As a boy, I always regarded Easter Mass as our parish freak show. Unlike Christmas Day services, with their subtle accents of red and green interspersed among the men's festive ties, Easter was a full-tilt celebration of everything kitschy and pastel. And no one embraced the season with such aplomb as the C and E Club. A family's Sunday attendance record was inversely proportional to how gaudy they dressed for Easter. If you needed sunglasses to gaze at a woman's attire, odds are that her butt wouldn't touch a pew until Christmas. Oh, how I loathed them.
The Reverend Mister Gerald Butler was, and still is, a man of habit-meticulous in his pew selection for religious services. When not on the altar, he preferred to sit dead-center in the church.
It was an ideal position to survey his flock: Too close, and he sat among the Jesus Freaks who thrived upon glimpses into our supposedly perfect family; too far, and he worshipped with the 12:30 Mass Gang who never understood that Mass started at noon. Even worse, the 12:30 Gang was populated by gum-chewers and, in recent years, cell-phone users.
Easter services threatened Dad's beloved pew. Perhaps a lesser man would have conceded defeat, accepted the sardine-can atmosphere of Easter Mass and stood in the rear of the church with other mere mortals. Dad was not such a man.
If Mass began at noon, the Butler family would surely be awake at 5 a.m., startled by Dad's oft-imitated, Army-honed bark of "Get your lazy asses out of bed." His thunderous bass immediately sparked a mind game between my brother and me that continues to this day.
After Dad hollered, we would attempt to stay in bed as long as humanly possible. With Mass at least half a day away, a 15-minute snooze wouldn't hurt anyone. Unfortunately, while God was allowed to rest on the seventh day, we sure as hell were not.
The trick was to sneak out of bed, without the other noticing, and tell the old man that his other son had failed to get his lazy ass out of bed. Early birds get the worm; early Butlers avoid domestic violence. Needless to say, the hapless sibling caught with his lazy ass in bed received a personalized fire-and-brimstone condemnation, unequalled by anything heard from the pulpit later that day.
A lifetime of Catholic schooling has taught me that church is where we go to commune with the Almighty, and that's partially true. However, the actual pilgrimage up the highway was where I truly felt closest to God-alternately praising and cursing His name while traversing a serpentine automotive daisy-chain of nearly blind, prosthetic-limbed senior citizens with tickers that could shut down quicker than you can say "Alleluia."
Old people love the Lord so much that their horrible driving may send you to meet Him.
Inevitably, the blue-haired horde would turn its gaze on me and ask if the seminary was in my future. I always felt guilty about answering, probably because I was distracted by the cornucopia of Catholic chicks populating the pews. But hey, I only ogled in the hopes of finding a nice, moral young woman to share my faith with, really, I swear.
Football may be the ultimate Sunday sport, but people-watching at Mass has to be a close second. Admit it, most homilies are way too long not to partake in some clandestine snooping, and it's never better than it is on Easter.
On this most holy of holidays, I'm uncertain if I'm in a church or a greenhouse with all the flowers in women's hair. Dudes who normally wear cutoff T-shirts to showcase their impressive inkwork don sharp suits accented with ties bright enough to provoke retinal bleeding.
The college crowd, home for the holiday, arrives with fresh haircuts, shaves (where applicable) and holes in faces usually plugged with metal jewelry.
My short-lived tenure as an altar boy was mired in mistakes, and I thank God for never having to work an Easter Mass, because every priest in the country brings his A (for Alleluia)-game to the tabernacle. The local hierarchy sings, dances and bangs strange instruments in the Super Bowl of the Spirit, desperately hoping that their biennial visitors will return frequently and pad the parish coffers.
Once I loathed them; now I've joined their ranks. Lapsed Catholics are easy to spot, and I can only imagine how much worse we look to our more devout brethren.
Some answer "The Body of Christ" with "Thanks." The sign of peace is either an aggressive display of machismo between close friends or a dead-fish salute to a stranger whom we don't feel like touching."Peace be with you" is always punctuated by "Uh, yeah, you too, bro."
If Mass is in the morning, we arrive with bar stamps still fresh on our hands. True pros may even detect which flavor of Carlo Rossi was transubstantiated (look it up, pagans).
This Easter Sunday, I plan on re-enacting the Lazarus story and obtaining a new lease on my spiritual life. I will shuffle into College Church at the ungodly hour of 10:30 a.m., sans the usual bar stamps and customary hangover.
I will throw 20 bucks into the collection plate to atone for my status as the Willie Nelson of Church tithing.
I'm still deciding which pastel shades to wear. (And peace be with you.)
