Confessions of a Guitar-Mass Catholic

In the old church there was occasionally no heat and never enough light, but there were also no confusing half-Latin/half-English missals or hymnals. Instead, there were hundreds of red Duo-Tang folders waiting to be picked up at the entrance, the kind with the metal prongs in the middle, holding purple-inked pages from the spirit duplicator of lyrics by artists everyone knew: Bob Dylan; the Beatles; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Simon and Garfunkel; Peter, Paul & Mary. Theirs were the songs that colored my celebration of Mass as a child. I pondered and prayed over what I would do if I actually had a hammer, what the sounds of silence were and what it was that I could teach my parents. It would be many years before I no longer looked forward to going to Mass, because what I experienced each week in that old church was a solid sense of peace and wholeness. I knew God was with us, and life was everything it was ever supposed to be while I was singing at Mass alongside my dad.