I was so happy to finally be
able to go to Midnight Mass again. I've
been too sick to go for the last three or four years and I was excited to feel
up to a late night in a crowd. I began
attending Mass about ten years ago when I missed a religious component to Christmas
in our very secular household—I particularly missed singing all the Christmas
carols. I chose Mass over a Protestant
service because there's lots of singing, praying, liturgy (that I can bring my
own meaning to), and not so much preaching.
And generally Catholics really know how to enjoy the Baby Jesus and the
Holy Family, Protestants tend to skip over Jesus' actual life—he was born so he
could die, that's the only important thing!
Last night my 15yo and I
went to a different church than we've gone to in the past, to meet up with a
friend of hers. The service was very
much about the pageantry and spectacle: the
Knights of Columbus in full regalia, swords aloft, to guard the procession of
the Bible and the priests to the altar; incensing everything; bowing, kissing,
crossing, in front of statues, Bibles, Eucharist paraphernalia; the entire
liturgy was sung, we bounced from seated to standing to kneeling to
standing. It was high drama religious
theater.
Then the pastor comes down
in front of the altar to preach and starts out with a slide of an Orthodox icon
that he used to introduce his point in object lesson form. Initially I was impressed because this guy
was clearly reaching outside his own tradition in what he considered a
broad-minded and ecumenical inclusion.
But then he veered off into his main point—the baby Jesus depicted in
grave clothes and in a coffin, the Reason for the Season is Death and Ultimate
Sacrifice (as if being born a human baby
isn't a bigger sacrifice for a deity).
That God "loved" us so much that …blah, blah, blah, John
3:16…that God loves us enough to transform us (loves us enough to change us from our obviously currently unacceptable
selves) if only we will let him.
Still the onus on us to DO something to "be reconciled" with
God.
But truly, all that
depressing theology aside, the bits of the homily that upset me the most, that
I raved about all the way home (at one in
the morning, to the annoyance of my totally "all religion is a joke"
daughter) was the casual, almost throwaway references to the Culture War: the priest opened his homily with "Merry
Christmas! (We responded "Merry
Christmas, Father") You can say that here. Unlike Out There, like in the stores and
stuff, where you might not be able to say it, here we rejoice that we can
loudly proclaim the reason for our celebration…." (Really? There are places, stores or anywhere, where
people are not allowed to say Merry Christmas to each other? Where does this priest hang out?), and
then later his patronizing tirade about an atheist conspiracy to evangelize our
youth into atheism, by spending "lots and lots and lots" of money on
"billboards around town, I'm sure you've seen them" that try to claim
God isn't a rational proposition "when we all know, everyone knows deep in
your heart that God exists."
Why? Why make up shit like that? There are enough
reasons that actually do exist, that are real problems faced by Christians even
in a society that privileges Christianity, why make up stuff? Although I admitted, that he probably
actually believed it was true. He seemed
like a True Believer™ so he most likely didn't even think he was
propagandizing.
Which was probably the
saddest thing I saw last night.
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