Have you ever been stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the highway leading to the beach, baking in the hot sun and wondering whether your car’s engine will overheat before you do? Have you sat shivering in a cozy (that is, tiny) summer cottage, wishing that the rain would stop and the sun would come out and above all that you hadn’t blown three weeks’ salary on a rental just one block from the water (which, by the way, was about one degree above freezing that week)? Have you watched the hands of the dashboard clock move toward midnight as you drove down a lonely country road, hoping that the next motel would not be showing the “No Vacancy” sign?

Behind every summer vacation plan there lurks the possibility of disaster. We enjoy taking a break from the familiar routine, but every unfamiliar circumstance entails a risk. An unfamiliar road may not lead us where we want to go. Unfamiliar food might revisit us in the middle of the night. An unfamiliar beach could be teeming with horseflies that somehow didn’t show up on the postcards and promotional flyers. For us practicing Catholics there is one more element of uncertainty: the unfamiliar parish.

When I was a child, the entire student body of the parochial school that I attended would troop down the street to Mass on the last day of the academic year. Every year, the solemn pastor would remind us that while our school days were over, our obligation to attend Sunday Mass remained in place. I was always struck by the contrast between this approach and the one adopted by a close boyhood friend, whose Unitarian church simply closed down in June, to reopen in September. (Years later, my friend became wildly enthusiastic about the work of the pop theologian Harvey Cox. I suppose it is a small step from the belief that God takes summer vacations to the conclusion that God is dead.)

Church-shopping
In August each year, my parents would rent a cottage near the shore, in a little resort town where a Catholic church was just down the street from the main tourist attractions. The building was too small to accommodate the summertime crowd (and too big for the handful of year-round residents); the pastor’s sermons were long and soporific; the buzz of traffic outside was distracting. But the Mass itself was familiar. In every important respect, the liturgy was identical to what I experienced back at home during the school year. Those were the days.

Then Vatican II arrived, and a thousand liturgical flowers bloomed. For a decade or more, many of us became accustomed to feeling that eerie sense of unfamiliarity in our own parish churches; month to month and year to year, things changed so radically that we did not know what to expect on a given Sunday morning.

Eventually things settled down, and we all developed new church-going habits. Individual parishes assumed their own distinctive identities, and we shopped around until we found a parish where the liturgy matched our preferences. So now on Sunday morning we drive past the church where the folk-guitar group lines up in front of the tabernacle, past the church where the nun delivers sermons on liberation theology, and past the chapel where a renegade priest says an unauthorized Tridentine-rite Mass, until finally we reach the parish where a “just plain” Novus Ordo liturgy can be found. (As we make the weekly pilgrimage, we might occasionally wave to our fellow Catholics who are driving in the opposite direction.) This situation is far from perfect, but at least it has become familiar.

Unpleasant surprises
But when summer drives us out of the city in search of cooler climes, and we visit parish churches for the first time, we never know what to expect. Has the pastor been assigned to this church in a remote coastal town because his colleagues wanted him to be as far as possible from the chancery offices in the big city? Have the members of the local artists’ colony taken over the music ministry, and incorporated a bit of liturgical dance? There is no way to know.

The sign outside the parish church might tell us that the Mass is celebrated on Sunday at 9 and 11. But if we choose the earlier time, might we be walking into the “Family Mass”—at which the choir of screechy young children specializes in bad music, badly performed? And if we opt for a few extra hours of sleep, are we letting ourselves in for the “LifeTeen” liturgy with the howling electric guitars and the pounding bass? Do the Eucharistic Ministers wear tennis shorts? Do the parishioners linger so long over the Kiss of Peace that you expect someone to begin serving coffee? None of these questions is answered by the simple dates and times listed on the signboard.

This is a problem without an easy solution. So during my own summer vacation, I relax as much as possible for six days. Then on Sunday morning I square my jaw, grit my teeth, and hope for the best on my day of rest.

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