Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (3 page)

A Catholic Mass is not, to be sure, the ideal habitat for an atheist. Much of the dialogue is either offensive to reason or simply incomprehensible. It goes on for a long time and rarely overrides a temptation to fall asleep. Nevertheless, the ceremony is replete with elements which subtly strengthen congregants' bonds of affection, and which atheists would do well to study and on occasion learn to appropriate for reuse in the secular realm.

Catholicism starts to create a sense of community with a setting. It marks off a piece of the earth, puts walls up around it and declares that within their parameters there will reign values utterly unlike those which hold sway in the world beyond, in the offices, gyms and living rooms of the city. All buildings give their owners opportunities to recondition visitors' expectations and to lay down rules of conduct specific to them. The art gallery legitimates the practice of peering silently at a canvas, the nightclub of swaying one's hands to a musical score. And a church, with its massive timber doors and 300 stone angels carved around its porch, gives us rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger without any danger of being thought predatory or insane. We are promised that here (in the words of the Mass's initial greeting) ‘the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit' belong to all who have assembled. The Church lends its enormous prestige, accrued through age, learning and architectural grandeur, to our shy desire to open ourselves to someone new.

The composition of the congregation feels significant. Those in attendance tend not to be uniformly of the same age, race, profession or educational or income level; they are a random sampling of souls united only by their shared commitment to certain values. The Mass actively breaks down the economic and status subgroups within which we normally operate, casting us into a wider sea of humanity.

In this secular age, we often assume that a
love of
family and a sense of community must be synonymous. When modern politicians speak of their wish to repair society, it is the family they hail as the quintessential symbol of community. But Christianity is wiser and less sentimental in this regard, for it acknowledges that an attachment to family may in fact narrow the circle of our affections, distracting us from the greater challenge of apprehending our connection with all of mankind; of learning to love kith as well as kin.

With similarly communal ends in mind, the Church asks us to leave behind all attachments to earthly status. It is the inner values of love and charity rather than the outer attributes of power and money that are now venerated. Among Christianity's greatest achievements has been its capacity, without the use of any coercion beyond the gentlest of theological arguments, to persuade monarchs and magnates to kneel down and abase
themselves before the statue of a carpenter, and to wash the feet of peasants, street sweepers and dispatch drivers.

The Church does more, however, than merely declare that worldly success doesn't matter: in a variety of ways, it enables us to imagine that we could be happy without it. Appreciating the reasons why we try to acquire status in the first place, the Church establishes conditions under which we can willingly surrender our attachment to class and titles. It seems to know that we strive to be powerful chiefly because we are afraid of what will happen to us without high rank: we risk being stripped of dignity, being patronized, lacking friends and having to spend our days in coarse and dispiriting surroundings.

It is the genius of the Mass to correct each of these fears in turn. The building in which it is performed is almost always sumptuous. Though it is technically devoted to celebrating the equality of man, it generally surpasses palaces in its beauty. The company is also enticing. We develop a desire to be famous and powerful when being ‘like everyone else' seems a distressing fate, when the norm is mediocre and depressing. High status then becomes a tool to separate us from a group we resent and are scared of. However, as the congregants in a cathedral start to sing
Gloria in Excelsis
, we tend to feel that the crowd is nothing like the one we encountered in the shopping malls or the degraded transport hubs outside. Strangers gaze up at the vaulted, star-studded ceiling, rehearse in unison the words

and leave us thinking that humanity may not be such a wretched thing after all.

As a result, we may start to feel that we could work a little less feverishly, because we see that the respect and security we hope to gain through our careers is already available to us in a warm and impressive community which imposes no worldly requirements on us for its welcome.

If there are so many references in the Mass to poverty, sadness, failure and loss, it is because the Church views the ill, the frail of mind, the desperate and the elderly as representing aspects of humanity and (even more meaningfully) of ourselves which we are tempted to deny, but which bring us, when we can acknowledge them, closer to our need for one another.

In our more arrogant moments, the sin of
pride – or
superbia,
in Augustine's Latin formulation – takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we dare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The Mass encourages this sloughing off of pride. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert – all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition. We have no reason left to dissemble or lie in a building dedicated to honouring the terror and weakness of a man who was nothing like the usual heroes of antiquity, nothing like the fierce soldiers of Rome's army or the plutocrats of its Senate, and yet who was nevertheless worthy of being crowned the highest of men, the king of kings.

4.
If we have managed to remain awake to (and for) the lessons of the Mass, it should by its close have succeeded in shifting us at least fractionally off our accustomed egocentric axes. It should also have given us a few ideas which we could use to mend some of the endemic fractures of the modern world.

One of the first of these ideas relates to the benefit of taking people into a distinct venue which ought itself to be attractive enough to evoke enthusiasm for the notion of a group. It should inspire visitors to suspend their customary frightened egoism in favour of a joyful immersion in a collective spirit – an unlikely scenario in the majority of modern
community centres, whose appearance paradoxically serves to confirm the inadvisability of joining anything communal.

Secondly, the Mass embodies a lesson about the importance of putting forward rules to direct people in their interactions with one another. The liturgical complexity of a missal – the directive way in which this book of instructions for the celebration of a Mass compels the congregants to look up, stand, kneel, sing, pray, drink and eat at given points – speaks to an essential aspect of human nature which benefits from being guided in how to behave with others. To ensure that profound and dignified personal bonds can be forged, a tightly choreographed agenda of activities may be more effective than leaving a group to mingle aimlessly on its own.

A final lesson to be taken away from the Mass is closely connected with its history. Before it was a service, before the congregants sat in seats facing an altar behind which a priest held up a wafer and a cup of wine, the Mass was a meal. What we now know as the
Eucharist began as an occasion when early Christian communities put aside their work and domestic obligations and gathered together around a table (usually laden with wine, lamb and loaves of unleavened bread) in order to commemorate the
Last Supper. There they would talk, pray and renew their commitments to Christ and to one another. Like the Jews with their Sabbath meal, Christians understood that it is when we satiate our bodily hunger that we are often readiest to direct our minds to the needs of others. In honour of the most important Christian virtue, these gatherings hence became known as
agape
(meaning ‘love' in Greek)
feasts
and were regularly held by Christian communities in the period between Jesus's death and the Council of Laodicea in AD 364. It was only complaints about the excessive exuberance of some of these
meals that eventually led the early Church to the regrettable decision to ban
agape feasts and suggest that the faithful should eat at home with their families instead – and only thereafter gather for the spiritual banquet that we know today as the Eucharist.