A SMALL THOUGHT ABOUT THE TRIDENTINE MASS: The Weekly Standard has this review of a new book on Auden and Christianity. While I’ve just started reading a huge whopping hunka-hunka burnin’ Auden, I doubt I’ll read the biography, just because biographies by their nature are kind of absurd. I mean, people think fanfiction is derivative! Still, I was struck by this passage in the review:

…The structure and aesthetics of high Anglican worship were so agreeable to him, not for snobbish or campy-gay reasons, but precisely because they best embodied the pattern of impersonal dramatic repetition that he so desperately needed, the patterning that made it possible for the act of worship to be, for him, an act of personal re-integration.

“Only in rites,” he would say, “can we renounce our oddities / and be truly entired.” Only by yielding the chaos of his inner disorder to the controlling order and harmony of liturgical space and time could he be made whole. The idea that worship should be an act of spontaneous personal outward expressiveness, directed toward God and toward one’s fellow congregants, could not have been further from his heart. On the contrary, he liked to insist, “orthodoxy is reticence,” the form of reverence that is too reverent and tasteful to speak its name, at least not very loudly or often.

Now, the last sentence there doesn’t strike me as necessarily the right cashing-out of “orthodoxy is reticence.” But the rest of this made a lot of sense to me. And it stands as a good counterpoint to a conversation I had over the weekend. Cacciaguida and I were talking about various rites, and he described how many people don’t realize that in the Tridentine Mass, the people really don’t say hardly anything. Their responses are given to the altar servers. (…If I’m misremembering this conversation, I hope he corrects me. I’ve been to a Tridentine Mass only once or twice.)

And although I wasn’t intent enough on my opinion to state it, I did think that staying silent would likely make me even more prone to woolgathering and accedia than I am already. Having to say the responses is very convicting for me, reminding me of all the places where I’ve lacked faith. I don’t want to commit what you could call “spiritual perjury”; and so when I have to actually speak a promise or statement of faith or prayer, it makes me at least somewhat more likely to live in accordance with that prayer.

But the Auden-review passage really resonates with me, and points up an aspect of the Tridentine rite that I might have missed on my own.