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“Midnight Mass ” 

Christmas 1985

By Charles Moon

     Isn’t it ironic that the one place a preacher’s son would feel completely and utterly out of place is in church – any church. That is what I came to realize in 1985.

      I had not attended church services since we left Philadelphia until I started dating Elizabeth, whose family were devout and practicing Catholics. My religious background was a huge disappointment to Elizabeth’s mother Bonnie, who envisioned a good Catholic boy for her youngest daughter. While I was able to dissuade Bonnie from standing in the way of our relationship, it was my promise to allow Elizabeth to raise any children we might have in the Catholic faith that allowed the wedding plans to proceed.

      We were married in September and immediately moved into our small handyman special of a house in Auburn to be near my job. By the middle of December Elizabeth had found temporary employment with a local staffing agency and I was beginning my second year at Lee and Stephens. Between work, the house and all the adjustments of newlywed life, the impending dread of the holiday season passed over me for the second consecutive year.

      Christmas Eve arrived with a warm front racing up the eastern seaboard of North America, bringing with it a mass of tropical air. Temperatures continued to climb all day until, by the time we were ready to leave for Elizabeth’s parent’s house, it had reached 53 degrees. There was no chance that this first Christmas as husband and wife was going to be white. Even though I had never fully realized the romantic concept of a white Christmas, feeling that it was simply a nuisance for travelers at best, Elizabeth was disappointed that the mild weather had given Christmas a spring-like feel.

      “What a beautiful day,” I commented, loading our portion of the family gift exchange into the trunk of my little Renault.

      “Why does it have to be so warm? It doesn’t feel like Christmas.”

      “No, it doesn’t feel like Christmas.”

      I tried to hide my enthusiasm. I was happy that it didn’t feel cold and miserable and tense, as if there were a giant disappointment waiting to fall on me. That’s what a typical Christmas felt like to me. Elizabeth had not fully realized my dislike for the season.

      The sharply angled December sun laid swashes its intensely un-festive light of on my leg and shoulder as we made the westward journey from Auburn to Palmyra along the interstate. Elizabeth was playing with the radio trying to find Christmas carols that would thaw her frozen Christmas spirit. I rolled down my window to cool off the irradiated portions of my body.

      “Do you have to have the window open so much, David?”

      “It’s hot on this side. The sun is blasting me.”

      “It’s too much air.”

      “All right. I’ll roll it up a little. Gee, what’s got you so cranky?”

      “This weather. It doesn’t feel like Christmas.”

      “What's Christmas supposed to feel like?”

      I was serious. I knew what it felt like to me and from everything I had heard from the age of 4, it wasn’t supposed to feel that way. Elizabeth looked at me like I was making fun of her. I wanted to know how Christmas was supposed to feel because I didn’t feel it.

      “Everything seems different. Not like the Christmases I remember.”

      “You’re a married woman now, Beth. Everything is different… including Christmas.”

      “I don’t like it. I wish Christmas was always happy and fun … you know, Christmassy.”

      “You have great Christmases every year?”

      “I guess not.”

      “Most of the time?”

      “Are you making fun of me?”

      “Not at all, Beth. I want to know what makes your past Christmases so special so I can make the future ones better.”

      Elizabeth sat quietly for a few miles staring ahead into the traffic, trying to discern if she should answer my question. She never answered me. Instead, Elizabeth returned to repeatedly pressing the search button on the car radio in her unrelenting mission to find appropriate music for the season – her season. The radio played Nat King Cole’s “Christmas Song.”

      “Have you ever had roasted chestnuts on an open fire?” I asked after the song had faded into a commercial for Big Ted’s Auto Body.

      “You are making fun of me.”

      “I am not. I want to know what makes roasted chestnuts, which taste like burnt sawdust, so special on Christmas.”

      “David. Don’t be so literal. It’s symbolic and you know it.”

      I got the picture – people warming themselves around an open fire roasting chestnuts while enjoying the company of friends and family. It wasn’t about the chestnuts at all, but for all the lip service that this season paid to sentiment, it always seemed to be secondary to the performance of tradition at any cost. Elizabeth wanted to wallow in the delusions that the perfect Christmas was achieved through repetition. I was convinced a good Christmas was only possible through change.

      “Snow and chestnuts would make everything better.”

      I was being facetious.

      “A white Christmas would be so nice.”

      “Do you remember the Christmas blizzard when we were kids? I was in Philly then, but I think New York got hit too. It dumped on the whole East Coast.”

      “The snow was over my head. It was so much fun climbing the drifts and making snow forts. That was a great Christmas.”

      “Did I ever tell you what a rotten Christmas that was for me?”

      “Oh, please David. No bad stories today.”

      Elizabeth shut me off. I had tried a few times in the past to tell her about my holidays but she didn’t want to hear about them. Having anything negative to say about the season was blasphemous in her eyes. We rode the last fifteen minutes in silence with only the fading radio signal to interrupt the sound of the trucks as they whizzed by us.

      We arrived at Elizabeth’s parent’s house at the same time as her older sister, Stephanie, who was living in an apartment in Auburn with her new husband. Stephanie was a teacher in the Catholic high school in Auburn and had married one of her co-workers a month before Elizabeth and I were married. I think there was this silent competition between these sisters though neither of them would ever admit it.

      “Merry Christmas,” Bonnie called from the kitchen where she was preparing the annual holiday buffet.

      Each of us returned the greeting as we crossed the threshold. When my turn came, I uttered the phrase with as much sincerity as I could muster, but no matter how much I wanted to have a merry Christmas, I didn’t believe it was possible so wishing it to someone else was nothing more than a perfunctory lie. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

      It took less than ten minutes for the comments to start from Bonnie about observing Catholic traditions. Had we been to mass yet? Confession? Something about not eating right away so we could attend the evening service at 6:00 to satisfy our Christmas obligation. I thought it paradoxical that attending a celebratory church service would be thought of as an obligation, but many aspects of the Catholic faith were strange to me.

      Stephanie finally spoke up.

      “St. Catherine’s in Shortsville is having a midnight mass. It’s a brand new church and people say the building is magnificent. I was thinking about going.”

      Tim looked up from the newspaper surprised, as if this was the first he was hearing about attending a midnight service.

      “I haven’t been to a midnight mass in ages,” Elizabeth remarked.

      “You want to go?”

      “You don’t mind, David?”

      “No. It sounds like fun.”

      Bonnie was satisfied that this would keep her daughters on the righteous path of The Church and not drift into the decadence of Protestantism. She returned to the secular activities of cooking, exchanging gifts, and prying into her children’s personal lives for the remainder of the evening.

      The four of us, Tim and Stephanie, and Elizabeth and me, drove to the new Catholic church in Shortsville a little before midnight. At least 400 other people had the same idea. We had to park several blocks away and walk the rest of the way to the main entrance.

      The building was large but not imposing. The first thing I noticed about it was the lack of traditional church architecture. There was only one main entrance on the front of the building. Mr. Bastian’s history classes had taught me that churches generally had three. The exterior was a light yellow stucco with white granite accents around the door. Three wide cement steps led up to the two sets of double doors that were being held open by teenagers in the traditional white alb of altar boys. We joined the crowd funneling up the steps into the building.

      Inside was even more of a surprise. I had expected a religion as anchored in tradition as the Catholic Church was to have rigid design guidelines for its structures. Instead of the central nave and apse of the classical basilica design of every large Christian church built since the Middle Ages, this was more like a theater. Rows of arced wooden pews wrapped around a gradually descending curved seating area that focused the parishioners’ attention on the altar, rising from a marble platform at the bottom. The altar was centrally placed under a tremendous stone arch that formed the termination of a concave tile wall that rose up from behind. It was like a holy band shell.

      There was an obvious lack of decoration throughout the entire structure. Walls were plain and monolithic, interrupted infrequently by small stained glass windows. The lighting fixtures were hidden behind simple cornice moldings casting an amber glow on the white ceiling around the perimeter of the room. The altar area had a single large cross on the back wall centered in an expanse of turquoise tiles. There was a bench at the base of the wall for the priest and his attendants to sit. Every other square foot of the raised marble platform was covered in potted red-leafed poinsettias.

      As the people filtered into the cavernous hall, each newcomer would stop and look around. Some would express themselves with a very vocal “wow”. Most just surveyed the room with wide eyes and found a place to sit. We were forced to stand in the back against the wall, being one of the last groups to arrive.

      The organist was playing an over-blended jumble of Christmas melodies while the people whispered in ever increasing tones to be heard over the shuffling of 800 feet on an uncarpeted cement floor, until the room was filled with a constant drone of white noise. The organ stopped and from a balcony directly over our heads, trumpets announced the arrival of Christmas day with a blasting fanfare.

      I looked at my watch. It was 12:03 a.m.

      The room turned quiet and the organ began the prelude to the processional hymn. Hundred of subdued voices accompanied the choir while the priest and his entourage solemnly marched down the central aisle. It took three complete verses of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” to situate the Monsignor, three altar boys, two priests and a lector in the various chairs and benches placed around the altar. The priest blessed the congregation with his open hand waving the sign of the cross and they all responded in kind before sitting.

      I looked around the room and imagined these other families returning happily to houses adorned with evergreen wreaths and strands of lights, never knowing the emptiness of an unrealized Christmas. A young girl three pews in front of me rested her head on her mother’s shoulder and quickly fell asleep.  A family to my right all wore red sweaters with matching pants and proudly displayed their broad Christmas smiles. Somewhere in front a baby started crying. These were just people living their lives the best they could and I began to feel contrite at judging their feelings and beliefs so unfairly. All I really wanted was someone to understand mine.

      My religious background had subjected me to most of the readings and scriptures so often that I could have almost recited them along with the priest. The sermon followed, praising the birth of Christ while clumsily working in a tirade against the hedonistic values that modern society venerated on a daily basis. We had to stand throughout the entire service, even when custom required us to kneel. It was, for me, tolerable to that point. There was nothing I hadn’t heard or seen before. Yet, for all the pomp, circumstance and empty promises steeped in mystic history and unyielding tradition, it was nothing more than a morality play with little relevance and no moral.  

      It was the Eucharist – the communion – that most holy of sacraments – that touched me this year. The priest raised his cup and blessed the wine to finish the ritual preparation. Then, one by one, the people on the altar took their turns at receiving the Holy Spirit in the form of a small wafer. The congregation followed one row at a time in a slow wave of bodies standing and walking silently to the altar for their personal communion with Christ. As the people rose, the movement came closer and closer to the back of the church like a tsunami about to crash around me.

      Elizabeth turned to her right and followed the person in front of her with hands folded in catatonic prayer. My sister-in-law, and every other person pressed against the terminal wall of this sanctuary, did the same, leaving me standing alone, framed by the solid backdrop of empty an cement wall. I felt singled out. I was not allowed to participate in this sacred practice because I was not Catholic. People approached me and I pressed closer to the wall to allow them to pass. If a darting eye or curious nod was not offered on their way to their personal communion with Christ while passing this heathen in the house of God, they conspicuously ignored my existence. I wanted to melt into the wall and become invisible. Even my wife had abandoned me here. It was painfully obvious to me that I did not belong here. I didn’t want to be here. This was not my church and it didn’t want me. This was not my Christmas and I didn’t want it.

      Elizabeth returned to my side as if nothing were different. Stephanie grabbed her sister’s hand and pulled us to the exit. Since receiving the Eucharist made the mass “official” we could leave in good conscience and miss some of the traffic – Stephanie had a way of reconciling compulsion with convenience. We left St. Catherine’s with the muffled strains of Yuletide hymns at our backs.

      Stephanie had been suitably impressed with the church’s size and newness, with the amount of money the church had raised to erect the structure and the final cost of building it. I thought it was an abomination. It was structurally sound and aesthetically deficient. It lacked any consideration for design and historical integrity, sacrificing them completely for ease of construction and utility. I kept my mouth shut. I had no right to comment openly about my architectural opinions, about the exclusionary practices of the Catholic Church or how out of place Christmas made me feel. I was, once again, alone.
           

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