I moved forward onto my knees. It was cold and the wood cut into my flesh.
“Let us pray,” the young priest beseeched as he spread his arms. It was another lonely Christmas eve for me, alone with a scattered three or four hundred people in an aging cavern of a cathedral that could have held several thousand.
“Speak but the word and our souls shall be healed.”
It was a slightly irreverent mixture of curiosity and boredom, and an affection for the theater of religious ritual that had brought me there that night. I like churches. I like the huge open spaces, the way light plays through stained glass, the old wood, the tapestries, carvings, and that dusty smell. I love the little echoes amidst quietness. And I love pipe organs, the bigger, the better.
I have often thought churches would be great places for feasts and dances. Remove the seats, put huge tables along the sides and fill them with food and wine. Then bring in music, classical, jazz, or rock and roll. That ought to get the spirit moving.
“We beg thy mercy, thy grace…..”
I thought of my parents. They were both ministers. My father was past forty and my mother past thirty when they found their work and each other. Perhaps because they brought love and a bit of wisdom, earned form some living and suffering, to both relationships, I was never intimidated by churches. I never had to kneel in a wooden closet and confess my intimate thoughts to a disapproving agent of God like some of my more orthodox friends.
“Lord, we are not worthy that you should come under our roof.”
In spiritual matters my parents taught their children basically just two things; God or “Godness” is omnipresent and is vibrating in ecstatic transcendent perfection, and also that there is some kind of impersonally divine law of cause and effect in the universe which allows us to get away with nothing, good or bad. So it was natural for me as a teenager to become, without an ounce of guilt, an atheist in my search for truth. No church, no organized religion had a hold on my on my heart or psyche. And it was just as natural for me to come back a few years later to a deep, rather organically religious view of my life and my place in the universe.
“Oh Jesus, truly we are sinners, we are undeserving…….”
I rocked from one knee to the other and straightened my back to squeeze the pain out. I remembered sitting in Eglise de Sacre Coeur in Paris, my lover Maryse and I alone on a winter Wednesday afternoon, trying to stifle my laughter as she wove a fantasy about a priest masturbating in a confessional while he listened to a parishioner’s confession.
“……..your infinite agonies on the cross…….”
He looked young, younger than me. An older priest with gray hair stood behind him and to the side with his hands clasped and his head bowed. They looked lonely up there. I felt like I was watching the remnants of a dying civilization, the priests the end of their line, going down with the ship. What power, what faith there must have been to build that cathedral, to fill it with riches, to gather enough bricklayers, doctors, plumbers, merchants, and housewives to fill every pew.
But then the hard bench against my knees brought my attention back. The theater had not been very good. The priests read their lines as if they were a language they had forgotten. The choir was sterile and lifeless. Nobody seemed to notice as I stood up and walked down the aisle to the door.
“Lord Jesus,” I heard the young priest say with a hint of emotion in his voice, “help us this coming year to bring your flock back home.”
And the concrete rose up to receive my feet and the clean cold air caressed my face as I walked out into the Christmas night.