Three visits to the chapel

 I was feeling so low about work (I may write about that later) that Rocky stopped at the St. Charles Borromeo  chapel in Arlington  so I could pray but  this visit was not in the least bit uplifting. The carpet in the Blessed Sacrament chapel was dirty and smelled moldy. The flowers in front of the Blessed Sacrament were dying and a strong odor of wet decay came from the befouled, slimy water. The chairs could've used freshening up as well. I knelt down in front Our Lord and felt  a wave of sadness at seeing  Him treated so poorly in his own house.  I wasn't expecting much to begin with. St. Charles is one of the ugliest churches in the diocese and I think the architect must have been an A-plus student of the brutalist school,  but ugly style or not there is no excuse for the lack of tenderness and  attention to the chapel.  St. Charles is not a poor parish, far from it but it's not even a matter of finances.

How much would it cost to throw out the dead flowers? Heck, how much time would it have really taken to change the water so the flowers would last longer than a day? Would it be so hard to get the janitor steam clean the carpet?  I got up and listened to the staff laughing in the office and then I went back to the chapel. Rocky came in and we prayed together. A young Filipina lady came knelt down to pray so we felt that it was okay to leave. I thought about that chapel and the prison floor and ceiling scene from The Passion of the Christ all the way home.

A few days later we took a mini break for Rocky's 50th birthday and went to Mass at St. Alphonsus in Baltimore. St. Alphonsus looks like my childhood idea of Heaven. The architecture soars straight up and there are saints or angels everywhere you look. After Mass we went to the Adoration chapel. It was totally different than St. Charles. The flowers were not dead and dying, the stone floor was clean, the pews were hard wood but not so dirty that it felt unnerving to sit there and there was palpable tenderness and love filling the room. Someone did their best to make a resting place for our King. The next day we went to Colonial Beach in Virginia and visited St. Elizabeth of Hungary. It's a darling little church with friendly people. We prayed in the company of four ladies and again, with not a lot of money they made something really beautiful for God.