After nearly 24 hours of travel
with about as much sleep as one can get on a 10 hour plane ride, everyone in my
group wanted sleep and food, preferably the latter first.
However, after
nearly 24 hours of travel it was Sunday, and the only thing I cared about was
getting to Mass. I anxiously checked my
watch every ten minutes as we waited for the last few stragglers at the Catania
airport so that we could drive to Taormina.
I asked the concierge at the hotel desk where the nearest Catholic mass
was before I asked for my room key.
Luckily some other traveling students helped me locate a nearby Catholic
church (I should just say church, there really aren’t any other kinds in
Taormina, Italy). Between my broken
Italian and signs posted on the church doors in military time, I realized with
profound joy I had made it with almost an hour to spare.
In Brideshead Revisited the falling away Catholic, Sebastian Flyte,
attempts to explain many things to his non-Catholic friend Charles Ryder. Speaking about Catholic people, he says, “They've
got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is
different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it
comes out all the time. It's quite natural, really, that they should."
It really
is amazing how Catholicism can and should reshape the way that you see
everything, the way that you prioritize everything. Rather than food that nourishes our
perishable bodies, we ought to more strongly desire food that nourishes our
immortal souls. Sebastian Flyte was perfectly correct in his observation of
Catholics. If you live the faith to the
fullest, you will be an anomaly, ordering your life in a way radically
different from your companions. If you
truly believe that the God who made the universe and suffered death for your
transgressions against him comes down to dwell among us in the form of bread,
and if you believe that you can receive this bread and consequently intimacy
with him every day, why would you not at least attempt to do so?
