Midnight Mass

I write this by tree-light, sitting at the kitchen table. The tree lights are those ghastly new LED ones, they make it feel like a spaceship has landed in the living room. It's not much for light (I can barely find my teacup), but we have to earn our romantic gestures, don't we?

I have just returned from a midnight mass at the local parish, St. Pat's. It's the first midnight mass I can remember going to, certainly the first I've been to by choice. When I told my mother I was going, she told a story about the infant me at a midnight mass: evidently I dropped my pacifier over the balcony rail, where it rolled down the aisle until it was picked up and passed hand to hand back to me.

I was surprised to see how many people were there, families even, and at how well-lit the church was—I suppose I had been foolishly imagining monks and candles, as if it were some kind of secret, as if everyone had not had a millennium's worth of notification. I came in during "Silent Night," and sat next to two bored-looking teenagers. To the side of the altar sprawled a bizarre assortment of musicians: a piano/guitar/drums combo, a horn section, a small choir, and two rows of timid girls with handbells (a scrawny ten or eleven year old rang the biggest bells; they were each the size of her head). Presiding over it all was an enormous woman with a bulldog face, the folds of which moved in and out like ocean tides as she emphatically mouthed the words of each carol. It was top to bottom a human enterprise—these yawning parishioners weren't here for magic, they were here because that what you do on Christmas eve.

The mass itself was beautiful. Much of it was sung, including all of the Eucharistic prayers and preparations, which I had never heard before. The priest mostly stayed in tune, fortunately, but his voice was high and thin and cracked once or twice, which I loved. That God was speaking in a weak, untrained voice made me much more inclined to listen carefully to what was being said.

I always feel a little strange when I go to mass, like I'm underwater: all of my movements are slow, awkward, and ill-timed. I forgot to genuflect, I made the regular sign of the cross at the gospel reading instead of the mind/lips/heart thing, I muffed the Nicene Creed. When I went up to take my illegal Eucharist, I half-suspected the server knew I was not supposed to be taking it.

Exiting the church, though, into the dark and the cold, I kept thinking of the chant from the Eucharist:

The Word of God became man; we have seen his glory.

There is such mystery in that, and yet such confidence. I've often felt like Christmas day is a bit of an anticlimax, that Christmas eve is the real holy day. Christmas eve night is always tense and expectant, and if you are up late you are so aware of all the sleeping people around you, the quiet and the calm. It feels like it's under glass. I find it frighteningly easy, on this night, to believe that God could, somehow, become man. Afterwards, at home, I felt something akin to that wonderful after-the-party feeling, that quiet satisfaction when you come home late and unwind in silence, kicking off your shoes but staying dressed up—one of my favorite things in the world. I suspect those things are not unrelated.