Where I attend daily Mass. She’s a sweet kid, tall for her age, inquisitive, and accustomed in cold weather to wearing a knitted cap with little ears that gives her the appearance of a bear cub. She’s a real trooper, too, when it comes to praying at so early an hour each morning surrounded by the 15 or 20 adult worshipers who otherwise fill our day chapel. She seems to know the parts of the liturgy by heart and prays with an earnestness that’s truly disarming. Her dad, who stands close beside her, trusts her to strike up conversations with me and others in the room as if we were old friends.
Clara reminds me of myself as a kid, full of words and wonder and happier to sit at the adult table on most occasions than trade pleasantries with children her own age. I welcome our spontaneous chats, which fill me with nostalgia for the days when my kids were small and carried an unmistakable whiff of heaven all their own. When she asks me a question, I know it’s to make sense of a world that is still somewhat new to her and full of mystery.
On a recent morning, Clara wanted to know about the prayerbook I carry into the pew with me; the gold-embossed cover and colorful ribbons likely caught her attention. “Is that like a mini-Bible?” she asked.
“Well, in a way,” I responded. “It’s called a missal, but not like the kind that flies through the sky. Its name comes from the Latin word missa, from which we get the word Mass. It reminds us that we’re sent from church (commissioned) different from the way we arrived.”
Michael E. DeSanctis is a retired professor of fine arts and theology at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Building from Belief: Advance, Retreat and Compromise in the Remaking of Catholic Church Architecture (Liturgical Press).
With thanks to U.S. Catholic, a publication of the Claretian Missionaries, a Roman Catholic religious community of priests and brothers dedicated to the mission of living and spreading the gospel of Jesus.
