Today is Ascension Thursday, which has been moved to next Sunday by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, but since the Sunday I showed up at a church and said I wanted to be Catholic was the Sunday before Ascension Thursday when it was still on Thursday, I have a bit of an emotional connection to it being on Thursdays.
The Archdiocese of Chicago has exactly one Ascension church in it, conveniently located less than a mile from my home, although I have a bit of a grudge against the parish (my emotional reactions, positive and negative both, tend to be long-lived). When I first moved back to Chicago, although I had grown up here, I had no community of friends. I saw that Ascension had a weekly young adult volleyball night and decided to go there to meet people. The first thing someone said to me was that I couldn’t play wearing street shoes. Fine, I took off my shoes. Then someone else told me I couldn’t play in socks. No one asked my name or anything else and I never returned. In the young adult community at my parish in California, if a new person showed up to something, everybody would want to know more about this person: who they were, where they were from, etc. Here, I was shown the cold shoulder. So I’ve never had a warm feeling about the parish as a result. I do go for Mass on occasion, but mostly because they’re (a) close and (2) have a Mass timed perfectly for those mornings when I oversleep.
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