Enabled Christianity

Today I went to Mass for the first time in two weeks, because last week I was in the middle of a bad cold, and didn't have the energy to walk to Mass, and back again--certainly not during winter. In any case, it seemed the prudent thing to do, to avoid infecting the rest of the congregation.

It was, in any event, a legitimate reason to not go to Mass, but it's one of a handful of times that I remember missing Sunday Mass. All the same, as I was walking back from Mass, I was thinking about the fact that it's winter and how, what with Boston having had a blizzard last week, that it would be temptingly easy to make excuses not to walk the 15 minutes to Church.

This led me to think back to being in Edmonton, when I probably would have made it to Sunday Mass, even feeling like I did last week (which may not have been so kind of me). I don't think this is because I used to have more spiritual fervour, though the part of me that feels guilty about having left seminary wants to push things in that direction. After some consideration, I think it might have had more to do with the ease with which I could get to Church in Edmonton. In other words, even when I didn't live down the hall from Sunday Mass (at seminary or in the rectory), I still owned a car.

It's funny how today's technological paraphernalia, which is quite often the cause of making it harder to be Catholic today, has been, in my case, part of what made it easier to stick with the rhythms of Catholicism. In other words, I have my own little brand of "cultural Catholicism," born in western Canada, which is still a fairly congenial climate for being a religious person, compared with the rest of North America, and keyed to the routines and capabilities of that culture--including the ability to drive places.

So, like Quebec in the 1970s, or Boston in the 2000s, I've going through my own mild version of "cultural fallout." Although I don't expect it to devastate my personal spiritual life in the same way Quebec or Boston, as a collective, felt it, I can sympathize a little bit more than I did before. Hopefully, I can also take their large-scale examples as warnings of what to watch for in my own microcosm.