Last Christmas, we attended the midnight Mass at the fairly traditional parish near our home. I’ve only been to a midnight Mass once in my life, when I was a kid and I was mostly excited at staying up late. That part isn’t quite so exciting anymore; the whole Mass and the arriving-early-to-get-a-seat took about two hours, altogether.

At the end, with the lights off, and only candlelight in the church, the choir sang Silent Night:

There was incense, there was organ, there was the Roman Canon (the long Eucharistic prayer that’s rarely used in modern Catholic parishes). The priest even faced the altar during the Eucharistic liturgy, the old ad orientem, also uncommonly used today.

It was all a striking thing to observe. Putting aside faith—whether or not any of this is real or true—it is a piece of history, of heritage. I was observing, here in a little plain suburban church, 2,000 years after the birth of Christ, one instance of the highest, most refined expression of one civilization’s understanding of the divine.

My wife and I traveled to Peru back in October, and in the city of Cusco we visited the major museum of pre-Columbian history and culture. One exhibit was about the religion of the Incas and other pre-Columbian civilizations in Peru. And in one display case was a metal chalice. The card under it explained that it was used to hold the blood of human sacrifices, and that the chalice of human blood was offered to the gods...