In Which I Rant about Where People Should Sit at Mass

Everyone should be at mass, no matter who they are, or how long it’s been since they’ve been there, or what they’re wearing¹, or how many minutes late they are, or where they choose to sit, no matter what, forever and ever, amen.

ALSO: more important than seating arrangements! TODAY is my sweet second born child’s day to receive her sacraments, so please say a prayer for her and for all of us. We are, maybe even as you read this, sitting at mass praying for her and with her, and where we’re sitting is completely beside the point. Thank you! 💖💖💖

But I’m a sucker for a hypothetical system, so, here goes nothing. To visualize: think of a Sunday mass like the deck of a ship. Important details: it’s just after midnight on April 15, 1912, and the ship is named The Titanic. You know what that means. Things are about to go down. Up at the front of the nave are what we’re going to call “the lifeboat zones.”

Who gets a seat on the lifeboats?

Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with the map below: (you’ll have to generalize for in-the-round churches). Left side is the back of the church, right side is the front of the church. I mean, ship. There are three colors in “the lifeboat zones” that will help us get organized: green, blue, and red.

thank you, https://elecsprout.com/parts-of-a-catholic-church-diagram.html, for the image

Green Lifeboat Zone: people who can’t walk up to the front to receive the host.

This is self-explanatory and happens naturally. It takes a lot of organization and sacrifice for these people to get to mass in the first place, and they belong right up near the front, very close to Jesus.

Blue Lifeboat Zone: anyone in OCIA/OCIC (Order of Christian Initiation for Adults/Children), the September-Pentecost class required for entering the Church at Easter.

I’m not about press-ganging people who are considering Catholicism into sitting in the same spot at church every week. One of the best things about mass is that you can show up 10 minutes early, alone and silent, stare daggers at the tabernacle, and leave whenever you like without a word of explanation to anyone. This is what I like to call “religious freedom.” Those in OCIA should have that option, too.

There’s two types of new people, the type who would like a nametag and an assigned seat and the type who want to navigate the space for themselves, thanks. A blue lifeboat zone that is optional for them but respected by the rest of the congregation (the ones who’ve been coming to mass since before, you know, birth) could be a way to accommodate both types. When we were in OCIA (which was RCIA), I was the former type (nametag please!) and Jonny was the latter (do I have to tell you my name?)… so it’s possible that assigned seats would have been just another thing we didn’t understand.

However, these people (both adults and children) want to learn more about the mass. So it could be a nice thing to have some reserved, near-the-front pews for them at one or two of the weekend masses. And just by typing that I’m realizing that the blue lifeboat zone is in the wrong place—there should be someone sitting in front of these people, so they can follow along with the whole stand/sit/kneel patterns without feeling stupid. But I made the picture on Word, and then had to clip and copy it, because I am a graphic design Kindergartener, so I’m going to change the plan but not the picture.

Red Lifeboat Zone: Children who have not yet reached the age of reason (more or less seven) and their families.

If children can see what’s going on, they don’t scream as much. Families need quick exits out those side aisles, which are less humiliating to walk up than the main aisle, and a family of six-ish takes up about two kneelers. Individuals who probably just came to stare daggers at the tabernacle have kindly scooted over so we could sit in this prime spot and wound up fetching random, thrown objects for us, like hair ties and laminated song sheets and the occasional shoe.

Of course, there are some Sunday masses that instantly overwhelm the “Red Lifeboat Zone,” as in, there’s going to be more families with littles than would even fit inside of those boundaries (typically 8am-10am kinds of masses).

Not on the map, but there’s always the “Every man for himself” option…

Which is to say, children don’t have to sit with their parents at every single mass. If your family is attending mass weekly, you will get all kinds of opportunities to sit together at mass. Do not feel any guilt about utilizing any options like: parents going to separate masses when it’s “one of those days;” the church basement nursery, especially for sourpatch kids (any child aged one or two, see footnote²); children sitting with godparents or friends on days when attendance overlaps. Takes some experimentation, but the options do exist.

Our oldest has been an altar server for about a year now, and him *not* sitting with us most masses has truly been best for everyone. Nothing I can say or do is going to have the catechetical force of an older server in the sacristy handing him an object that is both on fire (small fire, but still, you know, aflame) and fragile and saying, “This is your job for the next hour.” That signals to him, “This matters, and you’re a part of it.”

Alright, that about wraps—

Wait. This arrangement puts the new people and the people in fragile health as close as possible to the people most likely to scream during the consecration…

(crumples paper and tosses it aside)

Well… is it actually a valid mass if there’s absolutely no chance that someone’s going to scream during the consecration?

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In which I attempt to give you a very brief

CAMPING RECAP

I’ll do this bullet point style, because I could talk about that trip for *days*--we have been there and back again (once again) to The Great Sand Dunes National Park in Southern CO, my happiest place on earth.

• Thank you to everyone who voted in last week’s poll! Like a sizeable majority of you thought we would, we made it two nights! Can’t say I was as confident, but I’m glad it happened. Now, the much more interesting question is probably: does what we just did count as camping? We brought a tent that is so enormous I started calling it the “Tent Mahal;” it fit a queen size air mattress, a pack and play, and four tiny sleeping bags (all partitioned by “room dividers”). The campground had clean indoor bathrooms, a water spigot, SHOWERS, and a dumpster that we could use at any time.

• My five-year-old daughter wakes up at 2:05 a.m. to do a “surroundings check,” guess how we know?

• Not to transmute into a podcaster or anything, but our proverbial dehydration risk bacon was saved by electrolyte drink mix packets, which are expensive but effective. The cheater version of this is to just crank some salt into a waterbottle, which tastes funny, but is possible to get used to and does a lot of the same things.

In many ways, the trip represented on a small scale what happens when a family with children has enough people surrounding them. I’m not saying it’s not possible to have fun on a camping trip with just my family, but it would have been impossible to take a nighttime dune walk with Jonny if there had been no one else to stand watch over the Tent Mahal.

Left, dune sand that my son literally spooned out of his shorts pockets at home when he realized I wished I had kept some, a towering dune over a running Medano Creek

On the Calendar: Trinity Sunday

🍃You are exactly where you are meant to be, and you are already doing more than you think 🍃

🦅Gospel for Sunday: John 16:12-15.

Jesus said to his disciples:
"I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.
But when he comes, the Spirit of truth,
he will guide you to all truth.
He will not speak on his own,
but he will speak what he hears,
and will declare to you the things that are coming.
He will glorify me,
because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.
Everything that the Father has is mine;
for this reason I told you that he will take from what is mine
and declare it to you."

Since tomorrow is also Father’s Day, in kind of a fun collision of calendars, I kind of want to have the kids all sign a card for Jonny that declares “Everything that the Father has is mine”… maybe not 🙃. Trinity Sunday is another “welcome back!” to the rhythms of Ordinary Time, in which I remember that most growth (whether I like it or not) is incremental.

I’d like to know… how many “sacrament” related events have you attended since (and including) Easter 2025?

1. I mean, yes, no shorts or crop-tops in St. Peter’s Basilica, follow posted signage—but I’m mostly talking about people getting stuffy about things like jeans and sports jerseys and work clothes and you know exactly the kind of stuffiness I’m talking about so I’ll stop now.

2. I call them “sourpatch” because, like in the advertisement for the candy, these one-to-two year-old cherubs are both sour and sweet, often within the same space of five minutes. As per personal experience, they have the hardest time (ahem, I have the hardest time *with them*) at mass, in airports, on long trips, at weddings, whilst camping, etcetera… but they also enliven the experience for everyone else. It is a both/and situation and must be navigated as such. Also, if a family is on the RRS (Rapid Repeat Sibling) cycle, they *always* have one sourpatch kid (sometimes two, and sometimes *more*), and there’s just gotta be an option for handing them off.