Everybody Leaving In The Chreaster Parade

I will admit that I am not the most rigorous Catholic. I may have mentioned before that I was brought up Catholic, was married Catholic will raise my kids Catholic, I don’t however go to church regularly and I don’t fully agree with a lot of the precepts of the church. On the other hand, since I went to Catholic grade school and junior high, I still have a certain amount of the dogma stuck in my head. Some of the things that still make me twinge are wearing jeans to church, calling priests by their first name, etc. Some other things that get me are the new words. I know I have touched on this before but, some of them don’t even make sense. For example, there is a part where the priest says “Peace be with you” old response “and also with you” new response “and with your spirit”. So, YOU can’t be at peace but your spirit can. There are a number of other things changed as well but that is not the reason of my post. This is about being a Chreaster.

If you don’t know what a Chreaster is, it is someone who only goes to church on Christmas and Easter. These people, and I include myself as one of them, fill the churches to beyond capacity twice a year. I know that today the church was filled mostly with the Chreasters because for the first time in the last few times I have been to church (mostly for weddings and baptisms) the majority of the congregation was saying the old words and not the new ones. This means that a) they haven’t been to church enough since they changed to learn them (like me) or b) they haven’t been to church in so long that they don’t even know they changed.

With all of the extra people, a thought came to mind. Do churches get written up for violating fire codes? I KNOW that there were more people in there than was safe. Churches burn a lot of things during their services. I always thought I would go out in a plane crash or trampled at a concert. I don’t want my obit to read that I died in an over crowded church. I don’t really even see myself being in a church on December 21 this year. Of course, just wait until after communion and then there is no problem with overcrowding. Come on people, I am one of the worst at going to church but I at least stay until the end. If you only go once or twice a year, you can sacrifice the extra 15 min to stay until the end of mass.

At least Tori behaved and so did Alex. Alex slept and Tori watched Abby In Wonderland on the iPod. Yeah, I brought an iPod into church. Well, off to devil some eggs. Have a great Easter everyone!

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I Got Dirty At Church

Well, just a little bit. It is Ash Wednesday. For those of you that don’t know what that is, it is NOT an Evil Dead marathon. It is when Catholics and some other denominations as well, go and have ashes on their forehead reminding us that we were made from dirt and to dirt we will return. I am what I call a recovering Catholic. I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic grade school and Jr. High. Then I went to a public high school. There were a lot of things even back then that made me curious about why the Catholics were the right and only true church (in their opinion), but these days, as an adult, there are a lot of things I don’t agree with because of me being a grown up. I am not going to get into all that right now. I want to talk about the experience.

Because of what I mentioned above, we are not avid church goers. We aren’t really even Christers (pronounced kree-stirs), or those that only go at Christmas and Easter. We do go for weddings and the occasional baptism and we go now and then so we can get our babies baptized. Mrs. Voices is more Catholic than I am so there is that.

A while back, one of my favorite blogs WhatImenat2say, warned me that some of the wording has changed in the Catholic mass. This was disturbing to me. While I am not a big church goer, I am still looking for the structure that the mass taught me as a child. I don’t like change. I should have paid more attention to that blog post because Mrs. Voices and I kept saying the wrong things. I needed notes. Although, that wasn’t nearly as embarrassing as taking Tori to her first mass as a talking 16 month old.

When the pipe organ started playing, Tori danced. That was cute. When people started singing, Tori broke out in “la la la la la”. That was also cute. Then, Tori wanted to go to mama. I passed her off and Tori started playing with mommy’s necklace … the “pretties”. Then Tori started doing her next favorite thing. She started pulling on Mrs. Voices’ shirt collar. The Mrs. was able to pull it back up in time. Nothing fell out. The problem was, is that it was very quiet at this particular time during the mass. Tori learned a new word a while back. She pulls at mommy’s shirt and says “NIPPLE” really loud. I laughed a little. So did the people around us. I love going to church with children.

In other news, Whitney Houston is still dead and the flags are back up to full staff. Eating Girl Scout cookies will not cause your daughter to become a homosexual and you will not have to have an abortion and you will not have a sex change operation, unless of course you are a republican living in Indiana.