Holy Spirit - August 2020

August 11, 2020. Two days ago, I described my shift back to in-person Mass with Fr Carl at Holy Spirit parish, at their 'second' church, in Darboy. Fr Carl's infectious, self-deprecating laughter and positive energy are appreciated even more during the gloomy times of the pandemic.

We started attending Holy Spirit last fall in the Kimberly church (see accompanying photo). We were able to squeeze the four of us into the Christmas Eve Mass in a really packed church. Early this year I had started to talk to Carl about helping out with some management issues, in the parish council with his staff, for the school, and other ministries. Then the pandemic generally froze regular interactions and all of the discussions. Fr Hank's daily streaming Mass earned my regular attention, although I'd occasionally catch Fr Carl's Mass from the smaller, 'rural' church in Darboy. I helped Carl with securing new equipment for broadcasting. We met a few times in the back of the Darboy church, during his time for weekly confessions.

About three weeks ago, in-person prayer returned with the Darboy daily Mass. This small church evoked memories of Immaculate Conception in Eden, from the late 1950's through the 1960's. At first I assumed that it was Carl who reminded me of those days but I think now that there is something else. The Kimberly church is large; it reminds me of a cathedral or at least the church for a large urban parish. The Darboy church is altogether different. About twenty percent the size of the Kimberly church, the intimacy and design of the church, originally located in a rural, undeveloped part of town, produced real nostalgia, and had me looking up pastors from my early Eden days, like Norman George and Leo Benker, both now long deceased.

And there is something more. Our town, Harrison, actually lies across the county line, in Calumet County. Harrison, population 11,937 feels more like Eden (population 7,800 in 1958 and today) than like the Appleton mailing address me have or the Kimberly address for the larger Holy Spirit church. The parishioners here remind me a lot of Eden, the sunburned crop and dairy farmers, with rough hands, grey hair, work clothes and a real salt of the earth feel, along with young families, with more than two kids, outdoorsy looking young men, comfortable both on the factory floor and on the lake. Out home is adjacent to sprawling corn fields that remind me of Zittel's farms in Eden, where one could earn a farmer's tan (ivory white legs and tanned upper torso from shirtless days in the heat) from a summer's work on the farm. Farm days started at dawn in the summer and this farmer tans showed up at the lake or swimming pool, as both an embarrassment and a badge of work ethic honor.

The last time I lived in a small town was more than fifty years ago. I guess it never really left me. When I was young, I was more interested in growing up, moving out and on, and seeing more of the world. Today, I'd be happy to be back in Eden, and I'm probably even happier to be in Harrison. Few, if any of my Class of 1969 peers are left in Eden; I'd probably rapidly sour on the experience were we to move back there and try to revive those wonderful memories. When I have attended Mass in Eden over the past twenty years when I was in town for a visit, I searched longingly for familiar faces in the pews and found precious few.

Faith is one of the real revival elements of this absurd pandemic, and the pandemic has also sharpened my memories, my thoughts of days long past, of idyllic (boring?) summer days on East Church Street, looking for some adventure, trying to reduce the natural social distancing of rural, low tech life, and hoping to find enough brothers, sisters or friends to play a little baseball, even the 'two man' version we often resorted to playing. We created ball fields wherever we could find convenient, flat, reasonably smooth fields. We installed backstops from scrap material and old boiler pipes from the steel mill, and once even tried to add some lighting. And on Sunday, we'd put on our best and go to Mass. Immaculate Conception is pretty empty these days; they have merged with another parish -- another Holy Spirit -- in our rival town to the south, North Collins. The Immaculate Conception flock was too small to have video streaming Mass, yet also small enough to allow in-person Mass to resume with the natural social distancing of a church much too large for the current congregation.

Moving to Eden in second grade, my largest exposure to serious religious education came fro the five years I spent at the Immaculate Conception school in the custody of Sr Mary Martina and the Grey Nuns. Pale blue shorts with clip on ties, with navy blue slacks and simple shoes (never sneakers!) were the order of the day. I was a busy altar boy, including many daily Masses served in the convent, and later a lector, when that new role was created after Vatican II. I even looked forward to serving at funerals, which meant an extended absence from the classroom.

So tonight at 5:30 I will be back at the Darboy Mass, with my mind probably drifting back to Immaculate Conception, both with their small but sturdy congregations. And Fr Carl will put a smile on that memory while I work on my relationship with God...