I'm Still Whining

Just cruising around some favorite Trad Catholic blogs; one was addressing the "shock and awe" nature of the changes made to the liturgy, and I'd have to agree. The changes were swift, sudden, and shocking.

Now that Pope Benedict XVI is moving glacially back toward a more profound and literal translation of the Mass, it's interesting to see/hear what some churches have adopted and what some have not. A couple of recent examples:

I attended Palm Sunday Mass with a friend at an NO church. All the statues were, as far as I could tell, undraped. I asked about this, and it was pointed out that there was, indeed, a purple drape on everything, just  not covering the statue - the drape was loosely tossed around the figure. So, what is the point? Isn't the point of the drape the symbolic death and mourning? But anyway. In this particular Mass, the priest did read the Lord I am not worthy wording according to the re-translation; the congregation falteringly responded with "and with your spirit" as opposed to "and also with you." And the priest spoke the words of the consecration "for you and for many" and opposed to "all." There were also three altar servers (all girls, all sloppy); six Eucharistic Ministers (they don't even bother with the Extraordinary any more, do they?), a lector, and a cantor.

Easter Sunday was at my mom's NO church. The congregation was about half and half on the "and also with you" response. The church was, as always, beautifully decorated. The choir was, is horrible too un-Christian of me?  Father did not recite the new "Lord I am not worthy" prayer, and he spoke an "alternate" consecration (that one, I have to admit, deeply bothers me). Oh, and just as an aside: nobody sang at all; about half the people held hands and did the orans posture during the Pater.

In both cases above, "participation" was limited to responses ("We pray to the Lord," and so on), which, of course, were always part of all Masses for as long as I can remember.

It occurred to me, and I mentioned it to my mom, that one of the reasons given for the liturgical "renewal" of the 60s was that people sat in Mass and "said their beads" because they couldn't understand the Mass and couldn't follow the (very clear) Missals or Mass Cards supplied in every pew. I was only about 12 or 13 when they started messing with the Mass, and I already knew it by heart. How hard could it be to understand? I was given a Missal at my First Communion. We were instructed in the parts of the Mass during religious instruction. I'm not sure what went on in other parishes, and I have been told my experience was "unusual," so I can't say one way or the other. But the whole idea, I was told, was that the Mass was to be made more comprehensible, more participatory.

In my little Traditional chapel, everyone participates in the Mass, and I've mentioned on this blog before. We sing, we perform the Credo, Gloria, Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, as well as the opening and closing hymns. The choir "performs" only the sung readings, such as the Introit, or the Gradual, and the priest alone sings the Epistle and Gospel, as well as the Pater Noster and the main parts of the Mass. But looking around me, I don't get the feeling anyone feels left out. Granted, we're a self-selected bunch: we're there because we specifically love the Mass.

But I've had this discussion with a friend who is more in favor of the NO Mass than I am; he insists that my experience with the Mass as a child was unusual. I keep wondering, if it could happen at my ordinary parish in Buffalo, NY, why not throughout the church? Wouldn't it have been better to try teaching the great legacy of the Mass first, and really instructing Catholics in their faith, rather than going straight to dismantling a 1500 year old ceremony? Each word, each gesture of the Traditional Mass had layers of meaning - and once you understood them, each time you saw them you were filled with all the layers; you didn't have to think about them, they were there, like pulling out a Christmas ornament brings back not just one Christmas, but all Christmasses you have enjoyed over the years.

Physical Defects: Always Troubling to my Faith

I happened across a post on an odd website today, stumbling across it for no particular reason. One poster on this same forum made it clear that "God doesn't micromanage," but I will also acknowledge that for me, as a Catholic trying to make sense of it all, this was a blessing:

"John 9:2
And his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?
John 9:3
Jesus answered, Neither did this man sin, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him."

Why I had never found that particular quote in the Bible before I don't know, but I am grateful that it was brought to my attention. My brother was born with cerebral palsy, and was profoundly retarded, and it has troubled me all my life why God would allow the height of His creation to be so sadly "imperfect." Interesting, my family always contended that Mike wasn't our burden, but our blessing, and we felt sure that his soul was already saintlike. For whatever reason he had to endure his earthly life with limitations - and in doing so, brought so very much to all of us in terms of love, and compassion, and understanding, and yes, joy.

We have become so unhappily despairing in our view of life: if it's not just the way we want it, to hell with it - and maybe that's exactly right.

I'm still not totally clear if our family was right in the way that we dealt with Mike's situation. I can only imagine that Jesus was telling us all that God reminds us of His presence and our fall in both the perfection, and perfectly imperfect of His works.

Rick Santorum Throws Up

I had an interesting conversation with a friend last night.

He's a Catholic.

He didn't know Rick Santorum is a Catholic.

He didn't understand why Rick Santorum had objected to Jack Kennedy's famous "I won't be a Catholic President" speech.

Wow.

I had to back way up and go through the whole history of Catholics in the U.S.; Catholics being first subject to God (and the Church) and then to the United States as citizens; Catholics understanding Christ's teaching of "render unto Caesar," and being able to distinguish your duties as a citizen from being asked to do what the Church considers immoral and sinful (abortion); and Kennedy's going one step too far, though granted, understandably, given the anti-Catholic sentiment that was still pervasive in 1960, in his speech about how he could and would govern as a citizen first, and a Catholic - well, not as a Catholic at all.

Yes, at the time, there was a fear (and there is a whole backstory of the Masons vs. the Church that gets lost in the weeds of conspiracy theory and fact, and I won't even go into it here, because, frankly, I have no idea which is fact and which is craziness) that a Catholic would take marching orders from Rome, and would try to make the United States a "Catholic" country, an arm of the Vatican.

We can see this now as pretty silly, but at the time there were still many who were convinced that would be the case, and they were absolutely sure that we could never elect a Catholic president. Kennedy had  to make that speech, but in many Catholic's (certainly in Rick Santorum's) minds, he went just a little too far in distancing himself from his faith. All he really had to do was say that it would not be his intention, nor was it the intention of Rome, to turn the U.S. into a papal state. That he could and would govern as a citizen of the United States. He might have stopped there.

Rick Santorum freely admits that as a man he is informed by his Catholic conscience, and there is nothing wrong with that per se. We are all informed by the lives we have led, the principles we hold, our beliefs, our education, where we grew up and when, our faith (if we have one), even our ethnicity. It's all part of the person we are at any moment in time. Absolutely, something can come along and change our minds - a good argument, a new event, a discovery, a book, deeper thinking into a subject.

Rick Santorum wasn't saying anything wrong when he said he would govern as a man informed by his Catholic faith (and hence, would be opposed to abortion and the death penalty, among other things), but he went just a little too far in the whole "sick to my stomach" thing. If you don't know what hyperbole is, Santorum's statements in this case are a good example.

However, I was nevertheless amazed to learn that a well-educated man, a Catholic, a voter, could know so little about who's saying what, the belief systems of our candidates, and even the now-famous 1960 Kennedy speech to the Baptist ministers in Houston.

A Thought for Today

I am not skilled to understand

What God has willed, what God has planned

I only know at His right hand
Stands one who is my Savior

The Sanctity of Human Life

It's been a while. It's difficult to maintain the spirit, and I recognize that some of it was Father Pfeiffer at the BVM Priory, whose soul really was on fire with the love of God and the saving of souls. He infected everyone he met, and I was certainly ready to be infected. I just need to keep trying, and I guess that's all any of us can do!

I read something to day, though, that made me both laugh and cry. A quote from 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy: "Celebrate the 1995 repeal of the 55 mph federal speed limit by taking a liberal for an 80 mph spin through Texas and Utah—the highest speeds currently allowed anywhere in the United States, though of course there really should be no limits at all. As the wind blows through your hair, laughingly quote Ralph Nader who said at the time of the repeal, "History will never forgive Congress for this assault on the sanctity of human life."

Naturally what got to me was Ralph's concern for "the sanctity of human life." Now, I grant, Ralph Nader's central issue isn't abortion, and he leans more in the direction of "leave it out of the public discourse" (with which idea I don't entirely disagree). But that anyone would call upon "the sanctity of human life," and NOT be also anti-abortion (or shall I say, pro-life) is simply idiotic on its face. You either respect human life or you don't.

Polar Thinking

A brief dip into C.S. Lewis this morning, who never fails to get me thinking. He was talking about the relationship between the persons of the Father and the Son in the Trinity, and how we can't help thinking of them as two individual beings, though they are really one, yet distinct personalities - a mystery we can't really comprehend.

He went on to talk about our concept of "God is Love," and he said, "What we really mean is, Love is God." That is to say, God embodied love before creation, before there was anything to love.

That got me wondering, was the fall of the angels - the first rebellion against God - really the immanization (is there such a word?)  of polarity? In a way, that would make sense - at one time, everything was one - everything was God, and all his creation was a part of Him. There were no polar opposites. Evil was just the polarity of good, but of course this doesn't explain how - or why - it came to be.

In a philosophical way, it's interesting. Men and women, sexual congress, results in new life. Magnetic poles attract, and we always wonder if happiness would feel as good if we didn't know how unhappiness felt.

Yet aren't we told that if matter and anti-matter ever come together, that would mean the utter destruction of everything?

No wonder people want to put such questions away, and leave them to others to think about, and feed us well-thought-out answers. They stretch the brain into uncomfortable positions!

A Big, Bothersome Question

I had an argument with myself last night. It was over the question of whether the idea of God was reasonable.

I started to wonder about a story in which God really  was the God of Abraham, that that God really did communicate with us first through the Jews, then through Jesus, and finally through Mohammad. That he finally just got angry with us and said, fine. You wouldn't believe my rules (the Jews), you wouldn't believe my forgiveness (Jesus), so now you either believe or else (the Muslims). 

It's an interesting premise, if silly. But it does beg a bigger question: who is God? Why does he hide? Is it reasonable to think that he would communicate with us through a book (inspired writings) that are internally inconsistent and clothed in mystery and allusion? Isn't it sort of human to latch onto regular old objects and turn them into magical amulets, so why would we think there is anything any more special about the Bible than about any other old documents from a bygone age?

Then I got into the whole question of submission versus non-submission. This is a tough one. There is something both seductive, and impossible, about submitting. This notion has been explored on a variety of levels, and in many different ways (for example, Lina Wertmiller's Swept Away, a movie about sexual submission). 

On the one hand, how infinitely comforting to simply turn one's life over to a higher power and say, "I can't do this. The unexpected always happens; issues and questions and life events are so huge I feel powerless in front of them. How much easier and safer to say, 'Whatever you want, God. I just put myself in your hands.'" Then you float on the water like a leaf, go where the waves take you, rest in the power that compels you.

But then human nature kicks in - for some of us more than others - and we say, "Hell, no. It's my life, my choices. God, if God exists, wants me to handle things - to take charge. This is my life, my one and only life, and the choices I make, the things that I do, are all there is. I don't want to submit, I'm an adult, and I take responsibility."

We're told on the one hand that we're being children if we simply submit and go with it. On the other, it's explained to us that when we refuse to submit, we're guilty of the sin of pride - the sin of our original parents.

I'm guessing that the answer is, as the Church has taught us, somewhere in the middle. 

We are expected to own our lives; we are given the incredible power of free will. At the same time, we are expected to fight our human nature, and submit to the will of God. And the big, imponderable question is: if God's will were just all happy and positive and easy, it would be easy to submit. If it's that easy, it's not a challenge, and nothing has been proved by doing it.

The difficulty of all of this is why for me, and I suspect for many, faith is a matter of get up every day and try again. There will be good days and bad days and days when you think you're just going to quit. But you get up the next day and try again.