A lovely note from a reader

Here is somebody with a healthy attitude to bad liturgy:

My two oldest kids and I went down to Mexico over Easter Week with a church group to perform some corporal acts of mercy. A sad side-effect of this is that we spend the Easter Vigil on the road away from the rest of the family. So, Holy Saturday evening finds us at Loyola-Marymount in L.A. Having worked on the Liturgy with Jesuits at a Jesuit university in the past, I feared the worst: irreverent, incoherent, self-congratulatory, loud. And when we went by the chapel, we hear the obligatory rock band warming up, and go into a post VII remodeled chapel and play the standard ‘find the tabernacle’ game. And it’s about as quiet and reverent as a playground at recess. BUT –

It was a beautiful, moving liturgy. They butchered some stuff, sure, and displayed the artistic sensibilities of a boy band, BUT: I hardly noticed. We did (most of) the readings. We sang like we meant it. We carried the candles, bathed in the incense, and, most importantly of all, dropped our guards for a little while and let God do the talking. And the Sacrament was there. The Spirit, the Son, the Father were there. And I was humbled (always a good thing). What a great experience. I still think the music is silly and juvenile, and wish people could Just Shut Up in church for a few minutes a week, and wish somebody with a historical and artistic clue could have a go at that chapel – But: all in all, I’m very grateful for that Mass.

Same thing just happened for my elder daughter’s Confirmation yesterday – for mysterious reasons, and unlike last year when Confirmation was administered by the bishop at the cathedral, this year it was part of the Sunday afternoon ‘Teen Spirit’ Mass. Yikes. An even worse (and louder) wannabe rock band singing even worse music (does anyone besides me notice the overwhelming prevalence of 1st person pronouns in this weird music, especially compared with traditional hymns? Why, and to Whom, are we singing, again? It’s just not All About Me, after all). Anyway, again – it was very moving. The Sacraments do work by working. Even the foot-stompin’ jam tune they closed the set, I mean, the Mass, with couldn’t overcome the Spirit.

Moral: Sometime, you just have to shut up and listen. God works through us flawed human beings. I get way too wrapped around the axel over bad liturgy (not out and out scandalous or heretical liturgy, just bad) and forget that God is still there, and it pleases the tempter to no end when we allow stupid ‘artistic’ considerations to keep us from hearing Him.

So in a week or two maybe I’ll drive the family down to Palo Alto and hear the St. Ann Choir sing a chant/polyphony Mass in the cool quiet of St. Thomas Aquinas church. It will be nice. But I will have to remember to listen for God there as well, instead of basking in my own sophistication and refined taste. There’s always a temptation in the other direction.

Thanks, and keep up the good work.

Thanks for this. Part of the reason I’ve always been leery of liturgical obsessivism is that it seems to me to pretty consistently choke off the working of the Spirit. We’re told to look for fruits. And the fruit mentioned by Paul is not “keenly sensitive and fuming aestheticism” but love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. What consistently hits me in the face from so much of the Angry about Liturgy crowd is, well, anger. Of course, such anger is always justified as Holy Anger, but I’m afraid that looks an awful lot like self-delusion. Every time I mention liturgy on this blog and express my contentment with any liturgy the Church serves up, I can be guaranteed of one thing: a blast of rage. It’s the prima facie evidence that something is wrong with the Liturgically Angry crowd that makes all the logical arguments about my need to get angry about liturgy fall apart. If the tradeoff is between Perfect Liturgical Correctness and living a happy life with at least some of the fruits of the Spirit, I’ll take the fruits of the Spirit every time.

My readers seems to me to have found the key: which is to focus on God and remember that the liturgy is the means to an end, not the end in itself. His letter was balm and I thank him for it.