If the Big One upstairs gives grades for effort, I figure I earned a pretty fancy one this morning. Today's church service ran long and loud. There were several young children, who vocalized as such children are wont to do throughout the length of the service. They all must have had a good night's rest, because they were able to keep up the cacophony for more than an hour. The musicians appeared to accept the challenge and kept cranking up the volume of their voices and their instruments in an attempt either to be heard above or to drown out the din. As their volume increased, the quality of the singing and the musical accompaniment suffered. Father K. had prepared an harangue of a sermon and was committed to its delivery irrespective of the circumstances or the appropriateness of his message. He also kept increasing his volume. At some point, the louder one yells into a microphone the less intelligible one's speech becomes. He clearly refused to abbreviate his comments; the service ran all of an hour and a quarter. Maybe he got to repeating himself to make sure that we couldn't understand what we didn't understand the first time. In this battle of the bands, the clear winners were the youngsters in the pews. Maybe there is hope yet for the future of the Catholic Church.

The topic of Fr. K's sermon was "young adults no longer come to church." Interesting! The parents of the youngsters laying claim to center stage and refusing to back down in the face of either art/music or deference towards the clergy are young adults. It was as if the youngsters, as they represented several sets of parents, were shouting clearly and repeatedly: "For heaven's sake, look around. There are a bunch of young adults right here. How do you think we got here--both in terms of our simple existence and our presence in these pews?" The final kicker. Father announced that following mass there would be the baptism of a newborn. So, it wasn't like he couldn't have anticipated at least the possibility that some young adults (parents, godparents, aunts and uncles) would be in attendance today. I know that I am 66 and most everyone looks young. Trust me. This mom was young.

If this experience hadn't have been so painful on so many levels, it would have been funny.