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| From not-exactly the glass-enclosed nerve center.... |
“Expansive view includes parking lot” is not something any realtor would advertise to make a property or home attractive. But my second-floor sitting room with its multiple windows offers precisely that, and I want to tell you that this is a feature, not a bug.
I can keep tabs on the 6:30 Mass attendance, even when I am not the celebrant. I can see how confessions are going, to discern whether I need to go over to the church and help. One recent Saturday, the one with the constant and heavy rain, I was convinced that few hardy souls would come out for a sacrament that can be postponed so easily. But no – I looked out about halfway through to see eight cars in front of the church, then to watch them leave, one by one, then be replaced by another group. Fr. Brillis wondered how I knew how many penitents he had shriven!
I can watch the daily drama of school drop-off with its choreography of minivans, sports car, pickup trucks, and Catholic assault vehicles (CAV’s), often able to guess the level of chaos in the passenger section and distractedness in the driver’s seat.
This week the lot was shining and empty with the snowfall that cancelled school and kept Mass-goers home. I watched to snow removal expertise of Mark Macpeak’s landscape team deftly clear the lots and the surrounding sidewalks, more than half a day before the heavy front-end loader arrived on a flatbed truck to start clearing Blair’s lot across the street.
Just Saturday, I saw the Holy Name guys expertly dismantle and remove our outdoor creche. You and your kids may have enjoyed that Nativity tableau up close, from the little plaza in front of the church. But you may not have known how many people venture onto the property from the boulevard to admire the scene of the birth of the Savior from the warmth of their cars, sitting sometimes for quite a while in, you guessed it, the parking lot. The Sunday of Epiphany, the week before, Fr. Brillis and I drove by on our way to the annual priests’ dinner that evening. There was a car sideways in front of the creche, and as we passed I saw I a cell phone camera held up to capture the happy scene.
In more mundane moments, I can tell which of the school administration and faculty are working late – or early; I can spot when some disabled vehicle or confused driver has rolled up our driveway looking for respite, often from the madness of the beltway. And I notice when one of our regulars or neighbors is crossing the property at highway speed.
The view changes come spring, when the great maple trees burst into leaf and my view becomes more constricted but more arboreal; less of the parking lot, and more park-like. That has its pleasures as well, but not the practicality and drama that are the benefit when the trees are barren.
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot, is the refrain Joni Mitchell wove into her environmentally-plangent ballad Big Yellow Taxi, way back when I was a kid; more recently Counting Crows seems to be responsible for the rendition that is currently heard. It’s a catchy song, but at least in our case, nobody paved paradise.
Daily I call down God’s blessing on whoever decided not to pave all the way from the church doors to the boulevard, but rather left grass, to which was later added trees; many, splendid trees. Those doors open into the very forecourt of heaven itself, whose splendor and delight are better even than the paradise from which our forebears were cast out. And that we may dare to tread these sacred precincts, outside the gates of heaven there is a place to park. We have paved the way to paradise, and put up a parking lot! It bears watching, a truly expansive view.
Monsignor Smith
