Spotted a Spotted Dove on the Way to Christmas Mass with Mom

On Christmas Eve, I bought my mom a Rudolf pastry.

She wanted to display some beads she’d strung, I’m guessing at daycare:

I grew up celebrating Christmas in Hong Kong with presents under a plastic Christmas tree and caroling with my family on the university campus where my father taught. I loved singing Christmas carols, though neither of my parents were religious then. My mom had learned them in convent school and would sing a verse here and there in the house. This is the first Christmas I’ve spent with my mom as an adult. I thought she might enjoy carols, so I decided to go to Christmas mass with her for the first time.

I arrived at her nursing home after breakfast and took her out for a second breakfast. Afterwards, we sat under some trees in a small public resting area around the corner from the church. A bird that looked like a pigeon came by, walked back and forth for a while, lingered in the trees, and flew away. I didn’t realize until I looked it up afterwards that it was a spotted dove. There were other birds singing in the trees above us, amidst the whir of car engines.

I asked my mom what her favorite Bible story was. She named Moses parting the Red Sea. I asked her if it was from the Book of Exodus. She hesitated, and said yes. I thought of the exodus of Palestinians from the Holy Land, which I did not mention, since my previous attempts to talk to her about it met with silence. I asked her if she remembered the story of Moses’ birth. She proceeded to tell the story, beginning with the decree that all Hebrew boys be killed. She said Moses’ birth mother found him and saved him. I looked up the story on my phone and showed it to her. She corrected herself and said the Pharaoh’s daughter was his savior. My mom said her favorite carol was We Wish You a Merry Christmas. We sang some carols together, reading the lyrics from my phone: Joy to the World, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Silent Night, Jingle Bells….

Pushing my mom up the hill in a wheelchair wasn’t easy. I noted that churches are often on hills, even the convent schools my mother and I went to. We stopped in front of the statue of the Virgin Mary at the top of the wheelchair accessible path. My mother smiled. The statue was in a grotto under trees, surrounded by flowers, both in pots and bushes. A Spanish song I used to sing to my kids came to mind, La Virgen de la Cueva.

There was a nativity scene inside the church. The tree on the marble lectern caught my eye, presumably the tree of life. I was struck by the absence of green and the preponderance of marble extending to the floors and the pillars.

I thought about the prominence of green in Christmas celebrations in homes, the importance of the color in Islam, and the shared roots of the religions. Baby Jesus was in front of the altar on a gold colored sheet, not a bed of straw. I noted the contrast between this and the display of Jesus in rubble at the Evangelical Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem.

The priest spoke of the prologue to the Gospel of John, how “the Word became flesh” in the form of Jesus, the vulnerability of flesh, and of suffering. The genocide in Gaza came to mind again. I was not surprised at the priest’s silence on the subject. I made a mental note to donate to Doctors without Borders and MECA (Middle East Children’s Alliance), an organization I found out about from the poet Deema Shehabi’s Facebook page.

I attended a conference about the acoustics of sacred spaces last year. There was an electric keyboard, an acoustic guitar and a few other instruments, no organ in this church. There was a cavernous quality to the music, which dates back to worship in caves and evokes mystery, according to the talk I attended at the conference.

The array of gold colored chalices was rather bright for my eyes during the Liturgy of the Eucharist. My mom smiled at a little boy who was crying while waiting in line. I asked her if she wanted to take communion. She said no, she wasn’t a believer. She had told a social worker who interviewed her for a Protestant run daycare program months ago that she was Catholic, which surprised me then, as I had never known her to have been baptized.

The familiar carols came at the very end of the mass. There was an invitation to join the choir. My mom didn’t, so I sang for both of us. I asked her afterwards what she thought of the mass. She said it was pretty good. She said she needed to go to church on certain occasions, though she wasn’t religious. I was surprised to hear such urgency, as it had been my suggestion.

When we returned to her nursing home, I discovered she had wet her pants. The staff pointed out she was wearing a diaper that was too large for her. She had missed lunch, so I fixed her a snack of salami, brie and crackers and left her in good spirits.