The lovely chapel where noon Mass is usually held at my university is in dry dock, having its keel repaired and generally being buffed and honed.
So the noon Mass, not usually peripatetic, wandered into a classroom for a while, and then into a tiny dormitory chapel, where it has been celebrated for a few weeks, for those of us who can find it, up the old stairs, past the soda and candy machines, and down the hall to the right, behind the door with the crucifix.
There were 14 of us in toto yesterday, including a guide dog, who looked rapt at the whole thing, and who never took his eyes off the celebrant, an immense sapling of a man who looks exactly like a young Abraham Lincoln, without the hipster beard.
Also there was a small child, perhaps age two, with a terrifying neck brace; she too was wonderfully attentive, never taking her eyes off the miracle in the middle, which was a refreshing lesson for me, who has far too often taken his eyes off the miracles.
In a room this small there is no sitting in the back, there not being any remote regions, so we all sat essentially in a circle, and young Abe cheerfully noted in his homily that this sort of small gathering, with bread and wine and excellent stories and two miracles, surely harked back to the original meeting of the ancestral clan, which was also on an upper floor, and also featured a sinewy celebrant and 12 companions, although in our case we were luckier in that we were graced by a child, the greatest of miracles, and we were honored also by a representative from another species.
Although there may well have been dogs at the Last Supper, said Abe, considering the various times in the scriptures that dogs are mentioned as scooping up bread crumbs falling from tables.
One great thing about Mass being celebrated in a crowded college dormitory is that you can hear the seething life of the hall thrumming overhead and burbling faintly through the doors and windows; not until yesterday had I enjoyed a Mass during which I heard reggae music, and the samba of washing machines, and an argument about the Satanic