Ordinary Time
My local Catholic parish is St. Mary’s, and it is a short yet harrowing walk from my small city home. To get there I must pass an opera house which was once a jailhouse; cross the street where Indians imprisoned in that Colonial jailhouse were chased to a workyard and hacked to death in the bright light of a winter day; then scurry up a block that was part of the Underground Railroad, where a house on the corner hid slaves in a cistern buried in the backyard before they were funneled to freedom. All of this occurs before I step through the doors of St. Mary’s and enter sacred space, space outside of time, before I bless myself with water made holy by a priest, before I take into my mouth wafer and wine which have been transformed into the body and blood of a carpenter who claimed to be God. I do this each day at lunch. It’s a wonder I make it to dinner.
I returned to the Catholic Church after being away for some seven years, time spent settling the mind through Buddhist meditation, contemplating emptiness, loving-kindness, the root of attachment, the suffering of self-grasping. I was seeking peace at a sangha. But my mind still roamed; my spirit was unsettled. And so in the last weeks of my father’s life I found myself in an empty pew before Mass had begun, giving homage to my father’s Catholicism, taking in the solemn air, the saints in stained glass, the parishioners in prayer, the uncanny sacred silence. I was looking for a way home, as one often does when home seems to be dying before you.
Advent begins this Sunday, the beginning of our liturgical year. It is the four weeks leading up to Christmas, derived from the Latin adventus, meaning “coming.” We Catholics calculate time differently. Advent is followed by Christmas, then Ordinary Time, Lent, Easter, and then Ordinary Time again, though there is little ordinary about it. All liturgical time is filled with mystery and awe. The past, present, and future unfurling at once. This public worship of ours is a psychedelic wonder.
Today, Wednesday, is my day to help Father Paul serve Mass. I am a eucharistic minister, also known as an extraordinary minister, a term a bit grandiose but nevertheless specially trained and thus permitted by the Church to prepare the altar and serve the Eucharist, the wafer transformed into the body of Christ, the receiving of which is known as Holy Communion. Receiving the Eucharist is a powerful experience for me, preparing and serving it less so. But that is because when serving I am often caught up in the conventional when I should be enjoying the eternal.
What I remember most about my first Holy Communion is not that first trip to the altar to receive my first Eucharist, but the trip promised to me after the service by my parents to the local amusement park called Dutch Wonderland, a tacky takeoff on Lancaster County’s Dutch and Amish history. That amusement park still resides on a strip of highway we refer to as Amish Las Vegas for its garish neon signs inviting tourists to a crass and commercialized experience of the Amish and their simple style of life in this part of Pennsylvania. With the addition of large outlet malls, that area has become our eternal Black Friday. But Amish Las Vegas aside, there is a blend of history and religion here, memory and myth, which makes this county a mystical place for me. Perhaps all places in which you have lived all your life become that way. Or perhaps it is just the way in which you perceive reality regardless of where you are. Time, spiritual or secular, is rarely ordinary.
The Conestoga Indians were supposed to be held in protective custody in our old jailhouse on the corners of Prince and King Streets during the winter of 1763. Their small village down by the Conestoga River had been set upon by the Paxton Boys a few days before, and these few Indians were all that remained. Lancaster’s magistrates thought it best to put the Indians in jail to keep them safe. The Paxton Boys apparently liked this idea too, because they returned, numbering close to a hundred and riding with vengeance for Indian attacks west of them. What goes around comes around, they figured. And these last Conestoga were gathered in a jail. Fish in a barrel. The Boys gained recruits along the way, quoted scripture as they rode. “Joshua was ordained to drive the heathen out of the land.” And so on.
They arrived on a snow-covered afternoon as many of Lancaster’s officials gathered in St. James Episcopal for a delayed Christmas service, a Christmas Day snowstorm having caused the delay. The Boys encountered the sheriff at the jail, who knew why they were there and meekly stepped aside as the Boys had a ball. They shot, stabbed, and scalped fourteen Indians in the outdoor workyard of the jail. They hacked off hands and feet with tomahawks and blew out brains with flintlocks. Men, women, and children slaughtered in the snow. And then the Boys rode out of town with delight, circling our courthouse on horseback, whooping and hollering and firing off flintlocks. Skulls were split at this spot where I walk to St. Mary’s each day. I stand in amazement.
I was first told this story in second grade, when our class took a field trip to the Fulton Opera House, and we stood on an empty stage and were informed how the building had come into being, who had performed there, its evolution over the years. Then we were taken to a back room where the costumes were kept on mannequins, a room full of people frozen in time bearing eerie expressions. Finally, we were led deeper inside to what seemed an older part of the building, and it was there our guide unspooled the story of the Conestoga and how the Boys from Paxton rode into town one winter day and murdered them all, men, women and children, right where we stood. In my mind I saw terrified Indians running for cover with no way out. The guide was off in his history, the murders taking place in the workyard a few feet away, but the image of confined Conestoga being butchered in that building never left me.
One hundred yards from my house, Thaddeus Stevens, radical Republican congressman from Lancaster, lies buried. He reposed in this particular cemetery because at the time, 1867, it was open to burial of all races, and he did not wish to be segregated in death. “Equality of Man before his Creator,” his gravestone reads. Congressman Stevens hid slaves in a cistern buried in his yard, smuggled them through an underground tunnel from an old tavern next door. From his home they were ferried to Christiana and from there north to freedom. The Underground Railroad ran through Lancaster County, from Columbia to Christiana. Manstealers hid beneath the Columbia Wrightsville Bridge waiting for slaves to cross. They captured them for bounty, and took them back south. The Deep South where they’d never escape again. Drinking in the taverns in Wrightsville they’d hear rumors, stop wagons crossing the bridge, and search for false bottoms. Heavily armed. Hungry for money. They collected chattel for change, and drank their profits away.
This is a city of souls. Abolitionists and slaves, Indians and ancestors. My father’s father emigrated here from Germany in 1905, lived a few blocks from where I now live, walked these same streets. I never met him. He died too young, or I was born too late. But I know him, not through pictures, but through this town, the bricks of the old row homes, the bars on the hill, the Catholic churches. I put my feet where his were, my elbows on the tavern bar, my knees on the church kneeler. We wonder on the same questions, worry on the answers. He doesn’t seem a grandfather to me because I never met him, but I share a space with him that traverses the years. We walk together, just a heartbeat away, and in eternity that is nothing.
In the last weeks of my father’s life I sat in a chair beside his bed holding his hand. Hours passed each day, sometimes we talked, often there was silence. I told him I had gone to Mass, said a prayer for him. He knew I hadn’t been there in years and so smiled and squeezed my hand. He did not want to die, did not want to let go. His body was old, withered. But this world was everything to him. And so he held on to my hand, and I held his. I had no closer friend in this life, or for many a year when I was young, no greater foe. I had feared and fought and loved him. On the last day his grip loosened, and his eyes went to an empty stare. Soon it was just me holding on to him. About a year after he died, I dreamt we were walking down the sidewalk in front of my house. He was on a cane, and we were walking slowly. Suddenly he stopped and looked at me. I waited, wondering what was the matter. He then reached over and placed his arms around me and held me, and what passed between us was not just the love between a father and son but seemingly all the love there was in the world, as if he were saying, “This is what it is like here.” My knees buckled. I woke in tears. If my father was reaching across reality to tell me what heaven was like, he did a damn fine job.
Advent is not just the coming of Christ but also of winter. When I walk to church in these cold days, I think of the frozen trails south of the city where I hike among the skeletal trees and overtop the dead leaves and listen to how the water rushing over the rocks seems louder than in summer. Maybe it is because there is no foliage to absorb and soften the sound, or maybe it is because winter cuts deeper into things, making them harder and meaner. Everything is reduced, skinned to its essence. When all the green is gone, and everything seemingly dead except the fundamental elements of water and rock, I am back in those first days before man and beast and fish. Primordial days of water and earth and a spirit moving over things. In some places along the stream, between the riffles, the water forms small pools and circles back upon itself, gets caught in the current and curls around, replaying itself over and over in a watery loop that has likely gone on since the world was begun. To toss in a stick and watch it circle and swirl is to daydream in winter and lose all track of time.
The cistern which hid and kept safe the slaves still lies buried in the ground, but it is now partially unearthed, left as it was found by a construction crew several years ago who were excavating the site for a new Convention Center. The yard is now encased within the Convention Center itself, behind glass, part of an exhibit to Thaddeus Stevens and the Underground Railroad. To look at it is to see bricks and dirt from one hundred and seventy years ago, an underground safe room made from walls that once held rain water. Men, women, and children not yet dead were placed in the ground until it was time to flee. These are the things I encounter on my way to worship. Slaves and slave runners, manstealers and massacred Indians, the non-scriptural Stations of the Cross. My mind is a cup overflowing, reality cut loose in time.
Before noon I enter the sacristy, the room behind the sanctuary, and first check the Ordo which instructs me as to the required readings for the day’s Mass. I mark the two Roman Missals and the lectionary using the appropriate colored ribbons. The lectionary is placed in the ambo, or pulpit, the large Roman Missal on the credence table behind the ambo, and the smaller Roman Missal by the Priest’s chair behind the altar. The ciborium (a golden chalice containing the hosts), the cruets (glass containers holding the water and wine), and the chalices (which will hold the consecrated water and wine), are all set on the credence table. I then place a purificator cloth on top of the gold wine chalice, followed by a square of stiff white linen known as a pall. Atop that goes a gold plate, a paten, which holds a large host to be consecrated. Lastly, set on top of all that is a corporal, a white cloth which is unfolded during Mass and spread on the altar to act as something of a placemat. I then take the key and open the tabernacle, genuflect, rise and check to see if there are sufficient consecrated hosts, the transubstantiated body of Christ. I light the appropriate candles, dress in a white alb, and wait. All of this occurs before Mass has even begun.
Why go through all these rituals? What can it all mean? Does God really care about such details? Does the source of all being worry on cups and cloth? It seems an unreasonable notion, a quaint superstition. The path to the interior life can be a confusing one. But we have to try. “All the way to heaven is heaven,” said Saint Catherine. Perhaps details mark the way.
Here’s another detail. The foundation stones used to rebuild St. Mary’s in 1852 were stones taken from the walls of the old jailhouse where the Conestoga were slain. The jail was torn down to make room for the opera house, and the stone was sold off. And so the walls that were supposed to protect the Conestoga now protect the parishioners of St. Mary’s. We have much to consider when we drop to our knees and pray.
In one form or another, built and rebuilt, St. Mary’s has stood at this spot since 1741, just down the street from Thaddeus Stevens’s home and the Fulton Opera House. A church on a hill. Catholics called to profess their faith for over two hundred and seventy-five years. My Catholic ancestors worshipped here when the Paxton Boys rode into town, knelt and prayed through the years of slave running, rose and received communion during the bloodletting of the Civil War. Through it all Christ waits on a cross in the sanctuary, eternally spiked and splayed, somehow offering life and love. I am amazed at his offer and try to accept.
Father Paul climbs the back steps to the sacristy and opens the door. I stand, and he puts on his vestments. Together we walk into the sanctuary, hymnals in hand, singing “Holy, holy, holy.” The parishioners rise. I shake off the conventional to enter the eternal. It is almost Advent. The beginning of our liturgical year. Time is about to start again.