Nate Heeren - Church visit #1

Church name: St. Michael Catholic Church

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

Date attended: 9/20/2015

Church category: Significantly more or less liturgical

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

Since I am coming from a conservative nondenominational Protestant background, this worship service felt extremely different from my normal experience. The sermon is generally the main focus of my regular service (and most evangelical services, I would imagine), receiving a hefty chunk of the service’s time, but this was not so for the Catholic mass. Although it was one of the few portions of the service which felt original, it also felt more like an afterthought in the scheme of things--less of a filling meal and more of a quick snack. The Catholic service was also much more liturgical, and there wasn’t a hint of contemporary worship in it. However, although I had not attended a Catholic service before this in at least four years, it felt rather familiar because of circumstances having led to my attending Anglican services for close to half of the summer. It is remarkable how similar the two types felt to each other, so that in many ways they were indistinguishable.

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

It was fascinating to me how almost everyone was able to anticipate the process of the service despite the frequent lack of clear directions, and so more often than not I found myself following whatever everyone else did. Undoubtedly they had repeated these steps of the mass so many times that they were entirely memorized. It would certainly explain the lack of clear directions, because why give instructions when 95% or more of those attending know precisely what will come next and how to react? It wasn’t so much that I could not entirely follow, but the transition times were too fast for one so unfamiliar. It made me wonder if this was how an outsider might feel at the sort of Protestant churches I’ve regularly attended in my life, but I don’t think that’s the case. Our rituals are fewer and less commonly performed, and there’s generally less variety in their specific rules.

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

For one, I am ill-disposed toward most forms of liturgy (yes, even the ones expanding in chapel), as I was raised outside of liturgical practice other than the occasional instance of communally speaking passages of the Bible. I have difficulty staying focused and not becoming mind-numbingly bored during liturgy-heavy services, so this Catholic service was most certainly a challenge. With everything feeling like a rote process and without a substantial sermon to chew on, I felt difficulty in engaging with the service. It was also unusual to me to see so many of members of the congregation who seemed utterly disengaged with the service, yet obviously attended faithfully each Sunday. The degree was far beyond what I normally detect at Protestant service with a long and boring sermon, for those generally have elements such as contemporary worship to provide a jolt of life to otherwise withering congregants. I wondered to myself if it merely appeared this way, or if I was perhaps biased in my perception.

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

Part of the sermon drew from the Book of Wisdom, which I do not consider Scripture, so I cannot claim illumination in that regard except as it highlights a substantial divide between Catholics and most Protestants. I did appreciate the rather more personal way that they carried out the Eucharist, where the church body’s members serve one another rather than the impersonal passing of the plates of bread and wine. While I certainly don’t subscribe to the doctrine of transubstantiation, I think there is something to the Catholic method in terms of emphasizing the importance of taking regular communion and treating it with great reverence which we Protestants can be prone to forget. However, I’m not sure if their process suggests that priests are acting in a mediating role for the Eucharist, something I would find problematic. I suppose it bears further investigation.