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Monday, June 11, 2012

Spirit is a Feeling, Not an Object

I attended mass yesterday with two of my dear buddies at a beautiful church, St. Anthony of Padua, named after San Antonio's patron saint.  The pastor greeted us and chided my friends with dry Irish humor for not having seeing them for the past few Sundays.

We sat in the front, not in the back, where my pals say people who might be ashamed for their sexual orientation often sit in church. Not us. What I love most about these men is their powerful sense of what counts, what matters in life. When they first started attending, they had "the talk" with the priest there, who said to them, "You and your partner are welcome to worship here. At this church we follow, not the letter of the law, but its spirit."

Mass was beautiful, sacred in song and ceremony, recreating the awe that living day-to-day often obscures in its many to-do's, mash up of memories and compelling goals and wishes for the future. I gave special thanks for our successful and safe travels in Spain and our safe return back home.

In recent months, reading about the Vatican and its many legal trials as well as surreal edicts against family planning and American nuns has made me retreat even further from organized religion. Yet, the joy and peace that bloomed around me in prayer, song and human-ship, bright, alive and as yellow as Esperanza itself, made me remember that the church is people, not press releases.

The irony was not lost on me of having sat recently in so many gilded, centuries-old churches, built from the riches of Spanish colonies, any of which would have easily dwarfed St. Anthony's, a concrete-block edifice built only 80 years ago for quarry workers on the edges of Alamo Heights.

The lesson for me was spirit is spirit, no matter the clothes, the jewels that surround it, those that it lacks or even excludes.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you, Lindy for this lovely blog post. I am sorry I missed the mass. Susie

    ReplyDelete
  2. You are pardoned. For your penance, you will prepare two breakfasts, one lunch and a dinner. Amen!

    ReplyDelete