It breaks your little 2nd grade heart to see someone you admire so doing something so . . . not lofty. In truth, that never quite left me. I remember a choir to which my mother once belonged. There was a soprano who sang the solos for Handle's Messiah. She sang like the angels themselves. She wore a blue choir robe with a special golden sash because she was a soloist. She had mounds of curly golden locks that when the sun from the stained glass windows hit her made her seem as though she had a halo. Her name was even something like Angelique.
When she was not singing, I always sort of thought of her like this:
I think this is why people try hard not to allow me to do things. If a pick up a hammer or a plunger, someone grabs it out of my hands with a nervous, "Let me do that." But I want to help. I like to think that I can occasionally do things besides strictly priestly things.
5 comments:
Sometimes the truth .... well ... just hurts. ;)
Maybe unrelated to your punch line (which was pretty funny, btw)... but you have made a pretty good point here to support the idea that some priests should be wearing their clerics far more often than they do. I'm not into clericalism, but when junior sees the pastor dressed for a luau just as often as he sees him dressed in his collar... well... I don't know, it just does something to the kid's whole impression of the dignity of the vocation.
Inclined to agree
I remember early in our marriage when my wife and I would go grocery shopping. Some of her students would see her in the store and didn't quite know how to react. When we married, school let out in May; we married in early June; by the time school started in the fall, she was pregnant with our first child. Her students would see her and still call her "Miss D"; that led to some interesting glances from parents.
But who sees priests outside of the Church? Don't they hang in the Sacristy when they're not needed?
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