During the chilly but very bright morning yesterday, I hopped a train to South Orange and its beautiful Gothic-revival Our Lady of Sorrows, where I had the great pleasure of witnessing the first-ever Solemn Mass (the English kind, not the Tridentine) celebrated by the Rev. Alvin Kimel — the former Anglican priest beloved in the blog world as Pontificator Maximus.

The Pontificator himself had given me a heads-up, as we had just recently started corresponding. I'm sure that if he had told his readers about it, there would have been a blog-fan contingent, but as it was, there was just me and the church's parishioners, including its excellent 30-voice choir (which includes Father Kimel's wife).

In his post about the Mass, Father Kimel says he messed up the chanting. Whatever he did wrong was not noticeable in the pews; his chants went up to Heaven as sweetly as the incense.

I was struck by his homily and am sorry he has not posted it online, as anything I might write about it would not come out as well as his own words. [Update: The notes for the homily are now online.] His jumping-off point was that if we would meet Jesus, we must first meet John the Baptist. He repeated that point for emphasis. Then he described John the Baptist and his mission of urging repentance.

That in turn led Father Kimel to discuss the importance of the Sacrament of Penance. He noted that Our Lady of Sorrows had three priests who would "joyously" receive you for confession. The way he said "joyous" made me think of how the father received his prodigal son. It was so moving; I couldn't imagine anyone hearing the homily not wanting to confess.

Although I have heard at least one other priest speak of confession during a homily, I don't believe the topic is broached often enough. Hearing Father Kimel speak of it in such awed terms, emphasing the urgency of it — he urged congregants not to delay — brought home the beauty of conversion. His words reinforced the experience that I had upon entering the Church, an experience that I know Father Kimel had as well, because, checking his blog, I see that he previously quoted the very words from G.K. Chesterton with which I and many other converts identify:

When people ask me, or indeed anybody else, “Why did you join the Church of Rome?” the first essential answer, if it is partly an elliptical answer, is, “To get rid of my sins.” For there is no other religious system that does really profess to get rid of people’s sins. It is confirmed by the logic, which to many seems startling, by which the Church deduces that sin confessed and adequately repented is actually abolished; and that the sinner does really begin again as if he had never sinned. And this brought me sharply back to those visions or fancies with which I have dealt in the chapter about childhood. I spoke there of the indescribable and indestructible certitude in the soul, that those first years of innocence were the beginning of something worthy, perhaps more worthy than any of the things that actually followed them. I spoke of the strange daylight, which was something more than the light of common day, that still seems in my memory to shine on those steep roads down from Campden Hill, from which one could see the Crystal Palace from afar. Well, when a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning and look with new eyes across the world to a Crystal Palace that is really of crystal. He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in His own image. He is now a new experiment of the Creator. He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old. He stands, as I said, in the white light at the worthy beginning of the life of a man. The accumulations of time can no longer terrify. He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.