The Beauty of Anti-Triumphalism

In Boston there is a subculture of unemployed individuals who spend a lot of time in Catholic churches, and since being laid off last year, I have become a member of the tribe. One day I went to a 5:15 p.m. weekday Mass at a Franciscan shrine downtown. The priest came out of the sacristy with aid of a walker, the lector was an older woman with a hunched back, and one of the men who took the collection had a prosthetic hand. The scene reminded me of the title of a Flannery O'Connor story, "The Lame Shall Enter First," and I found it all to be sublime.