I walked into the gothic cathedral. It was early. There were sleepy looks on people’s faces. Puffy eyes. Saggy jowls. And that was just the face I saw in the lobby mirror.

One of the ushers shook my hand. He said it was good to see me. I don’t know if he meant it.

I sat in the rearmost pew because I was embarrassed to be here. The presbyterium was starting to fill up with people. I was not raised Catholic. We did not call them presbyteriums. We called them “the big rooms where the preacher had an aneurysm.”

You could tell that a lot of parishioners had particular seats. They marched into the room with purpose, families in tow, striding directly toward their seats. They wore nice clothes. The old folks wore suits and dresses. The young marrieds were dressed “snappy casual.” More casual than snappy.

The back pews, where I sat, were filling with only Latino congregants. Suddenly, I was surrounded by an ocean of rapid-fire Español. A few women wore maid-service uniforms. Several guys wore construction boots. There were a lot of children. I counted no Latinos up front.

A little girl sat beside me. She looked at me and smiled.

Service began. Priests proceeded forward, wearing what looked like kaftans, and hats that looked like traffic cones. Right away, I could tell this service was going to be unfamiliar to me.

Even so, my dad was raised Catholic. By the time I was born he had already converted to full-tilt evangelicalism. I never knew of his early life. All I knew were fire-breathing sermons, angry fundamentalists, and preachers who took important mission trips to Honolulu.

But my old man was Catholic. He grew up in a traumatized home of abuse and violence. And I know his Catholic origins helped him through this difficult boyhood. I know this because sometimes, when nobody was looking, he made the sign of the cross when he prayed.

Years after his death, I was in my mother’s attic. There, I found a box containing a christening gown with my name on it. My mother admitted that I was baptized Catholic as an infant. She said I was pretty ticked off about it, too. “You almost peed on the priest,” she remarked.

This was my first Catholic Mass.

Service began. The priest said something important, and everyone stood. He said something else, and everyone sat. He spoke; everyone talked back. People in the front pews spoke English. We in the back spoke another tongue. At some point, everyone deployed little kneeling benches attached to their pews.

The little girl unfolded our kneeling bench and stared at me. She could tell I wasn’t Catholic.

“We’re supposed to kneel,” she said.

“I’ve never been to Mass before,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said.

So we knelt. I thought about my dad. The older I get, the more I want to know where I came from. His life was cut short, and in a way so was mine.

Then, it was time to receive the Lord’s Supper. I was a little nervous. Namely, because I didn’t know what to do.

So I followed the little girl and her mom toward the altar. The child kept glancing back at me and smiling as if to say, “Just be cool, do what I do.”

After the front pews were served communion, the throng of Latinos and one redhead walked toward the altar, en masse.

The little girl took the wafer, then drank from the cup. So I did the same thing. The priest must have thought I was one of the Spanish speakers because he said, “El Cuerpo de Cristo.”

Then, the little girl and her mom showed me how to make the sign of the cross. It was the mother who demonstrated, while the little girl translated.

“First you touch your head,” the girl said. “Like this.”

The mom smiled.

“Then you touch your tummy,” the girl said. “Then both shoulders. Then you touch your heart and you say ‘Gracias.’”

“Gracias for what?” I asked.

Her mother replied, “Todo.”

Everything.