Zombie Mass in the Dessert

This year December 24th I went to my local Catholic church to celebrate the birth of the zombie god.

It certainly was pretty.

The first surprise was that when I crossed the threshold neither did I burst into flames or get attacked by rabid Christian maniacs. No big unbeliever alarm went off when I went in.

My wife walked me through the little steps as we went along and I asked questions when necessary. We walked in through the front door instead of the side door to get the full effect of the hall. I was very surprised by the beauty of the church. From the outside the place looks a bit like a desert brick. Like some Egyptian 3000 years ago slapped some clay and straw together into a square shape and dropped it on the corner. It truly is one of the uglier of the buildings in the city.

But on the inside it's lovely, it really is. Firstly it's not gaudy at all. The ceiling is very high and crossed with enormous beams.


We stopped by the holy water and my wife showed me how to cross myself. She walked us past the altar to which I bowed. I learned later that this was the appropriate action and I was pretty much the only one doing it. I just did it because my purpose there was to honor my sisters and brothers who live under Christ. To give my energy and love to them and to support them on this day which is so holy to them.

We arrived an hour early. We'd set out early to hit the store on the way and to avoid traffic. We needed plastic forks, the one thing that we'd missed in our Christmas brunch preparations. We passed the time with my describing the various bits of the church and answering any questions that such descriptions or the actions of the other people filtering into the hall raised. Also by picking on the priests outfits which make them look terribly fat. Perhaps it's not the outfits.

Mass followed pretty much as I had expected it and I won't even bother to try and go into it in detail here. For those of you interested look up 'Catholic Mass' on the googles. They have a very prescribed system and you will find almost 100% of what we did documented there. I will touch upon a few points where it raised interesting points.

There was a lot more singing than I had anticipated which I liked, even though the songs were slightly creepifying. I feel modern Christianity has very little soul. I think the white churches could learn a few things from gospel singing churches. There were readings from the old and new testaments and a little sermon, which I'm told is called a homily and a homily is different than a sermon but a lot like one. I'm totally going to have to look that up myself because I really don't get the difference. I think it's supposed to be less 'preachy.' That is less telling you what to do and more sharing with you. 

I have come a long way in the arena of interfaith and brotherly love and I think I'm doing worlds better in the arena of not being so damned judgemental. I didn't spend much time shuddering in revulsion. In fact I didn't feel judgemental much at all and slapped myself around any time I did. I wasn't there to be judgmental. I was there to share, to offer my own faith, power of prayer, spirituality, whatever. There are monks in seclusion who live their whole lives meditating or praying for the world. Working for the betterment of all. I wanted to do this in my tiny little way for my brothers and sisters in this church.

Watching the ceremony was kind of cool. It's just interesting to watch ceremonialized stuff. It's like watching the history channel. There's a point in mass where you kneel on these little kneeling benches that fold out from the pew in front of you. It's the image you see in all the movies where people are kneeling behind a pew and have their elbows on the seat in front of them.

I didn't get to do that. What I got instead was a whole ton of pain. The guy sitting in front of me was about five hundred years old and came in with a walker. Each time we stood his son, who is older than me, would grab his arm and hoist him up. When we go to the kneeling part it was no surprise that he didn't get up. So instead of resting my arms on the back of the chair I just knelt there with my palms together. What did come as a surprise though was when he leaned back. This forced me to do the same so I spent about five or ten minutes in this position. That doesn't seem like much until you do it for the first time in years. My legs were shaky for an hour afterwards.

The highlight for me was the homily. The priest told a cute little story of some family that couldn't give each other presents so cut out pictures and told us how god wasn't afraid to get down and dirty, he came amongst us. He started the whole thing by asking us questions. Questions he wanted us to ask ourselves and keep in mind. This was where the 'Jeezusy' really kicked in. His first question was 'Who brought you here?' To which I started to go all esoteric but he clarified it to mean who had introduced you to Jesus, who was responsible for you learning of the beauty and love or whatever of our old boy Jesus. This is where the brainwashing started.


But what I realized is that I was hearing what I had hoped for and not the brainwashing that I had feared. Because as he went on about the meaning of the questions and the meaning of the holiday and what not. What was important was that for every time he said "serve Jesus" or "In his name." For every time that he said some variation of "live God's will" He said "spread love to the whole world" at least five times often in the same breath. When he said that we were called to live as Jesus did it was bringing peace and joy to the entire world.


One thing that has driven most, like me, who have been driven away from Christianity is that 'His message' the message that Jesus seems to want us to spread is apparently to spread his message. All we ever seem to hear about the word of god is to spread the word of god. We are pushed away by this unrelenting need to convert everyone in the world to Christianity. It is that creepifying homogenization that scares us and that makes us think of  Pope Urban II commanding Europe to "destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends." A.K.A the Crusades.

What I saw on this night had none of this flavor but instead had the flavor of peace and love. It tasted not of commandments and hellfire but of a teacher offering us some suggestions on how to figure out the answer to a problem and where to go to learn more.