Confirmation

 

 

What a whirlwind week. Your host is completely exhausted.

 

Patch had her confirmation this Saturday. Confirmation is a Sacrament of the Catholic Church where the confirmee receives the Holy Spirit and becomes a full-fledged member of the Church through a freely-made decision. This is a process that normally takes about a year of catechesis, but due to workload with school and other circumstances beyond her control, Patch had to take an extra year to get it done. Usually the sacrament is administered to 8th or 9th grade students, so she was one of the older confirmees.

 

We planned a celebration to reward her hard work by having guests fly in and going out to an early dinner on Saturday followed by cake and champagne and gift opening at home. Her two aunts and two cousins flew in from Idaho and Austin, and four of her school friends were invited. Little One and her college roommate were there, too. Sunday would be a brunch and a walk-around antiquing (Patch’s newest thing) until everyone would fly or drive home.

 

Since we haven’t entertained since November, the house was somewhat, er, hairy, to say the least. So in addition to our normal workloads, we spent the first few days this week putting things in their place, moving items from the downstairs to their proper places upstairs, then vacuuming, sweeping, swiffering, and dusting the entire first floor. The dog, his crate, and his blankets all got washed. The ping pong table was cleaned and prepped. The lawn was mowed and hedges trimmed.

 

The mass took two hours Saturday morning, due mainly to Father Rudy’s extended homily (we like him a lot but he can be a little verbose) and the large group of confirmees – 60, each one of which stepped forward and had a cross anointed on his or her forehead and received a blessing. Normally the local bishop administers the sacrament, but Father Rudy had a dispensation to perform it himself because of the huge size of our diocese (this was just one of numerous confirmation masses).

 

Halfway through the baptismal font at the rear of the church spung a noisy leak. Ushers frantically began mopping and sweeping as the water line slowly crept forward. Those of us in the pews had to shift forward and to the side, and the center aisle was cordoned off, causing some traffic jams during communion. Our church is fairly new and very well-maintained and beautiful, so this is the first time in nearly three years anything like this has happened. Father Rudy recovered the ball at the mass’s conclusion, telling us and the young confirmees to take it as a Sign – even the waters of the baptismal font are springing forth with the power of the Holy Spirit and cannot be held back!

The rest of the weekend was delightful, though my social battery was soon drained. This was the first time the Mrs. and I got to really meet and interact with Patch’s friends, and they were lovely. My sister-in-law brought a guest who was a survivor of the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel, and that woman, a college friend of hers, brought her thirteen-month old baby daughter. The young cousins played ping pong all afternoon with the adults. Charlie the dog was medicated with his “special cheese,” but that did not slow him down. Around 6 half the group drove up a few blocks to the neighborhood swimming pool for an hour-and-a-half.

 

Sunday we drove to McKinney, Texas, an artsy enclave about a half-hour from us, to have brunch and then mosey around. There’s a record store that I patronize there, but, alas, I did not score anything. I did, however, find something much, much better, which I’ll blog about later this week.

 

We returned home to a quiet house around 3 and just chilled the remainder of the day. I caught up on my reading, my wife watched the horse races, the girls did their thing upstairs. Patch and I have been doing “Thursday Movie Night” for nearly two years, and this Thursday’s was moved to Sunday night due to all the house cleaning. The movie we watched was Fight Club, to which my wife laughed, “Happy confirmation Patch, welcome to the Church, now watch Brad Pitt beat people up!”

 

All in all, a good time had by all. Thankfully I’m working from home today.