Church Etiquette

Lateness has been one of my long standing pet peeves. It drives me nuts when people are late. If you think you are pushing it for time, then scheduled things later. If you are perpetually late, then start getting yourself ready to go earlier. Being late, to me, is just a very simple form of selfish disregard for other people. It's disrespectful whether we are talking about meeting a friend for lunch, going to a doctor's appointment, going to work, etc. It doesn't matter what the occasion is. What matters is that you care enough to get there on time. I am rarely late for anything. In fact, I am usually early. If I am running late for some reason, I let the person who is waiting on me know as soon as possible that I will be late. If we have planned to meet, and I am late and didn't call you, then you should probably call the police, because something bad happened to me. When someone is late, the message it sends to me is, "I just really don't care about your time. My life runs on my time only."

That message may not be true a true reflection of the person. I have several good friends who are perpetually late. My dear friend Danielle used to be HOURS late for gatherings. It drove me nuts. It still does. But I have to give her credit, because she is at least trying to make some changes. And she was the first person to arrive at my house for our annual Allegheny College get-together last year. I know for a fact that the friends I have do not intentionally make me wait for them as some kind of spite. Nor are they inherently selfish people. If they were, we wouldn't be friends. Still, lateness grates on my nerves.

That said, people who come to mass late have irritated me for years. It's bad enough when people walk in during the opening hymn and frantically try to squish into the pews, the same pew that I sat down in 10 minutes before mass began, to ensure that we were not only comfortably spaced, but also not distracting fellow church members by arriving mid-service. Those people are just a little irritating. What really gets me are the people, and there are at least a handful every single service, who come in 10 or 15 minutes into the mass. They try to sneak in the back, in the middle of a reading, and then the ushers have to get up, interrupting their own absorption of the service, to find a seat, sometime 5 or 6 seats, if it's a whole family, then disrupt the whole pew of people who were peacefully seated and attending just a second prior. Ew. If you arrive at church 15 minutes late, go down to the basement and help yourself to a cup of coffee and a donut. You are now an hour early for the next service. You'll get great seat, and be very relaxed and prepared for mass!

As if being late isn't bad enough, though, in the last month I have witnessed two different women on two different Sundays showing outright blatant disrespect. The first happened during a mass in January. This woman was a middle aged woman, not some be-bopping teenager, who waltzed into mass in the middle of the gospel. I moved over and she sat next to us. When Father started the homily, she balanced her checkbook! I looked over at her in complete disbelief! Really? You are balancing your checkbook at church? And during the homily no less! Not that it would be appropriate at any point during the service, but the homily is the most personalized piece of the mass. In all my life I have never had a priest as well connected as the priest we have now. His homilies are great. He always has some humor, stories of real life, things which tie our every day lives so perfectly into the gospel without being "preachy" or overbearing. I truly cherish hearing his homilies. I couldn't believe this woman! Then, to make matters worse, she went to the bathroom during communion! Why even bother coming to mass?

As if that wasn't bad enough, I saw another act of blatant disregard again today. It was another woman, young, maybe mid-twenties. She also came in the middle of the gospel. She sat down, and during the homily, she wrote checks for bills. Did I miss the memo about bringing your checkbook to church? Do they think that praying will prevent them from bouncing a check? After she was done writing her checks, she whipped out some little note cards. She sat in front of me, and to my left, so I had plain view of what she was writing. We can argue that I was being nosey, but, hey, why argue? I was being nosey! I read what she was writing. They were thank-you cards from her wedding! Come on, really? You don't have any other time free to write the thank-you cards?

I'm going out on a limb here. I imagine that God would welcome all who enter his church, period, regardless of whether or not they were late. But I also think that God would frown upon people who pay no attention. What is the purpose of going to church, if your mind is so preoccupied with other things that you cannot hear a word that is being said? I would think these two women would gain just about as much of Christ's wisdom watching a televised mass on channel 7 at home, doing their bills and writing their cards. And they would be a heck of a lot less distracting to others if they stayed home too!

OK, it's not my place to judge. That job belongs to God, and He knows that I certainly commit enough offenses against Him every day, that I myself have no room to talk. I'm going to vent my frustrations anyway. From my perspective, if you plan to go to church, be on time. Leave your checkbook, your cell phone, your thank-you cards and whatever other distractions you have at home. Sit down for one hour, without technology, without distraction and focus yourself on Jesus. Look up at that cross above the altar and think about how He died for you, suffering terribly on that cross, so that your sins would be forgiven. Then tell me that you feel OK about writing notes.