Mass Hysteria

I sat through the mass like a good Catholic should. More than most, I suppose, Catholics don’t really enjoy the mass, at least in the sense of deriving great personal pleasure from it. But we know that it’s good for us. We endure it more than embrace it – not unlike going to the dentist.

I entered St. Vincent de Paul five minutes after the start of the service, which is always a slightly embarrassing thing to do, what with all the looks from the parishioners and, possibly, the priest. So I slipped into the last pew to the left of the altar, just behind three screeching Hispanic toddlers, the children of children.

This was place of my baptism, of Fr. Bill, a large, burly man with hands the size of a small octopi, of eye-stinging incense pouring out of a bright brass orb with holes large enough to let loose the burning embers inside and set the whole damn place up in chomping holy spirit flames in seconds. Fr. Bill’s handshake could have turned coal into a diamond on demand, or split an atom, releasing enough energy to light Pontiac’s streets for a few nights, or bend the bars of a tormented man’s personal prison, and then reach in, grab him and pull him back to himself.

But he was also a man of such unearthly calm and kindness and, when speaking to him, one felt as though they were sinking slowly into the floor. He injected a buttery sureness and certainty into the eyes of everyone he came across, an undeniable dose of faith and love that became a part of people, and the people of it, like a benevolent symbiotic spirit-thing. 

I was 8-years-old at the baptism, or was it 9? It was late, for sure. The church likes to get its members in early, when God’s little creatures are soft and screaming, their cute pudgy-pink cheeks belying the fact that their brain is, at that point, nothing but warm marshmallow fluff. A drooling, shitting baby does not tend to protest this application of God’s good grace. They think they are taking a bath anyway and it’s just as well, for their dirty little souls need a thorough cleansing.

Like many things in my formative years, Mike got a bit of a late start on this one. But he managed to put down the bloody marys for one Sunday morning and haul me off to make it official. And it’s a good thing. God forbid that I should have died in some tragic biking accident, or by the evil hand of kid cancer, or by testing too much of Mike’s “patience potion.” There was nearly 10 years of sin clogging my spiritual circulatory system, blocking the efficient movement of the holy spirit throughout this make and model of God’s temple. Life after the baptism would be different, I was told, for if I was to die now, I wouldn’t go straight to hell. Yes, there was a chance for hell, for sure. But it wouldn’t be the express mine shft elevator ride toward white hot, stoked coals of fire and melting skin. One might descend deliberately, a speed along the lines of a walk along the beach at sunset or the gait of a disabled person or the shuffle of a senior citizen after a stroke. That slowly. 

Fr. Bill poured bucket after bucket of God-approved life-water on my head in what seemed like more of a carnival game than an initiation into the church, the first wade into the mystery of the sacraments. Then it was over and all I felt was wet and embarrassed, as the sound of Mike’s late-70s model .35 mm Minolta clicked and clicked and clicked at a time when nothing should have been...clicking. He took pictures of me like some kind of Vietnam-era photojournalist embedded with a backcountry outfit that was in the shit a lot. He knelt, he scampered, he stood on steps and climbed up to the lectern. All the movements could be seen in his polyester gray pants, which pulled and stretched as he contorted his legs into all the positions necessary to capture this moment. And then he started to direct people into the most advantageous pictoral positions – during the baptism – in a show of his personality that I had simply grown accustomed to. If he wasn’t anything, it was bashful. My father could convince anyone to do most anything. He was bold and brash and came off sometimes like a real sonofabitch. Which he was, God love him.

But here I was once more, older, in this sanctuary of old, dark wood and high stained glass windows, the names of the benefactors for each filter of God’s sunshine labeled on a section of glass at the window’s bottom. On a sunny day, like today, the sunlight would shine through the windows’ colored, paper mache glass in blood reds and deep purples and wheat-field yellows onto the worn rows of benches, the comfort of which was like a penance itself, a butt numbing endeavor that should be doled out by priests in the confessional as a punishment after a penitent purges their deepest and most embarrassing thoughts. No wonder we knelt so much.

The priest, a man in his early 40s, spent his time with his mass, like a mother breastfeeding her newborn or a farmer walking his land, reaching down to pick up a clump of earth and breaking it open, letting it slide slowly though his fingers. After the traditional back and forths, after the standing and kneeling and standing again and holding hands, after the time tested words and phrases – seared into the mind and able to be remembered after decades of roaming far from Rome – had been uttered, the priest laid into Stephen Hawking, about how he was anti-God and should be dismissed, shamed, ignored, I lost interest.

All the memories of this place – the hours that were so numerous they turned into weeks, maybe months – began to fade away. It wasn’t just that I’d been away from mass for so long, or that I’d been away from St. Vincent de Paul, on that lonely stretch of Wide Track Drive, by the abandoned office buildings and crack houses, for years. It was that I’d been away from this way of encountering God for so long. And for all the ways that I’d been moved by this faith for nearly a decade of my life, the mass ended with me not wanting to be there anymore.

There were so many times that I had felt truly embraced in that musty place by the spirit of God, of the Lord, of the Great Big Being Up There. And I can suppose one of the things I admire about this faith is that it’s often experienced in visceral ways, ways that you can touch and feel, see and smell.

The feel of the sanctified host on your tongue and how it dissolves and turns into a thick gummy mess of pure gluten, a warmth swelling inside me that I had no other explanation for expect to say that God had planted something in me that he intended on growing for a lifetime.

The sweet burn of the blood in the back of your throat, which, as a kid, feels something like rebellion if the child wasn’t so native to the meaning of it all. But is it even possible for anyone to fully understand how wine actually becomes blood, a process that just so happens to be one of my all time favorite English words, transubstantiation?  

Sitting across from a man, a familiar stranger, and divulging – puking out, really – all of the things that you are ashamed of, a litany that can stretch back days or years or decades, and crying or laughing or contemplating fully your life outside the closing click of the confession room door. And then leaving that place and feeling light and airy, like you just emerged from a tomb and into the light of newness and possibility. Feeling like you are floating on a puffy cloud to somewhere.

The time when I saw Mike – always in the second row – weeping as Betty, an aged woman of deep, dark ebony, sang Ave Maria after the Eucharist, swelling the sanctuary with the heart-spinning, contemplative sounds of that song to the point that I thought the slate sections on the roof might come loose and hurtle down the steep grade to the parking lot below.

Or the time as an “is-he-eating-enough?” skinny altar boy, when the robe hanging off me somehow drifted over the flame of a votive candle, setting my left arm aflame and seriously delaying the start of mass. From that point forward, I was put on crucifix duty, which made Mike proud because I was at the front of the procession every Sunday. He smiled at me every time I walked by him.  

I’d been moved there, that’s for sure. But I knew now that God could – and even should – be found and admired and felt in places and ways that were outside of the tight, rehearsed, fashioned framework of this church, this faith, this tradition. I left the church through the front door, past the priest before he readied himself for the post-mass hand-shakings and “Have a good Sunday’s.” The holy water that I crossed myself with dripped from my brow as I made my way back to the car. I didn’t wipe it off.