This Sunday was another bitterly-cold, windy day and I was walking into church about 8:30 to help get ready for 9:00 a.m. Mass.  As I hurried across the parking lot, trying to get to the warm church as quickly as possible, I was struck by the sight of the small First Student yellow school bus with its back door open at the curb by the entrance to the church.  Usually you don't see the back door of a bus open, so I stopped to see what was going on.
As I looked, the driver took out walker, after walker, after walker, and carefully set up each one by the passenger door of the bus.  One after another passengers got off the bus, carefully made their way to their walkers, and slowly inched through the bitter cold on their way to Mass.  There must have been a half-dozen walkers, along with another group of passengers who didn't yet need walkers but were clearly close to that stage. 
After Mass there was a baptism, and I got a chance to talk to the great-grandparents of the baby being baptized.  They were an elderly couple who had driven up from Albert Lea-- about 100 miles-- to be at the baptism, despite the weather.
These folks-- the great-grandparents and the passengers on the yellow First Student bus-- were cleraly members of what has come to be called "The Greatest Generation." But I wonder if we really think of them that way.  It seems that, while we pay lip service to their achievements, we long ago abandoned any notion of looking to them for wisdom or guidance.  As a society tend to be very dismissive of their ideas about how one should live one's life, about morals and values, about truth, goodness and beauty.
While I didn't ask anyone from the bus or the baptism why they were there or what motivated them to go out on a morning when they would easily have been justified in staying home, here's what I think their actions told me.
I think they were saying that it is supremely important in your life to have a solid relationship with God, and part of that involves experiencing the mystery of the presence of the Lord among us-- which is what we do at Mass. Part of having a right relationship-- any right relationship-- is being committed, and being willing to do things that might be uncomfortable, like going out on a cold morning.
They were also saying something about the importance of ritual and regularized relationships, that events like marriage and baptism aren't just empty forms but are part of the threads that make and hold together the fabric of our lives, and that without them we see people, particularly children, cast adrift without any stability in their lives.
The next time you hear someone say that going to Mass doesn't matter or that marriage or baptism are just outdated rituals, you might ask them to consider the wisdom of "The Greatest Generation."