So I’ll share some of the more funny experiences I’ve had as an altar server. Some happened at mass itself and others were in preparation for mass and others even farther removed from the experience on the altar altogether.
Here’s my first one and it comes from the first mass I ever served and the second comes from the first mass I ever served with a friend.
So one of the duties of the altar server is to light candles. So one needs to be comfortable with fire and lighting matches and generally speaking one needs to be comfortable enough with fire so as not to burn the church or themselves down.
So at my first mass, Henry (Enrico) Di Lello and Dominic Finouli were the two “Senior” altar boys assigned to train me. They were allowed to wear cassock and surplice but I, a Junior, was only to wear a white alb with a hood and a cross around my neck and a white rope tied around the waste to cinch the alb up a bit.
I always thought it looked a little too Ku Klux Klan (more on that in a later post).
Regardless, Henry lit a match for me and lit the taper on the long-handled “candle reach”–so one could light those really high candles–and proceeded to push me out the door to light the altar and tabernacle candles.
It’s harder than it looks. Candles can be testy and some don’t light with an easy touch. Tapers are also very temperamental. They burn quickly, but they are thin resulting in long burned ends of taper remaining and more importantly resulting in long flames if left burning too long.
So the first candle was up high and wouldn’t light and so the taper was burning…and burning and soon I had a flame on the edge of the candle reach that was probably (I’m not exaggerating) the length of my forearm.
Dominic saw that I was about to set the church ablaze and came running over and pulled the lever on the candle reach down to completely snuff out the flame.
I was all of 9 years old. Not exactly the start I was hoping for, but the candle was twice my height. I nearly fell over twice just trying to reach it. My early thought was “If I become a priest, I’m never going to have candles up this high in MY parish.”
My second experience was when Billy Butler (you just can’t make these names up can you?) and I were alone in the sacristy with nobody to light the match for us to start the candle lighting process. No sexton, Larry and Charlie were two older retired men who were always in the church prepping priests for mass.
No Larry, No Charlie, No priest. No mom or dad outside either. It was a Saturday mass and we had walked to church together from our houses. We were afraid of two things:
1) Msgr. Troy would come down and find that the candles hadn’t been lit yet.
and 2) In order to avoid situation #1 above, we’d actually have to light a match ourselves.
So attempt after attempt of us nervously trying to light a match by barely touching the flint strip on the back of the book of matches proved fruitless. Finally I had seen people fold the matchbook over and trap the match between the cover and flint strip to provide enough friction to create the spark that one would need.
So I tried it myself. Viola! I struck my first match.
The problem was that it scared me so much that I jumped, throwing the match out of my hand and landing on the cloth counter. I slammed the match with a book to put out an ensuing fire. That worked, but it also made a small burn mark on the cloth cover, not really enough to notice, but one that Monsignor would surely see.
Monsignor Cajetan J. Troy was our pastor. He was well-respected in the Archdiocese and often travelled with Cardinal Cooke to see the Holy Father. When the Pope visited New York, Msgr. Troy was enlisted to go with Cardinal Cooke and bring the Pope back to New York. Msgr. Troy was a great man. I loved him but we also respected him and even feared him a little. I’m not sure why…he was a gentle man of great compassion and would only get angry when we made too much noise in the sacristy. He came down and I told him about the burn mark and about how we were really trying to just prepare the altar for mass.
Msgr. Troy looked at the burn mark and then at us and replied, “You kids shouldn’t be lighting matches anyway! But here, let me light the taper for you. Now go light the candles and don’t worry about this little mark. I’ve made the other three marks in it myself spilling coffee and such on it. But you boys need to be more careful. Don’t worry about the candles until the last minute. It doesn’t take very long to light them.”
Whew! And in hindsight, there was really never any reason to fear our pastor. He served as my confessor for years and was always so compassionate and understanding. I cried when he retired and was annoyed when the new pastor forbade him from coming to visit the parish once.
His brother was a Paulist and I had served my first mass with him. Fr. Joe Troy, CSP was also a very compassionate man and was great with us kids. It was these two men who helped me love serving mass and I owe them a great debt of gratitude. It was quite ironic that I ended up working for the Paulists for nine years after serving my first mass with one of them.
So what altar boy or girl stories might you have to share? You can post comments or send me the lengthier ones to [email protected]