A Sudden Case of Liturgical Indifference
I’ve spent most of my life as a Catholic (over twenty-five years now) being unhappy about the liturgy: the bad music, the bad prose, the whole atmosphere that tends to be either dreary or irreverent or both. I’ve spent a lotof time complaining about it and trying to make the best of it, and have sometimes been completely demoralized by it.
But something odd has happened recently. I’ve become almost completely indifferent to the aesthetics of the liturgy. I think I’ve mentioned here before that my wife and I, now that we are empty-nesters, usually make the thirty-minute drive to the cathedral in Mobile, which is a beautiful building and often has very beautiful music. Last Sunday, having slept too late to get to the cathedral in time, we went to our local parish on Sunday evening. And it struck me afterwards that none of the things that usually bother me about the liturgy had done so.
I don’t have any explanation for this. It was not a step I consciously decided to take. Nor is it a principle: I still believe that beauty in the liturgy is very important. And I still cringe a bit when I talk to a non-Catholic who seems to have a bit of interest in the Church, and realize that if he or she gets interested enough to go to Mass I will have to apologize for the drabness of it.
But it doesn’t really matter very much to me. I would still prefer that the liturgy be beautiful, but am not oppressed or depressed if it isn’t. The only thing that matters is that I be able to receive the Bread of Life.
Some saint—Padre Pio, maybe?—has said something along the lines of “the world could more easily exist without the sun than without the Eucharist.” As a matter of physical fact, that doesn’t seem to be true, but I think I have a hint of what he means. The world would be a dark and hopeless place without Christ. Even those who do not believe in him receive his light, and are more conscious of darkness than they otherwise would be, because that light gives them the hope that there is something other than darkness, a hope that is very hard to kill. And because we are creatures of body and soul who can ordinarily encounter spirit only through the material world, our good God has given us this mysterious physical presence. Without it the world would be visibly more dark. Without it Christianity might indeed persist, but in a weakened, fainter, and more disembodied mode.
I’m sorry if this is offensive to Protestants; as I think I’ve made clear often enough (for instance in this piece, “On Not Being an Ex-Protestant”), I’m very affectionate and grateful toward my Protestant roots. But something is missing from Protestantism: this literal, physical presence of the body, blood, soul, and divinity of God Incarnate himself, this feeding of the spirit with, literally, God. And it makes a huge difference. I don’t think it can be understood by anyone who has not inhabited and absorbed the atmosphere of the Church. But once it gets hold of you, you find that you would have difficulty, at least, in living without it. Ugly buildings, ugly prose, and ugly music really don’t amount to very much in comparison; at this point in my life my hunger is so great they don’t amount to anything at all.
By the way, I had already decided on this as my subject before I realized that today is Corpus Christi Sunday.
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