By Jim Hagarty
2014
When I was a boy, I sat transfixed on Sunday mornings in a front pew at the Catholic Church in the country my family and I attended, watching the spectacle unfolding on the grand altar where the priest and his helpers performed their ancient rituals.
Slowly and methodically, they carried golden chalices, poured holy water from glass canisters, rang tiny handbells and put incense into a small holder which the priest then waved toward the congregation as he walked slowly up and down the aisles.
This was spectacle, and for a farm boy growing up in a modest home and spending his days around cattle, tractors and mows of hay, it was all very mystical and magical.
But I think now that the thing that impressed me most about all this was the deliberateness that the priest and the altar boys brought to everything they did on that stage in the big old church. Every motion, every step, every turning of a Bible page or raising of a cup, was done with great reverence and peace. Nothing was done hastily or impulsively.
All was part of a rhythm, like breathing.
In those days, except for the sermon, almost every word spoken during the Mass was in Latin. That simply added to the mystique.
There was much I didn’t understand in the world around me as I grew up. Church was one of the greatest mysteries.
Now, six decades later, it is the mysteries in life that intrigue me, often more than the observable realities of it.
At night, I am sometimes outside, looking up at the moon. The same moon the dinosaurs and the cavemen saw before me.
Much has changed. Much has not.
