A Mass of Masses (with sound)
June 11th, 2007
Before this week, I’d never been to a Catholic Mass. Since Saturday, I’ve racked up three at Immokalee’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Church – two in Spanish and one in Haitian Creole. Padre Ettore, the lead priest, told me not to bother going to the mass in English. “That’s for the old timers,” he said, “and drained of life.”
The Haitian mass was first, starting at 10:15. The presiding priest had come in from Naples, and looked a bit dubious when I asked to sit in (with a jumble of wires, a microphone, and a camera hanging off me). But eventually he agreed to allow me to attend. Here’s some singing from the service in Creole, and a photo of the choir. The choir was made up mostly of young Haitians – the children of undocumented workers. The Haitian migration, for the most part, predates the recent arrival of Latino farmworkers, and they have graduated to a more established place in Immokalee with jobs in local packing plants.
To an outsider, documenting the act of worship can be quite an uncomfortable thing. Catriona (who is with me here in Florida reporting on Ave Maria) and I talked over our experiences attending Mass today, and we had similarly ambiguous feelings reporting inside the church. Neither one of us is Catholic, and even if we wanted to we wouldn’t know how to go along with the motions. And yet, we arrive to places of worship to film, photograph and record people in their most intimate moments. Should we stand, sit and kneel with the congregation? Or is that just posturing? Even with permission, do we even have a right to be there? As if that’s not uncomfortable enough, the second mass I attend (in Spanish) is mostly made up of undocumented immigrants, many of whom have good reason to be uncomfortable around an unfamiliar gringo with a camera and a recorder. Their music, which was played by a bassist and two guitars, adapted Catholic lyrics to the marimba rhythms of Southern Mexico and Guatemala.
But there’s a moment that moves against this feeling of being an outsider. Both of the Masses have a section after the rite of communion when the worshipers turn to shake the hands people around them. And both times, people come over to me to shake my hand. They walk over from nearby pews, smile, wish me peace and welcome me to their church. It’s my favorite part of both masses.
June 15th, 2007 at 4:51 am
I was raised Catholic, as you know, and what I find interesting is how similar your experience as “an outsider” was to my own, as an “insider.” Church has never been a comfortable place for me. As soon as I was old enough to make my own decisions (or old enough that my parents could not be accused of raising Godless children) I stopped going.
Despite the gravity, austerity, and peace that I always felt in church, I never really felt God. And I was always susupicious of this. Although very beautiful, everything felt staged to me.
Like you, however, I loved the “peace be with you” ritual (that’s what I call it, at least). For a moment, the church is full of welcoming sounds, serious faces erupt into smiles, and you really feel that you are part of something.
For me, going to church was about feeling as though I belonged somewhere. It’s a great feeling to have and although I don’t miss church that much, I do miss that feeling.