Be Our Guest / Jim O’Reilly

Pastor, parishioners adapt to outdoor Masses via asphalt apostolate

Down the street from one of Indiana’s largest gambling casinos, Hollywood Casino Lawrenceburg, is a humble dumpster, about 100 feet from a white tent in the parking lot behind St. Lawrence School in Lawrenceburg.

I have come to be very familiar with my folding chair next to that dumpster, as I have joined in the remarkable liturgical celebrations that are happening this summer inside a nearby tent. There, with its canvas sides rolled up, the people of several southeast Indiana communities take part in the holy sacrifice of the Mass, with a remarkable celebrant encouraging their prayerful participation.

We greet each other at around 8:15 a.m. on Sundays, as cars drive into the school parking lot and congregants are handed their prayer page and parish bulletin, along with directions for where to park.

Amid the concrete and asphalt of this unusual yet prayerful scene, our pastor offers the 8:30 a.m. Mass, with timely sermons on the theme of the Sunday Scriptures, while his acolyte holds up the pages of a loose-leaf binder, printed with key phrases to remember, like “We are God’s people.”

After enthusiastic singing of the final hymn, the drivers are encouraged to watch out for departing cars by the astute traffic direction of our pastor, the best vested traffic cop in our county, keeping the traffic flowing.

I offer these viewpoints to praise the blessings of adaptability, sincerity and warmth of our pastor, Father Ben Syberg, not to get him into trouble with the chancery over an absence of formality that some in the hierarchy associate with rituals.

My chair next to a dumpster is far from the grand processions to install a new archbishop, which I had once led as former chair of another archdiocese’s pastoral council. It is closer to the people, literally, than the remarkable solemnity that I have observed with my Dominican daughter’s cloister. It is outdoors, on a scale far smaller than Vatican City. But what matters most is that we and our pastor have shown adaptability to overcome the coronavirus crisis.

We Catholics adapt to challenges, some better than others. In my day job as a public health professor with a new textbook on the coronavirus, I applauded our move outdoors as a prudent means to defeat the microscopic virons which could carry SARS-CoV-2 infection to persons too close to us indoors.

Now that Father Ben has shown the spiritual celebratory meaning of the Mass, notwithstanding the ambience of the parking lot, we might be tempted to eschew gold and incense for a different view of how Catholics can grow despite the challenges of the pandemic. Can we learn and discern? Can the energy of our Church community thrive in a parking lot down the street from a casino? You bet!
 

(Jim O’Reilly is a member of St. Lawrence Parish in Lawrenceburg.) †