A Catholic Goes To Non-Catholic Mass
Given the demographics in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, nearly all of the masses near my apartment were in Spanish. I didn’t think this would be too much of a problem - I had just spent some time in Buenos Aires where I didn’t have an issue speaking Spanish when I was on dates or hanging out with locals.
But there’s something about ecclesiastical Spanish that made it incomprehensible to me. By week cuatro of Lent, I had given up on Spanish mass - comprehension at church wasn’t something I had meant to give up for Lent.
I thought about just making my way to a predominantly English-speaking Catholic church a bit further away, but it didn’t seem to have much of a robust young adult presence, something I had been more interested in lately. I was new to the city and wanted to make new friends.
My problem seemed to solve itself in the unlikeliest of places, a date with M, one of the few girls I’ve met who could pull off a pixie cut. At the dimly lit jazz bar, she spoke quickly and drank her espresso martinis even faster, traits that seemed out of line with her numerous references to the non-denominational Christian church she went to.
Still keen on finding a church, I asked questions about her church. These questions led us down a variety of theological rabbit holes, which, of course, transmuted the date’s romantic tension into discourse you would expect to hear at a Bible study.
By the end of the night, we had referenced Jesus enough so that even our goodbye hug felt too intimate.
The next morning, M sent me the address of her church in Brooklyn. She went to the branch in Manhattan, so we wouldn’t be seeing each other that coming Easter Sunday.
While I didn’t meet the future mother of my children that night, I would, at the very least, understand what was happening during mass, service, or whatever Luther’s spiritual descendants (spawn?) called it.
Catholicism is kind of like the In-N-Out of fast food franchises. Its sacraments, traditions, and masses maintain a remarkable level of consistency across the world. Sure, every mass is in its own language and there may be slight variations, but the core of it is all the same - two readings, a homily, and the Eucharist.
The most appealing part of this consistency is that it isn’t just consistent across space, but also time. Every sentence said by the priest in the Catholic mass is there for a reason - debated over in various councils and presided over prayerfully by a string of Popes. The first of these Popes was Peter, whom Jesus declared as the “rock upon which I will build my Church,” a Biblical quote that every Catholic will gleefully recite to Protestants or Orthodox Christians who grumble about papal supremacy.
This was a very long way of saying that there was some amount of Catholic guilt attached to going to a non-Catholic service. I wondered if I would have been burned by the Spaniards in the 15th century if I tried shenanigans like this.
Still, my curiosity got the better of me. I even went early to the service since I saw online that there would be a coffee hour beforehand.
At the coffee machine, I met L and T, two girls from San Diego. We talked about normal people things - what do you do, where are you coming from, how long have you been in the city - which told me that I did not accidentally wander into the New York branch of the Westboro Baptist Church. Encouraged by this, I sat with L and T near the front of the church as the Easter service began.
What happened after was interesting.
I think that the secular explanation for what happened would be pretty straightforward. People get emotional when listening to music, especially in group settings. This sort of environment can initiate the release of neurochemicals like dopamine or serotonin, which, after a certain threshold, can elicit an emotional response that potentially turns into a physical one - like salty water being released from your pupils, otherwise known as lacrimation.
The fun thing about these kinds of explanations is that you can use them to make anything meaningless. All you gotta do is continuously deconstruct an experience into its component parts until you’re referencing quantum mechanics. Making love to your wife in a private beach hut in Bali is just mammals trying to procreate in a tropical environment, which is really just sperm cells trying to reach an egg, which is really just a bunch of carbon molecules moving collectively upstream.
In hindsight, I wish I had fought my instinct to deconstruct the experience in the moment, but I couldn’t help it. I tried to pinpoint what exactly it was about the environment that was causing me to be so emotional.
The whole crowd was swaying along to the five-person band performing at the front of the church, led by a lead singer who was way too pretty and talented to be doing this for free on Sundays. The lyrics were sufficiently comforting - something about telling you to give up all your burdens to God and that everything would be alright.
Whatever the specific trigger was, something about the service had set off a pretty big realization for me.
Up to that point, I don’t think I really acknowledged the magnitude of all the changes that had happened recently in my life. In the past twelve months, I had moved to Southern California after being in the Bay Area for nearly ten years, ended an eight year relationship a few months later, and then proceeded to live and work out of seven different cities over the course of my six month digital nomad stint. Oh and ya, as if that weren’t enough, I moved across the country to New York City a couple weeks after coming back to the States.
I had always thought that I was doing ok - good even. During the past twelve months, I had seen so much of the world, gotten promoted at work, and got my first short story published in a literary magazine. I was having a lot of fun in my dating life.
Life was good, right?
Right?
Whenever I get too caught up in the problems in my life, I try to think about how insignificant they really are, especially in the cosmic scale of existence.
I’m 29 years old living in a universe that’s existed for 15 billion years and spans trillions of galaxies, each of which contains 100 billion stars on average - to call my problems the equivalent of a grain of sand on a beach would be an insult to all the grains of sand out there.
I think what got me emotional at the Easter service was the reminder that there’s a different way of viewing our problems. The Christian viewpoint is that our problems are insignificant, not because they’re so small, but because God already has a plan for each and every one of us. So why worry?
All the music, the sermon, the lights, the swaying, and the whole Easter service production seemed to hammer home the point that Jesus made in Matthew’s Gospel, which I’ll end on.
“Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”