It’s an hour before midnight on Christmas eve; everything is still on the M80. The heating is turned up full, slowly returning the so-dependent festive spirit to quiet and chilly bodies. Mum is in the driver’s seat beside me, as ever unnerved by the nighttime driving. The expectancy of Christmas hangs softly overall. Outside the window, a moment occurs between each passing car, one of consideration and peaceful resentment, an acknowledgement of the disturbance each is making on the other. We take a wrong turn, mum says the road didn’t exist when she lived here and I think it’s funny she ever lived anywhere different. A house appears familiar. It’s decked out in twinkling lights and conjuring a household scene just out of reach – mum’s childhood home; we’re almost at the church.
When I had first agreed to go to midnight mass, decidedly indifferent to most religions and passively grumbling of Christianity and Catholicism, I had truthfully fancied myself as a bit of a martyr. I knew she would feel less awkward with someone with her, so I was going. Mum grew up the youngest of four in a church-every-Sunday Irish-catholic family and though she never speaks about it in any great detail, I can always feel the longing and nostalgia for the ritual and reverence of her Sunday morning trips up the road. She hasn’t considered herself religious for around twenty-five years but defends with quiet resolution her catholic identity; wearing a small cross necklace that once belonged to her mum. I thought I could hardly deny one who has indulged me for so long, an indulgence in a childhood nostalgia of her own, and anyway, I’ve always loved a good carol singing.
We arrive around twenty minutes early, owing both to our obsessive punctuality and mum’s hazy memory of midnight mass being queued out the door. I don’t think we quite considered that thirty years had passed, and pulling up into the dark little car park made it abundantly clear that there was definitely room for us at the inn this Christmas. Slightly nervous and giggling at the ridiculousness of the possibility that we would be tonight’s only audience, we got out of the car and made our way to the church door. I still hadn’t really known what to expect: I had to google multiple times on the way over to confirm that midnight mass wasn’t actually four hours long and was definitely the one hour that I had been promised. We were greeted at the door by a man handing out programmes and the relief that there were actual practising Catholics who knew the rules of the audience participation part of this whole thing.
We took our seats near the back. The church was small and brightly lit, it would have been almost clinical had it not been for the clouds and clouds of incense burning. The audience that filled up maybe a third of the rows of pews were singing demurely back at an older couple with a guitar and piano. Mum said afterwards that she thinks the man is the older brother of a girl she went to school with and part of a family whose piousness she had awed at as a girl. In and amongst the singing, I was quickly taken by the ceremony of it all. As the singing ended and the priest began the mass, I couldn’t stop thinking about how interesting it all was. The complete faith and childlike belief with which the priest carried and looked into the face of a vaguely ugly ceramic baby that represented his lord and saviour moved me so deeply that it remained an image in my head for the rest of the mass.
For the next hour, I wasn’t really paying much attention to the words of the priest but remained in a state of complete wonder at the idea of devoting one’s entire being to something beyond this life and this body, something that this man before me visibly had. I have never put my belief in the intangible. The forgoing of human desire, the discipline, and the safety of this man’s belief was something that before that night, this hedonist would have thought of as denial for the sake of denial. Come down to the pits with the rest of us I say, come fight it out with the gluttony, sloth and greed of planet earth. I had thought of Christianity as a denial of something real, as a child’s escape. In a moment in that church, I felt as if the devotion of this man transcended the space between us, his blind and utter faith in something, an invisible conversation.
In the car home I couldn’t begin to articulate the effect the priest had had on me, so I stayed quiet. Passing back over the motorway, I was almost embarrassed by the effect one hour had had on me, wondering if I was fickle. I am by no means converted and remain a devout sceptic of all, but I feel a change. I think a lot more about discipline and the strength of character it requires, of the nobleness and dignity in denying yourself your every whim and fancy because you know and believe that there is something bigger. There’s a world outside my own mind: there’s my mum, even my own life in thirty years’ time – they require blind faith. I might not have a lord and saviour to whom to devote a life of good deeds to, but I think I can definitely have goodness itself.
Stella Coutts
(Expressing The State is a monthly column by Stella Coutts, exclusive to qmunicatemagazine.co.uk. Stay tuned for more installments!)
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