On the Feast of Saint Patrick

For the first times in years I am not at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart for the Saint Patrick's Day Mass. Once, seeing the procession of white robed priests, hearing choir sing in Gaellic, the beating of the drums, I felt a wonderful exultation, a sense of connectedness and energy to everyone around me. Last year what I felt listening to the old Irish bishop whose words I did not completely understand, looking at all the gold and all the people and all the priests in their vestments, sitting around the altar was.... skepticism, weariness. Right now the Mass is going on and I know I shouldn't be there, know I'd be sad and tired if I was there, but I wish I could be the person who was there once, the one who belonged.

The only difference between the church I belong to now and the one I left is I am happy in this one. There is another difference: I believe in this one. And yet I feel something that's a little like loss, more like vague sadness.

This day has always meant something to me. It was by total accident that I stumbled into church on Saint Patrick's Day and came to love the Catholicism I had found burdensome. For seven years from college to the monastery and the two years out of it this day was a hallmark. And the Basilica of the Sacred Heart was the church I stumbled into by accident, so the mass with all its pageantry meant that much more to me.

But last year, and all the time after I felt that amidsts that noise and the pretty clothes and the long speeches what I celebrated, my liberation, was lost. Sometime last year the building with gold and marble became... a building with gold and marble. And I began to drift off from the sermons and drift toward the windows to watch the trees and hear what God had to say. Last Saint Patrick's Day I walked out of Mass and the endless talking and posturing to breathe. And then months later I just walked out.

And here I am.

And there is no going back.

I have never been so aware as I am today, when I used to celebrate my entrance into the life of the church, that I am no longer Catholic.

It is not that i miss it, not really, only that I look back and I wish I could miss it.