Dragonfly

A ghost story.

I’ve always felt a bit uncomfortable in “holy” places. This might have something to do with my upbringing. I was raised Roman Catholic, by the type of mom who would take me to mass every Sunday because it was the “right thing to do”—a ritual that I assume was often agonizing for the both of us. There is nothing more oppressive than a Catholic mass. As a kid it was simply boring, a dreaded stain on the weekend. Now, when I find myself at such a service, I am struck by how strange the whole practice is. The scripted, antiquated, unnatural speech. The way the entire audience speaks each scripted response in unison, somehow knowing exactly what to say at exactly what time. The fact that I sort of know what to say, too, despite the decade and change that has passed since my regular attendance. The fact that the script has changed somewhat since I was a kid, which somehow highlights the absurdity of the whole practice even further, because the new words are spoken by the crowd just as reverently and as unconsciously as the old ones once were. There’s an echo that has undoubtedly occurred in every Catholic wedding or funeral mass since the script change, whereby the regular churchgoers mumble the new script, and the irregular churchgoers (people who haven’t gone to church either since they were kids or since their own kids were kids) mumble the old one. The energy of the room changes upon the first echo. The dissonance momentarily wakes the crowd from their mass-induced stupor, and they look around the room, remembering that, yes, the script has changed, and yes, it has surprised them once again. This concurrent realization does not impede each subsequent echo, but instead actually prolongs them, as the irregular churchgoers, unfamiliar with the new script but still compelled to say something when prompted, hesitate and then meekly recite the old phrases, wondering which ones had changed and which ones were the same.