Wednesday, January 8, 2020 // The Statement
6B
A little faith

I

n the August before my junior year, I scrambled to 
rearrange my schedule. I cold-emailed professors, 
begging them to let me into their classes and hopping 
on the waitlist of any possible course. Then I came across 
one called “The Catholic Novel.” The course description 
read: “All are welcome: religious, agnostic, atheist, non-
Christian, just reading, Catholic curious, and ‘questioning.’” 
I considered myself Catholic-curious, but it came as a 
surprise that I could enroll despite being sort-of-Jewish and 
maybe-atheist. On the first day of fall classes, I found myself 
in English 473 with an assignment to attend Mass three 
separate times. I was eager to see what this 2,000-year-old 
commotion was all about.
My first Mass visit was in the basement of St. Mary Student 
Parish on a Wednesday afternoon. The parish sits on the 
corner of William and Thompson, just across the street from 
NeoPapalis. I’d passed it a dozen times and never noticed 
it before. I locked my bike up, crossed the street nervously 
and walked into the dim, air-conditioned building. It was a 
sunny day, but the basement was quiet and still. 
The second I sat down, a woman breathlessly approached 
me. “Would you like to be the reader?” she said. 
Maybe I looked like I needed saving. “The what?” 
“The reader,” she repeated.
“Oh, thank you, but this is my first time at Mass so I 
probably shoul-”
“No, it’s easy. You can do it. You’ll do it. Want to do it?”
I reluctantly agreed. Rapidly and without taking a breath, 
she explained my task. I started to feel like a bit of an 
impostor, so I jutted in:
“I’m not Catholic.”
“Oh,” she said, clearly caught off guard. “Are you 
Christian?”
“No.”
“Hm. Are you Baptized?”
“No.”
“Well, are you Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, let me think.” She proceeded to think for no more 
than one full second. “That’s fine. Same God. Old Testament. 
It’s fine by me. We won’t tell anyone. It’s probably fine. It’s 
alright.”
She took me to the lectern to show me the book I’d read 
from and finally introduced herself as Rainey. She told me 
she’d give me a nod when it was time. I returned to my pew, 
more nervous than I ever anticipated being on a Wednesday 
afternoon visit to Mass.
A priest walked onto the pulpit. He murmured some hellos 
and maybe a prayer — I wasn’t really listening, distracted 

by my imminent Church debut. When he finished, Rainey 
suddenly turned around. She looked at me and nodded. 
A-freaking-men, I thought, here goes nothing.
I walked past the seemingly-endless rows of pews and 
stood facing the pulpit like everyone else still in their seats. 
Five minutes before, Rainey told me, “When you get to that 
part, do not bow to the tabernacle, the crucifix or the Virgin 
Mary. Find a place where God rests for you. He cannot rest in 
any of these places for you since you are not a Catholic, but he 
rests somewhere, just think of him for a moment.”
Remembering Rainey’s instructions, I stood stiff and 
clammy-palmed, careful not to bow. I closed my eyes, but 
instead of thinking about God, I wondered how long I was 
supposed to stand there. 
When it seemed like a sufficient amount of time had 
passed for thinking about where God rested, I found my 
place behind the lectern and peered at the book. All the 
rapid instructions Rainey gave me minutes before swirled 
in my mind. Read only the black words, she said; I read 
only the black words. Pause at this part and raise your 
arm; I paused at that part and raised my arm. Everyone 
repeated something with me. It went on like this for a few 
minutes and then I was finished. I stepped back, closed 
my eyes and bowed my head for about as long as seemed 
appropriate.
Rainey smiled at me as I returned to my seat. 
The Mass continued with a short homily, various 
prayers and ample kneeling. I crossed my arms and 
did not receive communion like a good non-Catholic. 
It all went by as one would expect, but when the priest 
asked for anyone to share grievances or prayers, I was 
surprised when Rainey piped up, “May all the children 
of the Abrahamic religions know that they are loved by 
God, our God, one God,” she said. “That they shall feel 
and know His love and that they shall know that we are 
all united in God’s eyes.”
As she spoke, I looked around at all the heads bent in 
prayer. Instead of making me feel like some kind of strange 
religious voyeur stealthily observing Catholic rituals, 
Rainey’s words reminded me I was just another person at 
church on a warm Wednesday afternoon. I laced my fingers 
together, bowed my head and closed my eyes like everyone 
else — if someone had come into the chapel at that moment, 
they wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.
For my second Mass, I was at St. Mary again: same 
basement, different day, different priest. When I went up 
during communion at my previous Mass visit, I had looked 
down into the hands of the other priest, but I looked this one 
directly in the face. My crossed arms interrupted the flow of 

his communion. Ready to present the Eucharist, he tripped 
over his words as he noticed my closed-off body. He looked 
me in the eyes, leveled his face with mine, put his hand on my 
shoulder and said in a kind voice, “May peace be with you all 
your days.” It was a comfort I never knew I was missing — like 
the comfort I’d experienced after Rainey’s prayer. I felt a sense 
of belonging and peace, even in the basement of an unfamiliar 
building with little light and few faces I had seen before.
On another Sunday morning at Mass, a priest at St. 
Thomas the Apostle Church looked over my head to the line 
of communion-takers behind me, made a Sign of the Cross 
with the wafer, then waved me aside. It felt like hundreds 
of pairs of eyes bored into me as I walked back to my seat, 
seeing me for what I was: an outsider, a fake, unable to take 
communion.
Soon after, the priest and altar servers left the chapel in a 
procession carrying the crucifix down the aisle, with their 
green, gold, white and black robes drifting behind them. I 
watched them pass by as the organ played in the background. 
Once the fanfare ended, the woman who had been sitting 
next to me with her granddaughter turned to me. “I hope 
your day is full,” she said, then left.
I smiled. It almost seemed like she knew how I was 
feeling. Something inside me stirred quietly again, then 
settled. I walked out of the church alongside those who now 
felt a little less like strangers and into the cold, gray morning. 
Maybe God was trying to tell me something on these 
occasions: That there is mutual friendship or love to be 
shared with Him, or that there is a universal vision of 
grace, and Catholicism is the center of it. Maybe He was 
trying to show me that there are infinite ways to be good to 
other people. I cannot fully know His intentions — or know 
whether I believe He exists at all — but I was received with 
what felt like love by someone at each Mass I attended. 
And if any laws are regularly broken in life, they are those 
of human solidarity, social charity and love — laws on 
which Christianity is built. It was good to see these virtues 
actually in practice during my three Mass visits — good to be 
reminded they exist at all.
I don’t plan to start praying every night, confess my sins or 
convert to Catholicism, but I may return to Mass even after 
those three required visits. And if my return is not for the 
grace of Christ, then it will be for the wide and open ceilings 
of the churches and the way hymns filter through their 
stained-glass windows like rays of light through water.
And religious beliefs aside, those three Masses and the 
people I encountered at them made me pause and reflect. 
I was an outsider; I never knew the prayers, I didn’t know 
when to kneel or stand up and I never made the Sign of the 
Cross. But I was not treated as a stranger, or an intruder or 
even a visitor — just as another person at a church trying 
to make sense of why we are here on this earth. At a time 
in my life where I feel the constant pressure to compete 
with thousands of strangers who are smarter than me, 
more qualified than me or more driven than me, going to 
those churches and experiencing something so unfamiliar 
came as a relief I hadn’t expected. Not one of us is any less 
worthy than another of the love, kindness and friendship 
we encounter in this life. Mass reminded me of this — it 
reminded me that whatever it is we are doing on this earth, 
we cannot forget that we are doing it together, that we are 
beings bound together by history, time and even by which 
pew we decide to sit in when we go to church. 
Whatever is up there, around us or below, there is 
something to be said for quietly sitting beside another person 
for a while, for taking a stranger’s hand and wishing them 
peace for the day and for singing, standing and kneeling as 
one. Even if our prayers are not heard by God, I think it’s 
alright — we can be sure they are heard by those around us. 
There is comfort in being side-by-side as we bend towards 
heaven.

BY ELLIE KATZ, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL

