https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GvNQMdO648

Transcript

I was at a mass recently at a parish that is not my own where the priest seemed to take a lot of  opportunities to adlib with his own thoughts and colloquialisms in place of what is written in the Roman Missal.

This isn’t something I’m all that used to, so my initial reaction was one of anger and frustration. The texts that compose the mass are a treasure of the whole Church – not of any particular person or generation. For any one person to think that they ought to try to make cute improvements to something that contains traces as old as the faith itself seems to suggest that they are more concerned with the attention that it can bring them then on serving as they are called to in the liturgy.

The analogy that came to mind for me is like someone who is appointed curator of a great art museum filled with ancient treasures who decides that the whole collection could use some of their own personal touch, so they run around putting dabs of paint here and there and re-arranging exhibits to suit their own preference.

Now obviously, that’s a bit hyperbolic, but if you consider what the mass is and how sacred it is, it could be argued that individuals tampering with it to suit their own preferences is actually worse.

But as I thought about it, perhaps by the grace of the sacrament that I received on that occasion, I was reminded of something that helped me sympathize a bit.

Before I became Catholic, I spent quite a lot of time in other denominations trying to find where my fit was. Evangelical churches were a highlight and one thing that I appreciated in those experiences was the sense of authenticity that emerged in those prayer services. The pastor would get on stage and pray in a tone and style that seemed to be authentically from the heart.

Ironically, it was all very well rehearsed, but it was designed to appear spontaneous and full of candor.

When I started attending mass, I was somewhat discouraged by the complete lack of personal expression of prayer. Whenever the priest led in prayer, it was always something that was read in a monotone voice.

Whenever the people responded or recited a prayer, same thing. It was something from memory, and it was completely empty of any feeling, passion, or personal investment. And I’m sure I’m not the only person who has been struck by a suspicion that it’s not suppose to be like this.

No wonder protestants always appear to have such a personal relationship with Jesus and Catholics always appear to be relying on some formal and institutionalized religious framework to tell them what to do and say.

So, I can understand why some priests, struck by this same problem, feel like there needs to be a personal touch thrown in there so that it at least feels like there’s some humanity to it. Surely a faith as romantic as Roman Catholicism shouldn’t be characterized by robotic recitation of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

This apprehension used to bother me a lot. To the point where I would even do this with my own devotional life. I used to adapt the words of prayers like the Our Father and the Hail Mary so that I couldn’t get away with just reciting them without paying attention to what I was saying. I forced myself to fill the prayers with synonyms and variations so that it was an authentic personal expression of my faith and what I believed.

But at some point, I stopped doing that and enough time passed where I had almost forgotten that this was something that bothered me about our liturgy and when I was reminded of it after seeing this priest doing what I used to do in my own devotions, I realized why that is.

And I also realized that this suspicion, this sentiment that this is not how it’s supposed to be – I think that’s right. We’re not supposed to be droning through the liturgy in monotone voices. We’re supposed to be singing it.

And the reason this hasn’t bothered me for a while, is because I predominantly attend the extraordinary form of the mass where there’s hardly ever a moment when someone isn’t singing.

Sadly, over the course of the past century, we’ve kinda wrecked our liturgy. And don’t get me wrong in this. I’m not the kind of person who refuses to accept or acknowledge the new or ordinary form of the mass. I’m not a Latin only kinda guy, because that’s actually a pretty hard case to make.

But I am someone who will say that we’ve completely messed up in how we’ve implemented the reforms that were intended and even a quick perusal of the Second Vatican Councils document on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium will reveal this fact.

The Catholic tradition of using music in prayer is designed to elevate our senses to something transcendent, to beauty itself, who is God.

But over the past century, Western culture, has embraced a notion that music is solely about being entertained – it’s for our amusement and the irony of this modernist revision is in a pretty high dosage.

Music, in classical Greek thought, was any art inspired by a muse or that which the muses presided in. Amusement, is that which is without a muse. That’s literally what that word means. Like Atheism means “a – without” “theism” or without God. Amusement means without a muse.

In other words, amusement is the antithesis of music. And that’s absolutely what we have with modern popular conventions for music. They are without inspiration. They do not look to something higher unless that higher thing is money, sex, status. It’s a lot of navel gazing and what could be more tragic that a creature who finds themselves in a world like this who can’t stop thinking about themselves long enough to find another muse.

But the traditional Catholic understanding of music was much more like the classical Greek one – but God was the muse and our prayers where the lyrical expression of our love for him. That’s what the mass is. It’s supposed to be music.

And just like hearing someone read out the lyrics to a song with no expression, cadence, or timing, hearing Catholics recite the mass without singing it just feels wrong.

We allowed this modernist notion that music is for our amusement and since music has always been a part of mass, we’ll use it like some kind of entertaining interlude between all the boring stuff.

And that’s part of the reason we fight about liturgy so much, because we can’t agree about what is entertaining. Well, what if we just dropped the desire to be entertained, and instead sung the mass through chant itself and rediscovered what it is to focus our attention back on God rather than ourselves and our own personal preferences.

God is supposed to be our muse and the mass is our love song to him. I think it makes sense if we stopped mechanically rehearsing this ancient music and, you know, start to sing it as it was intended.