I’ve lived in Austin for a little over a year now. It is no secret that I have struggled to find a church where I feel comfortable enough to pray regularly and build community. The felt absence of a parish in my life has been a significant source of desolation since I moved to Texas. When I first arrived in Austin, less than a week after the publication of the Pennsylvania Report, I prioritized this search for a new parish. In the midst of a major life transition, I craved the sense of deep belonging that comes from participation in communal prayer born of the faith tradition members of my family have held dear for generations. In spite of a series of honest attempts, I left too many Masses feeling a kind of disappointment that was wholly unfamiliar to me. At the risk of sounding sanctimonious, I have been blessed and lucky to have been a part of life-giving parish communities since I was a child. This isn’t to say that they were free of the challenges that accompany real community, but each of them in their own ways was a home away from home to me, especially during divinity school and my doctoral studies. Not having that in my new surroundings, I felt unmoored.
The irony of this situation is hardly lost on me. My vocation includes teaching theology and ministry, and integral to doing so is spiritual self care. I did that as well as I could on my own, but I am a traditional enough Catholic that I feel the need to receive the sacraments in community regularly. Teaching in mainline Protestant seminaries, I was immersed in intentional community in my professional life, and that immersion did and does feed me spiritually…but it is does not satisfy the whole of my spiritual needs.
It wasn’t until this fall that I became acquainted with a Catholic parish where I feel both comfortable and challenged. Ushers and people sitting near me in the pews welcomed me. The congregation sings with the choir. The homilies break open the word in ways that speak to my life. At the start of last night’s Mass in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the danzantes aztecas began to move in rhythm with the beat of the drums, and tears began to roll down my cheeks. Fleeting thoughts crossed my mind—about the diversity of expressions of Latinx Catholicism, how much I have come to love its tradition of flor y canto, and how curious I am about what communal worship might look like in this postcolonial moment. While I participated in the movements of the Mass, I mostly felt present to the depth of emotions that had been bubbling under the surface but I had not been able to express. I experienced a sort of freedom in those familiar movements of the Mass; it felt like home.
