Show me the way to go home; the nice thing about a universal church is that you're never far from family.

Once a year I have to leave home and travel to a big city for training.

My friends say, "Oh, boy! What fun!"

I think, "Five full days in the clutches of airlines and hotels."

Usually I'm up at dawn, slipping into my sneakers and a windbreaker, heading out for a walk. It's a time when the people who really live there are going about their business, opening bakeries and shops, putting out the newspapers, arraying the inventory. Trucks are loading and unloading, and the traffic noise, usually a roar later in the day, has yet to peak. More often than not, I'm headed to Mass.

There's an instant community in every city--the Catholic Church. It usually begins at the front desk of the hotel, when I ask for directions to the nearest parish. You'd think that the desk staff would hand over a piece of paper and be done with it, but it has never happened this way.

In Vancouver the young bellman, a recent convert, called his mother on the phone to check out the daily Mass schedule. "She goes every day," he assured me. "She says she can pick you up if you want." We spent 10 minutes talking about the previous year's Easter Vigil, when he was baptized, and how his life had changed since then.

In Albuquerque it was the desk clerk's sister's parish, and I got detailed directions on how to get there, which door to use for the daily Mass, and how to arrive early if I wanted to pray the rosary with everybody.

In Toronto it was the concierge, who had grown up in the cathedral parish and knew at which Mass I could hear their famed boys' choir.

In Madison, Wisconsin they had no due, but I went out and asked a taxi driver, who said, "You're Catholic? Me too!" and gave me all the details.

It's not called the universal church for nothing.

This year it was Dallas and St. Rita's, just a short walk from the hotel. When I asked at the desk about a church and Ash Wednesday services, the clerk said, "Oh! It's Ash Wednesday already!" and told me how to get to St. Rita. "My cousin goes to school there," she said. Another clerk told me how to find the church in the large parish complex. Catholics everywhere.

That evening the church filled up fast. When I greeted the young woman who slipped into the pew beside me, she took me for a regular parishioner, confiding that she hadn't been to Mass in years.

"What a perfect day to come back," I told her, as we chatted about Lent and how she had found herself back in church. I told her I was from Maine, and she shivered at the thought.

Together we figured out that the hymns were in the book in front of us, that there was no missal, and that the responses were on our little violet piece of paper. "I'll just do what you do," she told me, and I assured her that this would work out just fine.

Then came the entrance hymn and the familiar rushing sound of the rising assembly, the comfort and anticipation of moving into prayer together. It seemed to me that the woman beside me made the sign of the cross with special gratitude, or maybe it was my gratitude for the gift of her beside me that made it seem that way. She remembered the responses and made them with greater confidence as the Mass progressed. After receiving the ashes she sighed a great exhalation of tearful relief. I patted her shoulder. We both dried our eyes.

We knelt in prayer, and in awe. We held hands for the Lord's Prayer and hugged at the sign of peace, smiling in happy amazement. She asked if we had to receive from the cup, and I said, "No, but you'll be glad if you do," and she was. We sat together after Communion, joined in thankful silence, soon to part. We said goodbye in smiles and tears, strangers here no longer, one of us having found a home away from home, one of us home again.

"Did you find St. Rita OK?" the hotel clerk asked the next day. The 5:30 was really crowded, we agreed, and didn't the visiting priest seem nice?

Just like home.

ANN LEBLANC, author of How to Go To Confession If You Don't Know How (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2003).