This week, I seriously considered if I should have a regular place to sit at Mass. For a non-churchgoer this may seem like a small matter. The experienced Catholic convert or lifetime-Catholic will be shaking their heads, giving me a wry smile as I consider taking this momentous decision. Where You Sit At Mass is one of the many unwritten rules of the Church. It is one I have been struggling with for over a year.
On a recent Sunday morning, I arrived in good time for Mass in Salisbury and sat down at one end of a pew. Before Mass, we are supposed to pray quietly, preparing ourselves for the sacrament of the Eucharist. However, quiet prayer is always a challenge as the musicians and singers warm up, people come in and chat and there is low-grade hubbub going on. When I find that I cannot prepare properly for Mass on account of the disturbance and distraction, I just sit and listen to it all. It is the sound of an active and happy Church coming together to worship their Lord. If you can’t put up with them, you might as well enjoy them … or something like that. That morning I was kneeling down, quietly thinking my way through some of my less glorious moments in the past week when I was aware of someone coming into the otherwise empty pew and being challenged in an insistent voice, “I usually sit there!” I looked up to see a very irritated man looking at me.
“I’m terribly sorry,” I replied. “Would you like me to move?”
There was no response beyond a hard stare, so I got up and moved to the pew in front. He occupied the patch of pew that I had just vacated, then got up to greet some friends who had just come in before settling back down in glorious isolation in his pew while I was on my own in the one in front. When, later in the service, it came time to share a sign of peace; we did so in a perfunctory and meaningless manner. It would have been so much better had we greeted one another and then sat in companionable silence as we prepared to take part in the Eucharist.
The Where You Sit At Mass rule is infuriating, disconcerting, off-putting and just a bit scary: you never know who you might offend when you do something as innocuous as sit down in church. Last month, I managed to offend a whole family when I chose a place that “belongs” to them; throwing the central aisle into confusion. As a singleton, I have no problem: I can sit anywhere. However, if anyone sits in ‘their’ pew, they can’t all fit in so they have to wander off in search of a totally empty pew in which they can all sit. Now I have explained it, you can see their problem. But they had arrived too late for there to be an empty pew so the whole family milled about in the aisle like bullocks around a gate until another regular church family, seeing their plight, suggested that they occupy seats in two pews with them. Crisis was averted and a couple of latecomers managed to slide into the seats beside me, no doubt gratefully amazed that the X Family seats were unexpectedly vacant.
Why do people behave like this? It isn’t meanness, because my fellow parishioners are welcoming and lovely without exception. It has, on occasion, left me fulminating with the hurtful rejection I have felt. Mass is not a social occasion, nor is it about where you sit, or whether you can see the priest during the homily, or if you have a good view of the altar. It is about increasing the bond we have with Our Lord, seeking forgiveness from venial sins and preservation from mortal ones. It is the central part of the Liturgy and the sacrament that St Thomas Aquinas described as “…the perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all sacraments tend…” I am sure that everyone in the church knows that. But attending mass also bolsters the unity of the Church as we partake in the Eucharistic Feast together. When we indulge ourselves in making someone else feel unwelcome, or behave as if we are part of a privileged elite within the congregation (those that can lay claim to particular seats), then we chip away at our Community, our Mother Church.
There has to be a good reason for this. I think I know what it is: we want to be assured that there is a place for us that is ours by right. The last thing we would want is to give the impression that we do not belong. It is like your first day at a new school when you go into the cafeteria on your own and have to look around for somewhere to sit or when you walk in to a pub and all the locals watch to see if you try to sit in Old Percy’s stool at the bar. It is an ancient and deeply ingrained need to be accepted, to avoid the faux pas of seeming to challenge an incumbent of higher status than ourselves. When Goldilocks eats someone else’s porridge and sleeps in someone else’s bed, we know why the bears get offended, but we are also amazed at the girl’s rashness. Did she not know that an unoccupied place might be owned by a family of dangerous bears? Teachers provide new kids at school with a mentor or guide for the first week or so; making sure that the new kid knows where he or she can go and learns where they should not go. Restaurants overcome our natural disinclination to occupy a space that might be defended by someone else by asking you to wait until you can be seated, so that the maître d can welcome you and guide you to a seat that is now yours by invitation. Quite naturally, parishioners like to adopt a seat that becomes theirs by custom, one to which they can go to with assurance and confidence. It is reassuring to know that you belong, that you have a right to be there.
This habit lasts longer than just one generation. A fellow parishioner recently asked me why I had been sitting amongst the So and So’s that morning at Mass.
“The Who?” I replied.
“The So and So’s. Did you not know you were sitting amongst the So and So’s? They always sit in those pews.”
“Pews?” I enquired, accentuating the plural. I tried to remember who had been sitting around me and if they had all shared an unnoticed identifier such as a conspicuous nose shape or hair colour. “How many So and So’s are there?”
“Oh there are four generations, I think.”
God bless, them! I thought. How dismayed must they have been to find me sitting in one of the places that they had occupied as a family for nearly a century? Of course they didn’t show it; The So and So's are a kind family and after a hundred years or so you must get to feel that you can put up with a few Johnny-come-lately converts.
It is acutely important to all of us to feel that we belong and knowing where we can sit is part of that. But what do we do when someone new ventures through the church door? Do we welcome them or do we let them try to guess where they can sit and risk the faux pas?
The warm, fuzzy feeling of comfortable acceptance that we have, the sense of assured belonging, is what we should give to the newcomer. It is what we have received from The One with whom we share the Eucharistic Feast and He wants us to pass it on, not keep it to ourselves.
I am going to start sitting in one place. I think that I have identified a seat in a pew that no one wants. It has been cut short to accommodate a pillar, so is too small for a family and you can only get into it from one end, so it is awkward after taking communion as the usual flow of the one-way system does not work. I have sat there before and no one has even frowned. Then I will have a seat of my own. I will have that feeling of security and confidence that comes from truly belonging. I just hope that I will be willing to give it to the next newcomer who comes through the door.
Kommentare