The air we breathe

Inhaling slowly and exhaling steadily throughout Mass, I mostly succeeded in avoiding the waterworks. I almost kept it together when Monsignor Kevin Hart, our beloved old priest at St. Andrew Apostle for almost the entire 10 years we worshiped there, mentioned us in the announcements.

“This is the Carney family’s last Mass at St. Andrew’s before they move to Virginia,” he began, instructing my wife, our children, and me to stand. Thus, a birthday party — Pentecost is called the “Birthday of the Church” — became a teary goodbye.

The Pentecost was the moment the Holy Spirit descended upon Mary and the Apostles, including our parish’s namesake, Andrew.

“Suddenly, there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were,” my daughter read from the lectern. She had begun as a youth lector there six years ago — her start in public speaking. “And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.”

“Wind” and “spirit” in that passage are two translations of the same Greek root, “pneuma.” You could translate it as “breath.” And for my children, St. Andrew was the air they breathed.

If we were home on a Sunday or a holy day, almost without exception, we went to Mass at St. Andrew. Typically, we sat near the front because that minimized the little ones’ misbehavior. A few years back, after a nephew was baptized at St. Patrick in Rockville one Sunday, my 7-year-old commented, “This was a lot like St. Andrew’s Mass.” Of course it was! It was Mass. We Catholics tend not to improvise or vary our liturgies that much. What’s extraordinary is that my daughter associated the Mass, said in 200,000 churches everywhere around the world, only with one specific building and one specific congregation.

St. Andrew is where our children went to school since preschool. For the younger three, it’s the only school they’ve known. It’s where they all got their start in either baseball or basketball. It’s where they sang in choir, served as altar boys, learned public speaking. It’s where they first received the sacraments of confession and communion. Our oldest was confirmed there and our youngest was baptized there.

Easter and Good Friday happened at St. Andrew. Our children watched their teachers get married here, and they saw the funeral of their babysitters’ younger brother here. The rhythms of our days, weeks, years, and lives were measured out by the liturgies, sacraments, and celebrations of St. Andrew Apostle Parish.

So when Montgomery County in March 2020 said we couldn’t gather for Mass, even outdoors — and when they kept that prohibition going into the summer, long after embracing and endorsing protests and other gatherings — the government wasn’t simply interrupting our worship. It was choking us off.

Other counties legalized Mass in June, and so it was on Pentecost 2020 that I drove down to southern Maryland to Sacred Heart to attend Mass for the first time in three months. We all were masked, but we were finally able to breathe again the air — the Spirit — that had been denied us for months. But still, it wasn’t home, and we couldn’t worship at home because our county somehow believed that while the air was safe to breathe at Black Lives Matter protests, the air was unsafe to breathe at a Mass on St. Andrew’s field.

COVID-19 wasn’t the first respiratory virus to upend our life. The biggest respiratory drama of our family played out in part at St. Andrew as well.

Turning blue

My wife was at the 11:30 Mass in November 2017 when she finally checked her phone, which had been blowing up (on vibrate) throughout Mass. Our baby’s blood-oxygen saturation was dangerously low. I was running, pushing Eve in a jogging stroller to the urgent care center, and calling and texting like crazy.

Eve couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t get enough oxygen into her lungs thanks to a case of RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, and she would end up spending five days at the Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. Those days when Eve couldn’t breathe on her own were days that we saw clearly the value of our parish (and our other institutions).

We got plenty of help from families from our parish in those five days, including meals, babysitting, and driving our children to school. But I love to reflect on the fact that my wife simply left our oldest daughter in the pew so she could finish up Mass. Katie instructed her to get a ride home with Dorrie, a grandmother in the parish.

It was a different parish grandmother — Mary — who helped that same eldest child out the time she puked in the middle of the church in the middle of Mass. (When I realized my daughter was going to throw up, I stupidly ran down the aisle to the main exit. We didn’t make it.)

I don’t know who cleaned up inside, but Mary, whom I had never met before, came outside to meet us and helped me wipe Lucy as clean as possible.

‘What you bring’

What a parish as an institution should do in today’s world isn’t always clear. In the multipurpose room one day, one of our priests put the question to me this way: “What are the unmet needs of these people?” Father Bill gestured to our diverse congregation, with families of all races from all corners of the world. “Middle-class and upper-middle-class suburban parents,” he said, “what do they need that their world doesn’t give them?”

“We need a place to bring our children,” I replied, “and ignore them while we hang out with other adults.”

And so one day at the Stained Glass Pub, a few of us hatched the tee-ball program. The hitting and fielding instruction was top tier, I promise you, but that was almost an excuse for a weekly parish picnic. We grilled burgers in St. Andrew’s right field (or ordered plain pizza during Lent) and served them to families, funded by voluntary donations.

Little children climbed on the jungle gym. Older boys played catch in left field. The girls rode bikes or walked and talked around the campus. And I saw parents become less helicoptery, more relaxed, and better connected to the other parents while enjoying a maybe-legal beer outside on a Friday night.

Parish life in most of America has been fading for decades, which is a shame. Even if you’re irreligious, you should lament this collapse because parishes make people better neighbors — including to those of a different religion. “Religious Americans are up to twice as active civically as secular Americans,” Robert Putnam and David Campbell reported in their book American Grace.

The extraordinary civic-mindedness of churchgoers isn’t mostly due to the sermons, I suspect. It’s due to the added opportunities an institution gives you to multiply your efforts (I never could have started a tee-ball program without the money, land, email lists, and imprimatur of the parish) — and, frankly, the guilt.

If you’ve belonged to anything, you know the look of the organizer, walking in a beeline toward you, clearly to ask you to take on some responsibility or at least donate your labor. It was such an encounter in the narthex at St. Andrew when I got roped into coaching kindergarten girls basketball. It was at a pancake breakfast after Mass one Sunday that I got roped into teaching Sunday school.

Teaching second graders or coaching kindergarteners is not something I ever would have done had it not been for my parish guiding me toward it. I have always believed I have a duty to serve others — especially children, the elderly, and the poor — but I wouldn’t have actually gotten off my butt to do it if not for St. Andrew.

I was recently recruited to help lead a group discussion as part of St Andrew’s participation in the global synod Pope Francis has called. It was a discussion about how parishioners journey together in life and faith. One of the women at my table said something to me about “what you bring to the parish.” I assumed she meant the tee-ball, the basketball, the Sunday school, or my wife’s stint on the principal’s advisory council. But no, she wasn’t talking about any of that.

“What you bring to the parish — your children in the school, your sons serving at Mass, your daughter reading, and taking six kids to Mass every Sunday,” she said.

For everything we got out of St. Andrew, what we really gave the parish was the presence of our children.

On the last day of school last year, we hadn’t acquired a gift for the preschool teacher who had taught five of our children. So while dropping off the youngest that day, I brought the only thing I could — all five Carneys she had taught. She cried.

Tears

Speaking of tears: However hard it was to fight off tears at our last Mass, the most St. Andrew ever made me cry was during the pandemic. I tried to tell my children the news we had just received, but I couldn’t get the words out, and I couldn’t catch my breath.

Hyperventilating, I spit out the news: We were losing our pastor, the Rev. Dan Leary. He was going to Mexico to serve impoverished children down there.

Just as “Mass” meant St. Andrew to my children, “pastor” meant Father Dan. Catholic priests have the charge of acting, in certain circumstances, “in persona Christi” — in the role of Christ. I have never met another person who seemed to emulate the savior as much as Father Dan. I believe most of St. Andrew’s parishioners would endorse that statement.

St. Andrew has many strengths: the school principal, the director of religious education, and simply the congregation. But all of those excellent leaders credited Father Dan with their own ability to serve.

The man is visibly infected with the Holy Spirit, and he in turn inspired his parishioners. He filled the church every Sunday — every day — with a strong spirit.

I believed, against the odds, that Father Dan would always be there. I also believed, without thinking it through, that I would always be at St. Andrew. My most recent book, about the importance of community institutions, ends at St. Andrew. The last chapter concludes with a vision, veiled in the text but crystal clear in my mind, of me walking my oldest daughter down that St. Andrew aisle on her wedding day.

I told her of that vision as we drove away from St. Andrew.

“Really?” She said. “I always assumed I would get married at St. James.”

St. James in Falls Church is, after all, where Katie and I married 16 years ago. It’s where Katie was baptized. It’s where her parents and sisters go to Mass. Our move to northern Virginia is, for my wife, moving home.