My First Day in a Cathedral

Catholisism is a sort of Sunday morning poetry. It's beautiful and evocative, but I have no idea what's going on. The mass lasts a little over an hour, yet there are only ten minutes of sermon. The remainder is filled with song and ritual, organs and choirs and incense burning. We stand and bow our heads, we lift our hands at the elbow, we kneel, we turn to eachother and say 'Peace be with you,' we shuffle through an elaborate circle to eat the body of Christ and to drink his blood.

What does all this mean? I am not Catholic and I was not raised Catholic. Yet even to somebody who has no idea what's going on, the beauty of this ceremony can be overwhelming. The chime of the bells, the high notes hit by the choir, the incense smoke rising across a stained glass depiction of Mary in heaven. They evoke the divine, the celestial. In a Godless universe, what is this feeling?

Even if we dismiss religion as mumbo-jumbo (as many of us were raised to do), it's worth noting that hundreds of millions of people practice Catholicism today and find some sort of meaning in it. Amongst the congregation, I saw only a handful of people with blond hair. Almost everyone had dark features, if pale skin. Compare that to the Aryan features of a protestant church. Why the divide? Is this something passed on from parent to child? From generation to generation for hundreds of years?

And the relationship between the Catholics and the Jews. Reading from a book written in the late 1800s, Jews are depicted as outsiders, often seedy. Just a hundred years ago, could I have walked so easily into a Cathedral? With all its grandeur, its expensive materials and its overwhelming size, this was the creation of the populous, of the majority, of the masses. These were the people that sweat and toiled, that transformed an inhospitable wilderness into a place where people could thrive. This was the great bulk of humanity, their labor divided, organized and hierarchical. A handful directed the many and guided them to create these great monuments to civilization. Because the masses were aligned with the will of their rulers, they were welcome into these places. Jews, however, were on the outside. They had a separate, smaller society with its own, less rigid hierarchy. They did not acknowledge the superiority of the Genteel elites, and so were kept on the fringes. Later, as Western civilization transitioned to capitalism, this outlook gave them the boldness to become leaders within the economy, while Catholics were encouraged to continue submitting out of love for Christ, love for their neighbors, love for order and society.

Even to this day, the Catholic church holds sway over countless people. Even if eternal life is a myth, something essential is passed on from father to son, mother to daughter. Eternity is found in the unbroken chain of heredity. And to those good Catholics who practice the love of Christ, who work hard and accept the authority of society, they are promised advancement through the ranks of heaven. From generation to generation, they will rise through society as long as their spirit doesn't falter and they wander not down the darkened paths.