A Christmas Card to Those Who Go to Church Once A Year, Love Sick Pilgrim

Every year, my local church divides each Mass on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day into two separate services, going on at the same time. One is held in the lavishly decorated church building, celebrated by the normal parish priest – like any other Mass. The other is held in the reception hall next to the church building, in a large conference room that normally houses banquets and parish picnics, complete with a retired priest celebrant and a temporary altar on wheels.

Guess which one I go to every year.

As I sat in the back of the reception hall before Mass began last year (or maybe a year or two before – traditions don’t change much in my little town), amid the whiny screeches of people dragging and settling into metal fold-out chairs and children mumbling/laughing/crying, I thought how irritating it was that a huge herd of people only came to church this one time a year, and made it necessary for our normal service to be divided in two.

Why must we kill the fatted calf for them?

As the Mass began, and the retired priest and altar servers and lectionaries paraded up the shoddily formed center aisle, I found the same familiarity I encountered week-after-week, no matter at which Mass, at which location, in whatever language. Is this reverence? Feels too lazy for that. Maybe just comforting. Is this feeling rare for the once-a-year church-goers? Does it even matter?

Mostly, whenever a Christian source mentions these annual church-goers, it is to degrade them. The lack of faith and simple adherence to cultural norms shown by the once-a-year crowd places a giant target on each of their backs for those comfortably settled in their faith routine.

Well, screw that.

If faith is only acted upon because it’s comfortable, we are doing it wrong.

When people who find the Catholic faith (or Christianity in general) ridiculous, it’s easy to avoid going to church. But if they go on Christmas because it makes Maw-Maw happy, they willingly become the least comfortable people in the room. But they are there. And that matters.

When I go to church every week because it’s convenient, that is in no way bad, but it is less heroic. If we do the right thing because it is convenient, is it the same as struggling to do the right thing? Catholic author Anthony Burgess explores this in A Clockwork Orange.

The Christmas Mass continued in its routine elegance. When the priest rose to give his homily – the unscripted portion of the Mass – his talk wasn’t what I expected. From the cheap microphone, in the conference hall with poor acoustics, the priest’s message was on the benevolence and mercy of our loving God. Not on the dangers of sin, nor even on the traditional element of the original Christmas. Not even a tongue-in-cheek joke about how he wished the church was this full every week. Just on the perfect love that God is. And that idea stayed with me after the homily was over.

Hopefully, it also stayed with those who only went to that Mass to please someone else. I hope what they remember from going to church that day is profound love, not an aftertaste of condemnation. Maybe these people would be more likely to return to church if they left with something other than a traditional dose of Catholic guilt?

As this syrupy thought settled in my head, the liturgy of the Eucharist, the higher of the two halves of Mass, began.

And I realized that beyond the logistics of physically getting to church week-after-week, the struggle of believing at all is real, at least it is to me. Even at Christmastime.

Sometimes I don’t get the miracle I pray for. Sometimes I keep hurting when I beg God for relief. Sometimes the church feels hollow and I feel foolish. Often, even.

What the hell am I even here for?

The sounds of people clumsily rising from their chairs to form two haphazard lines to the front of the room wake me from that reverie. But not really. Here, at the climax of Mass, we queue up to receive a bland wafer that we eat, which we are told becomes the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of our timeless and unrecognizable God, who came in the form of a human some 2,000+ years ago, and broke bread with his followers the night before he was executed, telling them that the bread was now his body and ordering them to repeat that act in remembrance of him until he comes again.

Despite what holier Christians than me would say, that isn’t easy to believe. Faith is hard most times.

So I feel more at home among those who go to church to please someone else, than among the crowd who never imagine missing a week.

The question, then, is why go? Why do I hold onto belief?

The best answer, for me, is the same question Peter asked: where else would I go?

Life doesn’t automatically get better for those in church, despite what Pop Christianity says. Sometimes life is awesome; sometimes it sucks. Faith doesn’t change that.

But where else would I go?

The Christmas Mass ended and people hurried from the reception hall to the crowded parking lot, hoping to escape the inevitable traffic jam. In spite of doubts, maybe because of them, I knew I’d be back next week.

***

This Christmas, I hope you have peace. Even in the midst of your struggling and even when the walls come crashing down around you, I hope that you feel loved.

Even if–especially if–you only go to church once a year.

Not a typical Christmas post. Not a typical Christian blog.

Merry Christmas, pilgrims.