Why I Wrote…

…A Crazy Tale, and thus submitted you to a post far longer than the internet’s attention span can handle. (Hey look! Something shiny!) If you have not read A Crazy Tale, then don’t read this until you do, you uncool ignoramus.

I was having a great conversation with a girl interested in Catholicism, while we busted suds during an evening shift. She had attended her boyfriend’s Confirmation mass, and was letting me in on her experience, which had been wonderful. She didn’t have any clue what was going on; her Christianity had been a recent development, and was limited to the facts that there was a God, Jesus was his son, and that he died for her and loved her. Not a shabby set of facts, when you think about it. But regardless of what she knew, what she felt was incredible; a fierce, unexplainable pride in her boyfriend for getting confirmed, a wonder at the liturgy that surrounded her. She wanted to cry with joy at many points in the mass, she was fascinated and loved it enough to – with no more than the experience of an unexplainable mass – to approach me about it, to have a discussion about whether God was calling her to the Catholic church.

He is, as he calls all of us, but what really hit me about that conversation was what she said next: “I don’t understand, though. When I spoke to my friends afterwards they were all saying, ‘that was so long!’ and ‘that was so boring!’ And there I was with tears in my eyes.” When I heard this my heart broke, because I could see the doubt this would cause, to see Catholics bored with their very prayer!

The problem is that familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, it breeds boredom. And in Catholicism, familiarity is a lie. What we are essentially saying, when we bemoan a mass for being boring or long, is that we are too familiar with the meeting of heaven and earth, the infinite ripping into the finite and filling it to overflowing, glorifying everything, and saving the world. But the truth we are clearly denying is that the Mass is made up of the sort of stuff that we simply don’t have the capacity to become familiar with. You and I, being natural products of a natural universe, cannot become familiar with the supernatural. We can become familiar with the strangest animal in the darkest jungle of the most obscure country in the world, we can become familiar with alien races, we can become bored and tired of the rings of Saturn and the Andromeda galaxy, but not the Mass. For the Mass is supernatural, so every time it is experienced it is in contradiction with our natural being, and in terrible alignment with our supernatural souls. The thousandth mass we attend is just as supernatural as the first; it doesn’t matter if we’ve attended it before – it still is outside of our experience, bursting into our lives like an uninvited adventure.

If familiarity is a lie, then what is it that makes heads nod in the pews, besides hangovers? The pretense of familiarity. We seem to believe that simply seeing something more than once makes it familiar. We know it all. But if you tell yourself you know all about your wife, then what’s the point of marriage? Would it not become boring, a peaked-out graph, a race finished before you were done running? But if, like most husbands, your wife remains mysterious after so many years, your marriage constantly brings you closer and closer to her but with always so much more to learn, more love to give, more room to grow, more to experience and feel, then would the marriage not be a happy one? I appreciate the value of catechesis, of attempting to know it all, of learning all about our faith, but I daresay it’s just as important to unlearn Catholicism as to learn it.

If, like the man in A Crazy Tale – which was based, by the way, on Chesterton’s own Crazy Tale – we walk into our Church and force ourselves to realize that we really know very little about what is going on around us, that we are surrounded by mysteries grotesquely revealed, and symbols overpoweringly rich, and truths outside of our very experience as human beings, but granted to us nonetheless, then we might begin to garner the reverence that comes from the statement: “This is all so crazy…and it is true.” If we see our religion not so much as something we know, but as something we approach with the trembling of one being allowed into a secret ritual, a beautiful and incomprehensible dance of Ancient Africa or a living legend of the Orient, a tale that we were told as children, with an Enemy and a Hero, a Quest and a Victory, a Divine Mystery that remains mysterious – which really is what we are invited to – then perhaps we would see the Holy Mass with the eyes of my friend washing dishes, brand new eyes, confused, ignorant eyes – to be sure – but eyes that weep at the incomprehensible beauty and truth we are surrounded with.

Take the word “Holy Mass” and repeat it a hundred times. Repeat until the words become strange to your lips, some foreign and alien garble on your tongue. Unlearn the words. Repeat them until all presuppositions and pretenses of familiarity are lost, and all that remains is something outside of you, words that you do not give meaning, rather words whose meaning is unique to themselves, a meaning unfamiliar because you did not invent and attach it to them, rather a meaning for you to find, a mystery for you to dive into once more. Then go to the Holy mass for that hundredth time, a stranger in a strange land, but so very home. For seeing something for the hundredth time does not make it familiar, it makes it unfamiliar, like the word repeated too often, and then by our reverence and awe of such a crazy gift, perhaps we will inspire the visiting non-Catholic with the beauty of our faith.