Playing at the Altar

Let’s return to the games we Kerber kids played upstairs. Most of the games I remember were with my brothers, except for board and card games, which I played with my sisters. The delineation seems to be the degree of fantasy the game involved. If there was some form of fantasy, I played with my brothers – tents, pirates, slow motion football (see May, xx posting), block forts or castles that needed to be knocked down, etc. There was one game I remember playing with Linda and Nancy however that did involve fantasy. It didn’t have a name that I remember.

We only played/did it a couple of times, and it involved recreating the ritual of the Catholic mass. It always included some of my younger brothers except John, the one just younger than me. And neither of my two older brothers played. Maybe this was because I was not only the instigator (along with Linda) but also because I got to be the priest. Or maybe it was too weird for them and John. But play mass we did, in my sisters’ bedroom.

Why there I cannot say, except that’s where mom kept her cedar chest, and it made an acceptable base for an altar. To decorate the altar, we placed some kind of tabernacle made out of a box and also some statues of Mary or Joseph. On top of the tabernacle was a crucifix. There were cloths covering everything, disguising the ordinariness of the cedar chest and box tabernacle. These cloth coverings must have been a light color, a pale yellow or blue, or maybe white, definitely not black or red.    

Building the altar is the part I remember best. It’s unlikely we performed the entire ritual of the mass, perhaps just the best parts, whatever those were. I do remember that Linda and Nancy pretended to be nuns, and of course I was the priest, and the younger boys were the congregants. I imagine I wore some kind of vestments, a blanket wrapped around my shoulders or a large shirt with a towel as a stole around my neck.

My favorite memory was that I fabricated an incense burner, a thurible, from a string and a metal teapot from my sister’s toy tea set. I swung it mightily, blessing the altar with incense as I had seen the priests do. I probably even intoned some Latin phrases, part of the ritual I learned from being a server.

These rituals of play took place somewhere in the late-50s, well before any changes from Vatican II in the early 1960s. Looking back, I can’t imagine that the “fun” would still be there after then. The altar facing the other way, a guitar mass, I can’t picture it. [Give me that old-time religion!]

Even now, with my beliefs and thoughts so different than they were in the 1950s, there’s something missing in my life regarding this. I wish my life had more ritual in it. I do have some, but it’s secular stuff – coffee and a book in the morning, painting or drawing at the end of the day, family dinners.

I would like to have something that would acknowledge and honor the sacred, and the forces in life that are larger than the individual. For me, though, it’s not Catholicism. That wound is too deep and has taken too long to heal.

--Bob