The First Mass Back

The night before the first Mass back is usually not peaceful. You may find yourself rehearsing how to sit, trying to remember whether you stand or kneel after the Sanctus, wondering whether the parish will notice you, whether anyone will recognize you, whether the priest will say something that undoes you. None of that is the point. The point is that you are going. The rehearsal is not required.

A few small counsels, from many who have walked this walk before you.

Set expectations low. You are not going to have a great experience. You are not going to feel rivers of grace. You may feel almost nothing, or you may feel too much. What you are going to do is be there — and being there, with a baptized soul present in the nave, is already more than your feelings can weigh.

Do not plan a performance. You are not going to impress God, and the priest is not grading you. You do not need to know the responses in the new translation. Mumble where you forget. Stand when others stand. Kneel when others kneel. You will pick it up again faster than you think.

Wear what you would wear to a job interview you are not anxious about. Not a suit, not sweatpants. Clean, ordinary clothes. This is not a fashion matter; it is a small act of respect that quiets the mind. If dressing well is already a burden on a hard morning, wear whatever lets you actually leave the house. Leaving the house is the sacrament of the morning.

Arrive five minutes early. Sit in the back. The back is fine. The back is holy. Half the saints of the last century prayed from the back. From there you can see what everyone is doing, you do not block anyone's sightline, and you can leave without drama if you need to. Nobody is watching you. The few who might notice a new face are glad you came; they are not taking attendance.

If you cry, you cry. Bring a handkerchief. Do not be embarrassed. Tears at the first Mass back are ancient and ordinary; they are often the body saying what the mind has not yet caught up to. Let them come. If they do not come, that is also fine. Your return does not depend on tears.

One more thing. Before you leave the house, make a small sign of the cross and say, "Lord, I am going." That is the only prayer you need. Everything else, the Church will pray for you.

"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want." (Psalm 22:1)

Something you may not have been warned about: your body remembers more than you do.

You will walk past the holy water font and, before you decide anything, your fingers will lift. You will cross the threshold of the nave and find your knee bending toward the tabernacle almost without your permission. At the Sanctus your hands may move to fold without consulting you. You may be startled by it. You may even feel a small resistance — "I am not sure I want to do this yet" — and find that you are doing it anyway, because your body learned this before your doubts learned anything. If you were baptized, brought to Mass as a child, catechized even imperfectly, the gestures are laid down in a deeper layer than the arguments you have had with the faith since.

This is gift, not theatre. The Church knew what she was doing when she taught small children to kneel, to bow the head at the Holy Name, to strike the breast at mea culpa. She was inscribing the faith into muscle and bone so that on a morning like this morning — decades later, in a soul that has lived hard — the body could still find its way home while the mind was still arguing.

The translation, yes, will feel different. "And with your spirit" where your mouth still wants "And also with you." Do not let that snag you. Mumble through; the angels know what you mean. What has not changed — what has never changed, in the West or the East, in Latin or the vernacular — is the Eucharist itself. The words of institution are the same words Our Lord spoke in the upper room. What was placed on that table that Thursday is what will be placed on the altar this morning. You have not missed it. It has waited for you.

St. Augustine knew this kind of return. He was catechized as a boy, wandered far and hard for years, and when at last he came back he wrote the sentence that has kept countless returning souls in their pews: "Late have I loved thee, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved thee." The word to notice is late. Not too late. Late is still in time. Late still arrives. The Lord, Augustine says in the next line, was already within while he was running outside; the search was never the Lord's failure to be found.

St. Bonaventure put it more briefly: the Eucharist is memoriale, signaculum, pignus — a memorial of what Christ has done, a sign of present love, a pledge of what is to come. All three work on the returning soul at once, and not always in the order one expects.

"Late have I loved thee, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved thee." (Confessions X, 27)

A short catalogue, so you are not surprised by yourself.

You will probably be distracted. You will think about your phone, your work, the argument from yesterday, what to eat after. The Mass will not fix this in the first hour. Do not grade yourself by your attention span; the faith of the Church is praying through you even while your mind wanders.

You may be bored. The homily may be mediocre. The music may be bad. The parish may be smaller and plainer than your memory made it. None of this counts against what is happening on the altar.

You may feel tears you did not expect during a simple moment — the Kyrie, an ordinary hymn, the small bell at the consecration. Let them fall and do not analyze them. Or you may feel nothing at all, and go home flat, and that is also normal. God is not withholding; he is simply not in a hurry to convince you of anything by feeling.

You may feel anger — at the homily, at a phrase you remember disagreeing with, at yourself for being here, at the Church for something done years ago that still hurts. Anger at Mass is not scandalous. It is often the first sign that something real is being touched. Bring it to the altar; do not pretend it away.

You may feel a sudden flash of peace — and then at once the suspicion that you made it up. You did not make it up, but do not build a house on it either. One felt moment does not settle anything.

You may feel like a stranger. You are not. You were baptized; this is your house. It may not feel like your house for a while, and that is all right. Houses take time to recognize.

You may feel guilty about not receiving if you go forward for a blessing, or if you stay in your pew. Good. That guilt is honest; hold it lightly for a few minutes and read the next section. Not receiving today is not a failure; it is often the most reverent thing a returning soul can do.

You may feel, for a single unannounced instant, a certainty that you are home. If it comes, receive it quietly. If it does not, do not look for it.

And the deepest warning the saints give about all of this: do not read any one feeling as the whole message. A morning of tears is not automatic conversion; a morning of dryness is not rejection; a morning of rage is not apostasy. The Mass is larger than the feeling you have at it.

Flannery O'Connor, over dinner when a literary woman praised the Eucharist as a "symbol," answered in the sentence that has become a watchword: "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it." If it is really Christ on the altar — and it is — then what you feel about it on one Sunday is not the measure. He is, whether your senses catch it or not.

"My flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed." (John 6:56)

A pastoral note, placed here because it matters and because the tradition is clear.

If you have been away for years and there are grave sins on your soul that you have not confessed, the ordinary path is confession before communion. This is not a trick the Church invented to keep you out; it is the path of love. St. Paul's warning — that receiving unworthily is to eat and drink judgment on oneself — is old and serious. The Church does not want you to stand in the communion line with a wound that a single good confession would close. She wants you to come to the table clean and free.

That said: do not let this stop you from going to Mass this Sunday. Attend. Stay in your pew, or go forward with arms crossed for a blessing. Both are honorable. Nothing is lost by not receiving today. Everything can be gained by being there, listening, beginning again.

Then — this week or next — go to confession.

A few words for the walk to the confessional, because many returning souls freeze there.

What to say when you go in. The old formula is still the easiest: "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been X years since my last confession." You are allowed to say "I do not remember how long." You are allowed to say "I have forgotten most of what to do." The priest has heard every variation. He will help you. He is glad you are there — gladder than you can imagine. One returning soul is the whole day's work; it is what he was ordained for.

What to confess. The grave matters, as best you remember them. You do not owe him a chronological diary. You are not graded on eloquence. Say the things that are heavy, in plain words. If you cannot remember dates, give ranges. If you are unsure whether something counts, ask — briefly — and let him judge. He is there to lift a load, not to weigh one.

What not to say. Do not confess other people's sins. Do not justify yourself. Do not lecture the priest about the Church. Do not try to impress him with your theology or your honesty. Just tell the truth and let him absolve.

St. Monica wept for her son Augustine for seventeen years. He finally came home. If Augustine could come home, so can you. The Prodigal's father "saw him while he was yet a great way off, and had compassion, and running to him, fell upon his neck, and kissed him" — notice that the father runs. The confessional is where the running happens now.

John Paul II said in Reconciliatio et Paenitentia that the confessional is not a courtroom but a place of mercy where the Father waits. You do not have to be good to go. You have only to be honest, and to want, even weakly, to be changed.

"I will arise, and will go to my father, and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee." (Luke 15:18)

The Mass ends. The priest goes out. You stand a moment in the pew, unsure what to do with yourself.

Here is the counsel, and it runs against the grain of a returning soul's best instinct: do not over-plan the next step.

You will be tempted, on the way to the parking lot, to build a whole life. "I will come every Sunday from now on. I will pray the Rosary daily. I will read the Catechism cover to cover. I will go to daily Mass on Wednesdays. I will volunteer. I will get rid of the things in my life that do not belong anymore, this week." The list will be beautiful. It will also, most likely, collapse within two weeks, and the collapse will tell you — falsely — that the whole return was fake.

One Mass does not make a life. But this one Mass is a hinge. A door has moved. You felt it move. Do not mistake the size of the door for the size of the life behind it.

A small next step for the week. Only one. Pick one:

• Go again next Sunday. That is enough, by itself, to be the whole of this week's Christianity.
• Go to confession, if the previous section applies to you and you have not yet gone.
• Open a Gospel and read one chapter. Start with Mark. It is short and moves quickly.
• Say a single Our Father before bed, each night, for seven nights. Not the Rosary yet. One prayer.
• Call the parish office and ask when confessions are heard, or when the next daily Mass is, or whether there is someone to talk to. A five-minute phone call can settle a month of wondering.

Choose one. Do it. Let the rest of the life build itself back slowly, in the way real lives build — by small repeated acts, not by programs announced.

St. Francis de Sales, writing to souls who were resuming the devout life after a lapse, said something like this: begin again gently, and do not be astonished at your own unsteadiness. The devout life is not a performance you perfect; it is a path you walk, falling and rising, and the rising is the proof of the life, not the not-falling. He was gentler than most of his century, and right to be.

If you received this morning — thank God, very quietly, at home, not in words. If you did not — do not brood on it. God has been patient across the years you were away; he is patient now across the weeks until confession. What matters is that something has begun again that is real.

Your mother the Church is not in a hurry. She has had you on a list for a long time. She will be here next Sunday, and the Sunday after, and the Sunday after that. The Eucharist will be there. The priest will be there. The bell will ring at the consecration whether you are in the pew or not — but the pew is waiting for you.

Come back. Keep coming back. That is the whole of it.

"This is the day which the Lord hath made: let us be glad and rejoice therein." (Psalm 117:24)