Camels, parish festivals, and liturgy

To put it simply, I inherited a broken program. I was the third youth minister in just over a year - and that right there should have been a big enough red flag to push me away. Because of all of the youth minister turnover, the teens of the parish had a tough time trusting anyone - why open up to people if they're just going to leave soon anyways? Then there was the programming "process" for lack of a better term - there wasn't one. Each Sunday evening LIFE Night was being planned about an hour beforehand. I recall seeing this play out of my first Sunday evening since the Core group that was running things in the interim had decided to do a night on Theology of the Body. Unless you're Christopher West, you're probably not going to be able to write a decent talk to boil down TOTB into a managable chunk for teenagers in a half hour. On top of that, the word on the street was that the previous youth minister often went way too deep in terms of teaching, which in turn went way over the kids' heads. Put simply, you don't give the Summa to a confirmation student who hasn't been to Religious Ed in years. So needless to say, there was a good deal of work to do.

Now, I had the unfortunate occurance of moving down there the week before Oktoberfest - their massive 4 day parish festival. Carnival rides, huge bingo tent, lots of food...and, of course beer. This parish festival was one of the biggest and most involved that I've ever seen. In years past, the job assigned to the teens was being ice runners - grabbing big bags of ice and taking it to the food booths and whoever else needed it. The festival was so busy that this frequently became a non-stop job. I was a little overwhelmed watching all of this, and there were two big things that really didn't sit well with me. First, the teens had pretty much a thankless job, and as such, received no thanks whatsoever. I've always believed that you should take care of those that are taking care of you - not in some huge way, but, for example...is letting them grab a sandwich from one of the booths for lunch or dinner THAT big of a issue? The kids were frequently pushed around by some of the organizers with not the slightest thank you outside of a brief mention in the builiten a few weeks later. As a YM, you don't like to see your kids taken advantage of.

As bad as that was, there was something else that bothered me even more. As the days around the festival made very clear, everything at that parish was subservient to the festival. The group planning it seemed to make no allowances for anything else going on. I'm sorry, but when Mass is going on, you SHUT THE FESTIVAL DOWN, I don't care what time it is. It's really difficult to pray the creed while carival music is filtering in. Everything gets scheduled around this. It is THE event - nothing else comes close. In some fairness, this is a huge fundraiser and goes to help defer tuition at the school - but some perspective was obviously lacking. I just remember watching this entire thing unfold thinking to myself "You know, if they put half the energy that they put into this into planning and entering into the liturgy...this would be a posterchild for the greatest Catholic parish on the planet."

Which brings me to the liturgy. Now, most of you know I'm from a LIFE TEEN background, and this was a LT parish. Please don't give me the "LIFE TEEN liturgies suck by default" canard. I've seen some wonderful LT liturgies. I've seen some terrible ones. I've seen some wonderful traditional liturgies. I've seen some terrible ones. As I've discussed elsewhere on the internet, youth ministry in general, and LIFE TEEN in particular acts as a bit of a mirror on the parish. For strong orthodox parishes, LIFE TEEN is done in a strong and orthodox way. For feel good entertainment parishes, LIFE TEEN is done in a feel good entertainment way.

I was at a feel good entertainment parish.

I have a confession to make - I'm a little bit of a liturgical snob. I like going to Mass that is actually about worshiping God and not about entertaining ourselves and making us feel OK. Call my crazy. My big problem with that though is that I'm frequently "evaluating" the Mass as it's going on. I frequently found myself cringing at something, and at the same time trying to force myself to concentrate and enter in to the celebration. This parish was a strong test of that, as each Mass had a number of cringe-worthy moments each week.

The biggest problem is that, across the board, it was obvious that Mass was a performance, not a sacrifice. Between the pastor and the music ministry, it was always designed to be a "focus on us" mentality. The music minister has a wonderful voice...she can belt songs out like nothing else. And they made very sure we knew that with her mic being turned way up over the rest of the group. Here's the best way I can describe the music for you. Go and listen to one of the Michael W. Smith "Worship" albums. The songs aren't terrible, but I'm not a huge fan of his arrangements (save for "You are Holy (Prince of Peace)." Now, take those songs done in that style, have all the instruments, instead of being played live, come out of a keyboard, and have a woman's voice singing in MWS's same style, including screaming word-for-word his exhortations to the crowd to "LIFT YOUR VOICES TO THE LORD." You try and pray with that. ;-)

Oh...and did I mention that we never sang the lectionary song for the week once in the 6 months I was there.

Oh...and did I also mention that the drums were coming out of the keyboard as well? So that for every song, before it started, there was a loud "count in." Imagine: "Let us proclaim the mystery of our faith." CLICK-CLICK-CLICK "Christ has died..." Every time. EVERY TIME.

One thing that LIFE TEEN strongly encourages and provides a good deal of resources for is liturgy planning - music, prayers, homily, built around the theme of the readings for the week, something that helps the liturgy be whole and flow as it was designed to be, instead of a jumpy jumbled mess of pieces of entertainment. Any time I suggested that, my pastor said that it would be a complete waste of his time and totally pointless. Apprently he mentally checked out during Mass, since he didn't think anything needed to be done to change it.

My turn of phrase may not be the best, but I hope I'm painting an appropriately sad picture of what liturgy meant (and probably still means) at this parish. However, nothing above comes close to explaining how bad it was than telling you about Christmas Eve.

Most parishes I've seen have some sort of "children's Mass" for Christmas Eve. Normally you'll see kids singing in the choir and doing the readings, and often you'll see some sort of "play" presenting the nativity story (ususally and most appropriately during the homily). It can be a nice celebration for the kids, and after that Mass you have your "usual" Christmas liturgies, and everyone is happy.

There were 3 "children's" masses scheduled for Christmas Eve. The late one, at 8:15, was supposed to have the teenagers reenacting the nativity. (Brilliant - let's try and get a bunch of teenagers up to Church at 8:15, right in the middle of what is generally a time for families to be celebrating their traditions, particularly when most families went to earlier masses (as the teens had younger siblings in those plays) or the next morning...the logic of this is astounding).

Oh, and a detail about the nativity reenactment - it replaced the Gospel. It replaced the Gospel. IT REPLACED THE GOSPEL!

IT REPLACED THE GOSPEL!!!

Instead of reading the Gospel for Christmas Eve, they replaced it with a home-written script of the story of Jesus' birth, including songs built into it at certain points.

Oh...did I mention the animals?

Yes. Animals. Mary and Joseph come into church on a donkey. The shepherds come in with sheep.

And the wise men come into the church with camels.

("I'll repeat that. I'll repeat that because that's the kind of sentence that when your brain hears it, it comes to a screeching halt. And the left-hand-side of the brain looks at the right-hand side of the brain and says 'It's dark in here, and we may die!'")

And the wise men come into the church with camels.

("Don't, don't think about that for more than 5 seconds or blood will shoot out of your nose.")

Now, to be fair...the idea of doing a live nativity scene originated with St. Francis, so I'm not going to knock the idea. Being charitable, there may be a way to pull this off and have it not be a distraction, not be about seeing a camel in the church (!!!), and have it draw people deeper into the liturgy. Being charitable, we may be able to keep the focus on God and not on the circus.

So with that said, I swear to you the following happened, because there's is no way I could make this up if I tried...

About 3 weeks before Christmas, I'm in the office on the weekend doing some work on the network (I doubled as the computer guy at the parish). While I'm there, the pastor comes in (which is unusual on the weekend) and is frantically making phone calls. At one point, the music minister goes in and asks him what is up and I hear him say "We don't have a camel."

It turns out that there was some sort of regional circus that had a ranch in the area , and this is where the parish would rent the camels from for Christmas Eve. Well it turns out that the circus sold the camels the previous week - and the camels moved to Texas. So he was making phone calls all over desperate to find a camel. Indicator #1 of what the real focus of the Christmas liturgies was.

So the next night at Mass, everyone is quietly reflecting after Communion...and he walks down to the front of the altar. He procedes to say, "The Bible tells us to pray for anything and pray for everything, and what matters to us matters to God. I found out yesterday that we don't have a camel for our Christmas Eve mass, so if you could please pray that God provides us a camel, I would appreciate it."

Staggering, isn't it? What's even more astounding is that, in the next two weeks, I heard him make that same statement AT LEAST 10 TIMES. And each time, I kept saying to myself "it's a show, it's not a Mass."

So Dec. 23 rolls around, and I'm in Atlanta for Christmas with my family (events surrounding which will be drawn out at a later time). After rehersal that night, the teens that were in the play emailed me to let me know that there was officially no camel (they thought the camel was just as insanely ridiculous as some of us adults did). So we were happy to hear that.

At noon on Christmas Eve, the pastor got a phone call from someone saying that they could have a camel there by 3:00.

*headdesk*

What's the theme for the circus? "The show must go on."

I'm so glad I wasn't there for that.

So there's a nice intro to what I was dealing with at this parish. Still to come: a Confirmation program that doesn't work, the most viscious things I've ever heard a priest say, let alone to me, and Steve gets fired because of a puddle.