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I’m reprinting this article because we’ve all been thinking about how it feels not to be present at Mass. But what does it mean to be present, and what does it mean when you can’t be present?  Something to consider as churches begin to open up again. 
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Whenever we possibly can, my husband and I split up and take turns going to Mass, so someone can stay home and let our youngest kid be rotten in private. That was not possible this week. So instead, we took turns sitting on a folding chair in the parish hall, watching the dear child writhe around on the floor in a rage because we denied her the pleasure of diving into the parish toilet. I eventually calmed her down, administered a few bribes, popped into the church in time to receive Communion, and then scooted out again before the howls resumed.

Because this is our tenth child, I’ve spent many a Mass this way, and I’ve spent many a morning wondering what it really means to be at Mass. I know that we should make an effort to fulfill our Sunday obligation, and I know that God doesn’t get mad at you for not doing things you can’t do.

But what does it mean to be present at Mass? I used to flagellate my heart with accusations of ingratitude. Nigerian converts, I had heard, would labor six days a week, then spend the Sabbath walking barefoot eighteen miles to and from Mass, because they recognized it for the privilege it was; that’s how unwavering was their focus on the prize of Christ.

I’ve mostly abandoned this guilty line of thought. They are they, and I am I, and the cross God has given me is lighter, but it is mine. I want to be at Mass, but I often spend Mass distracted by unavoidable duties. With previous children, I would have asked myself (and anyone within earshot) what was even the point of going to Mass, if I knew I wasn’t even going to hear most of it, much less say the responses, much less dwell prayerfully on the meaning of it all.

I don’t ask that anymore. I think that what it means to be present at Mass is to show up with whatever you’ve got. We are there to worship God and to participate in the divine mystery by which the Son offers Himself to the Father. We have the unthinkable privilege of joining in on that sacrifice, and we do it by bringing whatever it is we’ve got. For me, that’s a week-long effort, plus little spurts of devotion and gratitude on Sundays and Holy Days. That’s what I’ve got right now.

The great revelation: Whoever we are, whatever we’ve got, it’s still not enough. Whatever preparation we’ve done, it’s not enough. However attentive we are, it’s not enough. There is great peace in letting that knowledge sink into your heart: We’re not enough, and never can be — no, not even if we’re a shoe-less Nigerian toiling through the Mangrove.

But Christ is all.

So the parent who spends most of the hour outside the walls, but turns her heart to Christ for a good four seconds while her child is momentarily calm? She’s present at Mass, because she has offered up what she has to offer.

And so does young man with Down Syndrome, who chuckles and sighs his way through the liturgy, pausing only to whisper, “Jesus!” during the elevation. And so does the woman who isn’t even sure she wants to be a Catholic anymore, but she hasn’t made the rupture yet, because she loves her husband and knows he wants her to stay. And the man who grinds his teeth over liturgical banjos is offering up what he has, because he’s fighting his way through an invisible hedge of aesthetic suffering to get to Jesus.  Because nothing we have is enough, but Jesus is all.

What does it mean for you to be present at Mass?

If you’re angry at God, you can hurl that toward the altar, too. If you’re worried about a thousand things and find yourself thinking about them over and over again, rather than about what’s going on at the altar, offer up the distraction itself. You cannot believe how unfussy Christ is, in His love for us.

I’m not saying “don’t try.” It’s a worthy thing to make sacrifices, even painful ones, for the privilege of participating at Mass. If you spent your life working hard to enter more and more fully into the mystery of the Eucharist, then that would be a life well spent indeed.

But if you find yourself thinking, week after week, “Why am I even here?” then I’m telling you: You’re there because Jesus is all. That’s worth a huge effort, and it’s also worth whatever you’ve got.

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A version of this essay was first published in The Catholic Weekly in February of 2018. Reprinted with permission.

“Church Pew with Worshipers” by Vincent van Gogh [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye, the hard-working Jewish dairyman, introduces himself and his family and his way of life with the song “Tradition.”

It lays out the beauty and stability of their stetl ways, and also hints and some of the the injustices and absurdity woven into their daily life. The wheat and the weeds are all intertwined. It works well enough, and Tevye is unwilling to disturb it.

But the world around him is not working. It’s changing fast, he has to keep deciding how willing he is to let go of things that once seemed fundamental. His first daughter wants to marry someone she loves, rather than someone her father has chosen, according to tradition. He relents. Then the second one wants to marry a scholar with radical ideas. He again relents, and although they ask for his blessing but not his permission, he belligerently gives both. Then the third one wants to marry someone who’s not even a Jew, and this is too much. He cannot accept it, and so he loses his daughter, considers her dead. 

As the pogroms intensify, the way of life they’ve been trying to hold together is being torn away from them, whether they choose to release it or not. They are expelled; their shtetl is no more. They pack up and go, heading for a new world. But before this final breech occurs, Tevye does relent again, and he conveys to his renegade daughter: May God be with you. 

Right around the same time Tevye’s fictional family was packing up their life, the Olshansky family, my family, was leaving Kiev with their son and their daughter, my grandmother, Anne, or Hana.

It took three years to get off the continent that had become so hostile to Jews, and before they succeeded, they had a third child, a son, in Bucharest, Rumania. The five of them crossed the ocean and settled in New York, where they had two more children before my great grandfather died. My grandmother became a milliner and married my grandfather, Jacob, who had a small pharmacy, when she was in her early 20’s. It was then she applied for naturalization in her new home.

My grandmother and grandfather were not religious. They sometimes had a family Passover seder prayed in rapid Hebrew, but mostly just held on to the cultural threads, the jokes, the food. Some Yiddish curses that bubble up in my mind when I’m very tired. Maybe the family wanted to start fresh and leave behind as much as possible of that hostile old world.

But at the same time, even though she was so young when she emigrated, maybe my grandmother still felt like a refugee. My sister remembers my grandmother’s piano bench containing several decks of playing cards with little tags noting which cards were missing — a useless thing that somehow felt like it was worth saving. Maybe she was just a fussy old woman. But maybe, when so much has been taken from you, it’s hard to choose to throw anything away. You keep the things you can categorize, and that makes it easier to let go things that have been taken away without your consent. I don’t know.

My paternal grandparents’ gravestones are engraved with Hebrew, anyway. My grandmother’s says “Hana bat Feivel haLevi,” which, I was recently amazed to discover, means “Anna, daughter of Phillip the levite.”

I never knew that our family was descended from levites, and wouldn’t have thought to ask my grandmother, who died when I was seven. I knew her as a plump, profane old lady who smoked and sucked purple sour ball candies as she watched Benny Hill in the little apartment she made upstairs in my parents’ house in New Hampshire, after she became too old to live on her own in Brooklyn.

Hana, daughter of Phillip the levite? I did not know. Was this something she consciously left behind, or had that heritage already become vestigial, fit only to note on a gravestone? I wonder what her early life in America was like, before her father died. Maybe she was something like one of Tevye’s daughters; maybe it was something else entirely. From Kiev to Bucharest to Brooklyn to New Hampshire, and then she died hairless in a hospital bed, hollowed out with cancer. I remember one of her sisters, Micky, Miriam, probably, so dramatically screaming at her funeral, “Annie, Annie, don’t go!” 

Did you ever wonder why Jews are so anxious? The nervy, neurotic stereotype is not from nowhere. Jews — and this is a real thing — are genetically anxious, because when you’re actively persecuted for many generations, it physically changes your brain. Our amygdalas are highly developed, because they have to be, because we were always in danger. Now it’s our job to tell our brains to stand down and calmly sort through just how much danger we’re actually in. Is anybody actually after me right now? Is there a threat? Am I being expelled?

One of the things we need to sort out, as we sort through our possessions, deciding which ones to keep and which to discard, which to hang onto and which to leave behind: Who is with us? Where can I go? What will I take with me? What will I discard?

Will God go with us? Or is He one of the ones who is out to get us? We have to be calm, assess and sort through these things calmly. 

I don’t know anything about the journey, but I believe my grandmother had doings with God some form before she died. I know that, when my parents became evangelical Christians a few years before I was born, they made some clumsy efforts to badger their parents into accepting Christ. They asked them what would happen if they fell off a cliff on the way home, died without being friends with God. My grandparents were understandably annoyed with this approach. The effort failed and my parents realized their mistake. You have to let people make these choices for themselves, not out of compulsion. God seeks your permission and your blessing. My grandmother associated the cross with pogroms. But she, daughter of a Levite, once saw a nativity scene and said, “It’s so beautiful, it must be true.” But I don’t know if she carried it further than that.  

My father once told me his father once asked a rabbi if he could be bar mitzvah’d as an adult, since it never happened when he had come of age. He didn’t go to synagogue and he didn’t observe the holy days, but he did feel that something had been withheld from him, something he needed. He wasn’t observant, but on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, he would sit alone in a darkened room all day. My father saw and remembered this.

When my father was buried, no one cried out, “Don’t go, don’t go!” at his grave. It was clearly his time, more or less. He had cheated cancer and had his chest cracked open more than once to save his heart. No one thought he would live for 77 years, but he did, and he was ready to move on, more or less.

Now my brother is sorting through his house, trying to work out what should be kept and what should be thrown away, what must be remembered and what should be discarded. I don’t want the house. I’d rather just let it go. I haven’t been inside that house for some time. What is it even full of? I’m not sure I want to remember, much less lay claim to any of it. 

It’s a good thing these choices get made for us, sometimes. I shall calmly tell my amygdala: God is with us. Everything else can be let go.