Mass in Cantonese

...is weird.

It's like you're watching a DVD of Star Wars and you mistakenly press Audio 2, so the movie is now in Chinese. You know the film by heart, heck you've memorized the dialogue, but hearing it in a different language somehow still throws you off big time.

But despite the bizarre audio, you know when to kneel, sit and stand. You also know when it's time to say the Creed, the Our Father. And you instinctively say "And also with you" at the appropriate times. It's second nature, almost mechanical. It's creepy. I didn't know that I was that Catholic.

I'm not big on masses or any form of organized religion for that matter, but apparently it's written somewhere that you should go to mass on Sundays, so I went. It had been so long since I'd gone to communion, when the priest handed me the host, I said, "Thank you."

As I sat through the priest's unintelligble homily (and this time, it really was unintelligible) I thought, "This Good News of the Lord thing really got a lot people behind it, huh? I mean, imagine being a Chinese Catholic: believing in a God that does not look like you (heck even the saints don't look like you), a church whose foundations are from a country and culture so different from yours. Where the church leaders speak a foreign language and have nothing in common with you (actually they have nothing to do with you, ethnically or culturally). You have nothing in common except faith."

It's a lot like being a Catholic from the Philippines, we just don't think about it. So maybe they don't either.