Christmas Mass

By Alan Go

I was still reading new articles being written about Hitchens, where people reminisced about their favourite memories of him. This is why on Christmas eve, an hour before I was due to head off to midnight mass, I ended up watching the intelligence squared debate on the motion, ‘The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.’ There is no shortage of people Hitchens has trounced in debates, but this must surely count as one of his most dominant victories. It is also one of the few occasions where he may not have been the most effective debater on stage, since Stephen Fry rather stole the show. Together, they walked over the ineffectual Anne Widdecombe and Archbishop John Onaiyekan. The numbers speak for themselves really:


Initial Vote: 678 For, 1102 Against, Undecided 346
Final Vote: 268 For, 1876 Against, Undecided 34

This put me in a slightly unusual state of mind as I entered the church. I almost felt ready to be antagonised, on alert for those statements which would cause offense, but I was to leave the church in a different, more complex mood altogether.

To put things in perspective, my family is very much of the ‘Easter and Christmas’ variety of Christianity, where nobody takes their Catholicism too seriously. This means I have had to attend only a few services as an atheist, since my deconversion several years ago, but it has been interesting to see how my experience has changed from year to year.

I should also make clear that I am not obliged to go to church, although my family say they would prefer it if I did. I mainly go because it seems preferable to spending an hour alone in my house. This means I am voluntarily entering into an area where I know I will hear things I disagree with, which would makes any complaining in my part in rather poor taste. In any case, I must confess to being far too afraid of quarrels to do such a thing, and even in the most egregious case, where the Bishop began urging the congregation to set evangelising as their top priority for the coming year, I was confident enough that no-one was taking him seriously, to leave the matter alone.

The religion in this church is well and truly of the moderate, mostly harmless variety, and not worth bothering at all.

My first mass after becoming an atheist was a disorienting experience. The rites and rituals which I had grown so accustomed to suddenly morphed from the sacred and spiritual to the bizarre and nonsensical. Praying for those who are sick or living in poverty seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do, but now it just represents an outdated belief in the power of intercessory prayer. It is impossible to realise how strange it looks to an outsider when the priest proclaims he is changing bread and wine into Jesus’s body and blood until you actually become an outsider, and then it looks very strange indeed.

I remember not quite knowing how to feel towards the congregation and priest at the time. Hatred for having lied to me, contempt for being so stupid, pity for being deluded, anger for being so self-righteous; all felt right at one point or another. Over the years, these have moderated gradually down, and now I just feel mostly bemusement.

The most striking thing upon entering the church this year was its relative emptiness. The hall is large, but only half the seats were occupied for one of the most important services of the year. There were no altar servers either.

I’ll admit to experiencing some schadenfreude upon noting these facts, although I do not know how much the drop in numbers is due to our parish’s uncharismatic priest, or any reasons other than a general drop in religiosity.

The combination of low attendance and slightly inept organist served to put a damper on what is normally the redeeming feature of any service, the music. On the whole, I prefer listening to Christian carols over most secular offerings at this time of year, probably due to the fact that I can still recite many verses from memory, and can even remember harmony parts, from my days in a choir. Considering that these people were celebrating the birth of their saviour, there was a notable lack of any festive spirit, which makes it less surprising that people would rather stay at home than spend an hour in forced seriousness before starting their family traditions.

This was the first time I’d attended mass since the catholic church had introduced some new modifications. In their quest to keep up with the times, church officials decided to go back to a more literal translation of the Latin. Instead of, ‘And also with you,’ we now have, ‘And with your spirit,’ and, ‘In one being with,’ has been replaced with, ‘Consubstantial with.’ There are various other harmless, synonymous substitutions, but my favourite has to be the addition to the confession of the words, ‘Through my fault, through my fault, through my own grievous fault,’ because apparently people just weren’t feeling guilty enough.

Curiously though, I could really feel the effect of these changes. I may have found the low level murmuring of responses in unison disconcerting once I no longer believed, but there was also a part of me that could feel the urge to join in. That’s the result of attending mass every week during your childhood. This allowed me in a way to reconnect with the sincerity I felt when I still had faith, and the profound feeling of the numinous that touched me on occasion when I was part of the community that muttered their quiet replies.

This time, the rhythm was no longer there. The words that were committed to memory no longer matched what was being spoken. It was as if a key anchor to the beliefs of my childhood had been removed, causing me to become yet more detached from my earlier state of mind.

I used to say that my lengthy time as a believing Catholic gave me some insight into the mind of a believer. I don’t think I can make that claim anymore. The growing confidence and clarity of my atheism has made the mental reasoning of believers increasingly alien, until I find it hard to empathise at all. Now, I realise that the emotional triggers are also fading.

Not that it matters too much. If I have lost anything of importance, I am sure I have gained enough to compensate, and then some.