The parish: a bazaar of personalities.
There's the volunteer they call "the Diva" who rubbed the sleeve of my shirt between her fingers and said, "oh I like this...I like textures," and then proceeded to comment on the "texture" of all the outfits in the room. (Including Fr. Joe's pants, which she didn't approve of because they were too "boring").
And this woman gets along pretty well with my youth minister from Philadelphia who loves leopard print. Leopard print chairs welcome you into her office. Leopard print & pink work themselves into her daily wardrobe. She spent thirty minutes once trying to show me the leopard background of the youth ministry myspace. Today I found a coffee mug in the sink which was, go figure, also leopard print.
I met an old man last week who came in with a rose for me and the other women in my office. Within five minutes of meeting me, he had shared his epic of marrying an ex-nun and becoming Catholic.
I called a family to ask for volunteers last week, and it was the same deal- a guy picked up who was kind of a strange character, and within a few minutes, I heard a heartfelt story of his struggles and his process of conversion.
Tonight I went to a RCIA meeting. It was the first one of the year. The candidates are moving from the stage of inquiry to catechumenate. Several of the candidates were very old, but still wanted to go through this seven-month process to enter the Church. One guy said his wife is Catholic and that he has been married for 34 years, but is just now ready to enter the Church. The woman next to me was from Goa and grew up in Uganda. She was married for six days at 21 when she had to leave for the United States as a refugee and now she's at Holy Family as a sponsor.
I'm not sure what I'm going for here... I guess I just wanted to express how overwhelmed I am by the simultaneous eccentricity and depth of parish life. The parish is a hub of life changing events- the mass, baptisms, weddings, funerals, quiet moments of conversion. It's also the hub of the normalcy and dysfunctionality of every day life.
They go hand-in-hand, somehow. And it's beautiful.
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3 comments:
gen - i love your post b/c it's so true! beware of answering phones... you may get a 20-minute life story. sometimes a little crazy, but always somewhat interesting.
Calm down Gen.
J/k. It's so true. Universally crazy, we are.
don't forget about your mentor with her bumper sticker: "breathe deeply"
to paraphrase dorothy from the wizard of oz, we're not at notre dame anymore
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