(This article appears courtesy of The St. Augustine Catholic Online Magazine.)
By Kate Norton
The frigid air hits her like a slap. Angela shivers in the arctic wind tunnel of Newark Airport’s departures gate and counts out bills for the cabby, who stands turbaned and impervious. She would like to throw herself back into the taxi’s sauna-like warmth and tell the driver to take her straight back to her apartment. The Pakistani will think she’s crazy, but he’s from New York. He’s seen it all.
She automatically wishes him a “Merry Christmas,” then wonders if he even celebrates the holiday. What a relief it would be to belong to a culture that doesn’t, she thinks. Just a couple of flowers, a little incense, a house god or two and you’re done.
Trolling her carry-on, Angela ploughs through the terminal to take her place among the thousands of other human lemmings headed home for the holidays. In the ticket line people stand beside bulging shopping bags, inching their gift-topped mountains forward each time the line moves. Despite the chaos and the noise, everyone is jovial, exchanging what-are-you-gonna-do-it’s-Christmas? looks!
Try as she might, and really, she is trying here, Angela can’t conjure up the holiday spirit her fellow travelers seem to be enjoying. She pushes her curly auburn hair behind her ears and instantly hears her mother’s voice in her head. “Angela, don’t push your hair behind your ears. It makes them flap like an elephant’s.”
Her mother. The woman with an admonition for every occasion and pertinent advice for people in service industries. Her mother, who could make everyone’s life a lot easier if she simply printed up “Mom’s Rules for the Universe” and handed out copies in advance.
Angela, of course, knows the rules by heart. Especially the one that stipulates that a 38-year-old woman should be married with one, preferably two, children instead of wasting valuable procreation time on a career and a string of commitment-challenged boyfriends.
Angela stands motionless on the moving walkway, letting it carry her toward the gate. In front of Angela, a young mother holds the hand of a small boy who wears a pair of reindeer antlers. The airport Muzak starts up a jazzy rendition of I’ll be home for Christmas. Angela rolls her eyes and mutters, “Oh, please, if I hear one more Christmas song, I’ll think I’ll pu…”
The mother looks back sharply at her. The child stares, too, his antlers blinking on and off. Then, the mother discreetly edges her child away from Angela.
“Great,” thinks Angela. “Now, I’m scaring small children. I am in total ’Grinch’ mode.”
Later on the plane, Angela tears open the airline snack and reviews her plan. This holiday can be saved, she thinks, crunching a salty pretzel. Part one is already in progress. By arriving late tonight — Christmas Eve, Angela has avoided dinner with her mother and if she plays her cards right she can skip Midnight Mass, too.
All she has to do is plead jet lag and beg off church. Then she can sleep late tomorrow, take her mother to a noisy brunch on Christmas Day, watch the umpteenth showing of Miracle on 34th Street with her that night — television is a great conversation killer — and she could be in the air by first light on the day after Christmas. No time for emotional tennis matches. No time for guilt.
Steering her rented car through empty streets, Angela winces at the ugliness of her hometown, the rows of strip malls, the fast food outlets and the lube shops — how many lube shops does one city need anyway? The neon scenery is made all the more depressing by the addition of scrawny tinsel and unreliable Christmas lights. If Jesus had known what a “holy night” would look like 2000 years later, would He have even bothered to come, Angela wonders?
In 20 minutes, Angela is standing under a glaring bulb in the dark paneled entry of her mother’s house. It’s the same interrogation area she stood in as a teenager, formulating explanations for why she was late for her curfew — or what she and her date had been up to on the porch for an hour. Her mother regards her with the same impassive expression from years ago.
“Mom, I can’t take you to Midnight Mass tonight. I am beyond tired. Newark was a nightmare and…”
Her mother interrupts her. “I don’t want you to take me to Mass.”
Angela is so shocked she forgets to feign fatigue. Her mother not go to Midnight Mass? Is the pope still Catholic?
“But, mom…”
“No, I don’t want you to take me.” Her mother takes Angela’s coat, folds it against her chest and brushes off stray pretzel crumbs.
“You don’t?”
“No, I’m driving Mrs. Cappella to Midnight Mass.”
Angela’s spirit soars. She practically skips up the stairs, “Well, great! You two pray for me, okay.”
“Mrs. Cappella had to give up her license last month,” her mother says. “I’m going to pick her up in an hour. You don’t have to go with us.”
“Good, Mom, because I’m really tired…”
“You need to leave now and save us a seat.”
“But, Mom…”
If Jesus had known what a “holy night” would look like 2000 years later, would He have even bothered to come, Angela wonders?
“Mrs. Cappella is 83. She’s had a hip replacement. You want her to stand in the aisle while the ‘holiday’ Catholics get the best seats?”
“But…”
“Get there before the McNulty’s. They think they own the first pew.” Her mother hands Angela her crumb-free coat back.
Yes, Angela had a plan. But her mother had a strategy. Guilt wins again.
Now Angela sits in St. Michael’s, an hour and a half early for Mass, watching altar girls trim candles. She beat the McNulty’s to the front pew. Barely. Taking note of Angela’s coat splayed across the bench, they had filed silently, and somewhat begrudgingly, into the pew behind.
As more people arrive, Angela begins to squirm. She has never liked sitting up front. Anywhere. She imagines the people around her critically examining her hair, her posture, her clothes. Is the tag on her sweater sticking up?
To be honest, it isn’t just where she’s sitting that makes Angela uncomfortable. It’s being in St. Michael’s again, period. When she was a child, the turn-of-the-century church with its radiant stained-glass windows and soaring stone arches had enthralled her. She had knelt on velvet cushions, elbows resting on the icy marble balustrades and received Holy Communion. And she had felt entirely at home.
But she had left church when she had left for college. And while in many ways she can no more stop being Catholic than she can stop breathing, now she only returns for the occasional wedding or funeral — on forced holiday marches with her mother.
Sitting in the wooden pew, Angela feels transparent, tenuous like one of the Advent candles flickering on the altar.
It’s as if she’s marooned between two worlds. She’s not the eight-year-old in a starched plaid uniform she used to be, but she can’t quite connect with the woman she is today, the one with the to-die-for job in the city and a closet full of natural fibers. The tang of the incense, she thinks, is making her a little dizzy.
Searching for a distraction, Angela studies the Nativity scene on the altar. A plaster Holy Family huddles under a thatched stable roof set on a green felt hill, waited upon by shepherds, sheep and the requisite number of wise men. Joseph stands a little off to the side, like Angela’s own late father, more a benevolent bystander than patriarch. Center stage, of course, is Mother and Infant.
Angela wonders about their relationship. In seventh grade she wrote a religion paper about Mary. She had looked up all the mentions of her in the Bible and she remembers the encounters between Mary and Jesus always seemed a little tense. In the temple when he was 12, Jesus practically back talks His mother. “Don’t you know I have to be about my Father’s business?” Then, at the wedding at Cana when Mary asks Him to handle the wine situation, He balked at first and answered with a brusque, “It’s not my time, yet.”
And once, when told that His mother and family were waiting to see Him, Jesus hedged saying, “Who are my brothers? Who is my mother?” Angela can imagine her own mother’s response to that one.
Jesus was divine, but human. His Mother was human but blessed. Could they in their “human-ness,” as Angela’s therapist would put it, ever have disagreed? Was Mary disappointed in Jesus during His life? Had she expected Him to be more “God-like” or at least hang out with a better class of people? And Jesus spoke of forgiveness so often. Did He have to practice some of it at home?
Angela looks at the figure of Mary bending over the baby in the manger. She remembers once as a child overhearing her mother confide to a friend. “I prayed for so long for a baby and when I thought it was too late, God sent me an angel. Now, every time I look at her, it’s like God’s smiling back at me.”
That’s the story of life, then, Angela thinks. Great joy and anticipation followed by disappointment, followed by what? Angela looks at the scene of the crucifixion depicted on the stained-glass window above the altar — Jesus on the cross and at His feet, the women — and His mother. Her eyes suddenly fill and she had to open them wide to keep the tears from spilling.
“Scoot over.” Angela’s mother and Mrs. Cappella sidle in beside her. Mass has begun.
“The parking is terrible!” her mother whispers, loud enough to give Father Kelly pause on the altar. Angela waits for the usual tide of annoyance with her mother to rise in her chest, but instead she finds herself smiling. Actually smiling.
And Angela realizes that she is not wishing she were anywhere else — that she is glad to be here at Midnight Mass with her mother. She feels something within her open with each familiar prayer. And somehow, the carols that she has heard a thousand times before seem new, as if she is the one waking from a “deep and dreamless sleep.”
At the end of the Lord’s Prayer, the priest invites everyone to offer each other a sign of Christ’s peace. Angela reaches past her mother’s outstretched hand to pull her tightly into her arms. She holds her, feeling the soft fuzz of her mother’s hair and the slight slope of her back. Her mother is not a problem to be solved. Or even a duty to be fulfilled. She is a mystery to be held in the heart.
And so Angela holds her mother — in all her judgments and resentments, in all her neediness and expectations, in all her imperfections — Angela simply holds her and says, “I love you, Mom.”
Her mother is still for a moment. Then, she returns Angela’s hug, squeezing her gently.
“I love you too, sweetheart.” she murmurs.
Angela wants to say something else, but her mother has already turned away to make peace with the McNulty’s.
The moment is over. Yet, Angela knows she can find it again. Or perhaps, that grace will find her, as it has tonight at Midnight Mass.
