At St. Mary Star of the Sea in Beverly<\/a>, we have three regular adult altar servers for morning mass, but one is in her ninth month of pregnancy and another recently broke her arm. So Frank, the third morning server, suggested that Ferde and occasionally Webster fill in. This means training for Webster, so this morning, Ferde\u2014who usually serves only for funerals and other special occasions, why waste his talents as a lector?\u2014walked me through Altar Server 101: where everything is kept in the sacristy, where to set it in the sanctuary, when to light the candles and turn on the overhead lights, and so on.<\/p>\n The freshness, the beauty, the naked thrill of learning to be a Catholic all came back to me, in a series of flashbacks to my first days in this church when, even before I entered RCIA, I sat on this side of the nave\u2014until my troubles with Fr. Charles\u2019s accent<\/a> sent me over under the pulpit, where I could more easily read his lips.<\/p>\n I used to come very early, when the church is dark and only Flo and Frank<\/a> and two or three others are here, each alone in his or her quiet conversation with God, telling the beads, silently moving the lips. I had come early again this morning, to be schooled by Ferde, and even after the lesson, there were still twenty minutes to go before seven o\u2019clock mass by the time I had settled on the Epistle side. This morning, I felt traces of that predawn stillness I had once felt when I arrived, a newcomer, at six-fifteen or even six o\u2019clock.<\/p>\n I Googled it. Then I went to Amazon.com and bought a rosary with wooden beads, something like this one<\/a>. And I bought a couple of booklets on the rosary, this one<\/a>, I think, and this one<\/a>. And I waited excitedly for the UPS driver, the way I once awaited a shipment of Sea Monkeys.<\/p>\n These details don\u2019t really matter. What mattered today\u2014again\u2014was the sudden inrush of innocence I experienced, the joy again of becoming Catholic. When and where did I start to lose that? Definitely by the time I considered myself too busy with an important book project to arrive at mass much more than five minutes before the hour. But probably long before that. By pieces, by tiny pieces.<\/p>\n I have to start coming early to mass again, though I\u2019m sure even this will become old. I\u2019m going to have to start tricking myself somehow. Or making extra efforts. Or somersaulting up the aisle to my pew, while chanting a Hail Mary. I\u2019m not sure what will keep the child inside me alive so that I can continue to live my faith with the joy and purity I once experienced every morning. <\/i>But I\u2019m going to do my best to figure it out.<\/p>\n This morning, by chance, by grace, I remembered again why I am a Catholic. I can hear the chorus: More than 80 posts in 10 weeks about YIM Catholic and you can\u2019t remember? Dear Webster, Are you losing your mind?! The short answer to which is, there\u2019s remembering and there\u2019s remembering. Jesus tells us that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":143,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n![](\"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/_dmDaLWNETzg\/SurcRbPUpyI\/AAAAAAAAAbo\/6SYDRDM6OTc\/s200\/josephstatue1.jpg\")
<\/a>Then, and this was the beauty part, to watch Ferde closely while he went through his paces during mass, I sat on the Epistle side of the nave, not in the sixth row on the Gospel side, where I routinely sit. Here, closer to St. Joseph (left), I had a better angle on the action.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_dmDaLWNETzg\/SurcYhPVIrI\/AAAAAAAAAbw\/1TBmI2jttfQ\/s200\/CRW_5761_1.jpg\")
<\/a>I pulled out my rosary beads and I remembered: <\/i>Two years ago, my only experience of the rosary was a memory of joining in with chanting thousands at Lourdes <\/a>nearly forty years ago. Two years ago, I still thought that the second half of the Hail Mary began \u201cHail, Mary,\u201d instead of \u201cHoly Mary.\u201d I knew nothing about the Mysteries we are invited to meditate on as we pray. I had yet to memorize the \u201cHail, Holy Queen\u201d or the \u201cOh, my Jesus.\u201d But for some reason, on my second or third morning in this church, Father Barnes (left) spoke of the rosary from the pulpit, urged us to say the rosary daily, and said, \u201cIf you don\u2019t know how, Google it.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/6738513599344023043-8652029002134630978?l=yimcatholic.blogspot.com\")