walked in. He was late, the homily was over and as usual he marched up somewhere to the lower middle of the church and sat in a pew about five pews ahead of us. He made an elaborate ceremony of sitting down after adjusting his hair and I figured he would be ok. And then at one point in the service, he stood up and my mouth fell open... lo and behold, all the believers were exposed to a man in a teal blue thong with his jeans riding low enough that it left nothing to the imagination!As absurd as it seemed, my first thought was that that would have looked good on a woman!My older kid standing next to me started tittering and I threatened him with death if he so much as opened his mouth....I looked across at my husband who was smiling that ' will somebody save me from that image stuck in my brain' smile....
It was only a few pews behind him that got an eyefull of this and I felt sorry for the guy because he seemed unaware of it and I wondered about what his reaction would be if he found out that he had given such a show to his co- churchgoers.I would have been mortified..
And then it was time for communion and we all started lining up...since we move in order pew by pew, I knew I would soon be saved from this unsavoury sight and was looking forward to it and feeling guilty about having been distracted by something like this in church...pretty much everyone who had been privy to this ' indecent exposure' was looking a little befuddled and amused while moving in line.
And then it happened.This slightly older gentleman who was sitting two pews behind us marched right up to the poor fellow and whispered his predicament in his ear.And he immediately corrected
the issue and kept moving in line.Since we were all focused on receiving communion I did not notice what his reaction was when he found out about his wardrobe malfunction and by the time we had returned to our pews he was back to looking modest with no issues.
I did manage to mouth the words ' nice' to the old gentleman who helped him, but I felt guilty... immensely guilty.
Here I was, in the temple of God, judging a fellow human being despite knowing his frailties and more importantly his innocence. But my greatest fault was in not helping him. A good ten minutes passed before someone clued him in on what was happening...and I had spent those ten minutes admonishing my son, communicating my unease with my husband and generally being selfish and looking at it as having affected me and considering myself the victim .
In actuality,the victim was the poor guy who was hardly aware of what had happened and I had done nothing to help...nothing..all the while having absolutely no empathy for the guy. One of the two absolutes that God wants us to live by is loving your neighbour as yourself...which means empathising with our fellow human beings and I had failed miserably. If I had been, say,wearing a skirt and it had accidentally hiked up exposing flesh, I would definitely want someone to rush up to me point if out so I could correct it.
If one zooms out if this scenario to the world at large, empathy would, I think solve a lot of problems. Every bigot put yourself at the receiving end of bigotryand see how if hurts, every religious zealot put yourself at the receiving end of such zealotry and see if you like it...
And stop feeling victimised if people do not agree with you... everyone is entitled to their opinion and respecting that would definitely move the world in the right direction...
As for the gentleman who helped the guy- karma in spades buddy!! In spades!!! Not just the good deed of the day..but the week as well. It takes courage,ironically,to go up to someone and point out something as embarrassing as that. And he did it with minimal fuss and ado...and he moved on. Good people make the world go around they say and I guess we have enough of them,thank God!
We carried over this practice from our old church to the new and the upside is that you meet new people and they are, like you, constant fixtures at that specific service and in a few months you nod and acknowledge some of them, talk to a few more and in general develop a sense of community with them.
You also come across the actual sampling of society at large in that microcosm...physically, ethnicaly,intellectually.....we've had the service interrupted by homeless people with mental issues, we've have odd looking people straggle in in mid service and march up the center aisle nonchalantly...we've even had a young lady sit in church and tear up a bible page by page and change seats every five minutes until the service was over...
And there are the regulars...this lovely lady with a doll of a daughter , whom we have seen grow up...she was a few months old in her stroller when we started going to this church and now is almost three, a fiery looking doll, who has, take this, twin sisters!!Two more lively dolls!
And we absolutely love the two liturgical ministers who ask my older one to help with the offertory and always acknowledge us with a welcoming smile and make small talk. When I gave them goody bags from Noe's first communion celebration, they immediatley pulled out $5 bills and handed it to him. When I asked them why, I was shushed....
There is this one regular who walks in just before service begins, a tall guy, with a huge paunch...he marches right up to the middle of the church and settles in and always, always, says all the responses a step ahead of the rest of the church....you would notice if he isn't there in church by the unison of voices without that misnote!
And then there is this younger guy, maybe in his twenties, he sashays into church and settles down with aplomb. He always has a fanny pack and once used his cell phone inside the church...he preens in church, adjusts his hair and in general is a bit of a distraction...A friend of mine later told me that he has some intellectual issues and maybe on the autism spectrum. So these days when he walks in, I don't judge...I appreciate the fact that he comes to church....remembers his creator. I acknowledge the fact that the world belongs to all of us...not just the supposedly "normal" ones.
Last saturday we went to church as usual, but with a slight difference...my parents were with us. We sat at our usual pew and things were humming along when the young man walked in. He was late, the homily was over and as usual he marched up somewhere to the lower middle of the church and sat in a pew about five pews ahead of us. He made an elaborate ceremony of sitting down after adjusting his hair and I figured he would be ok. And then at one point in the service, he stood up and my mouth fell open... lo and behold, all the believers were exposed to a man in a teal blue thong with his jeans riding low enough that it left nothing to the imagination!As absurd as it seemed, my first thought was that that would have looked good on a woman!My older kid standing next to me started tittering and I threatened him with death if he so much as opened his mouth....I looked across at my husband who was smiling that ' will somebody save me from that image stuck in my brain' smile....
It was only a few pews behind him that got an eyefull of this and I felt sorry for the guy because he seemed unaware of it and I wondered about what his reaction would be if he found out that he had given such a show to his co- churchgoers.I would have been mortified..
And then it was time for communion and we all started lining up...since we move in order pew by pew, I knew I would soon be saved from this unsavoury sight and was looking forward to it and feeling guilty about having been distracted by something like this in church...pretty much everyone who had been privy to this ' indecent exposure' was looking a little befuddled and amused while moving in line.
And then it happened.This slightly older gentleman who was sitting two pews behind us marched right up to the poor fellow and whispered his predicament in his ear.And he immediately corrected
the issue and kept moving in line.Since we were all focused on receiving communion I did not notice what his reaction was when he found out about his wardrobe malfunction and by the time we had returned to our pews he was back to looking modest with no issues.
I did manage to mouth the words ' nice' to the old gentleman who helped him, but I felt guilty... immensely guilty.
Here I was, in the temple of God, judging a fellow human being despite knowing his frailties and more importantly his innocence. But my greatest fault was in not helping him. A good ten minutes passed before someone clued him in on what was happening...and I had spent those ten minutes admonishing my son, communicating my unease with my husband and generally being selfish and looking at it as having affected me and considering myself the victim .
In actuality,the victim was the poor guy who was hardly aware of what had happened and I had done nothing to help...nothing..all the while having absolutely no empathy for the guy. One of the two absolutes that God wants us to live by is loving your neighbour as yourself...which means empathising with our fellow human beings and I had failed miserably. If I had been, say,wearing a skirt and it had accidentally hiked up exposing flesh, I would definitely want someone to rush up to me point if out so I could correct it.
If one zooms out if this scenario to the world at large, empathy would, I think solve a lot of problems. Every bigot put yourself at the receiving end of bigotryand see how if hurts, every religious zealot put yourself at the receiving end of such zealotry and see if you like it...
And stop feeling victimised if people do not agree with you... everyone is entitled to their opinion and respecting that would definitely move the world in the right direction...
As for the gentleman who helped the guy- karma in spades buddy!! In spades!!! Not just the good deed of the day..but the week as well. It takes courage,ironically,to go up to someone and point out something as embarrassing as that. And he did it with minimal fuss and ado...and he moved on. Good people make the world go around they say and I guess we have enough of them,thank God!
Superb Kavi. Empathy is a very important virtue. Well written as usual and the way you have brought out the fact about how we judge even when we know nothing is very true.
ReplyDeleteGreat read. Very touching.
ReplyDelete