My uncle’s wife died in the spring and the funeral was a Requiem Mass at the parish where she’d worshipped for forty years. I went, not sure what I was walking into. I have been to Catholic weddings before, quick ones, side aisle, in and out. I had never sat through the whole thing.
The incense got me first. Then the kneeling, up and down, a rhythm the whole room seemed to know without looking at each other. The priest lifted the host and the entire church went silent in a way I don’t think I have ever heard a room go silent, not even in my own church on Good Friday. I found myself moved by something I couldn’t fully name. It felt old in a way that made me notice how quiet my own tradition can be by comparison. Different, not lesser. I have my own version of that silence; it just doesn’t come with incense.
Then it was time for communion, and I did not go forward.
I know why I didn’t. I am not confirmed in that church. I don’t believe what the elevation of the host is claiming, that the bread has actually become something else, ontologically, not symbolically. But knowing why doesn’t make the staying-in-the-pew feel like anything other than what it was: a small, specific loneliness, at the one moment the whole liturgy had been building toward. Everyone around me went forward. I sat with my hands folded and watched the line move.
I have turned this over since. What I love in that room, the incense, the kneeling, the sense of a story much older than my own preferences, I think I can have honestly, without becoming Catholic to get it. But the rail itself is not a matter of taste. Justification by faith, the authority of Scripture over the Magisterium, the things I actually believe about what happened on the cross and how a person receives it: those are not aesthetic. I can’t kneel my way past them.
So I love the room, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t. But loving the room was never the question that mattered. I know why I stayed in the pew, and it wasn’t hesitation. It was conviction, the same conviction I walked in with. I’ll go back for the incense and the silence any time they’ll have me. I already know which altar is mine, and this afternoon didn’t move it an inch.