Fragment #4: Occultum
For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing is concealed that will not be made known and brought to light – Luke 8:17
Preface
In the following essay, I describe an encounter with a Lyft driver named Gary interlaced with my reflections on attending Latin Mass for the first time, both of which occurred on a trip to Portland, Oregon.
Unless you are a Catholic reader born in the 1950s or earlier, it’s unlikely that Latin Mass means much to you. I don’t intend to excavate the history of the Catholic liturgy, except to say that it used to be celebrated in Latin and now it’s not, owing to the Second Vatican Council which convened in the 1960s.
This summer, I met a poet named Heather Kauffman who wrote a collection of poems inspired by the Gospel of Luke, Your Eye is the Lamp. The first poem of Heather’s collection was on my mind when I traveled to Portland and the epigraph of her collection, Luke 8:17, forms the cornerstone of these pages.
I wrote the original draft for this essay less than twenty-four hours after my brief encounter with Gary. Now, two months later, I publish it with misgivings. We only exchanged first names, and I have no way of asking his permission to share our conversation with others. Nevertheless, I share it with you, the reader, in spite of my misgivings, because in Gary’s eyes I saw a flash of eternity that has yet to fade in my mind. If he ever happens to stumble upon these words, I hope he will know how grateful I was and still am to have shared ten minutes of our lives together.
****
Downtown Portland
~5:20 am
“You’re going to Holy Rosary?” Gary asks, looking back as we pull away in his Subaru Outback. His ruddy, round face is buried in a snarled proliferation of white hair, the wild ruggedness of a pilgrim bumping along the Oregon Trail, but his voice is kind and energetic, especially for the black hour.
“That’s right,” I say, puzzled by his excitement. “Are you Catholic?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“But I go to Midnight Mass at Holy Rosary every Christmas.”
I lean forward in my seat, intrigued.
“When I heard they had something called Midnight Mass, I just had to go and see,” Gary explains. “Some of it was in Latin, and I couldn’t understand. But there was something about all the rituals. And the voices behind me that sounded like angels…My kids won’t go with me. I guess it’s not for everyone.”
“It makes me want to go see it for myself,” I say, moved by his tone of unabashed awe and sincerity.
“It’s the only time I go to church,” Gary says, with a note of shame or embarrassment, as if I am his confessor. “I’m not an atheist, but—well I’m never going to see you again, so I don’t mind telling you—”
“Don’t be so sure. I might show up to Midnight Mass one of these days,” I quip.
Gary laughs.
We cross the black river stretched out before us like a sleeping snake, and he unravels his memories of religion many decades old and shows me the unhealed scar tissue.
As a child, Gary attended a Pentecostal church with his parents and the congregation’s hysterics made him skeptical. “Everyone would always fall over in a trance, but they somehow never hit their heads on the wooden floor,” he said. His mom was a genuine believer, but his dad was not, and Gary was never able to reconcile this conflict. “The church said if you don’t believe, you’re going to hell. I asked my dad if he believed and he said, ‘Some people believe, some people don’t.’ I used to lie awake at night thinking about my dad going to hell.”
“Sounds traumatic,” I say.
“It was! I decided at sixteen I was an atheist. But I’ve never been an atheist, really. I feel bad saying it, but I’ve always had too much of a fear of God. And now I’m an old man and I don’t know where to look.”
We pass an ambulance parked on the street. Two EMTs stand casually beside a stretcher covered in a white sheet, as if they’re waiting for a coroner to make it official. A pall hangs over the streets of Portland, even in the daylight, and I hear very little compassion for the drug-addicted homeless dying in the streets, an observation more than a judgement.
We leave the river behind and turn past a 7-Eleven down a side street. The church—and Latin Mass—draws near.
Every weekday at 6am, Holy Rosary celebrates the liturgy as it used to be, a strange and subtle criticism of Rome. In Catholicism, even its rebellions are encrusted with tradition. Yesterday I came at this same matutinal hour because, similar to Gary on Christmas Eve, I heard there was something called Latin Mass and had to see it for myself.
At the beginning of Mass, the priest approached the altar with a stooped neck and white hood, like he was a refugee in hiding, and later during the consecration, he whispered imperceptibly beneath his breath for several minutes. There was a sense of mystery to the proceedings, the liturgy unfamiliar and foreign, the readings in Latin. I felt like an outsider in my own Church. And when we took communion, it was not the usual ho-hum procession but instead we kneeled at an altar rail covered in a white sheet, flanking either side of the altar. When the priest stopped in front of me, he rapidly recited a set of inscrutable words and placed Christ on my tongue, and I returned to my pew with a growing sense of confusion and wonder.
The pageantry struck me as both backwards and beautiful. I was annoyed because it felt as if the priest demanded some contributory emotion from me and required that I make myself blind, deaf, and dumb in order to be worthy of receiving Christ, and yet I was more aware of my blindness, deafness, and dumbness before the Almighty, what our forefathers might have called “reverence.” The experience stirred questions of hiddenness and revelation, lamps and lampstands, modern evangelicals in warehouses with wide open doors and elderly Catholics in their narrow pews listening to a priest whisper to them in a dead language.
For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed.
But when? When will everything be disclosed? If salvation was revealed in the risen Christ, the Light made manifest, why are we still in the dark two thousand years later? Why does Christ, even to this day, make himself so hard to find, taking up appearances the world does not recognize?
And what is the purpose of Latin Mass? Is there some virtue in obscuring the senses and preaching the Gospel in a language the laity cannot understand? Does this open a trapdoor to faith, or rather is it a foolish return to a dark and superstitious age? I don’t pose these questions ironically as a Socratic purveyor of truth, but as a confused pilgrim wandering in and out of churches in search of something that I cannot articulate.
But I must let these questions go and return to where I sit in the present moment—in the backseat of a Subaru Outback talking to a man who is neither Christian nor Catholic but attends Mass once a year at the stroke of midnight.
Gary’s aversion to organized religion strikes a chord.
I despised the Catholic church in early adulthood because of its stifling rituals and dogmas, and the way it defined sins like one sorting through a pile of coins, making (I thought) a mockery of grace. Still, my sins piled up over the years, and guilt clung to me like a bad smell, as pungent as incense, and I kept stumbling into Catholic churches, unable to look the crucified Christ in his sorrowful eyes but desperate to believe he held forgiveness in his wounded, outstretched hands.
When Gary and I reach the church, we stare into the darkness, each of us caught in our own interior worlds. Part of me wishes we could ride all morning through the streets of Portland, but we do not have hours, only minutes, to share our lives with each other.
“Addiction is a big part of my story,” I say. “I used to walk into church and think there was no way God could forgive me. I was sure that I was going to hell.”
Gary grunts knowingly.
“But then I looked at the stained-glass windows and I saw a beauty that I couldn’t put into words. I thought about the people who were moved to do something so impractical as build a church…” I ask Gary if he’s heard of Fyodor Dostoevsky. He nods with recognition when I mention Crime and Punishment as one of his novels that high school English students are forced to endure. “He wrote a book called The Idiot. There’s a character who says, ‘Beauty will save the world.’ That’s how I felt.”
“Beauty will save the world, huh?” Gary shakes his head, unconvinced. “That’s kind of like, ‘Love always wins.’ Yeah, but no, not really. Hate is what wins in the world.”
“I’m going to have joyfully disagree,” I say.
“Please!” Gary says, laughing.
“There is no greater tragedy than the Passion. Imagine, the man who is perfect, in every sense of the word, crucified for something he didn’t do. Hate won the day he was crucified. And yet, three days later, he rose from the dead.”
A long silence envelops us. Then Gary says, “You’ve given me something to think about. Because you’re right, hate won at first. And that’s where it ends for me.”
“And that’s a tragedy,” I say, quietly.
An alert flashes across Gary’s phone. He has another ride waiting for him.
“Wait,” he says before I can open the door. “Let me see what you look like.” He flips on the interior lights and studies my face, and I smile. He tells me where he sits for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, just in case I ever want to come. I decide not to tell him that I live in Atlanta. Who knows? Maybe I will show up someday.
I get out of the car, but Gary follows me into the church. His words, like the lingering flash of a camera, illumine my soul and fill me with a strange conviction that I have just spoken to a man who is nearer the kingdom of God than many who profess Jesus as Lord.
For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed.
I sit in the narrow wooden pews and await the start of Mass. I think of Gary and ponder the beauty that will save the world. A man wearing a black cassock and flowing white garments lights the candles around the altar. He covers the altar rail with a long white sheet and fastidiously smooths out the fabric, placing a hand delicately on the middle of his sternum in the manner of a woman, perhaps to prevent a cross beneath his robe from swinging.
For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed.
The clock strikes six and a priest tiptoes out of the sacristy, his vestments bloodred and shimmering gold, his head stooped and covered in a white hood trimmed with a golden fringe. He turns his back to the congregation and faces the altar. I kneel, not knowing why I kneel, and listen to his rapid, unintelligible Latin, not comprehending a single word.
Outside the sun has still not yet dawned and the black stained-glass windows are a veil, but a light shines forth from the altar when I hear a bell ring and the priest raises a small fragment of bread in the air.
****