Why I go to Mass

The Gift of Divine Grace

I am a Catholic, and I am at peace with this. It was not always so; theological certainties aren't easily reconciled with empirical realities. I bristle against doctrines that allow exclusion to take precedence over all expressions of love. I have not come to accept these things; rather, I am at peace with believing that the Church is wrong about some very important things, as is every human institution.

And I feel fortunate that when I go to Mass, these dissatisfactions are subsumed by the ritual humbling of these meticulously arranged liturgies. The doctrinal certainties of one God become an expression of absolute supplication, the affirmations of the Holy Trinity an embrace of divine dissonance. The spiritual space created is an anti-void; an enriched, endless summoning of pure being.

I feel the Spirit descend like the dewfall, I picture myself sitting under my roof, unworthy yet blessed. In taking the sacrament of communion, I feel the living Christ come alive in me. There is no other way to explain its profound effect.

As I kneel, my thoughts - my prayers - come to me in wordless perfection. There are words, but they aren't quite mine. Never is my hope, my love, so purely formed. My fears - which normally sit inside me like a cold, heavy stone - is dropped into the deep blue of an endless lake. I feel it fall, and fall, and fall, until it moves beyond my reach. My emotions are like the ripples on the waterskin, entering and exiting me like breath, slowly folding back into themselves until all that remains is the calm of the blue. I rest in a kind of living sleep – a state of deep grace ­– until it is time to rise. And when the time comes, I go in peace.

The older I get, the more I find within the ritual of mass and endlessly giving, endlessly renewing gift; a place in which the detritus accumulated in the ongoing course of an everyday life is shed. David Malouf once wrote of a child's epiphany, in which the mottled skin of a scab gave way to reveal a skin, lustrous as pearl. So, too, does the Mass offer an experience in which an outer layer becomes a shadow that disappears with the Light of the summoned Christ, the distinct creation insolubly bonded to the creator. I feel my wife, my children, my departed loved ones circulating in my blood. In fact, they are my blood.

In the end, there is nothing but blood.

Amen.