The Chronicles of Mark and Jennifer Ch. 15

Mark told me about the 'responses' that the congregation gave to the ritualistic phrases the priest used, and, oddly enough, those didn't seem all that strange to me. It seemed like Catholics don't sing as much as we Protestants do, but there was this one song, the one that closed the service, Jesus Christ Is Risen Today, that set my heart soaring. I used the Hymnal, which Mark and I held together, but I noticed: Mark didn't seem to need it, even for the later verses. I had asked Mark, after my first weekend at home, whether he was a Christian, because my mother wanted to know, but saying that you're Catholic and actually attending Mass are two different things. Only someone who attends church fairly frequently knows the hymns well enough to not need the Hymnal.

Mass took only an hour, which seemed really short to me. In our church, we don't have the formulistic responses, but Brother Gabbard's sermons can last two hours. The passionate preaching of our church, next to the softer and thoughtful tone of the priest's homily, I thought Mark called it, was really different to me.

We were walking back to the apartment, holding hands. The morning was mostly cloudy, but it didn't really look like rain. There was a question I had been meaning to raise with Mark, a kind of uncomfortable one, and one that I thought that was best raised after church, after a lesson in forgiveness.

"Mark, what do you know about your father?" He had said that, not having a father at home, he wasn't really sure what it meant to be a husband.

"Almost nothing. Why?"

"Well, you know that your sister Lisa actually went to visit him a couple of years ago, and she told me where he lives. What would you think of inviting him to our wedding?"

"No."

"That's it, just no?"

"Just no." Mark was not smiling, and he wasn't holding my hand anymore, either. Lisa had warned me that raising this subject could lead to our first fight, and I should have had enough sense to drop the subject immediately. Unfortunately, my good sense deserted me.

"Are you sure? He's not that far away."

Mark stopped, right in the middle of our walk home, and with the coldest look I've ever seen on his face, said, "If my father is at the wedding, I will not be."