| Dear Rev. Know-It-All,
What do you mean that Mass has become a
kind of hybrid with American Protestantism? Will you ever cheer up?
You’ve been listening to that dreary chant so long that it appears to
have hardened your brains.
Remember as St. Augustine said, “the
Christian is an alleluia from head to foot.”
The Mass is supposed to be joyful. The
Christian is supposed to be joyful. I want music at Mass that makes me
joyful and chant just doesn’t fit the bill.
Yours,
Ms. Joy Buzzer
Dear Miss Buzzer,
You sound like you got your theology from
the back of a shampoo bottle. “Lather, Rinse, Repeat.” A nice
hairdo may involve bubbles and lather, but the Sacrifice of the Mass does
not. The joy of the Lord is not exactly the same as the joy the world offers.
The joy of the Christian is caused by the nearness of the Lord, and not
by how catchy the tune is.
First of all, put things into context.
St Augustine may have said it, but when he said alleluia, he was chanting
it in Hebrew. Alleluia means “Praise the Lord.” It is Hebrew and it
has always been chanted until recent times. The very quote you use makes
my point. The word “Hallelujah” was not in the common language. It
was retained in the Catholic Liturgy of which St. Augustine was a priest
and bishop in order to tie the Christian worship to their Hebrew past.
It was kept in a “sacred language” precisely to express the universality
of the Church.
Remember that “Catholic” is the Greek
word for “Universal.” We are members of a universal Church and, while
it is appropriate to speak to local culture, we cease to be Catholic by
definition when we make the Mass so local as to be unidentifiable. It becomes
mine, not ours. I want to be a member of the Church that Jesus founded
through the ministry of the Apostles, a Universal Church. Universality,
that is Catholicism, means that the Church extended not only through space,
but also time. The Church I belong to is part of an unbroken chain of worship.
In the church in the village where my family
comes from in the old country, there is a baptismal fount. It is carved
from a block of sandstone, and is so worn with time that it is almost impossible
to tell what the carvings and decoration on it are. It goes back, I assume
to the 1200's when the church was built. When I first saw it and touched
it, I realized I was touching something that generations of my ancestors
had touched. It was a vehicle by which they had reached through time in
order to bring me to Christ and Christ to me. By my Baptism and my participation
in the Mass, I was more profoundly united to them than I was even by my
genetic and cultural inheritance. Well, I suppose we should throw it out
and get a new one, one that made sense, one that has words on it we can
read.
Don’t you understand that there is a
language that speaks more powerfully than words? Just because something
isn’t easily decipherable doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be
understood. The inheritance of 3,000 or 4,000 years shouldn’t be thrown
away just because it leaves me cold. Perhaps the fault is mine, not the
fault of the inheritance.
Fr. Martin Luther decided to rewrite the
Catholic Mass, to declare that it was not a sacrifice. It simply became
a re-enactment of the Lord’s supper, a sort of stage play, aimed at the
audience, not the ultimate act of worship.
"The cult (i.e. Mass) was formerly
meant to render homage to God; henceforth it
shall be directed to man in order to console him and enlighten him.
Whereas the sacrifice formerly held pride of place, henceforth the most
important will be the sermon.”
(Luther quoted by Léon Christiani, Du
luthéranisme au protestantisme [1910], p. 312)
The course was thus set for the modern world
in which the value of a religious service had nothing really to do with
the worship of God. Rather it has everything to do with the well being
of the participant. It is about me, not about God. In that sense it is
the worship of me, not of God. It is modern man distilled. Man, not
God, is the measure of all things.
Though I may feel just wonderful about
the whole service, I have not stepped into the unending stream of history.
I have not stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai nor entered Solomon’s Temple.
I have not trod Calvary’s holy ground nor drank from the cup which the
Savior drank. I have not wept for joy at the empty tomb, nor felt the fire
of Pentecost. I’ve been to a Church service and I guess it was okay and
now I’m going out to breakfast.
We live in a disposable society.
We have plastic plates and plastic forks and plastic shoes and plastic
cars and plastic music and on and on. It is all disposable, as are we.
We are drowning in a sea of plastic.
Give me something made of rock.
Give me the Catholic Mass.
Rev.
Know-It-All
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