Experiences That Make One a Traditionalist

Those who have assisted at the traditional Roman liturgy for some time can usually name many things about it that they noticed over the years — things that impressed, provoked, consoled, puzzled, that made them wake up, question more, dig deeper. There is a moment of transition, I find, from being one who appreciates the old liturgy, perhaps now and again, or as a field trip, or as a pastoral duty, to being one who has fallen in love with it, who makes it his spiritual home, and who, accordingly, may justly be called a traditionalist. (As much as some people protest against the use of that word, it remains immensely handy for naming a phenomenon, which is what language is supposed to do.)

My books mention many such experiences, but here are two that are especially appropriate to share in Easter week.

The first was the contrast I noticed, several years in a row, between the modern (Paul VI) Easter Vigil and the Easter Sunday Missa Cantata of the Roman Rite. The reason for comparing these two is that I was involved at the time in providing music for both — the “Ordinary Form” on Saturday night and the “Extraordinary Form” (how quaint are those terms now!) on Sunday morning.

The Paul VI vigil had no “spaces,” no obvious opening to mystery through which one could enter. It was a flood of didactic text, spoken aloud, with musical interludes. Modern people are already awash in words. Do we really need more? In the N.O. Easter Vigil, one felt that one had been thoroughly drenched in the Bible readings conducted in Nabbish, a lengthy homily, the unsatisfying glamor of receiving some people into the church in a ritual that culminated in applause, and a celebration of the Eucharist wholly lacking in supernatural resonance or fearful majesty. It made an impression for sheer length, number of lilies, and candles, but otherwise it was like cookie dough — the same consistency throughout. 

The Easter Missa cantata, on the other hand, was full of the sound of Alleluias sung in Gregorian chant — sixteen of them (not counting the repetitions of the Communion antiphon). The chants for Easter are strong, sometimes strange, always unearthly, already half-dwelling in the realm of eternity. The church, ablaze with white and gold… the ritual nailed to the altar, from which salvation pours out like blood and water… the clouds of incense billowing… all point to the mysterious reality of the Crucified and Risen One — and this is something that can be perceived by anyone seeking God or even seeking some meaning in life. Marshall McLuhan said, decades ago, that modern culture is obsessed with images and that the Church must therefore provide images of great power: visual and audible images that are startlingly different from what secular culture offers. At the Easter morning sung Mass, I had an almost unnerving sense of stepping back through time across all the centuries that separated me from the resurrection of Christ and coming once again into His powerful presence. This was a ritual that somehow poured from His glorified wounds to bathe me in their light. There was a holy awe about the place, a restrained joy coiled like a spring ready to leap to heaven, a hushed adoration like that of Mary Magdalene when she discovered Christ in the garden and He would not let her touch Him.

Let me not be misunderstood: I am not calling into question the good will of anyone who contributed to the Easter Vigil. On the contrary, there was abundant good will, which I remember fondly. The problem is deeper than the individuals: it is in the rites they are using and the customs that have grown up around them to the point of having nearly the force of law. The face liturgy presents to us depends much more on the rites and customs than it does on the personnel who happen to be using them; the former determine and delimit the possible range of influence for the latter.

The second experience was singing, and then reflecting on, Lesson III of Holy Saturday’s Tenebrae: “Incipit Oratio Jeremiae Prophetae.”

Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us:
consider and behold our reproach.
Our inheritance is turned unto aliens:
our houses to strangers.
We are become orphans without a father,
our mothers are as widows.
Our water we have drunk for money:
we have bought our wood for a price.
We were dragged by our necks,
we were weary and rest was not given unto us.
Unto Egypt, and unto the Assyrians have we given our hand,
that we might be satisfied with bread.
Our fathers have sinned, and are no more:
and we have borne their iniquities.
Servants have ruled over us:
there was none to redeem us out of their hand.
Our bread we fetched at the peril of our lives,
because of the sword in the desert.
Our skin was burnt as an oven,
by reason of the violence of the famine.
They have oppressed the women in Sion,
and the virgins in the cities of Juda.
Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
be converted unto the Lord thy God.

Pondering these prophetic words led me to see their application to our current liturgical situation, and the parallels have only grown clearer with time. We are alienated from our inheritance; our houses of worship are sold off to Masonic lodges or Hindu ashrams; we are become like orphans without a father in Rome or, in some cases, a father in our diocese; we bought our reforms for a steep price, and were dragged along without our consent; we grew weary of hyperactive participation and longed for a contemplative rest that was denied us; we exchanged our birthright for a seat at the United Nations and the European Union; those who fomented our disasters are mostly long-gone and we suffer from their sins; slaves of fashion rule over the sons of God; we fetched our traditional bread wherever we could find it, afraid of the sword of church authority in the desert of the post-Council; the spiritual famine has been violent, and it has extended even to threatening the religious life of consecrated virgins. Jerusalem, O Church on earth: be converted unto the Lord thy God!

Someone once said of the liturgical reformers: “They took the faith out of our hands and knees.” The reform stripped away, or allowed to be stripped away, bodily spiritual formation. Catholics can get a visceral sense of the contrast when they attend their first Tridentine Mass and find that there’s a lot more kneeling than they are accustomed to (even at High Mass) and more demands placed on their attention in general. It is a liturgy that pre-dates the invention of television, so it expects a long attention span, and the ability to be quiet and sit still. The faith has to penetrate into our bones and muscles or it remains cerebral and ineffectual.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the contrasting practices of Holy Communion. In too many churches, the faithful walk up in multiple lines and receive the Body of Christ in their hands, like people queueing for bus tickets, after which they take a cup to wash it down, like teammates sharing Gatorade. In traditional communities, the faithful kneel along the communion rail and wait until the priest comes to them to bless them with the Host — “Corpus Domini nostri + Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam, Amen” — and places it gently on their tongues. These two contrasting scenes are, in reality, expressive of two different ideas of religion, if we take religion in the sense of the virtue by which we offer God our worship through concrete words and actions.

This is why I am not surprised that the former Benedictine monk Gabriel Bunge, a world expert on the Trinity icon of Rublev, left the Catholic Church to become Eastern Orthodox. No one ever introduced him to the real Western tradition that corresponded to what he was studying from the East. He came to the conclusion that the only authentic tradition left was the East. His conclusion should rather have been that the modern West had abandoned its own authentic tradition, and that we have an urgent calling to recover it.

After experiences like the two I recounted, one’s soul is seared with the truth, at once liberating and daunting: I cannot go back to the 60s and 70s, to those pathetic works of human hands. Let the dead bury the dead. It is the perennially youthful Roman Rite that gives joy to me, that shines forth light and truth.

The Dire Need for a “New Habit of Mind”: MIT Argues for the TLM

Yes, you read that correctly: MIT, as in Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, my title is a bit deceptive. MIT isn’t arguing explicitly for the traditional Latin Mass; they are not quite so avant-garde. Rather, a recent podcast by an MIT professor, Alan Lightman, in discussing how technology and society have affected the way humans spend time and how society itself is ordered, touches on several dire needs of modern men that find a powerful remedy in the traditional worship of Catholics.

Prof. Lightman’s talk begins and ends with an anecdote about a trip to Cambodia, when he asked a village woman how long it took her to ride every morning ten miles on a dirt road to get stuff for the kitchen. He was surprised when she responded that she hadn’t thought about how long it took. Compared to how closely he, as a modern Westerner, monitored “time cost,” he was taken aback that someone could live with a calm indifference to the passage of time. She just took the time that was needed for the task.

How long does Mass take? This is a question that seems to be of great importance in the mainstream Catholic world, where people want to “get in and get out” in as “timely” a manner as possible. There is brunch to be made, or a sporting event to get to, or yardwork to be done, or some shopping delayed all week; in any case, who wants to be in church for very long? When I attended Georgetown University for a year (1989–1990), I learned about a Jesuit priest there who was famous for an 11-minute Sunday Mass at 11pm. It was very popular with students who wanted to “fulfill their obligation.”

We know that Catholics who attend the traditional Latin Mass are a self-selecting group (this already tells us something significant, namely, that those who love the liturgy are drawn to its traditional forms!). It is nevertheless worth pointing out that, on the whole, they are much less concerned about “how long Mass is going to take,” and are willing to attend, or even gladly look forward to, lengthy solemn liturgies. Like the Cambodian woman, they are willing to take time to travel the long road to the town and back. Apprehending that the liturgy is the best and most important thing we do as Catholics, they want to spend time with it.

The example of walking on a road is a humdrum one, but more generally we can say that we spend time on the things and people we love. The saying “time is money” is familiar, but a more correct version of it would be “time is life.” Our life is measured out in time. What we spend time on is what we spend life on. It does not seem too likely that the Lord will ask us on judgment day whether we spent enough time on sports, shopping, work, or sleep. It seems more likely He will ask us why we didn’t pray more when we could and should have done so.

Returning now to Prof. Lightman, I was particularly struck by these remarks of his, which begin 25 minutes into the podcast:

I think that we are destroying our inner world now via the wired world [after having destroyed the natural world]. It’s more subtle, it’s not as obvious, but we’re beginning to document the bad effects of our frenzied, hyperconnected lifestyle.... I think that the situation is dire. I think in some ways it’s just as serious as the destruction of our environment, even though it’s partly invisible. And we may already be at the point of no return.... We’re losing our ability to know who we are and what’s important to us. So is there anything that we can do? Somehow we need to create a new habit of mind, both as individuals and as a society. We need a new mental attitude that values our inner reflection, values stillness, values privacy, values personal reflection, that honors the inner self.

He then makes a number of suggestions: for K-12 students, a ten minute period of silence daily. For all students, more time to reflect on academic work, rather than pumping out assignments. He suggests quiet rooms in offices where people can go to read a book, close their eyes, or pray. For families, the evening meal should be entirely “unplugged.” Everyone should take walks. At the societal level, there should be “screen-free zones.” (This last suggestion was music to my ears. I have noticed over the years that almost every public space—in hotels, restaurants, airports, wherever people gather—is dominated by a giant TV screen. This makes it practically impossible for the center of gravity, the weight of attention, to reside in a single person reading a book, or in a conversation among friends.) A last point made by Prof. Lightman is our need for what he calls “unstructured time,” that is, time when we are not being made to do anything in particular, but are free to be alone with our thoughts.

This podcast is especially interesting because it shows a prominent secular thinker noticing a deep crisis and searching for a way out. I think that implicit in his searching is a sense that the foundation of the society is deeply flawed. Prof. Lightman gives us a glimpse at modern society stumbling around trying to find a way out of the mess it has made in all its novel cleverness. He gets the correct diagnosis, but are his proposals likely to be effective—or even taken seriously? One could say they are good but not radical enough. Will a quiet room in an office make a big difference? Doubtful. Not without some other change in mental disposition.

The fundamental decision is how we order our lives. Are we ordering our lives as the world directs, or should we try something else? It is not easy to get out of the wiring of modern society. Lightman says we need to find “a new habit of mind.” I don’t know if he knows about the ancient Latin Mass and the other rituals of traditional Catholicism, but it cannot fail to strike us how well these things, which were once widespread and are returning again in our day, embody the slow, reflective, low-tech, hands-on approach Lightman recommends as necessary for sanity and survival. As someone once pointed out, the gimmicky work by John Cage, 4’33, which consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of non-performance and the ambient sounds of the concert venue, was “written” at a time (1952) when millions of Catholics every week experienced about this much silence every week during the silent Roman Canon. Cage was hailed as a path-breaking genius, but he was an infantile dilettante compared to Holy Mother Church.

One of the great virtues of the traditional liturgy is that it enables the practice of a new habit of mind that can free humans from their enslavement to superficial things; it reflects the fundamental choice of Christianity to order all things to God, to make time for Him, to make room for Him. The traditional liturgy proved itself able to be the axis of Christendom, the burning heart of religious life, the source of strength for marriage and family, the glue of a Catholic society. Can we say this about the New Order liturgy, as it is practiced almost everywhere — and due to its own systemic features, as understood by its promulgator?

The radical theocentricity of the classical Roman Rite, which has as its counterpart the primacy of the interior life over external activity and phenomena, paradoxically leads to the fullest possible development of the external physiognomy of the rite and the aesthetic phenomena associated with it. This is not a contradiction but a necessary consequence of taking first things first. The Tridentine liturgy makes possible an unstructured interior freedom precisely by its dependable discipline of ritual form and its continual orientation to God. Never does a priest pray as intensely as he does when facing ad orientem and whispering the sacred words; never do laity pray as intensely as when they are kneeling at Mass, letting it envelop their senses and prompt their hearts.

In contrast, under the reign of liturgy designed as a social workshop or “school of Christian sociology” (Paul VI’s description), it will be a perpetual struggle for worshipers to recover the theocentricity and interiority that have been lost, and, ironically, a further struggle to acquire for it the splendor of external features as well. They will always seem like “glued on” accretions rather than emergent properties.

Other architecture at MIT is rather more like the reformed liturgy

Prof. Lightman’s observations, which are echoed by many commentators on modern society and technology (e.g., Marshall McLuhan, Augusto Del Noce, Ivan Illich, Neil Postman, Mark Bauerlein) fly in the face of the basic assumptions of the liturgical New Order, namely, that modernity is, or contains, a movement of the Holy Spirit that we should embrace. Instead of offering a truthful counterpoint to the worldly spirit, the New Order regurgitates that worldly spirit under quasi-liturgical trappings. The lost modern man will not find his way back to that which is perennial and, in that sense, unmodern in the one place he should be able to find it: the liturgy of the Mass.

Hence the vital spiritual, psychological, and sociological need in our time for the usus antiquior. The traditional Mass is not merely a question of aesthetics; rather it concerns all of the crises that we face as a society, as a race, as a planet. The only way forward is a reordering to God. This begins with traditional liturgical rites, Eastern and Western, which instill in man the practice of this ordering, without openly or subtly contradicting it. A key idea here, understood well by the wisdom of Catholic tradition, is that this reordering takes daily effort and work. We must apply ourselves carefully to this work. It goes against the grain of fallen nature. It’s not a whimsical word or profession now and then that makes the practice effective. This is one of the great virtues of the traditional liturgy. It helps us in this work when we need help the most. It is folly to set aside that help.

One last thought. It is sad that the most common reflex for people who become aware of the inner crisis of modern Western society is to turn to Far Eastern or New Age spiritual practices rather than to the beautiful Christian tradition. A friend of mine once met a nice young woman from the American South. She was reading a book on Buddhism. The friend mentioned in passing that Christianity, too, had a rich spiritual and mystical tradition, and gave her some titles to look up. Many years later, she wrote to him out of the blue to say “Thank you for helping me find my way back to the Catholic faith.”

In spite of decades of churchmen doing their best to obscure, deform, abandon, or proscribe the rich spiritual and mystical tradition of Catholicism, Our Lord will not allow it to be taken away from His Church. Most Catholics do not know it yet, but this tradition is still alive, as health-giving as it ever was and ever will be. We must do our part to make it known and loved.

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for events, articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen).

"Liturgy that requires ecstasy": McLuhan Meets Ratzinger

I don't know how I managed to miss this superb article, "The Mode in Which We Go to Mass," by Marc Barnes. Credit goes to Musings of a Pertinacious Papist for alerting me to it. The article is just wonderful: it strikes me as a blending of key ideas from Marshall McLuhan and Joseph Ratzinger, among others. Here are some excerpts:

The mode in which a message is delivered has the power to negate the content of the message. ... Catholics have, for the past 60 years or so, tended towards presenting the Divine Liturgy in a mode of similarity. We want to “get people to come,” and so we strive to make our liturgies similar to other experiences, to provide that condition by which some one may enter comfortably into its presence, as I am comfortable to be in the presence of someone I already know, comfortable to engage a conversation with people who have similar interests, similar views.
          The music of the Mass is made similar to the music of our culture. The demeanor of the Mass is made similar to the “Christian services” of our culture. The clothing we wear to Mass is made similar to our everyday clothing. The posture, structure, language, architecture, the position of priest to people — all this, and nearly anything that can be presented in a mode of similarity is thus presented. And, in a sense, it works. People come. But what does the mode of similarity do to the way in which people encounter the Mass? What does the mode do to the message?
          To understand this, we need a deeper understanding of similarity and dissimilarity. Similarity may be a condition for comfort, but dissimilarity is the necessary condition for love. Because a boy and a girl have “something in common” they can meet, comfortably enter into each other’s presence, and strike up a conversation, but only because of the fact that they are not ”in common” can they fall in love, can she — utterly dissimilar to him — and he — dissimilar to her — strive for personal communion — that difficult, wonderful embrace of two entirely unique and dissimilar lives.
          Because I am used to something, I am not afraid to participate in it, and in this sense, a liturgy of similarity succeeds. But because I am not used to something, because it is utterly other, I am pulled into the heart of a mystery. Similarity may provide the occasion for a meeting and a grouping, but dissimilarity provides the occasion for a binding. Because I do not know her, I strive to understand. Because I cannot fathom her, I gaze all the longer. ...
          What good is it if the mode of similarity brings every man in the world to the Divine Liturgy, if by the very mode that it brings them there, it undoes the entire point, which is not simply being there, but being in love? Similarity engenders comfort because it requires nothing of us. If a person is just like me in every respect, then there is no effort required of me to get to know them, to strive after them. There is no ecstasy, that is, no getting beyond myself. The fact that something is similar may just as well be an occasion for boredom as for unity — and hasn’t millennial boredom with the liturgy been an equally observable outcome of the mode of similarity as millennial presence at the liturgy?
          To say something is similar is to say it is already known, but the point of the Divine Liturgy is that it is the Pascal Mystery, the Pascal Unknown, and precisely because it remains unknown, it remains something worth applying the passion of our entire lives towards, to strive towards knowing.If the point of the Church is to make her children comfortable with God, a liturgy of similarity that “meets people where they are” make sense. If the point of the Church is to call her children to love God, to strive after him and to seek intimate communion with him, then a liturgy that opposes us makes sense, a liturgy drenched in a dissimilarity that accentuates the mysteries that we cannot understand — and thus must strive for, bow before, and commit our lives to surge towards. In short, what is needed is a liturgy that requires ecstasy of us. This reconciles itself in a series of paradoxes, that the unrelatable is the most relatable, the irrelevant is the most relevant, and the unfamiliar the greatest source of our desire for familiarity, for intimacy, and for union.
          ... The good news is that we are not caught between the choice of attracting people to Mass and letting the Mass be precisely what it is, in all its incens-y, ringing, silent, dark, unbearably bright and grotesque mystery, its complex simplicity and its simple complexity. For precisely by letting the Mass be what it is, and indeed, working hard to reveal the Mass as the Paschal Mystery in accordance with the rubrics and teachings of the Church, we attract, for dissimilarity is always a more attractive and binding force than similarity. An intentionally dissimilar liturgy may be more uncomfortable, but we were not made for comfort. We were made for love, that wonderful, uncomfortable ecstasy towards that which we are not.

The points made here are fundamental to the divide—a growing divide, it seems—between the modernizers of liturgy (whose main concerns are inculturation, relevance, immediacy, vernacularity, accessibility, familiarity, fellowship, etc.) and the lovers of traditional liturgy (whose main concerns are loyalty, fidelity, identity, mystery, silence, sacrifice, sacredness, beauty, transcendence, etc.). Properly understood, of course, many of these opposing qualities can and should be reconciled, but only if one begins from the right first principles that are capable of ordering into a unity the liturgy's complex elements. The horizontal dimensions of the liturgy emerge spontaneously and indeed more powerfully when we unambiguously prioritize the vertical dimensions—if, in short, we seek first God's kingdom and His righteousness, so that all these other things can be added unto us (cf. Mt 6:33). In contrast, if we look first to the horizontal, the doors to the transcendent are shut upon us by a kind of divine jealousy that brooks no divided mind.

Part of what appealed to me in Barnes' article was the use of the concept of ecstasy, which, properly understood, is an extremely powerful tool for understanding how the liturgy "works" on the human soul, by drawing it outwards and upwards into mystery. Some years ago I published an article in the journal Nova & Vetera entitled "Aquinas on Eucharistic Ecstasy: From Self-Alienation to Gift of Self," which mounted an argument comparable to Barnes':

The solemnity [of the liturgy] draws attention to, and keeps attention on, the symbolic representation of our being loved as no one else loves us, our being taken hold of and carried into something totally beyond our ken, yet offered to us through ordinary things which in turn provoke us to reconsider how we relate to the world itself. … [T]he avoidance of merely “common” modes of speaking and acting in the liturgy is by design, to help us break free from a profane mindset, to awaken us to the Presence that surrounds and penetrates the entire world. Hence, making the liturgy more common, more everyday, casual, horizontal, is self-defeating; it obliterates the liturgical as such, exactly where it cultivates the holy, the divine, the Other who is more myself than I. Ironically, too, a liturgy stripped of its mysterious alteritas would be reduced to the place of last among worldly equals, for it cannot compete against the secular on the latter’s terms. And so, it would be effectively sterilized in its power to fecundate outlying culture, prevented from casting an otherworldly light on the potential sacredness of the ordinary elements of this-worldly life.
          … Liturgical worship offers us an opening or clearing in which to practice, and thus to make our own, a sacred mode of thinking, feeling, acting, receiving—a mode that challenges our profane assumptions, the worldliness in which we tend to lose ourselves if we are not careful to cling to Christ. … If the liturgy ever became fully domesticated, if it ever struck us as perfectly clear and distinct, it would ipso facto cease to be a provocation to the shattered, alienated mentality of fallen “enlightened” man that pretends to be sweet reasonableness.
          … The true “unsettling” of which Preston speaks is accomplished primarily by a confrontation with the purest ritual manifestation of both the divine otherness and the divine condescension, a paradox that is vividly communicated in traditional liturgical rites—in their prayers, gestures, trappings, and overall complexion. …
          Without a mystagogical focus, liturgy will do little more than validate a community’s collective conceit, when it does not drive away the congregation from sheer boredom.

This link will take the reader to the full article at Academia.edu.

Meanwhile, I also encourage you to go over and read the whole article by Barnes.