Chaos at Communion: Christmas in India (part one)

I received an email from a friend on Christmas Eve. He said that this would be a Christmas that I would never forget.

I knew the moment I read the words that he was right. Already the epic journey to Pondicherry had made this a famous holiday for me. But even then, I couldn’t imagine the unique events would actually comprise the day.

It all started on the night of the 23rd when my team of nine sat around some chicken korma and paneer butter masala and swapped stories on Christmas traditions back home. Of the nine, five are Christians and the other listened happily as we described visions of cold (USA, England) and hot (Solomon Islands, Australia) Christmas days.

As we went round, various ideas emerged for how we could celebrate. We settled on attending a midnight mass and having two meals together – one on Christmas Eve night and the other for Christmas lunch.

Following a loungy day of taking in the sights of the city, patting the local temple elephant, taking down a South India thali and visiting the Sri Auribindo ashram we dressed up sharp (or as sharp as you can look after traveling on the road for five weeks) and went to a “multi-cuisine” restaurant for dinner. Food flooded the table as we canceled the budget for the day and let everyone indulge in the food they’ve been missing most. My chicken sizzler alerted all denizens of my choice when it arrived. The strange combination of Indian, Italian, English and “no particular ethnicity” cuisines brought a thousand smiles to our faces. With the air-con blasting to break the heat, we laughed in the holiday, topping it off with a proper cappuccino. After being in chai country for 4 months, that is what I call a Christmas present.

Scooting out I took the chance to grab an unnecessary ice cream and savored each bite of the coffee-chocochips combo as I strolled with my friend to the cathedral for midnight mass. By now it was on 10:30 and we showed up at the gorgeous Portuguese colonial style church. Painted a Mediterranean pink with twin apses, the courtyard outside could have been southern Europe. The inside, well, that was unmistakably Indian -- complete with a garlanded Mary and an epic nativity scene with blinking lights.

Int what I would later describe as one of the better Christmas Eve ceremonies I’ve attended, the Fathers opted for a three language service. I found this a bold choice as most people find church too long in the first place. To triple the length due to language, well, it seemed a move of either an untested and wily rookie or the touch of seasoned and gifted veteran. It would prove to be the latter. Playing to a packed house, the choir belted out songs for the majority of the service bringing loads of Christmas joy to our ears. The music came in three languages and, unsurprisingly, they all sounded about the same. And while a few slowly slid down their pews and faded into their sugarplum dreams, most of us cranked through the service with a growing Christmas spirit.

The standout Indian moment of the service came at communion. With four stations and about 1,000 people, I through we would follow the typical route of up the middle and down the sides. Well, if that wasn’t a Western concept of order in a church service then I don’t know what is.

When the priest made the call for communion, something only slightly short of chaos broke out. I don’t know of a competition for getting to the front of the communion line, but from the looks of it, I thought there might be. Immediately, several people came straight up the middle from the back, jumping the line in front of those sitting further up. Then it became clear we would not go row by row, but rather whenever you felt like it. We might call this go-hen-you-are-led-by-the-Spirit style. Just as I thought I might understand this more democratic (and maybe even more spiritual) process of communion, things changed again. I was sitting in the main section on the left side, but the man next to me quickly jumped over into the side aisle and walked up it to receive the sacrament. When I finally got up into the processional, I found myself squashed into a subcontinental queue** that welcomed in new people all the time at all points. As we proceeded to the cup, those who had finished started walking straight back down the center aisle, so now we had two lines going up, one each side of the aisle, with the recent recipients streaming down the middle, doing their best impersonation of a Brian Westbrook running between the tackles on Christmas Day.

By the time I received the bread, most of the congregation was somewhere in the midst of this mass movement. Something now resembling an beehive or ant colony. I struggled to get back to my seat, stepping on a couple of toes (which requires immediate apologies with lots of hand motions) and catching one man with a shoulder (which requires no apologies [stepping on the toes in India is a big no-no, but giving someone a stiff shoulder by accident is no problem]) and beginning to laugh at the whole scenario. I tried to pull it in when I got back to my seat, wanting to be reverent in the moment of Christ’s birth. But as I bowed my head, closed my eyes and prayed, my Vietnamese friend next to me nudged my arm. “Brother. Brother! Don’t fall asleep. It’s not over yet!” I wanted to be angry that she disturbed my prayer, but then I had to laugh as I could only imagine what this experience must have been like for her – her first time to a Catholic mass.

At 1:40 the music faded, we passed the peace and headed back home. First we walked the block to the sea and strolled the promenade, wishing the many gathered there a merry Christmas. One fellow asked me where I was from and when he heard I was from America, he gave me a big hug. Ah, the Christmas Spirit.

**In a conversation a week later, I had this conversation about the lunch line at a recent event I attended.

Prabhakar: Hungry for lunch?
Chris: Yeah, but it may be a while before we eat. It seems like more people are getting ahead of us.
P: Yeah, well, this is India.
C: Yeah. India has a bit of a queue problem. Don’t you think?
P: (laughing) Ha! India doesn’t have a queue problem. It just doesn’t have any queues. You have to believe in queues in order to have a queue before you can say it has a problem!