Nick House Visits St. Michael's Catholic Church

      Here at the Imaginary Christian Thought Newsletter, Mr. Bob the sock puppet caught up with Nick House, legendary adventurer, to talk about his visit to St. Michael's Catholic Church.

     Mr. Bob: Nick, how would you describe the worship service you attended---how was it similar or different from your regular context.

     Nick: Well, Mr. Bob, I would say that the service was shockingly familiar. When I went into the building, I didn't know what to expect. I noticed that everyone would kneel before they got into the pews, and that threw me off as well. I hadn't read up on the Catholic Mass before I went to the Church and I was worried that I was going to be horribly lost. 

     However, once the service got going, I felt at home. My church back home where my dad is a pastor is a CREC (Communion of Reformed Evangelicals) Presbyterian church, and it's a good deal more liturgical than the Baptist church that I attend here in Wheaton. So at St. Michael's, whenever the congregation would kneel or respond to the pastor or read one of the creeds, I didn't feel at all lost. Also, other churches in my denomination have been pushing towards a more liturgical style of worshiping, so much of the language used in the Eucharist and the chanting style of worship music were familiar to me as well. The most familiar thing to me was the people. Whenever you go into a new context, you subconsciously expect everyone else to be really different and weird, and it was very refreshing to know that Catholics are real people.

     Mr. Bob: What did you find most interesting or appealing about the worship service?

     Nick: Interesting? Hmmm...At the risk of being cliche, I would say it was the liturgy, specifically two parts of the liturgy. The first was the emphasis placed on beauty. The physical church building is a pleasant place to be in--the sanctuary has high ceilings and lots of windows, to draw the mind's attention to God's infinity and light. The actions that the priest performs in the Eucharist, such as when he lifts the Host into the air, or when the bells are rung as he presents the Bread and Wine, appeal to the senses and not just the mind. Despite my Reformed misgivings about these rituals (and I don't mean that word in a perjorative sense), it can't be denied that the Catholics know how to express Christian doctrine in tangible ways, and they do it quite well.

     The other interesting thing about the service was the music. The church I currently go to in Wheaton uses more "contemporary" music. I have no theological problems with that kind of music, but I think that the traditional music used at the Catholic church expresses God's majesty and beauty in a way that contemporary praise songs can't. I was also surprised at how many hymns sung there that I knew, including a John Wesley hymn (!).

     Mr. Bob: What did you find most disorienting or challenging about the worship service?

     Nick: There were a few things that I found disorienting, though not as many as I suspected. One was the way that Catholics treat communion. Though I was aware of the Catholic doctrine of communion before coming to the church, it still felt weird to watch everyone else receive the elements while I sat and watched. Another thing that was strange to me was how short the homily was.

     Probably the most disorienting thing was just being a Reformed Protestant in a Catholic Church. The Catholic Church hasn't always been very kind to our people, especially in France and Scotland during the Reformation. And to be fair, the Protestants committed all sorts of nastiness against the Catholics as well. I know that things aren't nearly as bad as they used to be, that we've been doing more ecumenical things together, and I'm glad of it. Yet, it still feels odd when your spiritual ancestors were fighting to get away from something and you're going back and observing it in a different context. It would be kind of like a Hatfield going to a McCoy family reunion. On the whole, it wasn't bad, but there was that undercurrent of psychological dissonance there.   

     Mr. Bob: Last question: What aspects of Scripture or theology did the worship service illuminate for you that you had not perceived as clearly in your regular context?

     Nick: I think that the service very clearly demonstrated the group nature of the church. Say what you will about the rituals, one thing that they do is bind everyone together with a sense of unity. When Catholics do these things together, even if they look pointless to outsiders, it seems that there's a bond created there that people from less liturgical churches don't have. I think there's something to be said for the strong sense of Catholic identity, for the fact that you can't just hop from the Catholic Church to a Baptist Church and then to a Methodist Church the way you could if you were a Protestant. It was very inspiring to see a large group of different people going through the same motions, especially because I knew that it all connected with God and was a physical sign of devotion to God.

     Also, in the homily, the priest pointed out that Jesus doesn't say " When you go to the altar, if you have anything against your brother, go forgive him," but instead he says "When you go to the altar, if your brother has anything against you, go make it up with him." I don't know if I have teased out the full theological ramifications of that, but it's worth thinking about.

Mr. Bob, the sock puppet