A reader offers his testimony after attending Mass for the first time since deciding to explore the claims of the Catholic Church.
Editor’s note: The following are SeekerAnon’s own words, with some clearly delineated commentary from me and some light structural editing to give the original forum style posts better flow and readability.
Going to my first Mass ever. I’ve gone to weddings in Catholic churches, but never have I gone to a Mass as a spiritual seeker.
Service is over. I’ll tell you all about it when I get home.
Let me preface it by saying that it was indescribable.
SeekerAnon made good on his pledge to report back and posted the following upon returning home:
Yeah, I wasn’t prepared for how the Ash Wednesday Mass would make me feel.
At first, my expectations were low — religion was dying, right? I figured the church would be full of a few elderly worshipers, with pews sparsely populated.
Well, I’m happy to say that I was wrong.
The pews were packed — and not just with old people. Every age group was there, from babies to grannies.
More importantly, families were there.
This meant the church was a healthy one.
And remember, this isn’t Christmas or Easter, but the first day of Lent. Ash Wednesday isn’t “celebrated” by the secular world; there’s no “Ash Wednesday Bunny.”
I knew this was real.
I turned off my phone and my watch — for now, it was just me, the congregation, and the Lord.
That’s an important point about Ash Wednesday. As holidays go, it’s nowhere near as high-profile as Christmas or Eater. Nor is it a holy day of obligation, so the effects of any “Ash Wednesday bump” on attendance would be minor.
When some lay women and the priests read from the Bible, it felt real. They read the part about hypocrites and Pharisees, and already I was thinking of virtue signalers who want to be seen as good instead of being good.
They also spoke of the significance of the number 40 — the 40 days and nights of the Great Flood, the 40 years Moses and the Israelites spent wandering the desert, and the 40 days Jesus spent fighting the temptations of Satan.
I couldn’t sing the hymns because I didn’t know them, but the lady next to me did.
So I just clasped my hands and closed my eyes whenever there was a hymn.
I did know the Lord’s Prayer, so I said that one right along with the congregants.
But I spent a lot of my time contemplating the crucified figure of Christ above the altar.
All of the worry, all of the disquiet in my mind, all of the anger — it all vanished for that moment.
Apologies for the editorial interruption, but this next part is a vital data point in support of the theory that ritual is how people apply the wisdom of tradition to their daily lives:
Due to the amount of contemplation about morality that I had done, I knew that this faith right here was the real thing.
Not some LARPy convenience to fulfill a political aim, but the source of morality. All else was arbitrary and tyrannical.
I just felt…loved. Like I belonged there.
I know for sure that I want to go back. Because I do need it.
As do we all.
So yeah. That was what Mass felt like. And no snarkmeister or cynic or skeptic can convince me otherwise.
I was not expecting to feel what I felt.
It sounds like God granted Anon what theologians call a sensible consolation. Think of it as God meeting us where we are on a level that’s accessible to our interior senses. AKA, the warm fuzzies.
However, because God is pure spirit, He wills that we eventually advance beyond the level of the senses to know Him on the higher intellectual level.
In t hat regard, Anon’s next statement is encouraging.
Now on to the next challenge: Lent itself.
It sounds like he’s already ahead of the game!
Bonus: Near the end of the service, one of the priests mentioned the Shroud of Turin, and how it shows us what Our Lord looked like.
Also, just eyeballing it, but I don’t recall anyone checking their phone during the service.
Not even the kids.
And it was seeing so many families with kids at Mass that gave Anon a broader cultural insight:
A possible reason for the Based Japan meme could also be that Japan appeared to achieve what the wignats and neopagans wanted: pre-1960s demographics with post-1960s morals.
But the resulting low birth rates put an end to that mirage.
The next time you hear some redditor or an account with a sun wheel avi proclaiming the Church dead, remember they’re citing stats from the same Death Cult that claims garbage like The Last of Us Part II and The Marvels are popular.
Not to mention the same media that lies about the Church habitually.
Here are some other numbers that paint a far different picture of the Church’s future:
Fedora and tree LARP bros, I don’t feel so good.
If recent events have taught us anything, it’s that our own lying eyes are far more trustworthy than official statistics.
Everywhere I’ve had occasion to make direct empirical observations of the Church, I’ve seen more signs of health than decline.
It’s not just me, either. Or SeekerAnon. Multiple readers have told me for years about standing-room-only Masses overflowing with young families.
Do conditions vary by region? Almost certainly. You’ll most often find signs of decline in dioceses overseen by “Spirit of Vatican II” bishops whose liturgical sensibilities are stuck in 1976.
But none of my local parishes have the Latin Mass, yet the Novus Ordo parish nearest me just built a huge new church. And attendance is already exceeding capacity.
The “Religion is dying!” meme is a psyop.
Don’t fall for it. The people parroting it are just pushing FUD on Christians.
As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
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