Anna Jakubiec - Church Visit #1

Church name: St. Michael Catholic Church

Church address: 310 S  Wheaton Ave, Wheaton, IL 60187

Date attended: 9/6/2015

Church category: More liturgical

Describe the worship service you attended. How was it similar to or different from your regular context?

I attended my roommate’s church. She’s Catholic, so it seemed to be the obvious choice. I’ve been in Catholic churches before, but only for funerals and weddings, so it was helpful for me to have someone’s lead to follow. The service was structured quite differently from what I’m used to, which is fairly simple and intuitive. In my church, we have an opening prayer, a handful of songs, a sermon, and a closing song and prayer; at St. Michael, singing, prayer, and Scripture readings were interwoven in a complex liturgy. The style of song was much older and more traditional than the worship I’m accustomed to; unsurprisingly, a lot more tradition and ritual stood behind the format of the service. In some ways, there seemed to be more interaction within the congregation through physical motion and vocal responses in prayer and Scripture reading.

What did you find most interesting or appealing about the worship service?

As of recently, for various reasons that are not all spiritual in nature, I’ve begun to find liturgy fascinating. In short, everything about the church intrigued me. I loved the way it looked, the stained glass and the crucifix and the hard wooden pews. On the whole, I was aesthetically very drawn to the place. I loved how many children there were. I especially loved how much motion was incorporated into the service. It kept my blood moving to genuflect before entering the pew, to cross myself, to stand and sit and kneel and the appropriate times (even though I didn’t always catch on immediately to when those times were). Everyone was always moving, but they did it together. It really brought home to me the feeling of being part of a body in a way that sitting in a pew to simply hear a sermon does not.

What did you find most disorienting or challenging about the worship service?

Though I loved them, the rituals disoriented me. Everyone around me knew what they were doing and how they fit into this, like cogs in a watch, but it led to me not having any idea what to do or say or when to do and say it. The number of people speaking together also made it hard for me to simply listen in; their voices all blended into each other to some degree, so it was hard at times to pick out what they were saying. Another thing that stood out to me, although it didn’t surprise me, were the number of images of a really pale Jesus. I love stained glass, but in my church we tend to be pretty sparing of iconography; the only pictures we do have in my church at home show him as a darker-skinned man. Since an awareness of Jesus as a Middle Eastern Jewish man is something that’s becoming increasingly important to me, it did make me somewhat uncomfortable.

What aspects of Scripture or theology did the worship service illuminate for you that you had not perceived as clearly in your regular context?

In all honesty, I found it rather difficult to hear a lot of what was being said, for aforementioned reasons. However, one of the things that I got out of the amount of movement during the service was a sense of corporateness and the body of Christ. In my own context, I often feel isolated. Partly because I don’t put the effort in that I should to be in community with those around me, but partly because my church looks at people more as individuals than a body. At St. Michael, the sense that everyone there, including the children, seemed to know what they were doing and what their place was—to me, it seemed like a way of physically embodying the theology about how Christ lives in us. There was talk about Jesus meeting individual needs, but everyone was joined in the act of worship together, too.