The ins and outs of the Mass

The Church of England, being these days in it's majority, is a faddish church, and one of the biggest fads that has been part of management training and self-help seminars is the Myers-Briggs Type indicator which deals out to everyone four letters that describe their preferences of behaviour:

• defining the self via externals or internals;
• making perceptions using intuition or sensation;
• making judgements using thinking or feeling ;
• preferring making decisions to making perceptions.

The theory is quite powerful, and does allow the individual to begin a foray into that classical objective of "Know thyself". It is but only one theoretical way, and the big danger for anyone using MBTi is that they get their four letters and are told that this is their personality type with which they were born and is somehow immutable. The temptation is to assume that one cannot change preferences, although an introvert can "learn" to become extravert et c. The implication is that once an ENFP, always an ENFP at heart.

It is one thing to know oneself, and a good thing too, but this is one of the root causes of the malady that is afflicting the Church of England. In the past, people were content with coming to church and saying the Mass as it was constructed by the church. However, it is the result of this "Know Thyself" phenomenon that people are now saying that they "cannot" do Mass in the traditional way because the Mass is geared to introverts and not extraverts or some such like. People object to the traditional Mass because it doesn't fit them.

Laziness!

It's sheer laziness. Rather than work at finding away of relating with the Mass, which is after all an engagement of the human personality with that of the divine, these folk demand that the Church changes its liturgy, its prayers, its expressions to fit all people. And the Church of England, in its desire to upset noone but to facilitate the notion of "meeting the people where they are" change the traditions to suit. It's never engaged with society on this level before, why should it have suddenly done so inthe 20th Century. Philosophies of the self have existed long before Freud, Jung, and MBTi, why suddenly engage with the individual now and thus run the ship off course?

This "priesthood of all believers" oft quoted by liberals to supplant the Catholic notion of priesthood is that the layfolk go out into the world and live Christian lives through which the world might see the Light of Christ. Then, having worked long and hard at this coal-face, they find nourishment from the Mass that has been celebrated in the same way since time immemorial.

"Boring!" say the ENTPs (to stereotype a type(!)), " I want a Mass that suits me, that changes every week, that engages my extraverted ideas." If it suits you, O stereotyped ENTP, then how will the same Mass suit an ISFJ? "Oh, they can have their own Mass." So how is the Mass a sacrament of Unity if you won't attend the same Mass as your INFJ neighbour? "Well, it's the same God that we worship, the Mass is still the same." Well, no it isn't - you are not there, effectively, though not in jurisdiction, you are creating another congregation. The Masses will still be valid in the eyes of both ENTP and ISFJ, but there is still an excommunication this time along the fault-line of personality - more purification, more diluted ethnic cleansing.

No, ENTP and INFJ should go to the same Mass and work hard to engage their selves into the traditional liturgies, and the Church should not have indulged them. Back to the Traditional Mass we should go.

"Why? Isn't that just an expression of your personality? Isn't that your preference, O thou self-righteous INTJ?" My preference is immaterial. My desire to serve God is that which is universal to all Christians. If the Catholic Church instituted and used a Mass largely unchanged for centuries (indeed, totally unchanged in the Orthodox Tradition) then it was adequate for all types of person regardless of who, where and when they are. The Traditional Mass is a lingua franca across Time displaying the Sacrament of Unity across the Ages. No matter who you are or where you are in the world, you could walk into Mass and be assured that it is the same Sacrament.

"But you're using your preference of intuition when you say that."

No, I'm stating a fact voiced by St Vincent of Lerins that the Catholic Faith is quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est. (that which is believed everywhere, always and by all). If there is no link with the theology of the past, then there is no Catholic Faith.

Now, O argumentative ENTP, go out into the world and minister to it as the Christian that you are using all your personality as God has given you. Pray to God in your own offices, in your own manner, but when you come to Mass, be prepared to celebrate it with all people in the Traditional way. Engage with it in your own way by all means, but don't force that way upon others. If you are bored, then that's your challenge, not a problem with the Liturgy.

How might I carry on this conversation with another personality type?

An orthodox apology.

I have to make an apology to Alana Asby Roberts who very kindly commented on my post about excellence in worship and who asked me a few questions about my experience of the Eastern Orthodox Tradition. Now that life is leaving me alone for five minutes, I shall answer her here in the main blog in the hope that she is able to read it without hunting for it among the comments.

I have to honestly answer that my experience with the Eastern Orthodox is limited to the musical and the theological. While there are Orthodox Churches in Blighty, they don't appear to have any parishes near me, but then I'm not a driver so that has limited my vision. Of course what marks me out among Anglicans is my view of the Holy Father in Rome as the Successor of St Peter and the Vicar of Christ.

I have a great love of the Orthodox Tradition and applaud the fact that they do have the excellence in worship that is being torn out from Faddish-Anglicanism. One only has to just read through the Liturgy of St James with that call of "Sigesato pasa sarx..." by the Deacon to know that the whole Mass is devoted to the heavenly comes into contact with the earthly. I believe that the old Anglo-Papalists contemporary with Fr. Patten were able to bring that same electricity into our humdrum existence. Both Orthodoxy and Anglicanism have unique musical schemes centred around their liturgy, something which the Roman Catholics have sorely lacked even in recent years.

From the point of view of Christian Unity: if it is possible for the Eastern Orthodox Churches to regain communion with the Holy See and keep their unique identity then it is, in theory at least, possible with the Anglicans who have remained true to Holy Tradition. I do agree that the unity which Anglo-Papalists have been praying for may only be possible because of the Orthodox Church. There would be nothing to lose and all to gain there! I pray that Orthodox Catholicism would become complete once again, and may it start by mutual oecumenism of the dynamic sort.

Excellence in worship

While I've been on Sabbatical, I've been visiting various churches of various denominations. It's interesting that in each parish, all I've found is an attitude of "well that'll do, won't it?" People will do enough to make the Mass work and/or a vaguely pleasant experience, but no more. I often wonder what's going through the head of the average congregant. What are they expecting to happen when they come to church? What are they expecting to do themselves?

Most of the time, the liturgy, the music, the sermon, and subsequently, the whole ethos is geared to accomodating the "comfy chair" syndrome that pervades most of society and panders to what the congregation wants rather than what forms an adequate expression of our love of God. It's interesting that these two concepts of "what the congregation wants" and "adequate expression of our love for God" are either totally discrepant or only common at the lowest level. I was most distressed to walk into a Roman Catholic Church and find the same vision of the Mass as entertainment (guitars, flutes, trendy songs with lowest common denominator lyrics) as exists in Anglicanism.

As a Church, we need to strive for excellence in worship. No, of course we are not going to end up with the perfect Mass. There will always be a flaw or imperfection in the way that we do things. However, spiritually, the West is rapidly reaching the point where God will say as He does in Amos (v.21-27):

I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream. Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?

But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. Therefore will I cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, saith the LORD, whose name is The God of hosts.

The quality of belief comes only from the quality in which we are prepared to invest in Worship of God, and this is a notion that each member of the congregation needs to be met with head on. We have to work to remove insincerity that affects even the best Mass.

To this end I'm making a start on trying to answer the question: What makes Excellent Worship? In view of the fact that all our worship is imperfect, we have a great scope for working for improvement in each act of worship that we do. We need:

1. Excellent Liturgy:
   I've written on this before. The purpose of the liturgy is to form a process from the temporal world to the Divine. It needs language that will strive to reflect on that transcendent nature and provide an adequate springboard for the soul to dive off into the Eternal Source. Excellent liturgy points the way univocally to God for the humblest soul, yet challenges the position of the most exalted. Excellent liturgy opens the way to the refreshment of the Soul, and needs to reflect on the pitiable state of humanity encouraging and drawing them into that Spring of Living Water.
   
   
2. Excellent Catechesis:
   I've also written about liturgy as having a didactic role, that it should not pander to the lowest common denominator in order to draw up the understanding of the Faithful. However, further than that, we now have entire generations who are unchurched and unlearned in the faith, the Church needs to focus its instruction on the Traditional faith. This can only come with an Excellent Catechesis. Excellent Catechesis has only one aim: - to pass on the beliefs of our Fathers to the next generation fully and faithfully. Each Parish must have a full educational programme of catechesis directed at the young. This is exceendingly difficult as it means that each Parish effectively needs to take on the role of School in educating infants, children and adolescents in the ways of Christ. A parish that does not invest in a full, planned, and thorough catechesis of the young, but rather a scrappy, hit-and-miss, vague and impromptu Sunday School will lose.
   
   For the Adults, this Catechesis needs to continue also. This is why house groups are vital. One should not remain a member of a Parish without being part of a housegroup which meets during the week to read Holy Scripture or to discuss Doctrine. The individual needs to be challenged by the sound teaching of the Church so that points where the individual disagrees with that Doctrine can be investigated and that the individual can truly grow.
   
   
3. Excellent Participation:
   In the CofE,traditional liturgy has been deemed "not inclusive enough" and leaves little scope for the Congregation to play a part. The consequence is that many of the Eucharistic prayers in Common Worship are interspersed with refrains like "To you be glory and praise forever" or "it is right to give thanks and praise". The sentiment is fine, but it's like scratching Michelangelo's David to insert precious jewels. The jewels are beautiful but their insertion into something else that's beautiful, but in a different way, is damaging to both. Likewise the process that draws the human being to the Incarnate Word present in the Host is interrupted with a repeated refrain. It's a fact that if you repeat a word or phrase frequently it loses meaning particularly in an environment in which one's attention is being drawn in several different directions. It is a good thing to pray the Jesus prayer repeatedly in time with one's breathing because it is an act of personal devotion and private prayer in which an individuals attention is locked on one purpose - namely an interior search for proximity with God. At Mass, however, the search is exterior and in communion with others, and with one's attention being diverted out to the consecration, it takes an effort beyond most of us simultaneously to give meaning to a repeated refrain.
   
   The result of this "inclusion" of the congregation into a CofE liturgy produces a confusion of roles and practices. What is the real purpose of the vicarious nature of the priest if the Congregation are expected to divert their attention away from the altar in order to make a response which is well-meaning but not necessary.
   
   Excellent Participation removes confusion. Each congregant knows why he is going to Mass and what his role is in that Mass. If he is "just" (there is never "just") a congregant, then he must realise that He is to give glory to God and to receive nourishment from Him in an organised way. There must be a submission of the individual to the liturgy so that Communion is full and God glorified by each person acting unity with the parish and the whole Church. This will mean the individual prays the Eucharistic prayer attentively and devotedly as an individual, but allowing the priest as alter Christus to be his voice. The participation need not be vocal, and it certainly should not intrude on the central voice of the priest. Excellent Participation must also remind the individual that his duty towards God is to live a Christian life daily, and to work hard at serving God in everything, so that the Mass becomes his observation of the sabbath in which he rests. It is only people who encounter Christ once a week who cry out for something more to do in the liturgy.
   
   Excellence in worship can only come about if the Church impresses upon the individual that he must participate in a Christian life daily, and strive to make the Kingdom of God real in the world around him. How is the Church making and equipping new disciples? If a parish has no plan to turn congregants into effective and participating disciples then how is it still a part of the Church?

These are only a few preliminary thoughts on how we can try to strive for excellence in our worship of God. They are ill-formed and have gaps in, and I intend to keep looking for ways in which I can make some of these ideas more precise, and realisable. The Church's main enemy is that voice within that cries "inclusivity". A person can only really be included into the Church if he is willing to be changed into a Christian. The Church can but only minister to one who wants his own way, and he can never enter it until he submits to the teachings of Christ that the Church has received from the beginning. A parish that tries to change to become "more inclusive" will only remain a Church if by "more inclusive" it means broadcasting the message of God so that more people feel called to be changed into Christians and submit to His kingdom.

What is a liturgy for?

I answer this question cognisant of my lack of education on the matter. Do correct me!

Liturgies are a good source of division between Christians, and this is natural. The old formula lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivandi, is perfectly true; we will only live and believe what we sincerely pray. In a world where individualism is rife, we are presented with a multitude of liturgies that we are expected to follow. Each liturgy has the purpose to present us with a passage to God Most High in a way that is meaningful i.e. didactic, unifying, humbling and transcendent.

We have to expect a liturgy to teach us about God because that is the One Whom we are aiming to meet at the culmination of the Mass. We cannot meet Whom we do not know, and while we cannot know Him entirely, we can be brought to know Him better. We should be equipped by the liturgy with all that we need to prepare ourselves for the Truth Inerrant.

We have to expect a liturgy to be unifying. The words of St Paul “though we are many, we are one body because we all share in one bread” demonstrate the purpose of the Mass in the light of St John xvii. We come to Mass to become one with God and to be united in Him. Thus, although we may be individuals and indeed created to be individuals, we need to submit ourselves to the liturgy in order to say and mean that, in the words of Olivier Clément, we are all “one human being in the multiplicity of persons”. We bring to Mass with us the complex welter of emotions and memories of our daily experience in the World. We bring with us the imperfections and limitations of our selves. While we seek unity, the potential obstacles to this unity are precisely our persons altered by the disparity of engaging with life which we have to reconcile when we come home to God in the Mass. True unity is something that can only be achieved by God, which is why a liturgy should be one that can be prayed despite who we are. The contents of our hearts and minds must be brought to bear on the task in hand – the worship and adoration (a wonderful word effectively meaning a divine kiss) of the One Who Is.

We have to expect a liturgy to be humbling. The point is that we come to God as we are, as imperfect folk. A liturgy should be something with which we can become familiar so that we can expect to be guided into recognising not only our shortcomings in the Kyrie but also the indelible dignity of love that we have been created to possess in that are permitted to offer Christ as Sacrifice to God through Christ the High Priest upon Christ the Altar. We have to be honest and real with ourselves in our relationship with God. He does not pretend with us, and that’s one of the many reasons that He has instituted the Mass so that we encounter God as He really is in the Consecrated Host. We do not understand that reality, but we understand that He is real. Likewise we have to understand ourselves as being real, not the strange beings that we create in our heads –humility is the key to that and liturgies must force us to realise our true position in the Universe.

We have to expect a liturgy to be transcendent, after all God is infinitely transcendental. (He certainly does not satisfy a polynomial equation – maths joke.) Not for nothing is the word Sacrament translated from mysterium. If a liturgy tries to explain what is going on in simple terms then it cannot be a liturgy. Part of our humiliation in the eyes of God is that we be confronted with the fact that something is happening that cannot be understood. There must be something in the liturgy that will make our minds boggle and wrestle, that will disturb our souls, that will bring a tremor to our knees as we try –and fail – to comprehend the truth that we are in the Presence of God Almighty. In the Western Mass Christ deigns to descend to us, in the East we are lifted up to Christ. The direction of movement we cannot understand for it is beyond the paucity of our dimensions, but nonetheless it happens.

The Liturgy must also transcend history, for we are all part of an Eternal Church where Time is meaningless because God has made it meaningless for us. Now has no meaning different from Then at Mass. We are presented with a different unity, one that spans the ages. As we offer the pax to the brethren whom we can touch, so must we offer our pax to the ones whom we cannot, those before us and those after us. As Christ Himself says, “the first shall be last, and the last first” thus rendering temporal positions and comparisons meaningless in the context of our Humanity.

In the Church of England, it’s easy to worship in a parish in which the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, and Collect for Purity, are habitually replaced with words that have been chosen to make the meaning of the Mass clear to the congregation. The language is basic and uncomplicated - but it does not inspire, it removes the necessity to engage the brain, it prevents people coming up to receive God with furrowed brow as they struggle with what this reality means for them. When the congregation speaks, it is to utter words of submission to love – “have mercy,” “glory!” “I believe,” “cleanse me.” A congregation responds to the love of God, not to utter a magic spell by going through the motions, a liturgy should not inspire automated responses.

However, that’s what we do – automated responses, wandering minds, grudges borne, selfishnesses acted on. I said below that our Masses are all imperfectly presented, but that they are all perfected. Indeed the perfection comes when all the millions of Masses that have ever happened are seen in the context of a single Mass which has taken place in the ages and outside all ages in the Mass in Heaven. For there the Perfect is always present.

I wait with interest for the expected motu proprio of the Holy Father on the Latin Mass will appear, for it seeks to present the Holy See with a better contact with those who are temporally before us. There is very little as humbling as the realisation that one is saying exactly the same words as millions who have gone before, and presenting oneself with them to God Who feeds us with the same food – Our Saviour, Jesus Christ. May the Church never lose this Truth.