A Flaming Red Horizon

I studied in a Catholic school my whole life, from kindergarten to college. But I don't think I really grew up to be religious at all, as much as I just simply grew up to be afraid of being unreligious.

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I don't remember when the last time I heard mass at church was. I think it was at Christmas eve last year, since I remember how annoyed I was that the whole thing was taking way too much time. Not that I found hearing mass during Christmas eve an inconvenience to my well-fed soul, but I just remember how annoyed I was with how they managed to make MASS at CHURCH so overwrought like it was some cheesy Sunday afternoon variety show. What??!? Since when did we need to have kids dancing in front of the altar, or old people singing barely tuneful songs that was only tangentially related to the whole point of why we were there in the first place, or various announcements about who won some community raffle and how to buy raffle tickets for the next self-serving one? Why make a supposedly solemn one hour of inherently personal time of worship for God into an annoying two hour extravaganza filled with unnecessary fodder?

Now that I think of it, I think that was what drove me away from going to mass at the church I've been hearing mass from ever since I was a kid. I hated how they made it so contrived and overdone and overly elaborate.

Or maybe I was just looking for a better excuse to stop going to mass on Sundays.

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