A Beautiful Mass
A couple of weekends ago I attended Mass at a parish which I will refrain from naming, in a city on the other side of the continent. I know I’ve mentioned more than once here that after a long period of struggle I eventually became reconciled to the normal American Catholic liturgy. What I tend to forget, though, is that in the archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama, where I live, the general practice is not so bad. Yes, it’s the basically the usual thing, but at least in my home parish and in the cathedral, where I also sometimes attend Mass, it’s generally fairly reverent and tasteful, at least by current standards. And the cathedral has excellent, sometimes superb, music. The architecture ranges from not too bad to beautiful—again, the cathedral is a treasure. The homilies are usually solid.
The unnamed parish of a couple of weeks ago, on the other hand, had pretty much all the bad things in plenitude. It was an ugly barnlike A-frame building. The main entrance was not through one of the “A” ends but in the middle, and I wondered if it had been modified in the spirit of Vatican II, though the building didn’t really seem old enough. At any rate, it was much—several times—wider than it was deep, but it didn’t have the almost semi-circular amphitheater-style seating arrangement that usually goes with those proportions. There were chairs, not pews, and they faced straight forward, so the result was that if you were out on one of the wings, as I was, you were facing a blank wal, which made for a sense of awkwardness and distance. And though the chairs had kneelers we were instructed not to kneel by a big video screen over the choir stall which cheerfully fed us the words to the songs.
The music was pretty bad, although at least not incompetent as it so often was twenty or thirty years ago. The only instrument was a piano played in a sort of rock-and-roll style. The lectors had apparently been advised to read with fervor and drama, and the effect in at least one case was grating. In general there was an extremely casual air, a lot of bonhomie from the white-haired priest, a lot of chit-chat among the congregation, a lot of wandering around and hugging at the Peace.
Well, most Catholics reading this will know what I’m talking about, and there’s no need for me to go on about it. But it did make me realize that what I’ve gotten used to is really not so bad, comparatively, and could be considerably worse.
I was right on time for Mass, and the church was mostly full. The entrance was crowded with the procession, so I went to a side door and slipped into a mostly empty row of chairs near the back. I sat down toward the middle of the row; it’s always annoying when people sit next to the aisle, and instead of moving when someone else arrives, insist on staying put and making the others squeeze by them, so I try to remember not to do that. (And also to remember that some people might have a good reason for doing it, as I try to remember that those people heading for the door after communion may have a good reason.)
Just after Mass started a group of three or four people came in. After squeezing by the people next to the aisle who wouldn’t move, they found that they needed one more space between me and the aisle-sitters. I wasn’t paying attention, so one of them, a young Asian-looking woman, asked me if I would move over, which of course I did. She smiled pleasantly and thanked me. I say “young” because she was a lot younger than me, but not high-school or college-young—in her thirties somewhere, I would guess, possibly even early forties.
She apparently hadn’t been to Mass for a while, or at least not regularly, because she didn’t know the new responses which have been in use for..what? Eight months or so now?–and kept breaking into the old ones.
After communion, in bold defiance of the instructions from the video screen, I knelt, as did a few other people here and there, including the woman next to me. And she remained kneeling, through a longish musical interlude and into a series of announcements. When she finally stood up, I glanced at her and saw that her face was covered in tears.
How long had she been away? Why had she come back? What was the source of those tears? I don’t know, and it’s none of my business, but I know what she came back to. Amid all our complaints about the liturgy, even if they’re justified, we need to remember that the distance between a clumsy or ugly Mass and no Mass at all is infinite. This Mass was not beautiful, but it was beautiful.
Light On Dark Water 
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