O
ur church has a very active group of altar boys. The ages range from about 7 to men in their forties; most of the time, it's a crowd of pre-teens led by a couple twenty-somethings. On a slow day, we probably have five altar servers, and on big feasts, like today's Corpus Christi, we had perhaps twelve young men attending.
I absolutely adore this facet of our church. The altar servers have become a completely independent and self-perpetuating organization by this point. Our community is blessed with a lot of children, and it has become fully expected that boys will at some point do their time as altar servers. But rather than this being a punitive service, it's clearly considered an honor by all involved. Our priest no longer has to teach anyone anything -- the tradition has become complete, with the elder boys teaching the younger ones how to go about their roles, and graduating them when they feel they are ready for new responsibilities. Very young children have to learn patience, silence, choreography, reverence; and in exchange, they get to enter into a special order, bonding and making friends, and developing a sense of interpersonal dependence and obligation. It's an absolutely beautiful thing.
Frankly, I believe that a healthy society would have many, many of such organizations. Self-sustaining, self-organizing, teaching virtues to their members, and generally enculcating a sense of responsiveness to society. In fact, this sort of thing did used to be very common, in the form of local amateur sports teams, political societies, craft workshops, unions, poetry clubs, enthusiasts of various kinds, and so on and so forth. We've lost the knack for creating these sorts of organizations, it seems. At least in my imagination, they had just the right amount of bureaucracy, tempered by real love and character. Nowadays, bureaucracy comes in hard and fast, and dominates the mixture, almost inevitably. I wonder what it would take to get some of that old feel back.