Be The [Liturgical] Change

Do you ever notice how at a talk when there’s a Q&A, there will always be this big, long, awkward silence before anybody stands up to ask the first question? Then the questions go fine. It’s not that people didn’t have questions. It’s that nobody wants to be the first to stand up.

Have you ever been in that situation where you’re with a group, out in the street, and one of you has wandered away, and you call him to get to that other place? But it’s awkward to be loud. So people go, almost whispering: “Bob.” “Bob.” “Bob.” and of course Bob’s all the way over there and he can’t hear you because he’s distracted by something else, so I’m always the guy who goes “YO, BOB!!!!!!!” Betcha Bob heard me. And everybody looks at me like I’m the one who burped the alphabet at the Duchess’s dinner party when they’re the ones who spent thirty seconds trying to get Bob’s attention while ensuring they wouldn’t get Bob’s attention.

Ever go to a church where every pew is packed, except the first two pews? I knew a priest who wouldn’t start Mass unless the first front pews were filled. He made people move. When I was a little kid, my Mom told me: “You sit in the front row. In Mass, and in life.”

This social pressure, this fear of standing out, of awkwardness, maybe there are some good things about it–social decorum isn’t wrong–but we need to recognize it for what it is, an atavistic instinct, which needs to be mastered by reason instead of being its master, and we need to recognize how tremendously powerful it is. I’m pretty sure Jesus wasn’t afraid of making things awkward when he had to. Remember all those stories when someone would invite Jesus over for dinner and he would berate them in this incredibly ‘rude’ way? I wish I could remember who commented: “Nobody ever invited a prophet to dinner twice.”

There are times when nobody wants to say the Emperor is naked. (By the way, in the original version of the story, instead of the kid’s outburst breaking the spell, it is just laughed off.)

But here’s the crazy thing. My friend Megan McArdle wrote a book called The Up Side of Down. It’s an excellent book, full of insights, you should get it. (My review here.) It’s not a book of theology, at least not explicitly (everything is theological). The book is about failure–why it happens, how it happens, what we can do about it. One of the most striking things in the book is about plane crashes, which are certainly a kind of failure. In movies, we imagine that when a big 747 is going down, everybody is running around screaming their head off. But actually, investigators have found that when a plane is crashing, people stay in their seats. Why? Nobody else is moving. People know something’s not right. But if nobody is running around screaming like their head is on fire, then everything has to be a-ok, right? So if everybody sits in their seat, everybody sits in their seat. In some cases, this caused deaths as people didn’t have time to rush for the exists, because they just sat there, because everybody else just sat there.

I say all of this to talk about the liturgy, and ad orientem.

I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks we need to go back to the future, and have the priest face towards the East in the Mass. In fact, I would assume that there are tons of people who agree with me–particularly priests. But I’ll be damned if, aside from the local radtrad enclave, you can find an ad orientem Mass somewhere. It’s easier to find a Mass said in Latin, whatever the rite. I bet you could count on the fingers of four hands the diocesan parishes that do regular Novus Ordo Masses ad orientem on the entire planet. It is just taken for granted by everybody that by now versus populum has become so ingrained in the culture of everyday Catholics, that the arguments for ad orientem have become so forgotten, that it would simply be inintelligible to do it. Everyday Catholics would just freak out. Even Benedict XVI seemed to agree. Everybody is doing versus populum so nobody is doing anything else.

Well, looky here. The bishop of Lincoln decided to try out a few ad orientem masses at the cathedral during Advent. He catechized. And guess what? Returns were mostly positive?

JFDI, guys. Write out an explanation in the Mass handbooks, and make a handout. Don’t do it at every Mass, at least at first. Ease into it. Be smart about it. But do it.

Be the liturgical change.