It’s Christmas, and I haven’t been to a church service in years.
When I was a child, I went to Catholic Mass a few times, mostly as a spectator. We weren’t Catholic. My mother, an agnostic, married my non-practicing step-father, whose mother was very much a devoted Catholic. So we went to church because we were Judeo-Christian in our upbringing, if not in our practice.
Of all the annual masses that I attended, the one that stands out the most was a particular midnight mass on Christmas Eve. I was about 10 years old. The church was cold and the priests (I am guessing they were priests) swung incense which made it very difficult for me to breathe. Everyone else seemed able to handle it, but I couldn’t breathe. My mother took me out to the vestibule where there was a wooden bench and told me to wait there. Then she went back to the service. It was even colder in the vestibule than it was in the sanctuary. I was so sleepy (it being midnight after all, and me being 10 years old) that I lay down on the bench. I knew I wasn’t supposed to lie down on a bench in a church, but I was so tired. I managed to ignore the cold to get some sleep, but it wasn’t very deep. At some point a man walked by and saw me lying there. I immediately sat up. I didn’t want to appear homeless. When he left, I lay back down.
So that is my most vivid memory of a Catholic mass- being tortured by cold and sleep while my parents sat through a service they didn’t believe in. More
