Mass should be a come-as-you-are party.

I went to Mass to pray. My mother had called that morning. "We put Papi in a nursing home today," she said, her voice trembling. My father suffers from Alzheimer's disease and, in the past year, it has advanced quickly. We all knew that my mother's capacity to take care of my father would soon be reached. Yet the words stung. It was one thing to plan for my father's stay in a nursing home. It was another to actually put him in one.

Like the moment when the casket is lowered into the ground, the reality of the human tragedy that had just occurred overwhelmed me, and I began to cry. I felt the need to pray, to register a lament before the Lord, to ask the "why" question and then put my father's soul in God's mercy. Blessedly, it was Sunday. My mother had called me an hour before Mass began.

The church began to fill when I entered. As usual, I was given several pieces of paper - bulletins, envelopes, and, of course, a guide to today's Mass - containing the reading ins, singing outs, standing ups, and sitting downs all carefully prescribed for a communal celebration. Indeed, the community's presence felt comforting. I was looking, however, for an out-of-the-way place to sit. I did not want to be alone, but I also needed a certain amount of privacy. My prayers this day would be very intimate, very personal.

Looking around, the prospects of finding a private nook or cranny seemed hopeless. Our church's space had been converted into a modern post-Vatican II vision of what a worshipping community should be. The statues of the saints along with their side altars had been removed. The main altar was now in the middle of the church with the pews arranged like a horseshoe all around it. There was no place for the shadows of the sacred, only for its bright full sun.

Resigned to the lack of privacy in our church's space, I found a place and began to pray. Suddenly music began. The Mass had started and everyone stood up. I stood up like everyone else and felt helpless and captive to some sort of tyranny that, for the moment, I could not name. Nonetheless, it was a tyranny that oppressed the intimate and the personal.

The prayers of the church came, and here I felt at last I could be intimate with the Lord and lift up my father's name and the sorrow in my chest. The horseshoe design of the church, however, made such an intimate moment problematic. Each seat was oriented in such a way that one could not help but face another. To kneel when everyone was standing would have been conspicuous and embarrassing.

Again, this nameless tyranny chafed against my deepest instincts to kneel and lay my soul bare before the Lord. The priest asked for our personal intentions. Names were spoken, and I struggled to get my father's name out. My father's name, however, dwelt in a deep place within my soul, and, before that place had been reached, the priest was now giving thanks to the Lord for having heard all our intentions.

Right after Communion, while the long lines of the faithful marched one by one to their personal and intimate encounter with the Crucified and Risen One, the tyranny appeared to be broken by the messiness of the Communion lines. I knelt with the Lord and, covering my face, at last found the moment of intimacy I had so badly needed.

Surprisingly I also found something else - the presence of the entire community supporting me in my prayer. Many of them were also kneeling and praying - their own intimate encounter with the Lord present in their gestures of a sacred, private rendezvous. Ironically I felt much closer to this community in their private moments than in the public moments so carefully prescribed by the liturgical guide to the Mass.

The Mass ended and the assembled community filed out. The ushers began to pick up the twisted bulletins and printed guides strewn across the pews. They had to hurry and so would I. The next Mass would begin in ten minutes. There was no time to linger behind and pray. The experience after Communion, however, stayed with me.

The following week I left for San Antonio, Texas. Father Virgil Elizondo, rector of the Cathedral of San Fernando, had asked me to join him and several other theologians and religious specialists to observe the liturgy at the cathedral. Something wonderful was happening there, and Elizondo wanted us to help put into words what amounted to a marvelous experience. I went to Mass at the cathedral that Sunday with the image of my father in a nursing home still troubling my heart.

As I entered the cathedral, I expected the usual battery of papers and the ubiquitous liturgical guide to the Mass, but none were offered. The only papers in sight were those adorning the crucifix of the black Christ of Guatemala, an imposing image encountered as soon as one enters the cathedral. Countless prayers had been written on bits of paper and then pinned on and around the crucifix. I felt a profound invitation to write my own prayer down and pin it along with the others.

My attention, however, was diverted. All around the cathedral another community welcomed us in. Saint Martin of Porres, Saint Jude, and Our Lady of Guadalupe surrounded the sacred space of the cathedral. Candles burning by the kneelers in front of these silent greeters gave witness that someone, many someones, had stopped to kneel and offer a prayer. Indeed, many were doing so now.

The feeling I had felt after Communion the Sunday before returned. I felt close to these souls who were now praying, and even those who had prayed there before and left a candle to mark their prayer. Suddenly I realized that the assembling community for this Mass was much bigger than the one filtering in through the cathedral doors. Not only was today's Mass to be attended by a visible community sitting in the pews but also by an invisible community that included the sick, the homebound, and even the dead. I began to understand why Elizondo had asked us to come. The Mass had not started yet, and I had already experienced a sacramental experience of sorts.

The Mass began without a guide. None was needed. Although I was not familiar with the opening hymn, I felt no pressure to sing. It felt all right to kneel as the procession came in. Indeed, many were kneeling when the singing started. People were moving about the side aisles and praying within the various nooks and crannies provided by the profusion of saints and virgins surrounding the assembled community. I marveled at this sacred symbiosis between the public and private moments of this assembled community. This intertwining of the public and the private broke with all sense of decorum or proper liturgy. It was, in effect, a sacred messiness that was very effective toward a worship experience.

I then realized that this messiness, this sacred chaos, was connected to the presence of that much bigger invisible community surrounding the pews of the visible assembly. The private and intimate moments of the visible assembly made present the invisible community, which also took part in the Mass. My deep need for a private and intimate moment of prayer, I now realized, was also a longing to have my father present at the Mass.

There were more surprises. I was startled, for example, to hear bells ring during the eucharistic prayer. The Cathedral of San Fernando, after all, could not be classified as a center of high-church liturgy. Nonetheless, bells were rung after each moment of sacrifice and thanksgiving: "This is my body. . . This is my blood." After each ring, the whole cathedral became silent for a moment. Even the children seemed to know this was a special moment and for an instant were quiet. The ringing had another effect. It stirred something deep within my soul and set it free. I now knew the name of that tyranny that had haunted me the previous Sunday.

At my church, we had been celebrating a banquet without any sense of sacrifice. The Mass at the Cathedral of San Fernando had been a sacrifice-become-a-banquet. The community that gathers for a banquet is not the same community that gathers for a sacrifice. The community that gathers for a banquet is visible and public, joyful and unified. The community that gathers for a sacrifice prefers to be less visible a broken society searching for community.

Neither, of course, describes the true sense of the faithful community gathered at Mass. The People of God are both a broken society and a sign of true community. But many post-Vatican II liturgies tend to emphasize a society that has already become a true community, a community supposed to be realized only in the end times.

Unreal expectations are made of such assembled community. We now must enter Mass as the community of the end times, the community that will see the lion and the lamb lie down together. The lion and the lamb who are to follow the community of these times to Mass have not yet learned to be peaceful and quiet. Nonetheless, many post-Vatican II eucharistic liturgies stress a happy, unified community, and, thus, a tyranny begins to form.

Such display of unity makes its own demands. The entire assembled community must act as one. All must get up at the same time. All must respond in unison. And, above all, all this must be done in as visible a way as possible. The sign of unity, it would seem, depends on the visibility of the community performing the liturgy in unison.

Indeed, in liturgies where such a sign of unity must dominate, the invisible must be suppressed. There is little room for spontaneous and significant response. The assembled community must be guided step by step through the rite of the Mass, much like a computer must follow the steps in the lines of code dictated by its program. This is the price of unity, or rather, I should say cheap unity. For to make believe that we have reached that unity pointed to by the cruel sacrifice that is the crucifixion of our Lord is, as the famous theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "cheap" grace.

The Mass as sacrifice-become-banquet offers a different vision of community. We come searching for community, a visible sacrifice, a sick and broken society gathered about the altar to find our prayers of sacrifice merging with the prayers of thanksgiving. Community now becomes an accompaniment, a pilgrimage to the end times, not fully realized but within our reach through the sacrament of the Eucharist. Community as accompaniment of the visible with the invisible becomes a costly sign of community made possible through a ghastly price. As such, the sign of community is prayer, the prayer of lament that begins in sorrow and ends in thanksgiving.

At the Cathedral of San Fernando, I was finally able to pray, to bring my father's presence into the Mass, and, together, we accompanied each other for a little but very meaningful while. When our churches, like San Fernando, begin to provide the nooks and crannies to welcome the church's invisible community to our eucharistic liturgy, true renewal shall begin. The gathered faithful will be able, once more, to pray and be accompanied in their costly journey towards a joyful and gracious family reunion.

Alex Garcia-Rivera, professor of theology at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California.