Reflections on Midnight Mass

My first realization that something was wrong came when I attended midnight mass with my sister at her local Catholic Church. My sister knew I wasn’t very religious person, so she asked me to go as a favor to her during this holiday season. It had been a long time since I’d been in a church, the last time to attend the funeral service of a friend in the Army who died, so I found myself ill at ease while waiting for the service to begin. Up until this time, I was a self-avowed agnostic who favored eastern religions and philosophies, but that didn’t mean I was beyond accepting anything, whether it was new or old.

As I sat on my seat in the pew, I looked around at the numbers of people who were gathered for this yearly ritual. It was obvious that some of these people attended church regularly while the majority of them appeared to be the type who attended once a year, on this particular holiday. While waiting for the service to begin, I found myself more and more interested in the people gathered around me.

The first person I focused on was a young woman about my age who had come alone to midnight mass. She sat all prim and proper at the far end of a pew with her hands locked together and set firmly over her lap. She was dressed in a conservative, blue business suit over a matching blue skirt that ended right above her white stockinged knees. Her knees were side by side…